Dante: A life by R.W.B. Lewis

Dante’s Love Dante’s love for Beatrice is truly at the core of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

She is the one who prays for him when he first becomes lost in the dark wood and it is through her intercession that Virgil arrives to guide him through Hell—the dark night of the soul—to Purgatory, where Dante finally meets Beatrice, who then conducts him through Paradise—after rebuking him in Cantos 30 and 31 of the Purgatorio for having “taken himself from her and given himself to others” (Purg. 30.126).

Beatrice reminds Dante of his “error” in succumbing to the songs of the “sirens” (Purg. 31.44-45) and thus serves for Dante as more than just a muse: she is virtue par excellence—which, of course, is why Dante places her in Heaven in the Paradiso and why she, not Virgil, serves as his guide for the final act of the Comedy.

In real life, Beatrice had died young and Dante had only known her from a distance—but the vision he had of her inspired him as an artist that he constructed the entire Comedy around this sense of what true sanctity could be. Beatrice for Dante represented holiness, virtue, grace, and supernatural life: when he forgets his devotion to her, he ends up in a dark wood—which is where he starts off the Comedy.

This paper will show how Dante’s love for Beatrice affected his work and gave him the inspiration to write one of the greatest epic poems in the whole history of literature. As Lewis notes, Dante’s respect for Beatrice was unparalleled.

Her rebuke of him in Purgatory mirrored an actual rebuke from her that he received in real life before she died: Dante had fallen in love with Beatrice and began courting her openly—too openly for the tastes of the town (people began to talk) and that did not sit well with Beatrice. She was young but had “a certain maturity of mind” as Lewis puts it (76).

When the met in the street, she cut him by not stopping to greet him at all: the rebuff was one that crushed Dante (Lewis). That feeling he experienced then is repeated in the Purgatorio when Beatrice reams Dante for his faithlessness. He sinks so low under the hard glare of her eyes that it seems he might again descend into the Inferno.

But, as always, her inner charity shines forth and lifts Dante out of himself back up to where he should be—in Heaven, glorying in the vision of God. This is Beatrice’s gift to Dante: she allows him to see Heaven.

In his works, Beatrice was not the only source of inspiration—and her rebuke of the poet in Cantos 30 and 31 for his faithlessness could be a reference to the fact that Dante actually used the names of other muses in his other love poetry—such as the Vita Nuova, which focuses on the love that another woman gives to Dante after Beatrice’s death.

A decade later and no doubt feeling guilty for including another muse in his poetry, Dante writes in Convivio that that gentle woman who showed compassion to him was but a representation of Philosophy and not a reference to a real woman. It was as though Beatrice was still in his mind, glaring at him for daring to include another woman in his writing—when he had made such a spectacle of himself by attempting to court her, Beatrice, in real life in Florence when she was alive.

Still, there is one other poem in which Dante references another woman with whom he committed some error—Parole mei—and it shows that there is perhaps a pattern in Dante’s writing of his falling away from Beatrice, whom he identified early on life as the one for him.

And yet through his works he shows himself constantly following away from the perfection devotion that he pledged to show her—and undoubtedly he holds onto that guilt and infuses it into the Divine Comedy, using it as the impetus for his descent into Hell and then his rise up into Purgatory and Heaven. Dante is very demanding on himself in his poetry as a result of this love he bears to Beatrice, even after her death.

Her public rebuff of his advances left a deep mark on his mind and soul—it was a message to him that one should be more constant, less emotional, and more conventional in his behavior if he seeks to attain the prize.

Dante took the message to heart and the guilt he felt for accepting favors from others after Beatrice’s death is echoed in Vita Nuova when he writes “Unless you die, you should not ever be / forgetful of your lady who has died” (Vita Nuova XXXVII/26). However, the fact that Dante is so committed to the memory of Beatrice in his poetry is unconventional in and of itself.

It was not a standard practice of his time—but his aim was to love her in life: she cut him down for his over-exuberance in attempting to court her. Upon her death, he took it upon himself to be the kind of lover he could not be in life—and he strictly held himself accountable, so much so that when he meets Beatrice in Purgatorio, he cannot let himself off the hook for his minor transgressions. He has Beatrice scold him severely.

As Barolini notes, “ultimately Dante does not accept the normative rules of his society and so has himself be reprimanded by Beatrice in the earthly paradise for not having remained faithful to her after her death.” The argument that Dante places into the mouth of Beatrice is philosophical to be sure: “The core of her argument is that, since he had already seen in her the highest mortal beauty—the ‘sommo piacer’ of Purgatorio 31.52—he should not have been distracted by lesser beauty after losing her” (Barolini).

The lesson Dante takes from this sequence is that placing all one’s love in a mortal creature is to engage in misplaced affection, warned against by none other than St. Augustine in his Confessions. Dante turns the romantic love that he held for Beatrice into a spiritual love for Christ—for after meeting Beatrice in Purgatory, she directs their attention to the mythical animal, the griffin, which has two natures subsisting in one personage and thus serves as a symbol of Christ the God-Man.

Thus, Dante uses Beatrice in his epic poem to show how romantic love is not the purpose and should not be the purpose of romantic poetry—but rather that all love should ultimately be directed back to its source, which is in the Triune God in Heaven. Dante uses this moment in his poem to reflect back on his own works where he failed to demonstrate the type of faith he pledged to have for Beatrice—and he also reflects on how even this is not the point.

Beatrice scolds him in Purgatory for his faithlessness, but even she understands what the real meaning here is: it is not Dante’s faithlessness to her but rather his faithlessness to God, Who is the ultimate Love. Beatrice is but a representation of.