If the later Heidegger went to great lengths to reinvigorate the ancient sense of thaumazein or wonder, which should be the root of all philosophy, he forgets that the Christian revamping of this wonder was not done without reason. It is just as possible to be flabbergasted by the Horrific as by the Good (see Kant’s sublime, and Lacan’s undoing of it), and it is of no small importance to determine what is the Good in this case. Dante’s Divine Comedy ends in wonder, but it is not wonder, simply, at that which we cannot comprehend — it is not the wonder at the void — but the wonder of gazing at the trinity, which we might call, inasmuch as it is a three in one, the ultimate example of rationality (of the triad, the minimum of knowledge) married to the beyond, the one (the maximum of unknowing). Thus Dante erects a bulwark in his poetry, the sense of wonder of the ancients, alied with the dogma of the Christian God. And the water does not run from his hands, even through these centuries.
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