Time, History and Literature
Auerbach located in Dante a profound cultural change. Where ‘… the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns against the divine order… and obscures it. The image of man eclipses the image of God. Dante’s work realized the Christian-figural essence of man, and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it.’ Here is another version of ‘reversal and continuation’, an extreme form that knows that the paradoxical realities embedded in religion are secular truths — and vice versa. To speak them threatens to erase everything, or walk you back to the start again for another attempt.
Richard Marshall reviews Auerbach’s Time, History, and Literature.