ABSTRACT
Dante insistently enjoins the observing of boundaries or confines (an imperative which Adam and Ulysses both catastrophically fail to obey), but in doing so he dissolves these confines into the illimitable horizon of divinity. Mazzotta renders explicit the central importance of limits and of their transgression or transcending. Following the fundamental schema also of Neoplatonic philosophy, God’s infinite gift of himself, his infinite goodness (“bontà infinita”), makes itself manifest and is felt, furthermore, all through the finite creation that proceeds from and returns to (strophe and epistrophe) the One or Infinite.
Mazzotta thus locates the “fundamental problematic” of the Divine Comedy in
the relation of reciprocity and complementarity between finite and infinite … the always mobile relation between the human consciousness of limits and the human desire for unlimitedness; and this desire is represented by the restless search for ourselves as a cipher of the encounter between the human and the divine.
One could state this interface or intersection in other, yet closely related, terms as the relation of reciprocity between the sayable and the unsayable. Dante pursues this ambiguity and tension as his fundamental problematic in these linguistic terms with ever-increasing concentration through to the end of the Paradiso scanned by the ineffability topos.