A very thoughtful reader asked about my reference to “Beatrice” in a description of home-school mothers . . . a group that I think are one of the major bulwarks for traditional Western civilization.
She looked up Beatrice in the usual sources and discovered a great deal of chatter about a “romantic love” that looks indecent (and properly so) to traditional Christian eyes. Dante was all hot and heavy for Beatrice, but little or nothing is said about his wife. How can a good and faithful wife and mother be Beatrice?
Who would want to be?
But as usual there is more to the story that the usual sources admit. I fear many of the usual sources have read Inferno carefully, but are a little bored by Purgatory and Paradise. This boredom is understandable since both books condemn their great god, the divinity of our age: Eros.
Classically Eros was the god of unbridled passions. Ancients feared him, but moderns use his power to sanction turning their desires into actions.
What the Christian writer Sheldon Vanauken called “the sanction of Eros” is the assumption that powerful romantic love makes any action proper. Many movies preach this lie and many of us have been snared by it. The god of our culture is often this pagan god Eros . . . who can make even the worst action seem right (God help me a sinner!) in light of passion.
On first glance, Dante’s love for this young Florentine woman Beatrice looks merely improper, but this is only because our culture, wanting to enlist the great Christian poet in favor of their god Eros has not told the whole story of that love.
Dante’s love for Beatrice in his life was a bad thing for him. It was a carnal thing and it was the sort of thing that could have damned him. How do we know? Dante has Beatrice herself make this point at the top of Mount Purgatory (Canto XXXI):
“O Thou!” her words she thus without delay
Resuming, turn’d their point on me, to whom
They but with lateral edge seem’d harsh before,
“Say thou, who stand’st beyond the holy stream,
If this be true. A charge so grievous needs
Thine own avowal.” On my faculty
Such strange amazement hung, the voice expir’d
Imperfect, ere its organs gave it birth.A little space refraining, then she spake:
“What dost thou muse on? Answer me. The wave
On thy remembrances of evil yet
Hath done no injury.” A mingled sense
Of fear and of confusion, from my lips
Did such a “Yea” produce, as needed help
Of vision to interpret. As when breaks
In act to be discharg’d, a cross-bow bent
Beyond its pitch, both nerve and bow o’erstretch’d,
The flagging weapon feebly hits the mark;
Thus, tears and sighs forth gushing, did I burst
Beneath the heavy load, and thus my voice
Was slacken’d on its way. She straight began:
“When my desire invited thee to love
The good, which sets a bound to our aspirings,
What bar of thwarting foss or linked chain
Did meet thee, that thou so should’st quit the hope
Of further progress, or what bait of ease
Or promise of allurement led thee on
Elsewhere, that thou elsewhere should’st rather wait?”A bitter sigh I drew, then scarce found voice
To answer, hardly to these sounds my lips
Gave utterance, wailing: “Thy fair looks withdrawn,
Things present, with deceitful pleasures, turn’d
My steps aside.” She answering spake: “Hadst thou
Been silent, or denied what thou avow’st,
Thou hadst not hid thy sin the more: such eye
Observes it. But whene’er the sinner’s cheek
Breaks forth into the precious-streaming tears
Of self-accusing, in our court the wheel
Of justice doth run counter to the edge.
Howe’er that thou may’st profit by thy shame
For errors past, and that henceforth more strength
May arm thee, when thou hear’st the Siren-voice,
Lay thou aside the motive to this grief,
And lend attentive ear, while I unfold
How opposite a way my buried flesh
Should have impell’d thee. Never didst thou spy
In art or nature aught so passing sweet,
As were the limbs, that in their beauteous frame
Enclos’d me, and are scatter’d now in dust.
If sweetest thing thus fail’d thee with my death,
What, afterward, of mortal should thy wish
Have tempted? When thou first hadst felt the dart
Of perishable things, in my departing
For better realms, thy wing thou should’st have prun’d
To follow me, and never stoop’d again
To ‘bide a second blow for a slight girl,
Or other gaud as transient and as vain.
The new and inexperienc’d bird awaits,
Twice it may be, or thrice, the fowler’s aim;
But in the sight of one, whose plumes are full,
In vain the net is spread, the arrow wing’d.”I stood, as children silent and asham’d
Stand, list’ning, with their eyes upon the earth,
Beatrice points out that the minute she was dead, Dante moved on to another woman. His protestations of eternal love disconnected from base desire were nonsense. Her death proved it.
The noble Beatrice of the Divine Comedywill not accept romantic longings that pretend to be about her soul, but are really a disguise for the love of her body. She knows (who better) that most poetic loves are just the opening gambits of seducers and use the sanction of Eros to justify their actions. Dante claimed to love her soul, but when her body was gone (though her soul was now more glorious in Paradise), he moved on. His love for her was earth bound.
Thus does Dante’s poem show in Dante (the character in the poem) the lies of the sanction of Eros. It promises purity, but delivers nothing.
But wait! Dante has seen this himself . . . it is after all his poem. How did he see it? Dante, the man, evidently was troubled by his own unfaithfulness. He sees plainly that all his talk before the death of Beatrice was just that . . . talk. She died and he moved on.
His memory of the holy Florentine girl who had been faithful to her church and her vows reproached him.
His love for her was shown to be as false as the famous lovers Francesca and Paulo who betrayed every vow for the romantic “love” of the period.
As a young man I loved the image of Francesca and Paulo as portrayed in the work of the painter D.G. Rossetti who loved each other even to Hell. Their fate does not look so bad in Rossetti’s painting. It even looks romantic, but the great poet denies this is true, denies even pity as appropriate to them, and condemns them as wicked. Rossetti gives the sinners hope, but Dante will give them no hope except repentance and that only in life.
Dante portrays these lovers in his Inferno Canto V and says:
I understood that to this torment sad
The carnal sinners are condemn’d, in whom
Reason by lust is sway’d. As in large troops
And multitudinous, when winter reigns,
The starlings on their wings are borne abroad;
So bears the tyrannous gust those evil souls.
Dante saw that his love for Beatrice had been no love, but a tyrannous gust covered up by his wonderful poetic words. The good news is that this painful self-realization woke him up from the poetic stupor that threatened his soul. His very memory of Beatrice, and his failure to be faithful to even his foolish romantic love for her, condemned him. It pointed him to higher loves and better passion. It is a hard word (as I understand all too well) when we discover that we have not even lived up to our vices.
Beatrice by being Beatrice condemned vice and pointed to a better way . . . the way of the faithful Christian woman who must be loved as Christian women are loved.
It is in this sense that the traditional Christian women of our time are like Beatrice. These faithful women condemn the great god Eros of modern culture. They refuse to sacrifice duty for applause and love faithfully. Our culture ignores them when it does not despise them, but this is only because, like Beatrice to a greater man in a better time, they condemn the false god Eros by their purity and love for the true God.
I can only stand before the purity of my own wife, the Fairest Flower in all of Christendom, who has given up so much for her children and for me, in wonder.
God help me, but it was not always (and is not always) so.
It is easy to ignore such sacrifice, because it does not come tricked out in the trumpery of Eros. It is love like that of the Virgin with Child. It is love that comes from the God of Heaven and not from a devil with a bow. It is the love of the Christian Saint Valentine and not of that pagan devil Cupid.
It is that sense that the legions of church-ladies, home-school mothers, single women faithful to Christ, and ranks of those working as women in every nation and career as faithful traditional Christians dazzle my eyes. It is in that sense that each mother, each sister, each lady who is true to the traditional Christian calling is a window or sign post to Heaven.
As I write this my family prepares for a family tradition. Each year we have a brief service where we remember that, almost one hundred years ago, brave men died in the Atlantic on RMS Titanic so that women and children could live.
There were cads on RMS Titanic and there was the class discrimination of the time, but the heroes are the ones easy to remember.
What made such men?
What made them capable of standing calmly as their lady-loves were rowed into the night?
Wasn’t it the eyes of those ladies that pointed them to a better way?
Wasn’t it the looks over many years that made heroes of those men?
They could bear to die, because it was for her.
She could live without him, because he had really loved her.
Eros demanded they get in the boat. Eros cannot stand to be parted, even to save the soul of the beloved.
Charity gently taught them to stay and die.
It is this charity learned by all men through duty, faithfulness, and sacrifice that Dante speaks of in the end . . . the force of charity that moves the heavens and the stars.
It is charity that we are reminded of in the sacrifice of a good mother and a faithful wife. No man is worthy of it. . . every real man sees Christ in it.
It has become unfashionable, indeed career threatening, to speak of the refining influence of such Beatrice-like eyes and such heavenly looks.
I make no claims that such civilizing is needed by all men or that all women are called to perform such a task.
I only know it was true for me, and more profoundly true for Dante and those men on RMS Titanic, that the Beatrice Brigade helped us . . . the eyes of ladies were God’s tools to save us.
