Learning from the Beloved: A Journey (Divine Comedy)

A Spiritual Journey: Forgetting, A Pagan Guide, Remembering

A vision of beauty stirs love, the more absolute the beauty, the greater the love. Scripture teaches Christians to look through the image, the icon of God, to the eternal that one can find in the beloved. The image of God in each human is eternal, but itself is an icon, another window to the Love Himself. This divine Love rectifies every other love that has led to God, incorporates all beauty, making all good and true, magnifying all and diminishing nothing God has made.

This is wonder of the incarnation. The Word became flesh and we could behold His glory, the glory of the only begotten, full of grace and truth. 

Yet I missed this or refused to hear it and was lost until I met a guide. He was not one of the faithful, but this was what I needed. Having wondered from truth, I needed someone who would bring back to the truth by ways I had not already blocked off or ignored.  The pagan Plato brought me back around to the truth.

His Symposium spoke the some of the same truths about love and the ascent of love from the beloved to the Beloved and back to all the lesser loves. As I read Plato, the old pagan guided me back to the truths I heard from the Gospel as a child. Plato led me to Dante and Dante was greater still: the truth in Plato coupled with the grace of God.

I realized all of that had been in the Narnia stories of boyhood and that Narnia stories were an icon of the Greatest Story ever told: the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Further Up and Further In: the Mind of the Beloved 

There was more recollecting of truth to do: the heart can help us find the good of the intellect. The intellect without love becomes dry reason without rhyme, logic without logos. Too often love came from passion and that was easily led astray. The mind of the beloved is beautiful. This beautiful mind naturally produces love and the love of a beautiful mind a desire to know. The consent of the beautiful mind to love produces conversation, a dialog where the lover listens to the beloved. Wisdom cries out and the person who loves wisdom listens.

God help me.

To be in love with a person should inevitably bring a primary focus on the good of the intellect.** Too often (Mercy!) I have stopped at superficial beauty or rushed on past hope, the good of the intellect. Questions are the activity of hope, the possibility that something good can still come. Dante was my sure guide to remind me of the need to love wisdom in the beloved.

Dante loves Beatrice. He sees he does through damnation and purgation. She is the beloved. He loves her. Right? He finally sees her and she points out that Dante has merely loved her form and not her. He stares, but does not venture to question her . . . As if she were merely radiantly beautiful physically and spiritually.

No.

She is wise and Dante has failed to love her wisdom. He is tongue tied and that is not flattering, but failure.

As soon as I was with her as I should be, She said to me: “Why, brother, dost thou not Venture to question now, in coming with me?” As unto those who are too reverential, Speaking in presence of superiors, Who drag no living utterance to their teeth, It me befell, that without perfect sound Began I: “My necessity, Madonna, You know, and that which thereunto is good.”*

Dante must not merely revere his beloved Beatrice, but speak to her and learn from her. He had to speak and haltingly began to learn from his beloved.

This is the dialect of love. Love is not foreign to the intellect, love, real love, wishes to know all there is to know about the beloved and all that can be learned from the beloved. Two people in love must talk, the deep  conversation that brings two minds together. Dante reminded me of what Proverbs taught me: hear Wisdom, seek her, listen.

Talk to the beloved and learn.

Know hope.

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Purgatory, Divine Comedy Canto XXXIII. Longfellow translation. If you can get used to the vocabulary, read this great American poet rendering the greater work of the father of Italian language and poetry.

**By this I mean the nous, the mind’s eye, the deep consciousness that is the essential self.