Dante
An Author Profile
Second Canto: Vita Nuova

❧ For referential details (full name, dates, etc.), see our first installment on Dante. 

So. The poet’s longed-for just emperor was dead, with neither legacy nor worthy successor; the papacy had proceeded from its own too-familiar rot to almost literal captivity in France; he had lost Beatrice more than twenty years ago now; his own native city, if he dared set foot in it, would burn him to death. Dante’s hopes were crushed, north, south, east, and west. The only way out was up. Beginning around 1308, and continuing for a decade, perhaps more, step by step, he recounted the way up.

The history of Western literature features many quests in an other place: that is, a place whose main trait is other-ness, often understood or assumed to be the land of the dead. (Even the name Hades, strictly translated, means something like “things invisible.”) Some are attempts to obtain wisdom, as in the apocalypses of early Christian literature, or the underworld journey of the Æneid. Many are about saving a loved one from death, with surprisingly varied results. The underworld voyage par excellence is the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice; its tragic conclusion, which is of its essence today, seems to have been Virgil’s invention—that is, it seems not to have been the original ending. Tolkien also took up the Orphic motif in The Silmarillion, though there it is the heroine whose enchanting voice and tale move even the inexorable keeper of the dead, and allow the resurrection of the hero. Dante’s trek through the invisible world is undertaken for both purposes, the achievement of knowledge and the rescue of one beloved, with two twists. First, the knowledge is bestowed rather than achieved; and second, the rescue is accomplished by the beloved, and on behalf of a fool who—to paraphrase her account of things—contrived to get lost while walking on an open road at midday.

The soul of Beatrice perceives that Dante is far off the road of salvation, lost in the woods—so far gone he will not even be able to hear her. She enlists the help of Virgil, one of the souls in Limbo.* Virgil finds Dante, takes him through hell to make him understand that his current way of life is leading toward damnation. After passing through the center of the earth, Virgil take his charge up to Purgatory (an isolated mountain at the antipode of Rome). Dante is pardoned, healed, and strengthened as he makes the climb—thousands of miles—to the earthly paradise at its summit. Here, Virgil hands Dante over to the soul of Beatrice, whom he is at last ready once more to hear and heed. With her as his new guide, Dante is lifted into the heavens themselves. He meets rank upon rank of luminous spirits: in each planet, the virtue  appropriate to it (e.g. courage for Mars) is rewarded, and the light of the planets is in fact the glory of the saints. At last, he passes through the outermost sphere and into the Empyrean, where time, space, matter, and change are transcended; Beatrice in turn hands Dante over to the Cistercian mystic St. Bernard. Beatrice had exhibited the elect in their diversity: Bernard shows them to Dante in their essential unity, all beholding God at once in the shape of a rose. At the prayer and example of the Blessed Virgin, Dante finally turns to gaze upon God Himself, and the Comedy closes with the serene and glowing statement that “my will and my desire were revolved / by the love that moves the Sun and other stars.”

Both these bones of the thing, and the finer points that we left out, are governed by the rules of allegory. Allegory is a specific form of symbolism in which the characters, plot, and setting are personified abstractions.** Most allegories are morality tales; The Pilgrim’s Progress is a typical example, both of the subject matter of allegorists, and of the techniques they use to show what a character or setting or arc symbolizes—which are in many cases named frankly for the purpose, like Christian’s fair-weather friend Pliable or the Castle Despair. The Comedy is Dante’s own spiritual journey, from his own ruin and that of his ideals in the early 1300s, through his wanderings from city to city and sorrow to sorrow, to his slow recovery of his sense of rightness and purpose (at first intellectual, then spiritual), and finally a recovery of grace.

If the reader is wondering where all the, you know, personifications are in this ostensible allegory, Dante’s technique is quite unusual. The issue is that, as characters, personifications have a grave drawback: ideas have no native personalities. The writer must try to work up our interest. Dante instead makes use of symbolic personages. These were figures familiar to the reading public—some mythical, but most drawn from history and many near-contemporaries—who, because of their personalities and historical significance, were fitted to represent the traits or concepts Dante had in mind.† By way of illustration: if a modern allegorist who wanted to convey the idea of “art for art’s sake” through personifications, he might create a character named Gratia Artis, arm her with a paintbrush, and give her dialogue about æsthetic principles and the creative calling; but, if he chose to aim at the same meaning with symbolic personages instead, he might use J. R. R. Tolkien or Bill Watterson instead, looking and talking like Tolkien or Watterson.