Il nome, la poesia e la misura del divino. Proclo interprete della critica di Platone ad Omero

Abstract

The study of Proclean interpretation of Plato’s critique to Homer, inside the Neoplatonic revival of archaic tradition, is conducted according to two specific interpretation’s levels, the first one linguistic and the second one other aesthetic. The reading of the Proclean text, in particular the Commentary on the Cratylus and the V and VI Dissertations of the Commentary on the Republic, shows side by side how the assimilative activity, by which a man names things and a poet constructs images of the gods, makes language and poetry activities fully incorporated with the system of analogic relations on which is based the hierarchical structure of Proclean metaphysics. Through their mimetic nature, the name and the mythical symbol are elements of union and tie of the men to the divine and so they can be said «proportion of the divine». The distribution of the real on different levels of the being allows the neo-Platonic exegete to describe the poetic production as an analogous to the demiurgical one and therefore the symbolic veils, visibly obscene, as an analogous to the procession of the divine orders from the First God. It is from this perspective that, in a perfect agreement with the triadic and serial configuration of the Whole, we can read the tripartite schema defined by Proclus at the end of the Sixth Dissertation as a distinction among three levels of poetic activity and not, such as required by the most recent critical literature, in three types of poetry. [edited by Author]