Page 294 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

294 from Italy to the Canary Islands

to matching the two places. At this point, we are gripped with a question.
Many centuries had passed since the Greek spirit, the World of Ideas, and
then the Revelation and even the fathers of the Church, St. Augustine and
St. Anselm with his ontological proof: did geography and its related inven-
tions make sense metaphysically, here among men?
What place did the beyond have metaphysically? Was Paradise not “de-
tached” from the Earth and earthly events? So, was Metaphysics beyond
the Pillars of Hercules? And looking toward the boundaries of knowledge,
the Pillars of Hercules, was it not looking horizontally and not up? Up
towards the heavens? So we had Dante’s invention still “anchored” to the
Earth, where Heaven was a terrestrial place, a mountain, as a matter of
fact, on the sides of which was Purgatory.
But was Paradise - the reunion with the Father - not in itself something
already detached from human affairs? And was a horizontal beyond just
as good? It is true that the mountain was reached through ascension; but
of course the invention calls for an engagement with the world of men,
and after all Ulysses is one of us, Man who thirsts for knowledge and
so violates the limits just to go and see how things really are beyond the
beyond.
“O frati, dissi che per cento milia/perigli siete giunti a l’occidente,/ a
questa tanto picciola vigilia/ di nostri sensi ch’è del rimanente,/ non vogli-
ate negar l’esperienza,/ di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente./Consider-
ate la vostra semenza:/fatti non foste a viver come bruti,/ma per seguir
virtute e conoscenza/.”
The broken rule is echoed by the biblical three-way event: man, wom-
an, snake. God who takes cognizance of the fragility of matter. Anselm
of Canterbury will say in his Proslogion, “Now we believe that you are
something such than which nothing greater can be thought”, but for us to
speak of God is to reach a limit (there is always a limit), for we give him
qualities: God does, God orders, God judges.
Although we act with boldness, we do it always within the same incon-
sistent scenario, between our paltry efforts and our awareness of a (self
concealed?) God. From these feeble considerations, we will again end up
by continuing to interpret the facts along the paths of History; but at the
end of each more or less fantastic construction, we will always come be-
fore silence - the only condition where it seems possible to seize the Abso-
lute - and from this dimension, once again, we will aim our gaze between
the horizontal and the vertical, between our concerns down here, and the