Dante's Repentance: From Love-Possessed to Possessing Love?
A further exploration of the relationship of human love and Divine Love.
Author: Abe Van Luik
Introduction
I had come to believe that Dante
Alighieri changed from a poet of romantic love
into a poet of Divine Love.
I believed that he changed personally from a person
enthralled and obsessed with
love into one obsessed with and possessed of Love.
Whereas at one point early in
his life he was convinced that love was life, later he
came to see that love was death.
Love, the capital-L Divine variety, was life! That
was my belief.
I had believed this at a conceptual
level for some time, and wrote about it in my
attempt to follow the changing
and maturing of his spiritual relationship with (the
spirit of) Beatrice. However,
until reading a more recent translation of the Inferno,
with excellent explanatory notes,
I missed a crucial section of the road he traveled
from being love-possessed to
possessing Love. And now seeing more of his
internal struggle, and seeing
the nuances of meaning at which he divided words, I
am inexplicably beginning to
suspect a double meaning in a crucial moment at the
end of his journey. A moment
that I thought was sweet at first, but rather void of
deeper meaning, but which I
now see as laden with importance that brings into
question my heretofore linear
interpretation of Dante's journey from love-struck
youthful poet to Love-struck
older poet-prophet.
Background
Dante was a man of his times.
In those times marriages were arranged, love in
marriage was a nice surprise
at best, but not usual and not expected. The soul's
need for love was to be satisfied,
but outside of marriage, and ideally not
physically. And so we see Dante,
a married man, sitting at a crossroad waiting for
his love-object Beatrice to
walk by with some of her lady friends. One time she
acknowledges his existence with
a smile and poetry flows! Another time she
refuses to even look in his
direction and despair sets in! Dante was into the games
of courtly love, the stylized
romantic attachments that were to be on a higher plane
than the physical, yet often
failed to remain at that higher plane. Of course.
When Dante, after being for a
time an alderman in his town, got into a political
scrape and was banned form his
own home town and hence his home, he moved
elsewhere and his wife stayed
behind. This was not wrong, his wife maintained the
family home. It may be that
she lived a happier life without him around writing of
his continual pining for a glance
of recognition from a townswoman, Beatrice. We
will never know, but the point
is that we should not judge by today's ideals, or
pretensions. There was nothing
particularly wrong with Dante's lifestyle in terms
of the realities of his times.
An excellent but disheartening
discussion of the realities of marriage in the Middle
Ages is the essay "What do we
Know about Love in Twelfth Century France?" in
the book "Love and Marriage
in the Middle Ages" by Georges Duby (The
University of Chicago Press,
1994). Duby points out that the husband, according
to one cleric's advice to one
wife, but meant for a broader audience, had feudal
tenant's rights to the use of
his wife's body, she should not refuse him. But while
she is lying there being used
by him she should find joy in contemplating her real
and eternal love relationship,
her relationship with God. (Page 28)
As Duby points out, wives were
being told to split themselves "in two - that was
their fate: on the one hand
(that side which was earthly, carnal and inferior) there
was passive obedience; on the
other, there was a leap to the heights, to passion - in
short, love." (P. 29) Of course
it was frustrating for men's egos to be making love
to an impassive wife simply
enduring him while she thought passionately of union
with God. Duby explains the
natural outcome of this course of events:
"I said earlier that, in marriage,
the woman was divided. It is now clear that the
man was also split in two, but
the way he was split in two was different; whatever
desire, passion and love there
was in men was not channelled, as female love must
be, into sublimation, into spiritual
feelings. He too escaped from the matrimonial
yoke, but without leaving the
earthly and carnal world. He turned away, towards
courtly pastimes and the wide
open spaces of frivolous leisure." (P. 31) And this
brings us to the subject of
courtly love, "love outside of marriage . . . a game . . .
of carefree adventure." (P.
33) A game with rules, however, that assured the
woman was an unattainable, powerful
"lure" who taught the rules of courtly life's
civility "effectively because
she stimulated desire" although she remained always
"forbidden" and "dominant,"
"sparingly dispensing her favour" and teaching "true
love" to be "restrained desire"
in friendship. (Pp. 33-34)
Duby then says these rules applied
exclusively to young men and their devotion to
the unattainable wife of their
seigneur. Manorial men simply went out and
fornicated and had babies illegitimately
and boasted about it. Duby observes
regarding the women these well
off men seduced that "nowhere is it stated that
they were courted or that before
possessing them their seducer had celebrated their
being with the liturgies of
'fine amour.'" (courtly love) (Pp. 34-35) However, I
would disagree with Duby's characterization
of courtly love as simply a seignorial
scheme for keeping the young
men of a court harmlessly focused on an
unattainable love-goal until
they were ready for battle as civilized knights. (Pp.
33-34) I believe it was part
of an ordering of society for this purpose, sure, but it
also served other purposes.
One other purpose was to help
men seduce women. Andreas Capellanus wrote the
rules of courtly love to cover
every circumstance: the one described by Duby, as
well as the one for which he
says there is no evidence. Capellanus gives detailed
instructions on how to seduce
women of lower as well as higher rank, recommends
chaste love but recognizes and
does not find fault with those who engage in the
"works of Venus" and even suggests
that raping lower class women is OK if it
keeps you from being stupid
and making amorous promises to those not worthy of
refined words by rank or breeding.
(See "The Art of Courtly Love" by Andreas
Capellanus [translation by John
Jay Parry, Columbia University Press, New York,
1960] a cleric who styles himself
chaplain to the court of Marie of Troyes, late
12th century, pages 122-123
and 150.)
The point is that courtly love
was a ubiquitous phenomenon for some times and
places, with its central theme
of the necessity of an obsessive search for love
causing it to also be called,
by some, the religion of love, with Church
condemnation following as a
matter of course. And atop the mount of artisans
plying this trade in the words
of love sits Dante, of whom Duby said: "one bows
before the formal perfection
of the 'Divine Comedy,' before the Florentine poet's
skill in expounding an inaccessible
theology." (P. 94, in the context of comparing
his work with that of Jean de
Meun, also a best-selling 'theologian' of courtly
love.).
C.S. Lewis (in his "The Allegory
of Love, A study of Medieval Tradition" [edition
published as a Galaxy Book by
the New York division of Oxford University press,
1958] is particularly vehement
about the heretical aspect of this religion of love.
Concerning courtly love, Lewis
says: "The sentiment, of course, is love, but love
of a highly specialized sort,
whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility,
Courtesy, Adultery, and the
Religion of Love. . . . . Yet this love, though neither
playful nor licentious in its
expression, is always what the nineteenth century called
'dishonourable' love. The poet
normally addresses another man's wife, and the
situation is so carelessly accepted
that he seldom concerns himself much with he
husband: his real enemy is the
rival. But if he is ethically careless, he is no
light-hearted gallant: his love
is represented as a despairing and tragical
emotion--or almost despairing,
for he is saved from complete wanhope by his faith
in the God of Love who never
betrays his faithful worshipers and who can
subjugate the cruellest of beauties."
(Pp. 2-3) The "fourth mark of courtly love,"
according to Lewis, is "its
love religion of the god Amor. This is partly . . . an
inheritance from Ovid. In part
it is that same law of transference which determined
that the emotion stored in the
vassal's relation to his seigneur should attach itself to
the new kind of love: the forms
of religious emotion would naturally tend to get
into the poetry, for the same
reason. But in part (and this perhaps, the most
important reason of the three)
erotic religion arises as a rival or a parody of the
real religion and emphasizes
the antagonism of the two ideals. The quasi- religious
tone is not necessarily strongest
in the most serious love poetry." (P. 18)
So why was Dante spared from
having his books, and perhaps his body, burned for
teaching an alternate religion
of love? Simple, he repented being a theologian of
the religion of love and instead
with all his artistic energies became an advocate of
the religion of Love! Or did
he?
A Statement of Conversion from the Religion of love to the Religion of Love
The conversion from being a worshiper
of love to being a worshiper of Love is
strongly hinted at in the tale
of Francesca and Paolo in the Inferno of Dante, Canto
V.
My interpretation of this tale
follows the text and interpretations in a recent book,
"The Inferno of Dante, A New
verse Translation" by Robert Pinsky, Illustrated by
Michael Mazur, with Notes by
Nicole Pinsky and Foreword by John Frecorro
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
New York, 1994).
Dante's changing perception of
Beatrice and his changing love for her was alluded
to in the notes in the Pinsky
book on Canto 1 line 97 where Beatrice is described
as the "ONE WORTHIER" than Dante's
guide, the poet Virgil. The Pinskys say
that "The historical Beatrice
was probably Beatrice Portinari who was Dante s
neighbor when they were children,
and who died in 1290 at the age of twenty-
four." In Dante's Vita Nuova
she is a living woman, who dies, sending Dante into
a period of grieving. (Dante
also has a short excursion into replacing her as his
love-object.) In the Divine
Comedy, the Pinskys note, "Beatrice stands for
blessedness and divine grace."
(Pp. 379-380)
This change in the portrayal
of Beatrice is related to Dante's change of heart
regarding romantic love as a
force to be obeyed. Instead, Love, with a capital L, is
now the center of Dante's universe.
This is well stated in the introduction to the
Pinsky book, in the general
Notes on the Inferno: "The subject of Dante s poetry
had always been Love it continued
to be Love, profoundly transformed, in the
Divine Comedy. For Dante, as
for many of his contemporaries, love and poetry
were inseparable," . . . .
So it seems that Dante changed
from a love poet to a Love prophet. Or has Dante
managed to have it both ways,
fooling the whole world and being love-obsessed
and Love-possessed at the same
time? Has he married the "erotic religion" that
according to Lewis "arises as
a rival or a parody of the real religion and
emphasizes the antagonism of
the two ideals" with the very thing it rivals and is
antagonistic to?
Some things suggest the answer
is no: he really did see the light and leave behind
the darkness of his former life.
The fifth Canto of the Inferno tells the tale of
Francesca da Rimini "which is
perhaps Dante s most famous meditation on sinful
love" according to Pinsky. And
it is in this story that we are put on notice that this
Dante has repented of the love-poet
he was in his younger years. Wrote Pinsky:
"When Francesca attributes her
weakness to her "gentle heart" "Love, which in
gentle hearts is quickly born"
(lnf, V, 89) her words echo lines from Dante s
earlier love poetry, where he
claimed that 'Love and the gentle heart are one.' If
Francesca s words are undercut
by her damnation, Dante s are as well, so that she
stands as a surrogate for Dante
s own poetic past. Her account of her seduction
by literature might be taken
as a veiled confession of a similar susceptibility on
Dante s part." (Foreword iv)
Pinsky's Notes on Canto V (pp.
385-386) suggest that Francesca and Paolo, the
two whose love led to their
death and spending eternity in hell, were
contemporaries of Dante's. The
discovery of their affair by her husband, who was
Paolo's brother, led to his
murdering them both. The tale she tells is of seduction
aided by a famous courtly-love
tradition romance, a book she now curses. The
Pinsky notes suggest that this
shows Dante now disapproving of a romantic
literary tradition his poetry
used to be part of. His earlier views on love and the
necessity of giving in to its
demands had radically changed by the time he was
ready to write his Divine Comedy.
I agree, but also have lingering doubts.
To read this story for oneself
I suggest Pinsky's translation, beginning with Canto
V, line 24, on page 47 and ending
with Canto VI, line 10, page 57.
This story tells of Dante, accompanied
by Virgil, entering into an area where "The
hurricane of Hell in perpetual
motion" is "Sweeping the ravaged spirits as it rends,
Twists, and torments them."
Among the hordes he sees, Virgil names a thousand
of the nobles and heroes of
the past, men and women, who "suffer here who sinned
in carnal things" . . . .
Achilles, Paris and Tristan are
among them, and Dante asks if he can speak with
two who are swept along together
by these horrible winds into an eternal, cold
gloom. Virgil says all he needs
do is call to them with compassion.
The two come to rest by Dante
and Virgil. The man can only weep while the
woman speaks. She prays for
Dante's peace, with a caveat suggesting it a useless
prayer since God does not favor
those who reside in hell's torments. She
introduces her story with the
words cited by Pinsky above as being Dante's own
words from his more youthful
poetry: "Love, which in gentle hearts is quickly
born," is what caused their
deaths and caused the man to experience joy of such
magnitude that even here he
is, in death, still inseparable from her. She suggests
their murderer will also find
a hellish judgement.
Dante is affected in the depth
of his heart and Virgil asks what the matter is.
Dante then agonizes over the
fact that "sweet conceptions and passion so deep
Should bring them here!"
In other words, he is recognizing
that what he had previously set his heart on was
the path that led these two,
as well as countless others, to hell. He then asks for
some clarification from Francesca,
calling her by name. He asks her to describe
the moment of their fall. She
answers that it causes her great pain but she will tell.
The two were, innocently she
claims, alone, and for pleasure reading Lancelot. At
times they read words that caused
them to glance at one another, and they
recognized what was happening
to them. But then there was one special moment
that "defeated" them: they saw
the words "the longed-for smile, Was kissed by
that most noble lover."
Paolo leaned over at reading
these words and kissed her mouth "trembling," and
the reading was over for that
day! They have been inseparable since.
Dante was so miserable at hearing
of this, perhaps because of a direct contribution
to this eternal torment by a
book of the courtly-love genre, a genre he loved and
wrote in, that perhaps he felt
some sort of complicity.
At any rate he fell into a swoon
and came to at another place of hellish torture
where his long journey to the
Divine Nature continued.
But why did Dante feel such strong
emotions with these two? He saw plenty of
others whose sufferings seemed
greater or at least as great. Was it because he saw
himself in their story? Surely,
but was it his past self or his present self he saw in
their story? Later in his dealings
with Beatrice he undergoes penances for the
tendencies to seek to posses
and love her. He had not yet learned. No wonder he
fainted of sorrow, what he didn't
say is he also fainted of fright for his own soul.
Considerations and Interpretations
This tale more than any other
explains that there was a break between the old
Dante and the new Dante. It
was a break foreshadowed by the Vita Nuova, but it
had not yet been completed in
that volume. Here, at the very beginning of the
Inferno, Dante in effect has
repented of his dalliances in the religion of courtly
love. He is now preparing to
enter the true Court of Love, God's Presence. And
his personal spirit guide will
cause him to confront, recognize, and repent of all his
foolish sins of love and learn
to value and seek only Love. That personal teacher
and confessor, and assignor
of penances leading to the forgiveness of Dante's sins
is none other than his Beatrice!
Beatrice is representative of
God, a messenger not unlike Christ: . . . "God has
graced her with an even greater
gift: whoever speaks with her shall speak with
Him. (Ch. XIX of Dante Alighieri's
"Vita Nuova," Mark Musa translator and
commentor (Indiana University
Press, Bloomington 1973).
Dante combines the Divine and
the Natural in Beatrice: . . . "God does have
something new in mind for earth.
. . . . . . She is the best that Nature can achieve . .
. . . . . her eyes, wherever
she may choose to look, send forth their spirits radiant
with love to strike the eyes
of anyone they meet, and penetrate until they find the
heart. You will see Love depicted
on her face, there where no one dares hold his
gaze too long. (Ch.XIX.)
The comparison of Beatrice with
Christ is even more overt in Chapter XXIV's
prose introduction where a vision
of Love shows him his heavenly lady preceded
by another beautiful lady who,
it is explained, is a forerunner to Beatrice as John
the Baptist was a forerunner
to Christ. After he beholds his "miraculous Beatrice,
Love said to Dante that 'Anyone
of subtle discernment would call Beatrice Love,
because she so greatly resembles
me.'"
These cites show that prior to
the Divine Comedy, Dante had thoroughly married
the theology of courtly love
with the theology of Divine Love, even bringing in the
God Love to testify to Beatrice
being Love right after declaring her a forerunner of
Christ as was John the Baptist.
C.S. Lewis' notion of a "rival or a parody of the
real religion" has been married
to that to which it is ideally antagonistic.
So, in the Divine Comedy, a few
years later, Dante has repented of love and found
Love, and finds favor with his
Church. He is a poet-prophet, telling of the afterlife
from hell through purgatory
and describes God's eternal heaven. More than that,
he describes the Divine Presence!
And he is forever changed, having obtained
Love!
But what was one of the last
things he saw before entering the Presence of God?
It was an approving smile from
his Beatrice. A smile that in his youth had lifted
him into new heights of passion,
a smile that when withheld had dropped him into
despair. That same smile!
On first reading I thought it
was very sweet of Beatrice to favor Dante with the
one thing she had used so sparingly
and withheld so effectively to control him in
the journey through purgatory
and into the lower heavens. He was finally,
according to her, capable of
withstanding her glory. He was finally worthy of it!
[I will be citing from the edition
of "The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri,"
translated by Charles Eliot
Norton (William Benton, Publisher, Encyclopaedia
Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1952
[26th printing 1984]), published with editorial
advice of the faculties of the
University of Chicago.]
As Dante approaches the Divine
presence, Beatrice disappears! St. Bernard of
Clairvaux suddenly becomes his
guide. Canto XXXI:
{65}. . . "I lifted up my eyes,
and saw her as she had made for herself a crown
reflecting from herself the
eternal rays. From that region which thunders highest up
no mortal eye is so far distant,
in whatsoever sea it lets itself sink deepest, as there
from Beatrice was my sight.
But this was naught to me, for her image did not
descend to me blurred by aught
between."
So Dante sees her from afar,
but his sight of her is perfectly clear. And he as much
as prays to her:
{79}"'0 Lady, in whom my hope
is strong, and who, for my salvation, didst
endure to leave thy footprints
in Hell, of all those things which l have seen through
thy power and through thy goodness,
I recognize the grace and the virtue. Thou
hast drawn me from servitude
to liberty by all those ways, by all the modes
whereby thou hadst the power
to do it. Guard thou in me thine own magnificence
so that my soul, which thou
hast made whole, may, pleasing to thee be unloosed
from the body.' Thus I prayed;
and she, so distant, as it seemed, smiled and looked
at me; then turned to the eternal
fountain."
This last approving smile is
the completion of what was begun with that one
earthly smile registered in
the Vita Nuova and suggests a promise made by the first
smile has been kept. Having
been thus reassured of Beatrice's love and approval,
Dante now follows the advice
of his new guide and moves toward his theophany,
wherein he sees the Holy Trinity's
glorious Light, the Love that moves stars
{Canto XXXIII, 142}
Dante has won both, Beatrice's
love and Divine Love, and has thus found a way to
validate the religion of love
at the same time as he witnesses to the truth of the
religion of Love! The only thing
he invalidated was what Capellanus called
"mixed" love:
. . . " one kind of love is pure,
and one is called mixed. It is the pure love which
binds together the hearts of
two lovers with every feeling of delight. This kind
consists in the contemplation
of the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as
far as the kiss and the embrace
and the modest contact with the nude lover,
omitting the final solace, for
that is not permitted to those who wish to love purely.
. . . This love is distinguished
by being of such virtue that from it arises all
excellence of character, and
no injury comes from it, and God sees very little
offense in it. . . .
But . . . mixed love which gets
its effect from every delight of the flesh and
culminates in the final act
of Venus. What sort of love this is you may clearly see
from what I have already said,
for this kind quickly fails, and lasts but a short time,
and one often regrets having
practiced it, by it one's neighbor is injured, the
Heavenly King is offended, and
from it come very grave dangers. But I do not say
this as though I meant to condemn
mixed love, I merely wish to show which of the
two is preferable. But mixed
love, too, is real love, and it is praiseworthy, and we
say that it is the source of
all good things, although from it grave dangers threaten,
too. Therefore I approve of
both pure love and mixed love, but I prefer to practice
pure love. You should therefore
put aside all fear of deception and choose one of
the two kinds of love." (Capellanus,
pp. 122-123)
So did Dante repent of his religion
of love? No, he validated it by taking its end
result into the very Presence
of God and thus effectively combined it with the
religion of Love, making the
two into one! And all that Canto V of the Inferno
condemned about courtly love
and its traditions was the falling into mixed love
exactly as described by Capellanus,
including the acts of Venus. It seems to me
Dante has had the audacity to
not only see and describe God's glory, but to add
Love and his female look-alike,
Beatrice, speaking to whom was the same as
speaking to God, to the pantheon!
Those who judged the Divine Comedy
to be the culmination of the courtly love
literary tradition have it right.
Those who see Dante as having repented of that
love tradition and having adopted
a Love tradition are not entirely correct. Dante
only made Capellanus' sentiments
about pure love stronger. Capellanus said "God
sees very little offense in
it" and Dante showed there was no offense in it, that
when it was further purified
it was a path into the presence of God! And Dante
strongly disagreed with Capellanus'
half-hearted endorsement of mixed love and
thoroughly condemned it in Canto
V of the Inferno as being a sure path to hell.
One wonders. Would the Divine
Comedy have had a different outcome had
Beatrice lived a longer life,
and had she finally been won over to love Dante
purely, or even mixedly, in
that longer life? Or, if she had lived longer and
persisted in resisting Dante's
courtly poetic overtures might he have, as any youth,
finally moved on to another?
Questions with no answers, but sad as it may be, it
was Beatrice's death in her
twenties that devastated Dante and led him into the
inner world of the Divine Comedy.
I believe Dante was tested and finally
spiritually matured by that
sad event. And through Dante the world was spiritually
enriched by that sad event.
And the main part of that enrichment is the simple idea
that pure human love is the
path that leads to Divine Love, the two are not
antagonistic, are not anathema
to each other.
EPILOGUE: As such things often happen, as soon as I wrote the above piece I ran across an even newer and even more vernacular English verse version of the "INFERNO -- DANTE ALIGHIERI" (translated into English verse by Elio Zappulla, Pantheon Books 1998). Take a look at this writing, it is so clear as to actually be easy to read! This is Dante in Canto V asking Francesca what moment it was that drew her and her lover, to whom she is still bound in hell, into the God named Love's "dubious desires:"
Again I turned to them and spoke.
"Francesca,
Your story makes me sorrow,
both for you
And for the one you love. But
I must know:
When you and he had breathed
those first sweet sighs
Of love, say how and when Love
led you both
To taste his dubious desires."
And she
"There is no greater pain than
to recall
The happy past in times of misery.
Too well your teacher knows
the truth of this!
But let me tell, though I must
speak through tears,
The way Love came to nestle
in our hearts.
"One day we sat and read for
pleasure s sake
Of noble Lancelot, by Love possessed.
We were alone and mindless of
the risk.
Some passage in the book would
often cause
Our eyes to meet and from our
faces drain
The blood. How quickly we were
overwhelmed!
For when we read that Lancelot
embraced
His Guinevere, his queen, his
love, and kissed
Those long-desired, smiling
lips, then he,
Who never shall be severed from
my side,
All trembling, turned and kissed
me on the mouth
That writer and his book--what
panderers
They were!. That day we read
from it no more.
"That day we read from it no more" is a seriously delicious piece of understatement.
At the same visit to my local library, I also ran into a 1987 book in the Modern Critical Interpretations series of Chelsea House Publishers called "Dante s Divine Comedy" edited and with introduction by Harold Bloom. In that book I found Bloom citing approvingly a person named Curtius who wrote the second essay in the book. Both seemed to be way ahead of my suspecting that Dante was a closet heretic (see pages 7-9):
>>In the allegory of the poets, Beatrice is the Muse, whose function is to help the poet remember. Since remembering, in poetry, is the major mode of cognition, Beatrice is Dante s power of inven tion, the essence of his art. That means she is somehow the highest of the Muses, and yet far above them also, since in Dante s version of the allegory of the poets, Beatrice has "a place in the objective process of salvation," as Ernst Robert Curtius phrased it. Curtius rightly emphasized the extent of Dante s audacity:
Guido Guinizelli (d 1276) had
made the exaltation of the beloved to an angel of paradise a topos of Italian
lyric. To choose as guide in a poetic vision of the otherworld a loved
woman who has been thus exalted is still within the bounds of Christian
philosophy and faith. But Dante goes much further than this. He gives Beatrice
a place in the objective process of salvation. Her function is thought
of as not only for himself but also for all believers. Thus, on his own
authority, he introduces into the Christian revelation an element which
disrupts the doctrine of
the church. This is either heresy--or
myth.
It is now customary to speak of Dante as the Catholic poet, . . . and the figure of Beatrice would be heresy and not myth if Dante had not been so strong a poet that the Church of later centuries has been happy to claim him. Curtius centered upon Dante s vision of himself as a prophet, even insisting that Dante expected the prophecy s fulfillment in the immediate future, during his own lifetime. Since Dante died at the age of fifty--six, a quarter-century away from the "perfect" age of eighty--one set forth in his Convivio, the literal force of the prophecy presumably was voided. But the prophecy, still hidden from us, matters nevertheless, as Curtius again maintains:
Even if we could interpret his prophecy, that would give it no meaning for us. What Dante hid, Dante scholarship need not now unriddle. But it must take seriously the fact that Dante believed that he had an apocalyptic mission. This must be taken into consideration in interpreting him. Hence the question of Beatrice is not mere idle curiosity. Dante s system is built up in the first two cantos of the Inferno, it supports the entire Commedia. Beatrice can be seen only within it. The Lady Nine has become a cosmic power which emanates from two superior powers. A hierarchy of celestial powers which intervene in the process of history--this concept is manifestly related to Gnosticism: as an intellectual construction, a schema of intellectual contemplation, if perhaps not in origin. Such constructions can and must be pointed out. We do not know what Dante meant by Lucia. The only proper procedure for the commentator, then, is to admit that we do not know and to say that neither the ophthalmological explanation nor the allegorical interpretations are satisfactory. Exegesis is also bound to give its full weight to all the passages at the end of the Purgatorio and in the Paradiso which are opposed to the identification of Beatrice with the daughter of the banker Portinari. Beatrice is a myth created by Dante.
Very little significant criticism of Dante has followed this suggestion of Curtius, and a distorted emphasis upon Dante s supposed orthodoxy has been the result. Curtius certainly does not mean that Dante was a Gnostic, but he does remind us that Dante s Beatrice is the central figure in a purely personal gnosis.<<
Dante pulled it off. He followed the Religion of Love right into the Christian Holy of Holies, the Divine Presence, and has all of Christendom's praise falling all over him. But then, just maybe, Christianity is the Religion of love, and for a while it lost its moorings and floated around in a love- less and stern masculine facade that saw women only as Eve, the Devil's Gate, allowing poor hapless Adam (all men) to be brought into his Fall. Christianity had Christ to undo the Fall of Adam. Dante introduced Beatrice as anther the Eve ante-type, she who is the gate through which fallen man may ascend to God. Mary, the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, existed of course. She pleads for men and women for forgiveness from a stern God. Beatrice goes further. Step by step she leads a sinful man into greater and greater purity, and finally into the very Presence!