Dante & Beatrice: A Non-Existent Love Affair

Dante’s love for Beatrice is unlike any love before or after it. At the very least, it is the strangest love of all. As Harold Bloom once said, nothing else in Western literature ‘is as sublimely outrageous as Dante’s exaltation of Beatrice’. He turned this average Florentine woman into a ‘crucial element in the church’s hierarchy of salvation’. According to the theologian Charles Williams, for the full expression of the ‘inGodding of man’, ‘the Church had to wait for Dante’. Bloom, likewise, calls Dante’s Divine Comedy the third and final testament; ‘in no way subservient to the Old and the New’. In placing Beatrice in the center of this new scripture, Dante borders on blasphemy, in one of the ‘most poetic of all idolatries’:

What Williams highlights throughout his intense study, The Figure of Beatrice (1943), is the great scandal of Dante’s achievement: the poet’s most spectacular invention is Beatrice. No single personage in Shakespeare, not even the charismatic Hamlet or the godlike Lear, matches Beatrice as an exuberantly daring invention

from ‘Dante and Virgil’ (1850) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Bloom calls Beatrice an ‘invention’ but this is the Beatrice of the Divine Comedy — Dante’s angelic guide through paradise — not the…