One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.
Psalm 27:4
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Matthew 5:8
Call to Pilgrimage
In 1274, nine-year old Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) first saw Beatrice in “a blaze of beauty and goodness” walking down a street in Florence. Dante never had a relationship with her (he was a lower social class) but remained enthralled, despite marrying Gemma Donati in 1283 and having four children. His autobiographical Vita Nuova (c.1294) describes Dante’s feelings for “this most gracious being” Beatrice and his service to the god of love. Beatrice’s death in 1290 shattered Dante. Meanwhile, he entered politics, becoming an ambassador, and one of Florence’s six highest magistrates in 1300. Like many Italian city-states (eg Shakespeare’s Verona in Romeo and Juliet), Florence was torn by political conflict, which in 1302 led to Dante’s banishment for life.
Dante was shaped by this twin loss of his beloved and his hometown, turning in exile to writing. Around 1293, visions of Beatrice’s glory revitalized her memory. Dante resolved not to write of “this blessed one” until he could compose “more worthily… what has never been written in rhyme of any woman”. A wandering, homesick exile in Verona and Ravenna, “the world his fatherland, as the whole sea is the country of the fish”, he did just this.
The Divine Comedy: Drama of Desire
The Comedy is a journey through the medieval afterlife of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, named Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso – the poem’s three parts. Written from about 1306 to 1321, it is set in 1300. Beatrice sees Dante lost in a dark wood “midway along the journey of our life”. She sends the Roman author Virgil to guide him through Hell and Purgatory. From here, Beatrice escorts him through Heaven. Throughout, Dante interacts with departed souls: “shades” in hell, bodiless “globes of fire” in paradise, “blazing like a comet’s head”.
“The supreme poet of joy” has inspired many poets, including Longfellow, William Blake, and T.S. Eliot, for whom “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world; there is no third… Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and depth”. In the twentieth century, Dante influenced C.S. Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles and other writings. Dorothy Sayers dedicated her last decade to translating the Comedy.
However, many mysticism textbooks ignore Dante, not a priest or a monk, although others rank him highly. In his “allegory of the way to God”, Dante fused opposites like sexuality and spirituality, intellect and imagination, antiquity and Christianity, Empire and church, the active and contemplative lifestyles. As a secular, married politician claiming to relate revealed truth, he challenged St Aquinas’ view of poets as liars. Whether Dante actually saw what he wrote is debated, but his work is “impregnated with mysticism”.
An epic poem, the Comedy can be read in many ways. It is a “cathedral of the mind”, synthesizing medieval thought. It satirizes political and ecclesiastical corruption. Like Marco Polo’s tales, it recounts a voyage to distant lands. A glorified morality play, it illustrates Everyman’s moral choices. It sings Dante’s romance with Beatrice. It is a psychological guide to the soul’s interior journey.
But supremely, the Comedy is a pilgrimage to God, an Exodus from bondage into freedom, a return home from Exile. It is a “drama of desire”, the yearning for God, “a movement of the spirit that never rests until what it loves brings joy to it”. Throughout Paradise, Dante’s thirst for intellectual understanding and emotional satisfaction is simultaneously quenched and intensified. Like St Augustine, whose Confessions he loved, Dante was dominated by divine longing. Inferno showed the endless frustration of desire. Paradiso begins with desire, and ends with fulfillment. At last Dante can “dine on joy” in the “feast of Paradise” where his “hungerings find their peace”.
Pilgrim’s Progress: Map of the Journey
Medieval man was “an organizer, a codifier, a man of system”, as epitomized in gothic cathedrals and Dante’s Comedy. For us today, “glory” means a “mazy bright blur”. For the medieval, “the maze should be exact, and the brightness… a geometrical pattern”, as beauty meant harmonious symmetry (Charles Williams). Without our poetry-science dichotomy, mathematics became worship, as seen in numbers, especially the Trinitarian three and perfect ten, with nine and 100, their squares. Thus Dante’s autobiographical Vita Nuova surrounded Beatrice by nines. The Comedy’s “intellectually integrated poetical structure” has three canticles of 33 cantos, plus a prologue making 100.
Inferno is a funnel of nine concentric “vicious circles” below Jerusalem, a “world of endless bitterness”. Hell’s gate is inscribed “Abandon hope, all ye who enter”. Beyond is an “inevitable progress of corruption” down into claustrophobic darkness. It terminates not in fire, but the “icescape” of earth’s centre. Here, having rejected the “fire of love”, souls are isolated in “frozen anger”. Having refused co-inherence, they are incoherent; silent and motionless in the “deep night of the truly dead”. They encircle the “Miserific Vision”, three-headed Satan, a parody of the Trinity, while hell’s many fragmented images mock the incarnation. Allegorically, Hell is “the map of the black heart”, a foil to heaven’s glory.
Purgatorio is a soaring Southern Hemisphere mountain, with seven terraces for purging the seven deadly sins. This is “heaven’s antechamber”, “the labyrinth of desire where longings are purified and liberated” for heaven. Hell is hopeless suffering and Heaven perfect fulfillment. But Purgatory is “weeping that gives birth to joy”. The souls here “rejoice while burning, for they have hope”, requesting prayers to shorten their suffering. This resembles our present experience, making Purgatorio the favorite book for some. At the summit is the earthly paradise, where Beatrice is reunited with Dante, now “pure and ready to rise to the stars”.
St Augustine wrote “my love is my weight; thereby I am borne”. By spiritual “gravity”, all things desire their proper place. Like a stone, sin’s weight pulls down to hell. Freed of sin in Purgatory, Dante’s soul naturally rises upwards like fire, pulled by love of the Highest Good.
The poet Shelley called Paradiso “a perpetual hymn of everlasting love”. Dante rises upwards and outwards, “from light to light” through Ptolemy’s nine geocentric spheres in “a riot of charity and hilarity”. The spheres spin ever faster, their music more harmonious, the light more dazzling, the dance more ecstatic. Above all the heavens is the timeless, infinite Empyrean, where the Unmoved Mover dwells. In “shimmering variations upon the theme of light”, light is “begemmed”, reflected and refracted through diamond, ruby, sapphire, crystal. This ordered “lightscape” of Paradise illuminates the three medieval conditions of beauty: integrity, harmony/proportion, radiance.
Throughout Paradise, Dante rises towards God through outwards-expanding concentric spheres, but in Paradiso 28 this order is inverted, confusing Dante. He beholds “a point that radiated light so piercing that the eyes its brightness strikes are forced to shut from such intensity” . Each of the nine angelic orders, corresponding to the planetary spheres, spins around the infinitesimal Point, “the angelic shrine”, as “Love’s fire burns it into motion”. The innermost seraphim whirl the fastest, alone directly contemplating the “Pure Spark of Being” and mediating his light to the cherubim. Then come the thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels and angels, each singing God’s praise to the slower-circling order below.
Hell is the de-centered “outer darkness, with weeping and gnashing of teeth” where the Living Light does not penetrate. Frozen in ice, rejecting the Eternal Joy, “the dance begun among the lofty seraphim” ceases. The devil, “fairest once of the sons of light”, eternally flaps his six seraphic wings, causing hell’s icy wind.
Thus the First Power is “uncircumscribed and circumscribing all”, both “origin and consummating end… center and circumference”. He is “a sphere whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere”. Love told Dante, “I am the center of a circle, to which the parts of the circumference are related in similar manner; you are not”. Dante’s journey to God remedies this, both ascending outwards and centering inwards to the universe’s unchanging Archimedean point, “where joy becomes one with eternity”.
Romantic Pilgrim: Dante’s Way of the Soul
The Middle Ages simultaneously produced romantic troubadours and deeper Christian contemplation; secular courtly love and emotional, love-dominated spirituality. While some suggest a mutual influence, others stress their difference.
Upon seeing his lady’s face, the courtly lover was struck by Cupid’s arrows, henceforth sworn to her service in an elaborate protocol. While supposedly ennobling, this often became ritualized adultery, despising marriage. Desire for the Lady in herself led to lustful idolatry, worship of the god of love parodying real religion.
By contrast, body-denying ascetics fled women, fearing temptation. They rejected created goods as distracting from the Good Supreme. To passionately love God, St Francis avoided “images of woman’s form”, so could hardly recognize women by face. Instead of becoming a worldly knight, he became a knight or troubadour of Christ, a devoted Bridegroom of Lady Poverty.
While renouncing sexuality, many contemplatives commandeered erotic language. The Biblical book Song of Songs was interpreted allegorically as the soul’s divine romance. Christianizing Cupid, the arrow of desire was shot heavenward, a repeated Paradiso image. Hearts burning with passion for God, they used language “developed in the boudoir”, drawing on romantic courtly verse as “poets and artists of the Ineffable”.
But Dante combined love and longing for a woman and God. He embraced visible creatures as sacraments of Reality. As Christ is the Image of God, so Beatrice images Christ for Dante. Her eyes, “vivid crowning beauties”, “the emeralds from which Love shot his arrows”, reflect God’s glory. As Dante’s “beatitude”, her “miraculous salutation” brings him salvation, inspiring charity and humility. Purgatorio climaxes in a Corpus Christi-type procession, with Beatrice a symbol of the Eucharistic host. The ecclesiastical authorities “in a positive terror of the flesh abolished everything but the flesh” by censoring these semi-theological phrases (Charles Williams).
Unlike St Francis, throughout Paradiso Dante admires Beatrice’s face. Unlike courtly love, this is not immoral – Dante meets “the queen of virtue” after traversing the lust-purging fire. Neither is it idolatry – “the Beatrician vision” leads to the Beatific Vision. As he rises, his Lady’s mounting radiance strengthens his eyes to see the Sum of Joy. Unlike the bewitching dream-siren or the courtly mistress, Beatrice delights when “eclipsed” by Dante’s adoration of God and her merciful intercession initiates his pilgrimage. Thus in Dante’s “romantic theology”, romance becomes a “way of the soul”.
Two-fold Desire: Love and Light
Early in the twelfth century, St Francis of Assisi (1181/2-1226) and St Dominic of Calaruega (c.1170-1221) founded two new orders. The Franciscans and Dominicans became symbolic of love and truth, emotional and intellectual desire, affective and speculative contemplation respectively.
For the unlettered Francis, “where the scholarship of the teacher stands aside, the affection of the lover entered”. Although more intellectual, his successor Bonaventure still taught that only love, not knowledge, can reach God, emphasizing “wonder and will over intellect”.
Dominican learning peaked in St Aquinas, whose theology incorporated Aristotle’s philosophy and dominated medieval thought. For Aquinas, contemplation was the “clear gaze of the mind” at God the “intelligible light”. “In intellectual activity is our ultimate bliss… no other desire soars so high as the desire of intelligible truth”. Divine union was about knowledge, strengthening the intellect to behold the “Mirror of the Truth”.
So for Franciscans “the spiritual world was all love”, for Dominicans all law. For Dante’s “passionate intellect” it was both. Paradiso is “pure intellectual light full of love”, a harmony of ardour and insight. In the heaven of the sun, the dancing spirits of great theologians ring Dante and Beatrice. Aquinas praises Francis’ love of Poverty, while Bonaventure recounts the virtues of Dominic. Each lauds the other’s founder, uniting “the love of learning and the desire for God”. The Comedy interweaves discursive and lyrical strands, but after Dante, “a chasm opened irrevocably” between mysticism and theology, spirituality and speculation.
The Pilgrim’s Choice: Divinization or Damnation
The Comedy is the “drama of the soul’s choice”, rejecting both astral determinism and courtly love’s psychological fatalism. We choose to be “transhumanized to heaven”, or “dehumanized in hell”. Dante insists on personal responsibility, but without individualism. Self-centered self-sufficiency leads to hell, interdependent mutuality to heaven’s “interwoven joy”.
The Comedy is about the right ordering of the free will. Inferno maps the loss of choice, “twisted by false desire”. In Purgatorio, disordered desire – wrongly directed or inappropriate in magnitude – is purged until Dante’s will is “free, true and whole”. Paradiso climaxes when Dante becomes one with God, finding that “his will is our peace”.
Pilgrim’s Homecoming: The End of Desire
Each canticle builds to a final encounter: with Satan in Hell, Beatrice in Purgatory and – after Dante is examined in faith, hope and love by Peter, James and John – God in Heaven. Mary – “Virgin Mother, daughter of your son” – assists Dante’s vision of God. This was for T.S. Eliot, “the highest point that poetry has ever reached or can reach”.
The music is “unbelievably melodious”, “inebriating with such sweet sound”. Like St Paul, Dante’s eyes are often dazzled by “the brilliance of the light”. “Nor fantasy nor words” can “paint the subtle folds of Heaven’s light”. “No poet, comic or tragic, ever was more outdone by his theme”.
Dante bathes his eyes in a river of light, a “prefiguration of truth”. It transforms into a circle, symbol of perfection, blossoming into the snow-white celestial rose. Like “people at a masquerade take off their masks”, the stream’s flowers become the “white-robed company” of saints on petal-thrones, tier on tier, the angels like golden bees. Above blazes the Uncreated Light. It reveals an almost pan(en)theistic vision, “all things bound in a single book by love”, the “Great Artist” as “all in all”. Contemplating “Its depthless clarity of substance”, Dante sees “the Great Light shine into three circles, in three clear colors bound in one same space”.
Dante saw the central circle “depicted with man’s very image” and yearned to understand the incarnation. However, despite striving to square the mystical circle, he “cannot discover, think as he may, the principle involved”. But finally a “great flash of understanding struck”. Dante is “a pilgrim refreshed with joy” at “his journey’s perfect consummation”.
Love earlier told Dante he was off-center. Now he is centered. “A wheel in perfect balance turning”, his will and desire move in harmony with the Love that spins the spheres. They whirl by desire for “the Sun of angels”, the “one Face above all the worlds merely to see which is irrevocable joy”. The First Love is “the quarry, the Intelligences the huntsmen; the mistress, all things else the suitors; the candle, and the universe the moth” (CS Lewis).
This is a shortened version of a university essay – the full version (including references) is available if desired.
