Il Paradiso di Dante e l’esperienza estrema della visione di Dio

In line with medieval thought, Dante believes that God cannot be fully grasped rationally and that the vision of God is granted only mystically, through contemplation: in practice, the mind is able to detach itself from the body, it exceeds its constraints, and manages to get absorbed by divinity. Moreover, memory cannot record this experience that goes beyond human faculties and the human being does not have the linguistic ability to describe such a vision. So how does Dante describe this extreme experience, that is the culmination of his work? He proceeds working on two semiotic dimensions, connected to each other: the sensory and the plastic dimension. The purpose of my essay is to analytically reconstruct these two dimensions that characterize the visio Dei: on the one hand the sensorial perception and the centrality of light; on the other the vision of points, circles, angles and nodes with which the poet seeks to give a finite representation of the infinite. Finally, I will make some comparative observations on the Aleph, a metaphysical space that Borges certainly imagined starting from Dante’s vision but which has some very different structural characteristics.