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The details that Dante gives us of his meetings with the earthly Beatrice are so sketchy and the circumstances so ephemeral—they encounter each other as children once, she begins to greet him in the street some nine years later and then shortly after passes him by—that one can reasonably say that Dante never fully meets Beatrice until Canto XXX of the Purgatorio. And it is neither the style of meeting nor the woman that Dante quite expected. He had gazed at a distance on the earthly Beatrice in the Streets of Florence and at Mass and at banquets—though she had rarely looked at him; he had gazed on the heavenly Beatrice, too, in his mind’s eye. But the actual encounter, the real meeting, with the heavenly Beatrice (and the heavenly is the revelation of the earthly, a manifestation of the truth) is a rude awakening. He has trembled through the reeking horrors of the Inferno, encouraged by Virgil’s indomitable trust that it is by descent into the deepest cavern that they will reach the redeeming light and come to Beatrice; he has toiled up the mountain of the Purgatorio, lightened by the hope of meeting Beatrice; he has cast himself into the wall of fire that divides the last purgatorial terrace from the Earthly Paradise, urged on by Virgil: ‘ “Look now, my son, between Beatrice and thee is this wall” . . . and my sweet Father, to comfort me, kept talking of Beatrice as he went, saying: “I seem to see her eyes already” ‘ (XXVII 35f and 52ff.).
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- Copyright © 1973 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Cf. Gilson, E., Dante and Philosophy; New York 1963Google Scholar; p. 73‐‘they at last speak for the first time’.
2 The numbering and translation of the Rinw follow Foster, Kenelm and Boyde, Patrick, Dante's Lyric Poetry; Oxford 1967Google Scholar.
3 Cf. Dante's immersion in the waters of Lethe (Purg. XXXl), transforming the memory so that past sin is recalled only as cause for praising God's redemptive act, and marking the entry into the true Unity.
4 T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton. Cf. Rob van der Hart O.P., ‘The Descent of Christ into Hell’, New Blackfriars, April 1972; pp. 168f.
5 Timothy Radcliffe OP has drawn my attention to ST la. 14.2 and in particular the statement that ‘redire ad essentiam suam nihil aliud est quam rem subsistere in seipsa’. Whilst it is only God who can fully achieve this, it could be said that the degree to which Beatrice achieves it is the degree to which she becomes what she is in the mind of God.
6 ST la2ae 85.3.
7 Ethics II vii.
8 Cf. Brecht:— He who is defeated cannot escape Wisdom.
Hold on to yourself and sink. Be afraid.
But sink. At the bottom
The lesson awaits you.
9 See, for example, Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony; Oxford 1951Google Scholar; pp. 102ff.
10 Quoted in Campenhausen, The Theological Problem of Images in the Early Church, in Tradition and Life in the Church; London 1968; p. 193Google Scholar.
11 The mode of knowledge is necessarily different when God is known in his essence or as he is in himself: this directly intuited knowledge cannot be communicated through any created likeness. See ST la. 12.2, to which Herbert McCabe OP has kindly drawn my attention.