The essays on Dante collected in this volume interpret his Commedia as the attempt of a renewal
of the Christian work of salvation by means of literature. In the view of his author the sacro
poema responds to a historical moment of extreme danger in which nothing less than the
redemption of mankind is at stake. The degradation of the medieval Roman Empire and the rise of
an early capitalism in his birth town Florence entailing a pernicious moral depravation for
Dante are to him nothing else but a variety of symptoms of the backfall of the world into its
state prior to its salvation by the incarnation of Christ. Dante presents his journey into the
other world as an endeavor to escape these risks. Mobilizing the traditional procedures of
literary discourse for this purpose he aims at writing a text that overcomes the deficiencies
of the traditional Book of Revelation that on its own terms no longer seems capable of
fulfilling his traditional tasks. The immense revaluation of poetry implied in Dante's Commedia
thus contemporarily involves the claim of a substantial weakness of the institutional
religious discourse.
