Commentary Par XXXIII 67-75

The word concetto (conception, conceiving) is the linchpin of this passage, occurring in verses 68 and 75 (on the latter occasion as a verb). Dante, in this last of his nine invocations (see C.Inf.II.7-9), asks God to make His reality 'conceivable' by mortals. If He requites Dante's request, the poet promises, that will be the result. A scaled-back request, the poet insists, is all that he makes, underlined by the repetition of the phrase 'un poco' (one small part).

This is the fourth time in the poem that the word concetto is connected with an invocation (see C.Inf.XXXII.1-9 and C.Inf.XXXII.10-12; C.Par.XVIII.82-87; and, for a survey of all the presences of concetto in the poem, see C.Par.XXXIII.127). It surely seems to be involved in Dante's sense of what the human agent needs from a higher source, not the mere substance of his vision, but its shaping conceptual formulation. And that is precisely what, the poet will tell us, he was granted in the lightning bolt that resolves all his questions in [Par XXXIII 140-141].

It is interesting to look back to the two uses of concetto in Convivio. In the first of these (Conv.I.v.12) Dante concludes that Latin possesses higher conceptual power than the vernacular: 'più la vertù sua che quella del volgare.' When, only shortly afterward, he returns to the topic (Conv.I.xiii.12), he seems to have revised that opinion. Speaking of the vernacular, he says: 'E noi vedemo che in ciascuna cosa di sermone lo bene manifestare del concetto è più amato e commendato.' That he first had held that highly significant utterance was possible only in Latin stands in clear opposition to his eventual insistence on the conceptual value of the vernacular throughout the Commedia. The noun concetto appears first in [Inf XXXII 4] and then reappears ten more times in the poem; in addition to its first two presences in this final canto (once as noun and once as verb -- see the first paragraph of this note), it reappears in the final tercets (vv. 122 and 127), once again first as noun and then as verb. That four of their fewer than twenty presences in the poem are found in its final canto underlines the importance that Dante found in the words concetto and concepire.