Dante and Beatrice
An Analysis of the Relationship of Beatrice to Dante
Dante describes his meeting with Beatrice at an early age and in La Vita Nuova (The New Life) discusses and poeticizes the love he instantly held for her. Beatrice becomes for Dante a gate to the divine love that he examines in La Comedia, today referred to as The Divine Comedy. This paper will analyze the relationship between Dante and Beatrice and show how her role in his life is like that of a muse -- an agent of God, drawing the poet closer and closer not to herself but to the Divine.
The Vita Nuova
In the Vita Nuova, of course, Dante is drawn solely to Beatrice without anticipating the higher love that Beatrice reflects in her own person. It is this reflection in her that attracts Dante, although he does not place it as a reflection of the divine love of God. Yet, as a poet, his intuition is not long in divining that the source of this love is indeed Heaven. But what draws him first is simply her: "Her apparel was of a most noble tincture, a subdued and becoming crimson, and she wore a cincture and ornaments befitting her childish years" (Vita Nuova 1). It is a vision of beauty that will compel him towards the transcendentals -- the unum, bonum, verum -- the one, the good, and the true, which reside in God Himself (as Dante will show in The Divine Comedy).
Dante gives a hint of this compulsion, however, immediately he is attracted to Beatrice: He states, "At that moment (I speak it in all truth) the spirit of life, which abides in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble with a violence that showed horribly in the minutest pulsations of my frame, and tremulously it spoke these words: & #8230;'Behold a god stronger than I, who cometh to triumph over me!'" (Vita Nuova 2). Dante remembers the poetry of Homer and is able to locate the origin of Beatrice's beauty in Heaven. He quotes Homer, applying the words of praise to Beatrice: "From heaven she had her birth, and not from mortal clay," (Vita Nuova 2); therefore, it is no surprise to see that Dante should, after the death of Beatrice, compose an epic poem in which he is the central character traversing the realms of the afterlife with the ultimate object of reaching Heaven, where Beatrice waits for him.
Yet, what Dante learns along the way is that Beatrice herself is not the ultimate goal or object to be attained -- but something else: an inspiration, a means of drawing Dante to Heaven, which is union with God. Dante desires union with Beatrice (even though he does not hear her even speak until he is eighteen), but as her death in Vita Nuova (and his encounters in the Inferno and the Purgatorio) teach him, the greater and more important desire of all human souls should be that of union with the Divine. Beatrice is Dante's introduction to love, which, his Divine vision assures him, is not located on Earth but in Heaven.
Dante's love for Beatrice did not end in earthly marriage (for she married another), nor did it end with her death (for she appears as a guide to Dante in the Divine Comedy). Her role in his life is as a light of grace, a light to God. Their relationship develops over the years of their initial contact as children (although in a largely one-sided way). What appears to be a kind of masked devotion on Dante's end, is actually revealed (in the Divine Comedy) to be a full, deep, and spiritual relationship that extends into the everlasting.
The Vita Nuova ends with Dante's conception of this relationship, for he writes, "After I had written this sonnet there appeared to me a wonderful vision, in which I saw things that made me determine to write no more of this dear saint, until I should be able to write of her more worthily" (74). But Dante then proceeds to reveal something of the vision he has received -- for he seems to appeal to the Giver of the Vision in a petition for time to do the seeming impossible: "So, if it shall please Him, by whom all things live, to spare my life for some years longer, I hope to say that of her which never yet hath been said of any lady" (74). Dante concludes by begging...
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