The New Testament, like the Old, offers exemplary models for the conjugation of poetry and prose working together in order to make poetically possible a revelation of the divine. The beatitudes, liturgical hymns like the Magnificat, and prayers like the Pater noster communicate lyrically a sense of salvation to those who experience the Christ and believe. Such lyric core texts provide a basis for expansion into the full-blown historical narrative of the Bible. The synergy of poetry and prose is crucial in the process of memorialization of a life-transforming love followed by the death of the beloved and the glorification of the beloved person in an afterlife. The experience of Christ by his disciples, as crystalized in the New Testament, proves in these respects to prefigure Dante’s experience of Beatrice, as recorded and interpretively actualized in the Vita nuova. Dante’s book opens penetrating insight into the indispensable role of literary construction in the theological revelation of its progenitor text, Holy Scripture, especially the Gospels.

Beatrice’s salutation in the streets of Florence communicates salvation in a religious and even in an eschatological register to Dante as her lover. Dante translates his experience of “beatitude” in relation to this lady into the lyrical language of his poems. He thereby endeavors, furthermore, in an evangelical mode, to communicate this experience to others who can be transformed in their own existence by means of the revelation of his witness. Beatrice is a Christ-like figure for Dante, even a mediation to him personally of Christian salvation. The lyrical quality of this experience is in excess of all objectively communicable facts and content. Hence the dynamic interplay between autobiographical prose, testifying to concrete aspects of Dante’s existence, and the poetry that manifests what these contextual facts can never encompass or exhaust. Ineffable aspects of existence are translated into the ecstatic language of lyric testifying to irreducibly personal experience. The experience of Beatrice, as interpreted in this poetry, is for Dante a transcendent revelation of divinity. The Vita nuova understands this experience in light of the Gospels and, in its turn, illuminates how the Gospels, through literary and lyrical means, become a revelation of the divinity of Jesus.

Moving from the recently changed landscape in literary theory, in which the distinction between sacred and secular literature blurs, this book demonstrates that Dante’s Vita nuova harbors enormous potential for responding creatively to the cultural and intellectual crises of our times. Our “post-truth” era can rediscover the deeper meaning of truth as a poetic interpretation of what in the Middle Ages could still be understood as theological revelation. Dante’s “little book” makes startlingly clear how theology is crucial to the continuing intelligibility and viability of the humanities. Meant here is especially negative theology, or theology as (negated by) poetry. Theology, qua negative, is the knowing of our own unknowing of divinity – or of whatever it is that most deeply bonds us together as humans and grants us our very existence together with everything else. Dante’s hybrid of lyric poetry and autobiographical prose in his “little book” shows how the language of theology, like that of poetry, is grounded in the ineffability of human existence itself. This recognition is the beginning of the critique of all ideology as, in effect, idolatry. On this basis, a possibility of salvation through and for humanities tradition and theological revelation alike is projected from Dante’s work into our contemporary times.