La mistica ebraica come chiave per un'interpretazione della problematica creazionistica e della percezione della lingua originaria nella Commedia dantesca

The paper focuses on an examination of the creational theme and the perception of the original language as Dante expressed them in the twenty-sixth Canto of his Paradiso and aims at proving the importance of the message hiding in the deepest folds of the anagogical level of Dante’s text, in addition to the three customary hermeneutic levels, the literal, the moral and the allegorical. This new reading of issues as creation and the original language, already amply treated in different critical approaches to the Commedia, underlines the parallels with themes and theories exploited by Jewish qabbalah. The purpose of such reading is twofold: 1) To prove the validity of the use of a cabalistic key for the opening of the hidden message in Dante’s text, as a «privileged instrument» that enables to provide answers to questions Dante’s criticism has yet been unable to solve in a satisfactory way; 2) To offer additional evidence of the extent of the circulation of the theories of Jewish qabbalah within Christian society in the late Middle Ages, and particularly among those schools of thought that were trying to reconcile the principles of Christian orthodoxy with the tenets of neo-Aristotelian philosophy