Commentary Purg XV 85-86

What is the precise meaning of the word visïone as it is used here?  In Vita nuova the word was used six times to denote dreaming and, at the conclusion, once to denote 'vision' (in the Pauline or Johannine sense -- see Hollander [Holl.1974.1], p. 9).  In the Commedia it is used a total of 10 times, as follows: [Purg IX 18]; here; [Purg XVII 34] (in the same sense as here); [Purg XIX 56]; [Par III 7]; [Par XIV 41], [Par XIV 49] (in all these three last cases denoting the power of sight in general); [Par XVII 128]; [Par XXIII 50]; [Par XXXIII 62].  In Purgatorio IX, XIX, and in Paradiso XXIII it denotes 'dream.'  The other four occurrences include the usage which gave the poem a working title for some commentators (i.e., 'La visione di Dante Alighieri') at Paradiso XVII and XXXIII.  That leaves us with the two uses here on the terrace of Wrath.  How do we construe them?  Pietro di Dante (DDP Pietro1.Purg.XV.85-87) offers the following bit of medieval etymologizing for the word 'ecstasy' (extasis): 'ab ex, quod est extra, et stasis, quod est status, quasi extra suum statum' (from ex, that is, outside, and stasis, that is, state: as though outside oneself).  The word visïone modified by estatica denotes a very special kind of seeing, one that the poem will return to only with its final vision in the Empyrean.  Thus the mode of presentation of the exemplars of meekness is, within the fiction, a preparation of the protagonist for his eventual opportunity to see God 'face to face.'  Outside the fiction, it is a test of the reader's capacity to understand the nature of Dantean poetics, reliant upon claims that are, to say the very least, unusual for a poet to make for his poem, one that will finally offer us precisely una visïone estatica.  Here the text offers us a foretaste of that final visionary moment.