Last week we left Dante in a slightly better place than we found him. Virgil had entered the scene and with him, so had hope. But although in canto II the three beasts are no longer a concern, the pilgrim still has an obstacle to overcome, this time an internal one. Am I good enough for this? he asks Virgil. I’m nowhere near as brave as Aeneas, nor am I as devout as Paul. So how can I possibly claim I am worth the honour of roaming the realms of the afterlife, something such few mortals have done before?
Canto II opens with a similar image to canto I. After the ray of hope that Virgil’s arrival brought, the evening is drawing near and Dante is slowly drifting into a dark place again. All living creatures withdraw from their daily activities, leaving the pilgrim to wrestle with his fear alone. There is an emphasis on loneliness here, particularly in the Italian text. Verse 3 reads io sol uno, placing the words ‘I’, ‘alone’, and ‘one’ in an ascending climax filled with a tension that the Kirkpatrick translation ‘I alone, I was the only one’ (v.3-4) doesn’t quite manage to capture. These are the words of a man who is existentially alone on the journey of life.
Aware of the arduous road ahead and crippled by self-doubt, Dante the narrator does what any self-respecting poet ought to do: he invokes the muses. The invocation of the Muses is a rather formulaic part of any epic poem. It comes from the Greek and Latin lyrical tradition (see for instance the opening of the Illiad), and it’s an appeal made by a poet to a muse or deity to ask for help in composing their work. Curious that a supposedly devout Christian should ask a figure of the pagan pantheon for help writing his poem about man’s journey towards God, right?
Without descending into the minutiae of Dante’s personal brand of Christian faith or my own theory about how his relationship with religion was more theoretical than spiritual, the simplest reason for Dante’s use of this convention is that he wants to place himself among the Homers and Virgils of the world and be recognised as their peer. This invocation of the muse is basically him telling us “SEE? I’M WRITING AN EPIC POEM LIKE THOSE OTHER GUYS”.
But back to Dante the pilgrim. He thinks of the people who were granted a journey through the afterlife before him and realises he can count them on one hand. One was Aeneas, whose trip to the Underworld has a political purpose. While he is down there, the spectre of his father Anchises appears to him and offers counsel and encouragement. According to Virgil’s fictionalised account of the events in the Aeneid, it was Anchises’s advice that gave Aeneas the courage to finally take on Turnus, king of the Rutuli, marry Lavinia and found Rome. The other was Paul, the Paul, Apocalypse guy, whose journey to/vision of Hell was given to him so that he can warn to rest of us. Ok cool, so why is Dante allowed to go? What makes him so worthy?
Virgil – an honest man – says, well, you’re not worthy, but your journey has been willed by higher-ups. When he was in Limbo, Virgil explains, a ‘blessed’ and ‘beautiful’ lady came to him and told him a dear friend of hers was in a pinch. Could Virgil possibly go and help him out?
Sure, says Virgil, but what’s so special about this man that you came all the from Heaven to this place of despair to tell me this? And here a third frame narrative begins.
Amor mi mosse (love moved me, v. 72), says the lady, Beatrice. And here Love, like almost everything in this poem, has both a personal and universal quality.
Just as Virgil was hanging out in Limbo with his poet friends when Beatrice arrived, so was Beatrice hanging out in Heaven with her friend Rachel, when Saint Lucia came to her. Lucia’s own orders came from the Virgin Mary, who had sensed Dante’s distress all the way in the highest of Heavens. So in the universal sense, Dante’s pilgrimage was willed by Holy Love, the divine love that moved the sun and springtime stars (remember from canto I, v. 38). The journey was then made possible by divine intervention via the three (remember how the structure of the poem revolves around this number) holy women mentioned: Virgin Mary, then St Lucia, then Beatrice. Basically, through the biggest humble-brag in literature, Dante is telling us that he is in no way worthy of this experience, but God chose him to make this journey and write this poem. The creation of the Comedy, in other words, stems from the same root as the whole of Creation.
I love this. I love how through a single trope - the hero’s refusal to answer the call to adventure - the poet humanises Dante the pilgrim, gives Dante the narrator a chance for further exposition, while Dante the author has the opportunity to anticipate criticism from those who might question the hero’s suitability for the pilgrimage and settle it with a simple and incredibly effective “well, he was chosen by the powers that be”. How can anyone argue with that?
In a more personal sense, although she is in Heaven, and as we will see, there’s no room for worldly passions there, we are told that Beatrice cares for Dante. She is moved to come to his rescue by a personal kind of love, the love he had for her while she was alive and long after her death.
This is another example of how Dante weaves historical reality into fiction. Beatrice Portinari was a real woman, some years younger than Dante and whom he met when he was a young boy. They then crossed paths as young adults, but by then Beatrice was already in an advantageous marriage with another Florentine man. This didn’t stop Dante from using this encounter as the catalyst to his artistic awakening (and sexual, probably). He wrote numerous poems about his love for Beatrice, and after her death, he wrote Vita Nova in her honour. In the Comedy, she is among the women who facilitate his passage into Inferno and she will be his guide in Paradiso.
There’s no indication that Dante’s feelings for her are reciprocated. The real-life Beatrice was probably barely aware of him. Dante is not known to let the truth get in the way of a good story, however, the love fictional Beatrice professes for him errs on the side of platonic; she describes him as ‘a man most dear to me’, a true friend.
A little translation note. In my version (the Robin Kirkpatrick), the English verse goes ‘A man most dear to me - though not to fate’ (v.61). The Italian verse however, is l’amico mio e non della ventura’. While it’s true that “ventura” can be translated as fate, I think in this case it’s in reference to “friend” and intended as "faithful friend”, the opposite of a fair-weather friend. Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (another amazing Dante Scholar, look her up), reads the verse as ‘my friend, not just when fate is favourable’, and I prefer this reading, too.
Personally, the word “ventura” makes me think of “compagnia di ventura”, an expression used to describe Medieval mercenary troops, which inherently refers to bought loyalty in the same way that the concept of “fair-weather friend” does.
So the gist is this: Dante, a flawed human, is not particularly worthy of this journey. But just as God gave up his son out of love for humans, so love will allow this journey in the interest of humanity. A most humble, chosen-among-many Dante will proceed through hell and purgatory, come out the other way in paradise and live to tell the tale to the rest of us. Next week, we walk through the gate of Hell.