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DANTE AND THE BLESSED VIRGIN

by Ralph McInerny

The Blessed Virgin Mary is present in The Divine Comedy from beginning to end, though of course she is not mentioned by name in the Inferno, anymore than Christ himself is. She is at the very origin of the great drama recorded in the poem.

Dante, midway through this way of life we're bound upon, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, is lost in a dark wood, that is, morally lost, the captive of sin. He is confronted by three beasts which are the allegorical representations of Lust, Pride and Avarice. Suddenly Virgil appears and offers to conduct the terrified Dante through the underworld where souls despairingly howl in a second perpetual death, then on to those who are being cleansed of their sins, "who in the fire are happy, for they look to mount on high" (118-9). And beyond. But at that point, a worthier spirit than Virgil will take over as Dante's guide as he is taken up into the heavens, something closed to the pagan Virgil.

Who sent Virgil? Who is so concerned for this wandering soul? Virgil discloses this in Canto 2 (D. G. Rossetti's translation):

While I was with the spirits who dwell suspense,

A Lady summoned me so blest, so rare,

I begged her to command my diligence.

Her eyes outshone the firmament by far

As she began, in her own gracious tongue,

Gentle and low, as tongues of angels are

O courteosus Mantuan soul, whose skill in song

Keeps green on earth a fame that shall not end

While motion rolls the turning spheres along!

A friend of mine, who is not Fortune's friend,

Is hard beset upon the shadowy coast;

Terrors and snares his fearful steps attend,

Driving him back; yea, and I fear almost

I have risen too late to help for I was told

Such news of him in heaven he's too far lost.

But thou go thou! Lift up thy voice of gold;

Try every needful means to find and reach

And free him, that my heart may be consoled.

Beatrice am I, who thy good speed beseech;

Love that first moved me from the blissful place

Whither I'd fain return, now moves my speech.

Heaven hath a noble Lady, who doth take

Ruth of this man thou goest to disensnare

Such that high doom is cancelled for her sake.

The Blessed Virgin Mary summoned Lucy who came to Beatrice who has come to Virgil, a series of intermediaries with the mediatrix of all graces. Mary, the Mother of God, and then Beatrice, the woman who inspired La vita nuova but, more importantly, is inspiration for Dante's great moral turn.

When Dante first met Beatrice they were both nine years old and, if we can believe the precocious Florentine, he was swept off his feet. Apparuit jam beatitudo nostra. They met again nine years later. The sexual revoution has perhaps deadened the sense that women have a civilizing effect on men not merely by domesticating them, making them responsible for spouse and children, but also by stirring the soul and imagination. The history of poetry is rife with verse in which a man waxes eloquent about a woman. This can range from the crude expression of the pain at failing to conquer to a sublimation whereby the woman becomes the very path to heaven. When to this one universally recognized truth is added the conventions of courtly love, where all this was considerably heightened, we have Dante Alighieri.

It would of course be absurd to think of Dante as merely an instance of a type. He made himself into a type. He took his own life as the subject matter of two of his greatest works and quite unabashedly regarded himself and his experience as a sufficient lens through which to see the whole, this life and the next.

It begins with La vita nuova. In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica Incipit vita nova.

"In that part of the book of my memory before which so little can be read is found the rubric: A new life begins."

In alternating prose and verse he tells us of his love for Beatrice, of the vagaries of their relationship, and the increasingly moral and spiritual role she plays in his life.

It has been said that there was nothing like this since antiquity, a planned book, with a beginning, middle and end. A unifying theme, an overall purpose. This is overstated perhaps, and there is a warning there. Dante tempts one to overstatement.

The first part of La vita nuova is addressed to Beatrice, the second praises her, the third remembers her after her death. His mentor and ideal must now from the next world continue to exert her influence on the poet philosopher. La vita nuova ends with a famous resolution:

Si che, se piacere sarà de colui a cui tutte le cose vivono, che la mia vita duri per aliquanti anni, io spero di dicer de lei quello che mai non fue detto d'alcuna. E poi piaccia a colui che è sire de la cortesia, che la mia anima se ne possa gire a vedere la gloria de la sua donna, cioè di quella benedeta Beatrice, la quale gloriosament mira ne la faccia di colui qui est per omnia secula benedictus.

"If it should please him by whom all things live that my life should continue for some years, I hope to say of her what has never been said of any woman. And then may it please him who is the Lord of all courtliness that my soul may go on to see the glory of his lady, that is, the blessed Beatrice, who now gloriously gazes on the face of him who is forever and ever."

He will say of her what has never before been said of any woman in The Divine Comedy. Dante married and had children and if his exile separated him from his family for an extended period, there is no suggestion that he was anything but a faithful husband to Gemma and father to their children. How can his lifelong devotion to another woman (and Beatrice married before her early death) be grasped by us at the fag end of the twentieth century?

Beatrice has become a heavenly intercessor, one of the saints, linked with Mary the preeminent creaturely mediatrix between God and souls still in via. Indeed, when Beatrice comes to Virgil, in the meeting recorded in Canto 2 of the Inferno, she says that St. Lucy came to her, sent by the Blessed Virgin, out of concern for Beatrice's votary who is all but lost. Beatrice in turn enlists Virgil's help. (It is a nice touch for Dante to have Virgil praise Beatrice.) In the way already mentioned, the great poet of Rome, Dante's model, will lead the Florentine through the abyss and up Mount Purgatory and turn him over to Beatrice.

The poem is the story of Dante's conversion, of his being rescued from the evil of his ways and brought face to face with the realities of life. Among the letters of Dante is to be found the famous dedication of the Paradiso to one of his patrons, Can Grande della Scala. The confidence that Dante had in his own genius and immortality in the Horatian sense, "non omnis moriar" for sure, but in his salvation as well, given the help he is getting, is so omnipresent in his work that we respond to it as matter of factly as it is stated. At the beginning of The Divine Comedy, he is established as a peer of Virgil and it is the poem itself that drives away any thought that this is presumption. So too in the letter to Can Grande, Dante applies to his own work the commenting techniques that the Scholastics had learned from Neoplatonists and others. A commentary should begin with a preface in which certain set things are to be done:

Sex igitur sunt que in principio cuiusque doctrinalis operis inquirenda sunt, videlicet subiectum, genus, forma, finis, libri titulus, et genus philosophiae.

"Subject, kind of work, its shape, its end, its title and the part of philosophy to which it belongs."

Part of philosophy! Does it surprise us to learn that Dante thought of himself as a moral philosopher? Unsurprisingly then we learn that the great poem has both a literal sense and a moral or anagogical sense. (Here Dante is applying to his poem the techniques of biblical interpretation associated with Augustine's On Christian Doctrine [De doctrina christiana].) Taken literally, the Comedy tells of the state of souls after death. What is its moral meaning?

"The subject is man, insofar as by the free use of his will in meritorious acts or their opposite he becomes subject to just reward or punishment."

Si vero accipiatur opus allegorice, subiectum est homo prout merendo et demerendo per arbitrii libertatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est (n. 8).

Led by Virgil, at the intercession of Beatrice, Lucy, and Mary, Dante will be shown and in turn put vividly before us the souls of the departed whose earthly lives have earned them the condition they have in the next life. First, the souls of the damned; next, those who, while saved are not yet ready to come into the presence of God but must be purged of the effects of the sins they committed; and finally, the blessed souls in heaven. The impetus behind the whole poem is the compassion felt by the Blessed Virgin Mary when she sees what a mess Dante is making of his life and resolves to give him special and dramatic help in shaping up.

The name of Mary is not spoken in hell, no more than is that of Christ; the souls here have freely and deliberately separated themselves from God; they are the agents of their own condemnation. Punishment is inflicted upon them, but it is punishment they deserve.

Hell is no flatland. It is a pit into which Dante and Virgil descend by stages toward the center of the earth. The year of the poem is 1300, the time of the poem is Holy Week into Easter Week. The drama of salvation is thus linked with the great redeeming act of Christ - his passion, death and resurrection.

When Dante and Virgil pass through the gate with its ominous legend: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"; they pass through a vestibule, then into Limbo, the first circle in which are found the good pagans. Aristotle, the master of those who know, and other philosophers, sages, and poets of pre-Christian times. This is the place from which Virgil was summoned to guide Dante. They descend through the various degrees of damnation calibrated according to the ranking of the capital sin that brought the soul here: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath and then Despair and the varieties of sins against nature and finally fraud, the variations of which bring us to the ice in which Satan is imprisoned. Hell was created by Lucifer's fall - he hit the earth and drilled himself through to the center, pushing out on the other side of the earth the mountain of Purgatory. After warily encircling the ferocious if frozen Satan, Virgil and Dante quickly clamber up and emerge on the far side of earth where the mount rises up into the clouds and must be reached by boat.

It has been said that The Divine Comedy is the Summa theologiae in verse and it is impossible now that it not have been said. For whatever help it might be in explaining why the great poem can be so difficult, it has the intimation of a putdown. As if the structure and content of the poem were provided Dante, and all he had to do was translate it into verse. This is of course nonsense. It is true that Dante, in order to fulfill the pledge with which La vita nuova ends, frequented the Dominican and Franciscan schools of Florence. He may have studied with Dominicans who in turn had studied with Thomas Aquinas a few years before in Paris. In any case Dante became knowledgeable about the dispute that had raged in Paris at the end of Thomas's life. Thomas died in 1274 and in 1277 some 219 propositions were condemned by the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, a list that included some teachings of Thomas himself. Dante will put the major disputants together in the 8th-Circle of heaven, thereby putting a definitive end to their differences.

What is common to Thomas and Dante is the truth of the Catholic Faith. Neither man invented this, but it is subsumed into their work in different ways. Dante links himself with a pagan poet, and The Divine Comedy is an amazing fusion of the pagan and Christian, of mythical beasts and angels, and the like. The descent into hell is suggestive of the visit that pious Aeneas makes to the underworld to see once more his beloved father Anchises. The pagan companion of Thomas, on the other hand, is Aristotle.

For our purposes, it is Thomas's teaching on the moral life, on the virtues and their opposed vices, that is surely relevant. The account of hell, as has been mentioned, starts off as if it is going to be structured on the basis of the capital sins. But Dante does not follow through on this, a fact that has attracted endless comment. But it is clear that the logic of hell's degrees, distance from God, proximity to Satan is not based just as such on the capital sins. It is otherwise with purgatory.

As we turn to the second cantica, we encounter a very long wind-up. We are almost a third of the way through this part of the poem before we arrive at the First Cornice. As you know, there are 100 cantos in The Divine Comedy, with the Inferno getting the extra one, so that the distribution is 34, 33, 33. It is with Canto X that we arrive at the First Cornice. Souls pass through Peter's Gate into purgatory proper and as they do, seven P's are marked on their foreheads: P for peccatum and these are the seven capital sins. Mount purgatory has seven cornices corresponding to these sins and the soul must spend time on each of them, first confessing sins of the kind in question, then expressing contrition and finally making satisfaction for it. At that point, one of the P's is erased and the soul mounts to the next cornice.

The three levels of lower purgatory deal with the sins of Pride, Envy and Wrath, examples of love perverted since they amount to love of one's neighbor's harm. Upper purgatory deals with Sloth, Covetousness, Gluttony and Lust, all of which consist of a disordered love of the good. On each of the levels of purgatory, as the sin and its effects are being purged, the corresponding virtue is embraced by the soul. It is here that the Blessed Virgin Mary plays a continuing role. Some incident from the life of Mary is invoked to represent virtues which replace the capital sins and this at every level. She is taken, thus, to exemplfy all of the virtues. Well, almost all. Mary is not brought in to exemplify the virtue of generosity opposed to Envy. The opposite of Pride is humility. Mary exemplifies this in her reply to the angel at the Annunciaion. This gospel scene is shown to Dante and Virgil as etched in white marble:

The Angel who came down from God to man

With the decree of peace the centuries wept for,

which opened heaven, ending the long ban,

stood carved before us with such force and love,

with such a living grace in his whole pose,

the image seemed about to speak and move.

One could have sworn an Ave! sounded clear,

for she who turned the key that opened to us

the Perfect Love, was also figured there;||and all her flowing gesture seemed to say impressed there as distinctly as a seal impresses wax Ecce ancilla Dei (Ciardi, Purg. X, 31-42).

You notice that Dante changes Domini to Dei because of the exigencies of his poetic line. Mary's response is found in Luke 1:38. The virtue opposed to the capital sin of Wrath is meekness. What episode from Mary's life does Dante choose to exemplify this virtue?

Then of a sudden I was caught and drowned!

Deep in a trance of ecstacy; and lo!

A temple there, with people thronging round;
And through the gates I saw a Lady go,

Saying, with a mother's tender gesture, 'Why,

My dearest Son, has thou dealt with us so?

Nay for behold now how thy father and I

Have sought thee sorrowing

(XV, 85-92, Sayers).

The passage is from Luke 2:41-50. The opposite of Sloth is zeal and Dante invokes Luke 1:39 at XVIII, 100. On the Fourth Cornice, where souls are being purged of Sloth, Dante and Virgil are surprised by a crowd hurrying along, making up for their indolence in life.

So round that circle sweeping, stride on stride,

I saw them come whom love, devoutly vowed,

And glad good will, like horsemen, spur and ride.

Soon they were on us, for the whole great crowd

Were running at top speed; and there were twain

Who went before and, weeping, cried aloud:

"Mary ran to the hills in haste."

Mary's response to the news that her cousin Elizabeth was with child was to rise and go forthwith into the hills to be with her. This serves as a model for those too slow to do the good when opportunity presented itself.

Liberality is the vice opposed to Avarice and on the Fifth Cornice Mary, Dante and Virgil see souls expiating for their greed:

Then, just ahead, by hap I heard one fling

A cry out: "Ah, sweet Mary!" such a moan

As of a woman in her travailing.

"How poor thou was we know," the voice went on,

Seeing to what hostel thou didst bring thy precious

And blissful burden, there to lay it down"
(XX, 19-24).

The reference needs no explanation. No more does Mary's exemplification of the virtue opposed to Gluttony, temperance or moderation. Here is John Ciardi's rendering of XXII, 142-144:

They said: "Mary thought more of what was due

the joy and honor of the wedding feast

than of her mouth, which still speaks prayers for you."

The speakers are of course the souls expiating for their gluttony. The text has a somewhat Methodist tinge, suggesting that Roman women drank water, not wine, an allegation Dorothy Sayers says Dante might have gotten via Thomas Aquinas who was quoting Valerius Maximus. This is not the first time that an example of virtuous behavior drawn from the life of Mary is matched with another drawn from pagan antiquity and it will occur to you to wonder how a pagan could exemplify a supernatural virtue. I will come back to that.

The seventh and last Cornice is the one where the sin of Lust is expiated for; the opposed virtue of chastity will be preeminently exemplied by Mary. Souls are cleansed of the effects of lust by fire.

"Summae Deus clementiae," sang a choir

inside that furnace, and despite my road

I could not help but look into the fire.

Then I saw spirits moving through the flames,

and my eyes turned now to them, now to my feet,

as if divided between equal claims.

When they had sung the hymn, those souls in pain

cried out in a full voice: "Virum non cognosco."

Then softly they began the hymn again

(XXV, 121-129: Ciardi).

It will not have escaped your attention that these Marian examples suggest the Joyful mysteries of the Rosary: the Annunication (twice), the Nativity, the Finding of Jesus in the Temple. It is the Beatitudes that match each level of Mount Purgatory as well, but of course the structure of this middle part of The Divine Comedy is as intricate as the other two, and we have been plucking from it the significant role that Mary plays as souls ascend the seven storey mountain.

Just a passing word on the way in which Dante blends the pagan and Christian in his great poem. Virgil, his guide, cannot go beyond purgatory and from time to time alludes to the limitations of his knowledge as a mere pagan. The very fact of limbo underscores the difference between the natural and the supernatural and the location of the poem at the juncture of human history - Christ's passion, death and resurrection - further underscores this. Thomas Aquinas found the philosophy of Aristotle an amazing achievement, relying as it must only on what the human mind can know on its own. As opposed to what? To what God has revealed to us. Mysteries of the Faith cannot be proved on the basis of what everyone knows. But, in the familiar adage, grace builds on nature and does not destroy it. This permitted Thomas to subsume philosophy within the higher wisdom of theology, seeing the natural and supernatural as complementary and compatible with one another. What Dante does is more daring, perhaps, incorporating the myths and mythical creatures of antiquity into his great Christian poem. It as if he wants to sweep up into his vision of the whole everything human as well as divine, much as Thomas had in the Summa theologiae.

When Aeneas emerges from Hades he comes out upon the Elysian Fields where the shades enjoy a thousand years of bliss before they pass through Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and embark on another embodied life. When Dante and Virgil have passed the seventh cornice they emerge into the Sacred Wood of the Earthly Paradise. It is Wednesday of Easter Week. This is the Garden of Eden, pushed skyhigh by Satan's fall which created Mount Purgatory on the side of the earth opposite to Jerusalem. They are met by a woman, Matilda, a personage whose identity has fascinated Dante scholars. She gives a little lecture on the location, chides the ancients for their wrong guess as to where it is, and then a great pageant begins, which welcomes the purged souls to paradise.

Cantos 28-33 of the Purgatorio are perhaps the most allegorical in the whole Comedy. Suffice it to say that the Old and New Testaments are represented in the pageant, the Church, Christ, the three theological and four cardinal virtues, the apostles and evangelists. In Canto XXX, Virgil vanishes. This may not be Kansas City but he has gone about as far as he can go. A veiled Beatrice has now taken over from Matilda as Dante's guide and her tone is admonishing and didactic. A drink from the waters of Lethe remove all trace of sin. Beatrice now removes the veil and Dante is shown her smile. This is the occasion of a glimpse of the Beatific Vision. The waters of Eunoe constitute the final act before Dante is ready to ascend into paradise.

Paradise is made up of the spheres of the nine planets in Ptolemaian astronomy. That is, the earth is at the center and is ringed by the planets which move around it. The levels or circles of heaven are keyed to the planets so that Dante is being taken on an astral ascent to the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Zodiac (fixed stars), Crystalline Heaven, and Celestial Rose.

The Comedy as a whole consists of Dante's account of the special privilege he was accorded, thanks to the concern of the Blessed Virgin, conveyed to St. Lucy and thence to Beatrice who commissions Virgil to show Dante what the world beyond is. The task of the poem is to present to the living what the living cannot see. The difficulties Dante confronted in the first two cantiche are as nothing to what he faces when he attempts to give poetic, that is, visible and graphic shape to the invisible, to imagine the unimaginable. In the last year of his life, Thomas Aquinas had a vision which prompted him to stop writing. Everything he had written now seemed to him, he said, just so much straw. Dante states his problem in Canto 1 of the Paradiso:

Such things I saw as one

Who thence returns lacks wit and skill to tell,

Because, as it draws near to its desire

Our intellect so deeply penetrates

That memory cannot follow after it.

(Berger, p. 237).

Of course heaven does not literally consist of the planetary spheres; these are an imaginative device that enables Dante to put before our eyes something of what he has seen. Beatrice insists on this. The souls of the blessed are all in the celestial rose which is the goal of this final ascent.

At the culmination of the great poem, Mary comes ever more sharply into view. We are in heaven and she is the Queen of Heaven. This title occurs again and again in the Paradiso. Her face is said most to resemble Christ's and of course more than a natural family resemblance is meant. She is Full of Grace. She intercedes for and helps souls on the route to heaven.

Canto XXXIII, the final canto of the great poem, consists of the prayer of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, noted for his devotion to Mary.

Virgin Mother, daughter of thy son;

humble beyond all creatures and more exalted;

predestined turning point of God's intention;

thy merit so ennobled human nature

that its divine Creator did not scorn

to make Himself the creature of His creature.

The love that was rekindled in Thy womb

sends forth the warmth of the eternal peace within whose ray this flower has come to bloom.

Here, to us, thou art the noon and scope of Love revealed;

and among mortal men the living fountain of eternal hope.

Lady, thou art so near God's reckonings

that who seeks grace and does not first seek thee

would have his wish fly upward without wings.

Not only does thy sweet benignity flow out to all who beg,

but oftentimes thy charity arrives before the plea.

In thee is pity, in thee munificence, in thee the tenderest heart, in thee unites all that creation knows of excellence!

The Divine Comedy ends where it began, with the role of Mary in our salvation. Is this a surpassed view, a medieval excess that we have grown beyond? Lumen Gentium, Vatican II's dogmatic constitution on the Church, proceeds through the various modes in which men can participate in Christ's salvific act, moving from baptism through the other sacraments and the corresponding need for the priesthood and a hierarchy with teaching authority, but it ends with a chapter on Mary as Mother of the Church. Mary is not simply the object of pious devotion. She is central to the economy of salvation. Vatican II and The Divine Comedy are on the same page.

Ralph McInerny is editor of Catholic Dossier.