Page 13 - GALIET EXILE: Dante IV+
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Galiet & Galiet
a journey to "ailithre," another land in imitation of the lives of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Elijah and John the Baptist after the manner of the Thebaid Christian hermits. Dante’s garments, in Paradiso 25, 7 are as humble as that of the Christian monks. He claims to wear a "vello" or fleece skin in which he returns from his exile to his "bello ovile" or fair sheepfold of St. John's in Florence. He also wears the humble chord. It suggests imagery of Revelation whose heavenly Jerusalem is as a sheepfold, inferring that Dante becomes the sheep that quests for his shepherd just as the falcon longs to return to the falconer (Pur. 19, 64-66), its master: allegory of the Maker’s relationship to his creation.
The Maker. Dante, poet and maker: from Gr. “poiew:” to make. Dante, like Moses, believed to be God's scribe, who having written Genesis and Exodus and delivered God’s Tablet to Israelite pilgrims, becomes at one with God. God is seen as a supreme poet whose universe blooms in his glorious poem of creation: Word of his Word. Dante, the poet, assumes the role of the omniscient Maker by becoming father of his exiled and wandering child, Dante the pilgrim. As such, Dante the pilgrim shares the mission of illuminating Dante the poet who becomes God’s scribe in his Abrahamic peregrination. In Genesis 12.1, God's direct words tell Abraham to “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee,” a command that Abraham obeys, going on pilgrimage from Chaldea to Canaan. A decree that, in turn, echoes Beatrice’s command to Virgil, and which, Virgil, the Pilgrim, exiled briefly from Limbo, at once dutifully obeys. Dante the pilgrim obeys, too, in deeds and words, Virgil, his teacher and guide, who allegorically journeys with Dante through his exile in an inter-textual feast. Paradigm of images that mirror Exodus and a journey that spans from a fallen
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