Trespassing on the Word

In Paradiso XXVI Adam tells Dante that the cause of the Fall lay in the trapassar del segno, the “trespass of the sign. ”This refers most immediately to the first human violation of divine law, yet Dante did not choose the word for trespass, trasgressione, but took instead a verb meaning “to pass away” or “to die” and transformed it into a noun, “the passing away of the sign. ” We are perhaps not too far off the mark, then, if we see in Adam’s “trespass of the sign” the fall of our human language at precisely the moment when human being is turning away from the divine Word. Seen in the light of this primary linguistic fact, Dante's Commedia stands to reverse the ancient exile of language from its source, to bring our fallen words through hell and purgation so that in the context of heaven they may rejoin the divine syntax, the Alpha and Omega in Whom they find their meaning. Vary the light, however, and Dante's poem becomes another trespass in the line of Adam, daring to speak the “ineffable words, which it is unlawful for a man to utter” (II Cor 12: 4). What Dante does in the Commedia is not unlike the theologian when he or she sets out to elucidate the Mystery. All talk about God bears witness to the fact that we are not with Him: it is the poor noise of our words against the full Silence of the Ineffable Trinity. And yet because that same has in Christ entered our mortal syntax, there is within language an interior movement back to the Word Who spawned it. Once again Dante creates a word to express it: trasumanar(Par. i. 70), to “pass beyond humanity, ”as to the Word from Whom in Adam we “passed away. ” He goes on to say that this metamorphosis of human language into God‘s ineffable speech cannot be expressed in words any more than it can be conveyed in thought. But like the resurrection of the body, this “passing beyond humanity” is a mystery of continuity in change. By virtue of that continuity—that reflection of our image in God’s Archetype—“trasumanar” can be, if not expressed, then suggested in our speech, in the interstices of words and between the lines.

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