Virgil And Dante

11 Pages 2787 Words

Temple Classics edition of verse 63: «Virgil, who stands for Worldly Wisdom», it reads). Allegory may be __ when applied, as Pope Gregory the Great intended, to Scripture __ «the wonderful machine»; this kind of allegoresis, it seems to me, is more correctly recognized as «the dismal science». Its thudding flattening out of the problematic presence of Virgil into a one-for-one simplistic equation has an understandable appeal for its practitioners. It rids them of the need to encounter a complex and disturbing issue, with all its ramifications. For if «Virgil» stands for something else, the problem represented by his presence in the Christian poem simply disappears.
It is thus that we tend to glide past the most disturbing moments in the text. For instance, when we observe that in the series of interrelated events in Inferno XXI Virgil is neither wise nor rational, do we argue that «the allegory is temporarily suspended»? In these scenes we observe the following reactions on Vi...