Page 304 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

304 from Italy to the Canary Islands

huge number of characters and symbols, thanks to which it could finally be
claimed that the Pillars of Hercules, which had been crossed since antiqui-
ty, had now been crossed poetically as well.
The latter is a bone of contention between the commentators of the
Commedia: those who saw in Ulysses a violator of divine rules and those
who considered him a precursor of the great navigators. And here poet-
ic fiction became a real event and all matters concerning God, heaven,
salvation, seemed to pass because of Ulysses’ leap forward. At least at
the moment, those who approved it seemed to disengage from any divine
speculation and so Ulysses appeared to be a giant through his fantastic act.
Ulysses, before Aeneas, essentially means questioning the presence of
God. Without God’s will, one can understand that unstoppable thirst for
knowledge that is also a challenge to oneself and to death, exceeding a
limit to go and see how “things really are”; it means an inner defiance of or
getting used to (the idea of) death.
Ulysses’ journey has value but it is not indicated by God; exceeding
that geographic limit is after all not even a violation. It is in the spiritual
dimension that we can capture the difference; where there is no divine plan
there cannot be true knowledge, ultimate knowledge. In this sense, Ulysses
is what happened before. An antiquity still filled with myths and gods that
does not (yet) have Revelation. It is also the tranquillity of a pagan world
that reflects and develops divine thoughts while hoping especially for the
days to go on.
Dante’s poet-navigator makes us understand that Ulysses’ problem is
not the geographical border between the Mediterranean and the Ocean but
the spiritual border between classical pagan culture, which seeks knowl-
edge heroically (though insanely), and Christian (Dante’s) culture, which
has the opportunity to know revealed truth for it acts with the help of divine
grace. This border would be shown at the moral-allegorical level through
the distinction between a <going to discover> out of curiositas and another
<going to discover> with the permission and the help of God.
Dante - and Virgil before him - aimed the eye of his heart at the Uni-
verse, meaning the mind considering the conceivable All. A poet’s incli-
nation, nice and easy one might say, where going out of oneself from a
well-guarded penumbra does not mean creating phantoms but rather set-
ting in order the accumulation of thoughts, feelings, and images that come
from the light, and the darkness, and the words of everyone, whether lying
in books or pronounced by people, from the most learned to the least il-