Dante and the Blessed Virgin

ONE A New Life Begins

1 O NE A New Life Begins La donna gentile: The gentle lady The Blessed Virgin Mary is the key to Dante. We find her there behind the scenes at the very beginning of the Commedia, since it is her compassion for the wandering poet that sets the great journey in motion, through intermediaries; we find her there at the end in the magnificent closing cantos of the Paradiso, the very gate of heaven. And, as we shall see, her role becomes ever more explicit throughout the great poem. In the Vita Nuova, an earlier work of Dante, Mary is present as the object of the young Beatrice’s devotion, a devotion that is contagious, although it is difficult to think that Dante was ever entirely devoid of it. With his love for Beatrice, for her beauty, and for her virtue, that devotion intensifies, and after her death—not immediately , to be sure, but only after and despite dalliance with another woman, whom he treats as a mere bagatelle in the Vita Nuova1 and puts to allegorical purpose in another earlier work, the Convivio—his love for Beatrice finally emerges in his great poem as the means of his salvation. Lost in a dark wood, threatened by the beasts within him, he acknowledges that after Beatrice’s death he had fallen into vices 2 Dante and the Blessed Virgin that endangered his soul. In the Vita Nuova, his love for Beatrice is filtered through the requirements of courtly love and only gradually transcends them. In the Comedy, Beatrice’s role in Dante’s conversion , in his salvation, is given immortal expression. So isn’t it Beatrice, not Mary, who is the key to Dante? There are moments in the Vita Nuova when the two seem almost to fuse, and the reader feels uneasiness at certain descriptions of Dante’s beloved in which the devotee is almost identified with the object of her devotion . The two women are inseparably linked, and in the Comedy they will be joined with another, St. Lucy; Dante scholars will write of the tre donne, the three women, and for good reason, as we shall see. But the preeminence of Mary is never in doubt. To call Mary Dante’s alpha and omega would be too much, of course: her role is always that of a mediatrix. It is in her Son, her spouse, her creator, that Dante’s heart will find its rest. At the end of the Comedy, Dante, thanks to Mary’s intercession, is given a glimpse of the Trinity, of the “love that moves the sun and other stars,” and returns to recount his journey. The Divine Comedy is the poetic expression of the journey any sinner must make if he would realize his very reason for being.2 The sublimation of Dante’s love for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova and the poet’s transfiguration of his beloved might tempt us to think that the role of Mary, too, is largely a poetic device. There have been quarrels among scholars as to whether the Beatrice of the Vita was an actual historical person, since the young woman can so easily be interpreted in terms of various abstractions. Did the Beatrice of the Vita have any actual Florentine counterpart? The answer is Yes, but the tendency to allegorize her out of existence is not unfounded. That in turn may suggest that the Mary of Dante’s great poem is also a pardonable poetic exaggeration, a Florentine excess. It would be a profound mistake to think so. The Blessed Virgin of the Comedy is the Blessed Virgin of Christian faith. One of the unfortunate and doubtless unintended effects of the Reformation has been to create among many believers suspicion as to Mary’s role in the plan of salvation. What need have we for any mediator but Christ himself? Devotion to Mary is thought to intrude between the soul and God, or to divert the soul in its journey to God. It is a commonplace that many converts found the Catholic emphasis A New Life Begins 3 on Mary a great obstacle to be overcome. John Henry Newman—I am tempted to say, even John Henry Newman—felt this for a time. Dante has softened this suspicion for many, enabling them to regard Mary as a character in a poem so that disbelief could be suspended for the nonce. But the...