Dante y la imaginación agente: el "narrador" de la "Commedia" y la transparencia perfecta de la profetología árabo-judía

Abstract

This research pursues two avenues of thought: 1. Prophetology—that is, the theory dealing with the gnoseological status of the prophetic gift—and 2. That of a rationalistic philosophical culture, common to Christians and Jews and used for mystical and “anthropological” ends—that is, the quest for the perfection of the human being. In the former instance, the discussion deals exclusively with natural prophesy as it appears in the Arab tradition, which was spread throughout the Christian and Jewish cultures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries through Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. This type of prophecy, for the spread of which the Latin translation of Maimonides’ work was decisive, was adopted—with variations—by a number of authors who formed part of Dante’s culture, particularly Albertus Magnus, in the Christian sphere, and Judah Romano and Abulafia in the Jewish sphere. With regard to the latter—i.e., the common philosophical culture—this relates to the High Medieval sacralized formulation that instrumentalised—through the study and application of a given exegesis—an Averroist model of demonstration of the condition of the possibility of thought: the instrument of scientific demonstration becomes a propaedeutic for salvation; that is, an instrument of a mystical nature for the achievement of personal and civil perfection. The philosophy that supports this model— Averroes’ noetics—along with its exegetic instrumentalization, formed a fundamental part of the intellectual climate of the Italy (and, above all Florence) in which Dante’s works were written...