TIN VAN

The Meeting in a Dream

After conquering the Circles of Hell and the arduous borders of Purgatory, Dante sees Beatrice at last in the Earthly Paradise. Ozanam conjectures that this scene (certainly one of the most astonishing in all literature) is the primitive nucleus of the Comedy. My purpose is to relate it, to repeat what the scholiasts say, and to present an observation, perhaps new, of a psychological nature.
    On the morning of April 13, 1300, the day before the last day of his journey, Dante, his tasks accomplished, enters the Earthly Paradise, which flourishes on the summit of Purgatory. He has seen the temporal fire and the eternal one, he has passed through a wall of fire, his will is free and upright. Virgil has crowned and mitred him lord of himself (per ch'io te sovra te corona e mitrio). He follows the paths of the ancient garden to a river that transcends all other waters in purity, although neither the sun nor the moon penetrates the trees to illuminate it. Music floats on the air, and a mysterious procession advances on the opposite bank. Twenty-four elders in white robes and four animals, each with six wings adorned with open eyes, precede a triumphal chariot drawn by a griffin. At the right wheel three women are dancing; one is so ruddy that we would scarcely be able to see her in a fire. Beside the left wheel there are four women in purple raiment, one of whom has three eyes. The chariot stops and a veiled woman appears; her costume is the color of a living flame. Not by sight but by the stupor of his spirit and the fear in his blood, Dante knows that it is Beatrice. On the threshold of Glory he feels the love that had transfixed him so many times in Florence. Like a frightened child he looks for Virgil's protection, but Virgil is no longer beside him.

Ma Virgilio n'avea lasciati scemi
di sé, Virgilio do1cissimo patre,
Virgilio a cui per mia salute die'mi.

    Imperiously, Beatrice calls him by name. She tells him not to mourn Virgil's disappearance but rather his own sins. With irony she asks him how he has deigned to tread where men are happy. The air has become populated with angels; implacably, Beatrice enumerates Dante's aberrations. She says that her quest for him in dreams was unavailing; he fell so low that the only means for his salvation was to show him the reprobates. Dante lowers his eyes, mortified, and stammers and weeps. The fabulous beings listen; Beatrice obliges him to make a public confession. This, then, in imperfect prose, is the pitiful scene of the first meeting with Beatrice in Paradise. Theophil Spoerri (Einuhrung in die Gottliche Komodie, Zurich, 1946) makes this curious observation: "Undoubtedly Dante himself had imagined that meeting differently. Nothing on the previous pages indicates that the greatest humiliation of his life awaited him there."
    Commentators decipher this scene figure by figure. The twenty-four elders who lead the procession (Apocalypse 4:4) are the twenty-four books of the Old Testament, according to the Prologus Galeatus of St. Jerome. The animals with six wings are the Evangelists (Tommaseo) or the Gospels (Lombardi). The six wings are the six laws (Pietro di Dante) or the diffusion of doctrine in the six spatial directions (Francesco da Buti). The chariot is the Universal Church; the two wheels are the two Testaments (Buti), or the active and the contemplative life (Benvenuto da Imola), or St. Dominic and St. Francis (Paradiso, XII, 106-111), or Justice and Piety (Luigi Pietrobono). The griffin-lion and eagle-is Christ, by the hypostatica1 union of the Word with human nature: Didron maintains that it is the Pope, "who as pontiff or eagle, ascends to the throne of God to receive his orders, and as lion or king walks the earth with fortitude and vigor." The women dancing at the right wheel are the theological virtues; those dancing at the left, the cardinal ones. The woman endowed with three eyes is Prudence, which see the past, the present, and the future. Beatrice arrives and Virgil disappears, because Virgil is reason and Beatrice faith-and also, according to Vitali, because Christian culture followed classical culture.
    The interpretations I have enumerated are no doubt plausible enough. Logically (not poetically) they justify the ambiguities quite adequately. After defending some of them, Carlo Steiner writes: "A three-eyed woman is a monster, but the Poet does not bow to the restrictions of art here because he is more interested in expressing the moral code that is dear to him. This is an unequivocal proof that not art but the love of the Good occupied first place in the soul of this very great artist." Less effusively, Vitali corroborates that opinion: "The desire to allegorize leads Dante to inventions of dubious beauty."
    Two facts seem to be indisputable. Dante wanted the procession to be beautiful (Non che Roma di carro così bello Rallegrasse Affricano); the procession is of a complicated ugliness. A griffin attached to a chariot, animals whose wings are studded with open eyes, a green woman, a crimson one, another who has three eyes, a man who walks in his sleep, all seem to belong less to Glory than to the vain Circles of Hell. Their horror is not lessened by the fact that one of those figures is from the prophetic books (ma leggi Ezechiel che li dipigne) and others are from the Revelation of St. John. My reproach is not an anachronism; the other scenes of Paradise exclude the monstrous. (1)
    Every commentator has emphasized the severity of Beatrice, and some have stressed the ugliness of certain symbols. In my opinion, both anomalies have a common origin. Of course, this is merely a conjecture; I shall explain it briefly.
    To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. That Dante professed an idolatrous adoration for Beatrice is a truth that does not bear contradicting; that she once ridiculed him and another time rebuffed him are facts recorded by the Vita nuova. Some maintain that those facts are symbolic of others. If that were true, it would strengthen even more our certainty of an unhappy and superstitious love. Dante, when Beatrice was dead, when Beatrice was lost forever, played with the idea of finding her, to mitigate his sorrow. I believe that he erected the triple architecture of his poem simply to insert that encounter. Then what usually happens in dreams happened to him. In adversity we dream of good fortune, and the intimate awareness that we cannot attain it is enough to corrupt our dream, clouding it with sad restraints. That was the case with Dante. Refused forever by Beatrice, he dreamed of Beatrice, but he dreamed her very austere, but he dreamed her inaccessible, but he dreamed her in a chariot drawn by a lion that was a bird and was all bird or all lion when it was reflected in her eyes (Purgatorio, XXXI, 121). Those facts can be the prefiguration of a nightmare, which is set forth and described at length in the following canto. Beatrice disappears; an eagle, a vixen, and a dragon attack the chariot; the wheels and the pole are covered with feathers; then the chariot ejects seven heads (Trasformato cosi'l dificio santo Mise fuor teste); a giant and a harlot usurp Beatrice's place. (2)
    Infinitely Beatrice existed for Dante; Dante existed very little, perhaps not at all, for Beatrice. Our piety, our veneration cause us to forget that pitiful in harmony, which was unforgettable for Dante. I read and reread about the vicissitudes of their illusory encounter, and I think of two lovers who were dreamed by Alighieri in the hurricane of the Second Circle and who are dark emblems, although he perhaps neither knew that nor intended it, of the happiness he did not attain. I think of Francesca and of Paolo, united forever in their Hell. Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso. With frightening love, with anxiety, with admiration, with envy, Dante must have formed that line.

J.L. Borges

1.    After I had written the foregoing lines, I read in the glosses of Francesco Torraca that an Italian bestiary identifies the griffin as the symbol of the devil (Per lo Grifone entendo lo nemico), Shall I add that in The Exeter Book the panther, animal of melodious voice and soft breath, is the symbol of the Redeemer?
2.    One will object that such ugliness is the reverse of the preceding "beauty." Yes, but it is significant. Allegorically, the eagle's aggression represents the first persecutions; the vixen, heresy; the dragon, Satan or Mohammed or the Antichrist; the heads, the capital sins (Benvenuto da Imola) or the sacraments (Buti ) ; the giant, Philip IV; the harlot, the Church.