The other two looked on, and each of them
Cried out: "O me, Agnello, how thou changest! ..."
Dante, Inferno 25. The damned soul being turned into a snake is - supposedly - some Agnello, or maybe Angelo Brunelleschi. But Dante was a keen interpreter of the Apokalypsis, the Book of Revelation, where the "Agnello" i.e. the Lamb was a symbol of Christ. So, the verse could be read as
Cried out: "Alas, [divine] Lamb, how you're changing!"
The Lamb being turned into the Serpent, Christ into the Antichrist. The wording used to describe this monster clearly recalls and twists the key mystery of the Incarnation of the Word: "... thou now art neither two nor one ... Already the two heads had one become ... two figures mingled ... the two were lost ... Members became that never yet were seen ... the perverted image ..." This, on the other hand, is Inferno 25, the first major turning point in the poem, as the 25 percent = one fourth of the plot. The worst moment in the Church and society crisis. Will there be a way out, towards salvation? That's what the following Cantos of the poem will show.
A 'gnostic' reinterpretation of Dante . . .
ReplyDeleteJeffery Hodges
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There are clues in that sense.
ReplyDeleteOr rather, according to my last researches, Dante shows the world -- this world of ours, not a so-called afterlife -- at the same time as hell and heaven. At the very center of the universe you can find either Satan (Inferno) or God (Paradiso), it all depends on your 'standpoint.'
Btw, by rereading the New Testament, the grounds for a half-gnostic worldview are set there; not only in some well-know passages in John, but even in Luke, the Letters, etc.