Love and Reason in the Ruins
We are nearing the culmination of my course in medieval literature at Thales College, reading Dante’s La Vita Nuova, to be followed by his Purgatory, the second of the three divisions of the Divine Comedy, and the one most keenly focused on human love and art. I think my students have gotten by now a fair idea that we have spent our semester in another universe, one whose scholars and poets took for granted that reason can extend far beyond logical deduction, to encompass all that can be known from first principles, open eyes, and a trust in the order of creation. It is what enabled Chretien de Troyes, in The Knight of the Cart, to show in startlingly physical and delightfully absurd forms the contradiction that Lancelot harbors in his soul, having yielded to his sexual desire for Guenevere, the wife of his best friend and benefactor and king, Arthur. It is what enabled the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to show the danger of overvaluing a human good, that of chivalry and courteous speech, as Sir Gawain attempts to refrain from falling into a sexual temptation that would cost him his life and his soul, while not insulting the lady who offers the temptation on three successive days, the lady who is his host’s lovely young wife.
And now we turn to Dante, who says that when he was nearly nine years old, he met Beatrice for the first time, she “who was called Beatrice even by those who did not know her name,” because “Beatrice” means “she who brings a blessing.” So overcome was he by her beauty, that the animating soul within him spoke straightaway to the spirit of the eyes, in Latin, Apparuit beatitudo vestra: Your bliss has appeared. When I asked the students about that word beatitudo, they said it reminded them of Scripture, and they noted that it had to do with heavenly bliss, the ultimate blessing. I mentioned that the tense of the Latin verb was the perfect, to suggest something that has already happened. It is a bold move on Dante’s part, as if the whole of his future life as a human soul enthralled by love, and as a poet and philosopher and theologian, had been concentrated in this one moment, when he was but a boy with no clear understanding yet of any of these things.
This epiphany will lead us to an illuminating moment in Purgatory, when Dante is speaking to a fellow poet who, in life, did not like his artistic union of the amatory with the theological. That poet, Bonagiunta da Lucca, now appreciates what Dante has accomplished, and he asks Dante whether he is looking on that same man who introduced the sweet new style, the author of Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, Ladies who have intelligence of love. The word intelletto is startling, as it names a faculty higher than reason itself. Reason, in its proper sense, is ratio, weighing, comparing, discoursing, deducing. But intellect involves the direct apprehension of a truth. We do not argue to the first moral law, which is to do good and avoid evil; rather, we see the law at once, and we argue from it. If the Love that Dante has in mind is the object of intellect, it cannot be the same thing as sexual desire, because that must be ordered by reason, as to what it is good for, when it may be indulged, how it must be restrained, and so forth. Whatever Love is, it is both an object and a principle of immediate insight. Says Dante in reply to Bonagiunta:
I’m one who takes the pen
When Love breathes wisdom into me, and go
Finding the signs for what he speaks within.
The artist, then, is a finder and fashioner and arranger of signs, to shed light for others on an already given reality, and to submit to that reality, as you would submit to an object of surpassing glory and beauty, even to God himself.
Need I make the point that no one talks about love in this way anymore? It would be easy enough to turn from Dante’s love poetry in La Vita Nuova, or even from the merry and bawdy songs of those days, to the coarse, brutish, ugly, and angry obscenities that “artists” who cannot even sing well now pour into the minds of young people like acid, making a lot of money while they do so. A tradition of love songs that lasted for almost eight hundred years, I said to my students, has finally run out, in disillusionment and indifference, if not worse. It is not that nobody among us writes like Dante. It is that, if we did not have the records of it, no one would ever imagine a Dante seeing in Beatrice a bearer of divine love and grace. It is one thing to stop singing songs. It is another not to be able to conceive of what would move people to sing those songs in the first place.
Still, that is not my main point here. I think of Thomas Aquinas, whom Dante usually followed closely though by no means slavishly, since dearly as he loved Thomas, he loved what he saw as the truth even more. The ultimate realities transcend reason, but nothing in reality is beneath reason’s grasp; there is nothing about which we can reasonably say that there is no reason in it at all. That goes for love and beauty, and for the just and comely ordering of loves in a sound commonwealth. The Dante who wrote in praise of the beauty and goodness of Beatrice is the same man who decried the corruption and hypocrisy of his native Florence, and that is not a mere coincidence. There is no amatory Dante on one side, and a political Dante on another, just as there was no Thomas Aquinas the priest and hymnodist and mystic on one side, and a Thomas Aquinas the analyst of virtue and law and civic order on another. To long for intelligence of love is to be open to the vision when it is offered to you, and one of the fit responses to that insight is to reason from it to its conclusions regarding how we are to live with one another in this world. But if you deny that there is any such intelligence, you have already cut yourself off from what Dante and Thomas recognized as the principle of moral reasoning and as its main motive force.
I do not intend to paint a pretty picture of the Italian cities in Dante’s time, vibrant, muscular, and often plunged in bloody wars both foreign and domestic. Nor do I suggest that all the women in Florence were demure and chaste, and all the men courtly and reverent; Dante himself denies it, and in quite scabrous terms. But it does appear that the constriction or demotion of reason, and the chaos of brute passions and dull sloth into which that pitches us, can be seen simultaneously and not coincidentally in the death of the love song and in the death of reasoned political discourse. We do not sing about love, nor do we talk rationally about the order of loves. We do not look to the heavens or to the earth beneath our feet. The grunts of obscenity on the radio, “loveless, joyless, unendeared,” to use Milton’s words, are like the grunts of mutual political hatreds, or the whoops and howls of political advocacy, sub-rational, out to score in one way or another, and that is all.
My students at Thales tend to be politically conservative, and so am I, but I spend exactly no time in class discussing any current matter of shouting or howling, no more than I would use drumbeats of obscenity to introduce them to Johann Sebastian Bach. We have more important and more human work to do. At the least, we must help half-starved Reason to stand on her feet again, and we must bring back Intellect from the solitary cell where modern man has consigned her. The land is in ruins. The order of the day is to remember, recover, repent, and rebuild.
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