International Medieval Society, Paris • Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2010 - Traditio

The ‘trasumanar’ in the Anticlaudianus and the Divine Comedy: bringing language through metaphors towards God

Gabriella Addivinola, University of Warwick

IIn the Middle Ages the intertwining of theological and grammatical reflection is such that the treatment of the issue of the Supreme Being cannot be understood without a reference to the grammatical categories, especially when dealing with the possibility of naming God, the problem that theologians call the «translatio» of the parts of speech to the Divine.

My paper will analyse how this issue has been developed by two authors, both deeply concerned by its linguistic and gnoseological implications: Dante and Alan of Lille. Both of their major works, the Divine Comedy and the Anticlaudianus are journeys towards God, journeys made by men but also by words, journeys that challenge the defeat of language and deeply explore the possibilities of human expression. Both of the poems can be read as an answer to the questions posed by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in his treaty On the Divine Names, an answer given not only theoretically but bringing language at the outmost of its possibility of expression.

I will focus particularly on their use of metaphorical language, trying to show how the metaphor is interpreted as a gnoseologic device that enables the poet to go across the Augustinian path of the «region of unlikeness» towards the union and description of God, that «embraces in himself the names of all things […] conceives everything by means of a trope and by way of a figure and assumes the unadulterated name without the object» (Anticlaudianus, V, vv. 124-127).