The question of how much of our knowledge is owing to pure perception and how much is dependent on interpretive construction animates the ongoing debate between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Recently, phenomenology has taken a “theological turn” and concerned itself with what is imperceptibly lurking within the perceptible. The eternal may be found to be implicit, in this manner, within time. Indeed, Dante’s temporal experience is projected toward an eternity experienced already by Beatrice as beholding the face of God. Just as time can mediate the eternal, so mediation by poetic interpretation can be reversed into an immediacy of perception in Dante’s model of knowledge as revelation. This revelation is incarnate. Dante experiences it in the beauty of Beatrice, which takes him to the very limits of his beatitude. The inextricably lyrical mediation of this revelation does not deliver it over to rhetorical convention and condemn it to narcissistic self-enclosure. Lyric grounded in Dante’s personal life experience becomes a means of encountering a wholly other dimension of existence open without limit. Dante’s lyric epiphany opens him to the world, as crystalized in pilgrims in transit through Florence, as well as in a vertical, transcendent dimension reaching toward the infinite.

Phenomenology of time-consciousness underwrites Dante’s entire experience of the letters appearing successively to him in the Heaven of Jupiter and forming a whole only in his mental synthesis of their event. Dante takes the “I” as organizing framework and originary principle of the poem. But this I and the poem itself are put forward as mediations of a higher being, that of God. The situation is thus fundamentally different from that in modern phenomenological tradition, where the “I” as mediation of otherness is centered in itself rather than in a divine Other. The self in the perspective of Dante’s poem is a structure serving to relate to God as the absolute Other rather than simply encompassing all possible reality within its own parameters. Whereas in modern philosophy from Descartes to Husserl, otherness has typically been comprehended as no more than a detour back to self and thus as an indirect mode of self-relation, we need to stand this insight on its head (or turn it inside out) in order to see things from Dante’s perspective. Not the I, but God, is the ground and principle in Dante’s theocentric world-view. The reality of the “I” is derivative: it consists of being “made in God’s image.”