Dante "The Letter to Can Grande"

Dante's Letter to Can Grande della Scala About Allegory

Note from William Fredlund: In the following letter Dante explains his ideas about allegory to his friend and host in Verona, Can Grande della Scala.

The meaning of this work is not simple. . . for we obtain one meaning from the letter of it and another from that which the letter signifies; and the first is called the literal, but the other allegorical or mystical. And to make this matter of treatment clearer, it may be studied in the verse: "When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion." For if we regard the letter alone, what is set before us is the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt in the days of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, we are shown the conversion of the soul from the grief and wretchedness of sin to the state of grace; if the anagogical, we are shown the departure of the holy soul from the thralldom of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in general allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical. The subject of the whole work, then, taken merely in the literal sense is "the state of the soul after death straightforwardly affirmed," for the development of the whole work hinges on and about that. But if, indeed, the work is taken allegorically, its subject is: "Man, as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of his free choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing Justice."

Dante shows us that we can interpret the passage first as simple literal or in this case historical fact: the Jews came out of Egypt. Or in other allegorical ways and he lists three ways which can be applied to a reading of the Divine Comedy.


By: http://www.westernciv.com/greatminds/dante/danteallegory.shtml