Dante: A Life by R.W.B. Lewis Essay

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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.

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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…

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…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 the goodness of God—a small microcosmic depiction of God’s beauty and grace. Dante realizes this and recognizes the fact that all this time he has stopped short of arriving at the fullness of love by getting so hung up on Beatrice and his faithlessness to her—when what he should have been focused on was whether he was being faithful to God.

In conclusion, Dante’s love for Beatrice fills his works because it fills his mind and heart so completely. From the moment he tried to court her to the moment she cut him dead in public by refusing to acknowledge him for all his ostentatious displays of affection, Dante himself goes through a range of emotions that he uses in his works to explore what is actually meant by love. He finally comes to a sense of this when he puts Beatrice into his….....

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Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. "The Divine Comedy, Volume I: Inferno, trans. Mark Musa." New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Barolini, Teodolinda. “Purgatorio 31: Non-Normative Consolation.” Commento

Baroliniano, Digital Dante. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2014. https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/purgatorio/purgatorio-31/

Lewis, R. W. B. Dante: a Life. Penguin, 2004.

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