Angelus News | August 27, 2021 | Vol. 6 No. 17

Detail of a miniature
of Beatrice
explaining to Dante
that the universe is
a hierarchy of being,
with creatures
devoid of reason
in the early "sea of
being," and heaven
as nine spheres
ruled by the figure
of love. | CNS/
BRITISH LIBRARY
VIA THE PUBLIC
DOMAIN REVIEW
man freedom, which is the only thing
that God refuses to overcome. Mercy is
an initiative of God in response to the
faintest movement of human freedom,
the slightest opening of our hearts to
him.
This is illustrated by another memorable
character of “Purgatorio,” Buonconte
of Montefeltro, a knight who
fought alongside Dante in the battle of
Campaldino. The spirit of Buonconte
tells Dante how, pierced in his throat,
he fled to die alone:
“I lost my sight,” he says, “and all my
words ended in uttering Mary’s name.
I fell — my flesh alone remaining
there.”
A devil shows up immediately, ready
to drag Buonconte to hell on account
of his many sins. Yet an angel also
arrives. God has heard the silent prayer
uttered by the dying man, who crossed
his hands and died with the name of
Mary on his lips. The angel obviously
succeeds in claiming Buonconte’s
spirit. The devil’s words highlight the
paradoxical logic of God’s mercy:
“Why do you rob me, son of Heaven,
of this [soul]? / You’d prize him from
me for one little tear, / and carry off his
everlasting part?”
Love is a crucial theme of “The
Divine Comedy.” “Love that moves
the sun and other stars” is the poem’s
last line. How does Dante define
love? And how does he understand
the relationship between divine and
human love?
Love for Dante is closely connected
to desire. “No creation or creature was
ever without love,” he writes; and when
desire turns to that which someone
likes “that turning is love.” But desire
and love do not end when we seize the
object of our desire, but they push us to
go further, to discover who we are and
who we are made for.
This appears clearly in one of “Inferno’s”
most famous episodes, in which
Dante hears the story of Paolo and
Francesca, a pair of adulterous lovers
(Francesca was married to Paolo’s
brother, who murdered both upon
discovering their affair) overwhelmed
by a passion akin to what Dante, who
was married to another woman, felt
for Beatrice. Francesca and Paolo are
condemned to hell not because they
yielded to their desire for illicit love,
but because they limited their own
desire to the immediate object of their
longing.
In other words, they blocked the
trajectory of their desire, constraining
their freedom to an object that cannot
satisfy their thirst for happiness. They
refused to look further toward the greater
good and refused to follow in the
direction into which their love, even if
sinful, was pointing them: the infinite
and the divine.
For Dante, what is essential is not the
distinction between sacred and profane
love, but whether people are prepared
to travel, through love and desire, the
full distance that separates them from
the infinite.
What can Dante say to our profoundly
divided world today? And to
a Church that seems equally torn?
What Dante keeps saying, to the men
and women of today as well as those of
We should understand Dante’s fictional
journey as the endless adventure that is
our own journey through life, marked by
an attempt to fulfill that desire for happiness
that defines us as human beings.
700 years ago — and St. Francis’ canto
in “Paradiso” proves it — is that the
only way for us to be happy is to take
our own “I” into our hands again.
This means taking our desire of happiness
seriously, recognizing that we,
like Dante, are lost in the woods of life.
We need to beg for help and to follow
those who are ahead of us along the
path that, like Dante’s journey, reaches
for the stars. This is the source of every
change, of every rediscovery of our
identity, and of the rediscovery of our
particular vocations.
Stefano Rebeggiani is an associate
professor of classics at the University of
Southern California.
August 27, 2021 • ANGELUS • 17