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In his recent work on the Divine Comedy Andreas Kablitz has characterized Dante's magnum opus as "the completion of salvation history." He thus presents its author as a prophetic writer, whose essentially secular poetics in the Commedia is absorbed into a larger work of redemption that intended to be nothing less (as Kablitz succinctly puts it) than a Third Testament (Kablitz 1999; Kablitz 2001). In his text Dante transforms the secular world into one whose essence derives from a history of salvation in which the typology consistently opens the way for the representation of anagogy. This anagogical dimension is therefore more than simply an encoded sensus mysticus that only alludes symbolically to the Last (and ultimate) Things. Instead, it is meant to appear as the experience of a person elected by God, which is why it has even been represented on a literal level. By thus making anagogy the vanishing point of his epic representation, Dante shapes himself as a divinely inspired author, descending in a direct line from the "Pauline visionary mode," as is made clear especially in Paradiso XXVIII, 138s., after some tentative allusions in Inferno II, 32.
The problem at this point is, however, that for conveying this inspired discourse on truth he chooses poetry, a medium on whose conditions, possibilities and also restrictions he repeatedly reflects in his writings, from the Vita nova through the Convivio even to the Commedia itself. This critical examination of the status of his own verba is indispensable for Dante's project of creating an inspired prophetic poetry under the discursive conditions of the time: for within the scholastic system of knowledge and understanding, poetica was considered the lowest of all disciplines, and thus unsuitable for conveying ultimate truth (cf. Summa theologica I, 1, 9.1). Dante therefore takes considerable pains to justify his own poetic enterprise, especially in the Convivio, by vindicating poiesis as a textual form behind whose veil (velamen) the truth-conveying doctrina is concealed. Within this concept, the decoding of truth functions allegorically, according to the pattern of the four senses of Scripture. Dante thus establishes the prerequisite that allows him to claim the status of a poeta theologus-and this is, as Robert Hollander has shown, quite unique in medieval poetics (Hollander 1980b). From a...