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the present prefiguring as well as acting like a sort of eternal redemption, the whole thing witnessed by Dante the pilgrim, whose artistic genius compresses human drama into an aspect of the divine.
    The refinement of Auerbach’s own writing about Dante is truly exhilarating to read, not just because of his complex, paradox-filled insights, but as he nears the end of the chapter, because of their Nietzschean audacity, often venturing toward the unsayable and the inexpressible, beyond normal or for that matter even divinely set limits. Having established the systematic nature of Dante’s universe (framed by Aquinas’ theocratic cosmology), Auerbach offers the thought that for all of its investment in the eternal and immutable, the Divine Comedy is even more successful in representing reality as basically human. In that vast work of art “the image of man eclipses the image of God,” and despite Dante’s Christian conviction that the world is made coherent by a systematic universal order, “the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it” (202). Auerbach’s great predecessor Vico had flirted with the idea that the human mind creates the divine, not the other way around, but living under the Church’s umbrella in eighteenth-century Naples, Vico wrapped his defiant proposition in all sorts of formulae that seemed to preserve history for Divine Providence, and not for human creativity and ingenuity. Auerbach’s choice of Dante for advancing the radically humanistic thesis carefully works through the great poet’s Catholic ontology as a phase transcended by the Christian epic’s realism, which is shown to be “ontogenetic,” that is, “we are given to see, in the realm of timeless being, the history of man’s inner life and unfolding” (202).
    Yet Dante’s Christian and post-Christian achievement could not havebeen realized had it not been for his immersion in what he inherited from classical culture — the capacity to draw human figures clearly, dramatically, and forcefully. In Auerbach’s view, Western literature after Dante draws on his example but is rarely as intensely convincing in its variety, its dramatic realism, and stark universality as he was. Successive chapters of Mimesis treat medieval and early Renaissance texts as departures from the Dantean norm, some of them like Montaigne in his Essais stressing personal experience at the expense of the symphonic whole, others such as the works of Shakespeare and Rabelais brimming over with a linguistic verve and resourcefulness that overwhelms realistic representation in the interests of language itself. Characters like Falstaff or Pantagruel are realistically drawn to a certain degree, but what is as interesting to the reader as their vividness are the unprecedented riotous effects of the author’s style. It is not a contradiction to say that this could not have happened without the emergence of humanism, as well as the great geographical discoveries of the period: both have the effect of expanding the potential range of human action while also continuing to ground it in earthly situations. Auerbach says that Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, adumbrate “a basic fabric of the world, perpetually weaving itself, renewing itself, and connected in all its parts, from which all this arises and which makes it impossible to isolate any one event or level of style. Dante’s general, clearly delimited figurality, in which everything is resolved in the beyond, in God’s ultimate kingdom, and in which all characters attain their full realization only in the beyond, is no more” (327).
    From this point on, reality is completely historical, and it, rather than the Beyond, has to be read and understood according to laws that evolve slowly. Figural interpretation took for its point of origin the sacred word, or Logos, whose incarnation in the earthly world was