ABSTRACT
Language, the Word, is revelation. However, in the Paradiso in particular, Dante attenuates reference in the attempt to reveal the essential nature of language. Dante thereby anticipates modern symbolist poetics in which language itself becomes the ambit of an original experience of unprecedented reality that can be experienced only in and through the experience of the essence of language itself. Language thus inaugurates our history and destiny in ways that Heidegger magisterially theorizes. In the Paradiso, Dante seeks to recover the essence of language as itself revelation of the divine Word. Dante employs empirical reference, but he uses it to refer to or to evoke another world beyond the range of the senses. What Dante achieves is to show, in words of the later Heidegger, that “language speaks”. We have to pay attention particularly to the limits of language in order to fathom its revelation of an invisible realm beyond the world.
