The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso
The Metaphysics of Representation

In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - 'painted' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal - the divine vision. This book offers a fresh, intensive reading of this extraordinary passage at the heart of the third canticle of the Divine Comedy. While adapting in novel ways the methods of the traditional lectura Dantis, William Franke meditates independently on the philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and aesthetic ideas that Dante's text so provocatively projects into a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. This book demands that we question not only what Dante may have meant by his representations, but also what they mean for us today in the broad horizon of our intellectual traditions and cultural heritage.

Part I. The Literary Vision; 1. Writing as Theophany: The Medium as Metaphor for Immediacy; 2. The Presence of Speech in Writing: Speaking as Sparking; 3. The Parts of Speech: Mediation and Contingency; 4. From Speculative Grammar to Visual Spectacle and Beyond; 5. Sense Made Sensuous and Synaesthesia in the Sight and Sound of Writing; 6. Infinite Script: Endless Mediation as Metaphor for Divinity; Part II. Philosophical Reflections; I. Language as Concocted of Letters versus the Mysticism of the Name; II. Saussure and the Structuralist Idea of Language as a System of Differences; III. Temporalization and Transcendence of Time through Language; IV. Transcendental Reflection: Time Synthesis and the Role of the 'I'; V. Unmanifest Wholeness of Sense: Language as Image of the Imageless; VI. Transcendentality of Language and the Language of the Other.

William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University and Visiting Professor at the University of Navarra. He is a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and has been Fulbright-University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and Study of Religions. His books include Dante's Interpretive Journey (1996), On What Cannot Be Said (2007), Poetry and Apocalypse (2009), Dante and the Sense of Transgression (2013), A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante (2015), Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante (2016), A Theology of Literature (2017), On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020).