CRASSH

Dante’s, at one level of consciousness and commitment, is an anticipatory eschatology, an eschatology involving a typological sense of the fulfilment of the what is of human experience under the conditions of time and space by the what will be of that experience under the aspect of eternity. But to live with the Commedia is sooner rather than later to become aware of its anxiety to deepen the typological idea in favour of the notion of history itself as eschatologically revelatory, as apt even now, in the moral and ontological consistency of the moment, to confirm the abiding truth of personality as determined in this or that individual. In what amounts in this sense to an essay in immanent or actual eschatology, this paper will consider (a) the substance and psychology of self-encounter as reconstructed by Dante in the Inferno, and (b) his essentially prophetic sense of the infinitely precious character of the historical instant as, in effect, the crucible of eschatological truth.