12/29/2023 0 Comments Almi rose gemini datesAs in the sun, there is a host of writers. The pilgrim's journey to the origins of both his natures is also in the largest sense the return to his auctores. The pilgrim's journey of the intellect and the tragic destiny of the poet form a double cycle, each wound around and reflecting the other. Gemini, traditionally the gate for returning souls, locates a series of cycles or returns, both in the fiction of the poem and with reference to the future of the poet, both in the abstract terms of Platonic remeatio and in the concrete terms of the poet's own history. Tismal font where he was enrolled among the souls that might expect salvation. And if the poet imagines a journey back to his oldest ancestor, he also sketches a future return to his native city of Florence, the specific terrestrial situs where he was born after his information by the stars, indeed to the bap. But the pilgrimage sites are also figures for the final destination, the celestial Jerusalem: and so the pilgrim's return is also to Paradise, the celestial garden of the lily and the rose, Christ and the Virgin (23.73–74), and to first father Adam, who forfeited the paradise to which his descendant now returns. The pilgrim, sitting his exams in the theological virtues, has come to Jerusalem from Egypt (25.55–56) his meeting with James the apostle excites reference to Galicia, where the apostle's tomb was an important destination for pilgrims (25.17–18) meeting Peter is like a pilgrimage to Rome, where Peter was martyred and buried. The reference to Christ as Alpha and Omega (26.17) implies the whole adventure of human time, from creation to apocalypse, and notably the drama of the Fall and redemption: of exile, exodus, and return to Eden. In returning to his stars, the pilgrim (properly, for a Gemini) acknowledges both his natures, utranque naturam. The presence of Adam (26.82–142) suggests, however, that the poet's return is not only intellectual. Dante's reordering is perhaps only verbal but the principle of benigne interpretare (echoing Macrobius's own attempt to minimize Plato's error) is affirmed, inspired perhaps by the pilgrim's approach to the Good ("Lo ben che fa contenta questa corte," 26.16), in terms Plato and Boethius would recognize, and in his professed love for all the creatures (26.64–65). In the same passage, Dante subtly recuperates a Platonic tenet by giving the planets in the "astrological" order ascribed to Plato (Macrobius 1970a 73–74, 89), placing Mercury and Venus above the sun. Leaving the planetary spheres behind, the pilgrim comprehends their motions (22.142–150)-a feat held in the Timaeus to be impossible without a model (Plato 1961 1169). The pilgrim's return, by visual retrospection, to earth (twice: "col viso ritornai," 22.133, and "adima / il viso," 27.77–78), to which he must also soon return in the body ("per il mortal pondo, / ancor giù tornerai," 27.63–64), also touches on several Platonic topics. In Paradiso 22 the tolerant option becomes the poem's fact, as the pilgrim, voyaging to the stars that presided over his birth, recognizes in the technical sense their influence over his genius, as we noted earlier. In Paradiso 4.49–60, Plato's doctrine of the descent of souls from the stars is countenanced if taken as referring to the influence of the stars. Neoplatonic influence is strong, and with reason. Poetics of the petrose is one among several.
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