Una proposta per Paradiso VII, 145-8

Abstract

The essay moves from the need to correctly interpret vv. 145-8 of canto VII of the Paradiso, alluding to the resurrection of bodies. In general, it was understood that the sacrifice of Christ, to which the discourse on the resurrection is directly connected, freed man from original sin, and thus restored him to the original condition in which the body would have been eternal as the fruit of direct creation (vv. 67-72), such as angels, the heavens and the raw material. In these terms, the explanation of the final verses, which makes the death of the body a sort of interval or parenthesis between two eternities, appears, if not explicitly heretical, very daring, and some scholars have thought of a peculiarly Dantean devolution. Moreover, it is in contrast with the doctrine clearly shown by Aquinas in his Compendium Theologiae, according to which originally the body was not properly immortal but rather rendered incorruptible by the soul that would have, so to say, adequate it to itself. In other words, the body would have enjoyed the privilege of the posse non mori, lost with the sin of our forefathers; only with the incarnation of Christ and with redemption such privilege would have changed nature, and the body would have acquired the prerogative of the non posse mori, which is of the real immortality and which it will enjoy at the time of the final judgment.