Dante’s Commedia is based on the concept of a double authorship, which tries to combine worldly poetics and visionary prophecy in a way that promises to render the divine work of salvation newly fruitful for a medieval humanity fallen into disorder. This requires a constant renegotiation of the relationship between decidedly contradictory instances: earthly poeta and scriptor Dei, fiction and truth, science and myth have to be brought into a difficult balance. A most prominent example of this can be found at the end of the Inferno, where, in a complex interplay of the earthly poet and the scriptor of God, the brief narrative of the origin of the earth demonstrates how an imaginary cosmogony turns real and is made to converge with the history of salvation “in pro del mondo che mal vive” (Purg. XXXII, 103).