Commentary Par IV 55-63

Dante opens the question of the potential truth to be found in Plato's literally untrue teachings.  Here again (see C.Par.IV.13-15) the reader will want to turn to the Epistola a Cangrande, again near its conclusion (Epist.XIII.84): 'For we perceive many things by the intellect for which language has no terms -- a fact which Plato indicates plainly enough in his books by his employment of metaphors; for he perceived many things by the light of the intellect which his everyday language was inadequate to express' (tr. P. Toynbee).

Dante's view of Plato would seem to indicate great respect (if not as much as for Aristotle, given greater praise than his teacher in Inferno IV), a sense that some of his teaching was potentially or actually heretical, and a further sense of admiration, perhaps based principally on what in Plato he found most poet-like, his use of metaphor to express truth slantwise.  In both major moments in which Dante discusses Plato, here and in the epistle, the salient subject is, indeed, Plato's use of metaphor.  It is possible that Dante is fervently opposed to those who read Plato as a teller of literal truth (in which reading he is nothing short of a heretic avant-la-lettre, as are, on historical grounds, the neo-platonists, in Dante's view).  It seems possible, however, that Dante is willing to allow the philosopher himself a potential escape route; he may have seemed to him, in the end, more like a poet than a philosopher.  Dante's teacher, Thomas Aquinas, is cited by Oelsner (DDP Oelsner.Par.IV.51) as allowing for the possibility, just as we have seen Dante do here, of a possible metaphoric truth in some of Plato's dicta that are literally untrue.