Dante in Love

Dante is the greatest poet of the middle ages.  His encounter with Beatrice would have him yearning for God and unraveling all of love’s mysteries.  She would grow up and so would he.  She, like Dante, had an arranged marriage.  But Beatrice and Dante were not sweethearts, or doomed lovers.  His love for her was something else.

As a boy, Dante was taken to a party of a wealthy banker by his father.  When the food was served, the children ran off to play.  Dante was arrested by the sight of Beatrice in her bright red dress.  From the beginning Dante’s passion for Beatrice was extraordinary.  Dante tells us, ‘At that very moment, and I speak the truth, the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the most minute veins of my body were strangely affected; and trembling, it spoke these words:  Here is a God stronger than I who comes to rule over me.  At that point the animal spirit, the one abiding in the high chamber to which all the senses bring their perceptions was stricken with amazement and speaking directly to the spirits of sight, said these words:  Now your bliss has appeared. '

What does a child do with such feelings?  The child can only adore, sufferingly.  Out of the happening Dante would interpret all his subsequent experiences, all his philosophy of life, and ultimately his idea of God Himself.  Dante’s obsession with Beatrice was to become the framework through which he viewed all other experiences. 

Dante wouldn’t encounter Beatrice again until he was the age of eighteen.  Dante sees her walking along a street in Florence.  She greets him, and he is overwhelmed.  This was the first time she had actually spoken to him.  It would be daring for a woman to speak to a man on the streets of Florence in that time.  It was a token of boldness.

 He went home to his bedroom completely overwhelmed; he lay down on his bed and fell asleep.  It is then he had the following vision:  A fiery mist filled the room, and through its vapours he made out the fearsome Lord of Love, who declared that he was Dante’s Master.  In the arms of the Lord, a woman was asleep.  She was naked, except for a blood-red cloth loosely wrapped around her body.  Dante recognized the Lady whom he had met in the street.  In one of the Lord’s hands, Dante saw a flaming object.  “See your heart,” says the Lord.  Then the Lord woke up the young woman and forced her to eat the heart.  The Lord had been joyful, started to weep, as he and Beatrice vanished, drifting upwards towards heaven.

He encapsulated the experience into the form of a sonnet.  He was an aspiring author and he circulated the sonnet.  Dante’s fame as a young poet began in a small circle.  Having told of his strange dream in this way, he would have not been surprised when another poet replied with the suggestion Dante should wash his balls and maybe this would temper his lurid imagination. Another poet responds with a sonnet taking Dante’s vision seriously.  The sonnet conveys that the Lord of Love took Dante’s heart because the Lady asked for his death.

 From the beginning of Dante’s serious, poetic career, there exists the bold idea that in the experience of loving Beatrice, he will discover that love itself is going to bring about great changes in his lifetime- changes to the church, to the way society is ordered- and changes in the relations between men and women.  Dante was seeing Beatrice as having a cosmic significance.  She becomes the vehicle for his thoughts about love, the allegory of his love.

During an illness, Dante was overcome with fits of weeping.  In the delirium of the fever, he saw an inward vision of her death.  In it he saw the body of Beatrice lying dead.  Beatrice died shortly after he had the dream.  She was only twenty-four years old. The death of Beatrice meant a new life was to begin.  The crisis of Beatrice’s death was a profound and complex one which involved Dante’s entire being. 

Dante becomes a married man and has three children.  He had been married by arrangement into one of the grandest families of Florence.  He did have love affairs that became the subject of his art along with Beatrice, the tempest of his emotional life.  Dante would become a diplomat and a politician in Florence.  Later this would also be the cause of his exile from his beloved homeland.

It is in exile Dante begins to write his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.  Beatrice would be his guide through hell, purgatory, and heaven.  One who reads the Comedy is led on a spiritual pilgrimage in hopes of having an encounter or vision of God.  Dante believed that Love encompassed all things, that it was the force which moved the sun and the stars.  Dante died in 1321 of malaria.

Reference~ Dante in Love by A.N. Wilson