Orpheus and Beatrice: Fear & Trembling
(Purgatorio, Canto XXX): Orpheus, Beatrice, Lady Philosophy
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
~ Thomas Mann
Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨
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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide is the great Roman poet Virgil and in this Thirtieth Canto of the Purgatorio, we encounter the long awaited Beatrice, and say farewell to Virgil. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.
In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.
All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.
This Week’s Circle ⭕️
The procession halts - The bride of Lebanon from the Song of Songs - One hundred angelic voices and a cascade of flowers - Beatrice, on the chariot, appears before Dante - Dante turns to Virgil for comfort - Virgil has disappeared - Beatrice’s rebuke - Dante’s shame.
Canto XXX Summary:
The triumphal chariot had halted before Dante, standing in the heavenly garden, across the river Lethe. The suspense of the pageant had built to an almost unbearable tension, as the sight of Beatrice was imminent.
An exposition is at hand. The pageant which follows is not altogether easy for us, for our literary tastes are now different. But we need not start, as so many writers on Dante seem to start, by warning every reader away. It is (as we all know) the pageant of Beatrice, but of course Dante—in the poem—does not know that. All he knows is this slow exhibition of greatness. Yet the figures of greatness have a meaning for him; they are, even as he sees them, ‘allegorical’ to his mind.1
In these opening tercets, the seven candlesticks that led the procession—here compared to the ‘first heaven’s Seven Stars’—had stopped, and all members of the pageant turned to face the chariot, that source of peace. Symbolically, the candlesticks, and therefore the stars, represented the sevenfold Spirit of God.2 That ‘first heaven’ was the Empyrean realm, the most distant circle of the heavens, and first in line when looking down from it as God would do into the realms below. In its fullness of clarity and light, it is only the sin of humanity that “beclouds our vision” of it (3).
The seven stars of the first heaven is, in some translations, called the Septentrion, referring to the northern regions, or alternately, as the name of the grouping of seven stars that contained the North Star, Ursa Minor. Those symbolic stars were guides to the procession just as the literal stars guided the sailor; the procession had stopped just as the sailor would pull into port.
The twenty four elders, representing the prophets of the Old Testament, turned, and all eyes were on the chariot when one of them called out in song:
One of them, as if sent down from Heaven, hymned
aloud, “Veni, sponsa, de Libano,”
three times, and all the others echoed him.
xxx.9-12
This was the prophet of the book the Song of Songs, also called The Song of Solomon, who sang “Come, bride of Lebanon.”
Mystically, the Bride of the Canticles is the image of the soul espoused to God, and prophetically, of Mary, the Bride of the Holy Ghost.3
One hundred angelic voices joined in song to respond to this sounding of the elder—ad vocem tanti senis—just as emphatically and eagerly as would be sung ‘Hallelujah’ at the Last Judgment when the dead were raised. This imagery all pointed to the advent of the highest God, the most blessed, in the representation of Christ. Yet we realize—but, we wonder, did Dante?—that it is not Christ who is about to appear, but another. They sang Benedictus qui venis!—Blessed are thou who comest—which again pointed to Christ, not only in the reference from the book of Matthew, but in the formation of the very grammar.
If, throughout the whole course of the poem, our minds had not been insistently prepared for the coming of Beatrice, the whole symbolism of the Masque, and particularly the chanting of the Benedictus, would lead us to expect the appearance upon the car of the Holy Host Itself.4
The welcoming cry in the masculine is remarkable in view of the fact that it is Beatrice who comes. It serves, in fact, to guide the reader yet farther along the line of deliberate ambiguity. Is it Christ who comes now? But Christ is already on the scene, in the figure of the griffin. Is it Beatrice who comes as the bride from Lebanon? Then why not ‘benedicta quae venis?’ The cry, in any event, brings immediately to mind Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and the strewing of fronds, matched in the scene here by the tossing of flowers.5
The tossing of flowers by those singing was accompanied by the chant Manibus, O, date lilia plenis!—O, give us lilies with full hands! This line from the Aeneid, in which Aeneas’ father Anchises speaks his last prophecy to Aeneas in the Underworld as they said farewell, matches the building pathos of the triumphant scene blended with an upcoming farewell:
Give me lilies with full hand; let me scatter purple flowers.
Aeneid vi.883
I have at times seen all the eastern sky
becoming rose as day began and seen,
adorned in lovely blue, the rest of heaven;
and seen the sun’s face rise so veiled that it
was tempered by the mist and could permit
the eye to look at length upon it;
xxx.22-27
The rising sun heralds the coming of Christ, again pointing to an ambiguous line between Him and the character of Beatrice; the mist which tempered the sun enabled the eyes to gaze upon it more fully than they could without; so does this mist enable Dante to look upon she who is about to appear.
so, within a cloud of flowers that were cast
by the angelic hands and then rose up
and then fell back, outside and in the chariot,
a woman showed herself to me; above
a white veil, she was crowned with olive boughs;
her cape was green; her dress beneath, flame-red.
xxx.27-33
A woman. Beatrice. Beatrice had arrived. Beatrice, the center point of the pageant, her colors those of the theological virtues; her white veil of Faith, her green cloak of Hope, her flame colored dress of Charity, her olive crown of Peace and Wisdom. Although not yet named, all know who this lady is, and every moment thus far has been a journey to this very moment.
Dante had not seen Beatrice for ten years, since her death on earth, yet even through her veil, Dante felt the power and mystery of her love, which had so captivated and transformed him in his youth.
Wherefore casting mine eyes upon her somewhat steadfastly, I beheld my nurse Philosophy, in whose house I had remained from my youth.
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, I.iii.3-6
Dante’s first instinct was not to speak to her whom he had loved for so long, but to turn to his sweet father Virgil, as eagerly and with all the confidence of a child hurrying to their mother for comfort:
to say to Virgil; “I am left with less
than one drop of my blood that does not tremble:
I recognize the signs of the old flame.”
xxx.46-48
I recognize the traces of the olden flame.
Aeneid iv.23
Yet Virgil was not there.
But Virgil had deprived us of himself,
Virgil, the gentlest father, Virgil, he
to whom I gave myself for my salvation;
and even all our ancient mother lost
was not enough to keep my cheeks, though washed
with dew, from darkening again with tears.
xxx.49-54
Slowly we have said farewell; we heard his last words, his last movements, and now here, upon the advent of Beatrice, the arrival of the new guide, the old guide slipped away and was gone. Dante gave us his name in triplicate, emphasizing his being and his loss. Virgil had been his protection, and now, standing before Beatrice with no one to shield or guide him, Dante wept. He stood as a naked soul, the moment of supreme, yet honest and humbled knowledge of the self, stripped of pretense. It was thus that Beatrice began to speak to him, and we may have found ourselves surprised in what way that introduction went.
The shock is too much; Dante, trembling and without any protection, breaks into tears. Virgil had not left him alone outside Dis; now he has. He had been a shed of safety on the ice; now he is not. There is no safety now. All that Virgil had been has vanished; all (to call it so) indirection of experience-the Institution, wisdom, learning, reason, poetry, everything which might support his humanity under the direct shock of humanity…the loneliness of Dante at this moment is almost terrible. Here at last are the voice and the eyes for which he had looked, and he is alone with them except for that strange new City which surrounds and contemplates the meeting.6
“Dante, though Virgil’s leaving you, do not
yet weep, do not weep yet; you’ll need your tears
for what another sword must yet inflict.”
xxx.55-57
We may admire the poetic tact with which Dante leaves the whole weight of this allegorical structure to be carried on the framework of the Masque, so that he is free to conduct the interview between Dante and Beatrice throughout in those human and personal terms which make the story dramatically effective.7
Where we think we will hear words of love and praise, instead, we confront Dante’s naked, unprotected soul. Beatrice, in her harsh greeting, acts as judge to Dante’s past, making him see every action of his life, not just his approach to this moment through the trials of his journey. His name is spoken from her lips, the only time in the whole Commedia that we see it spoken.
The name, spoken by Beatrice in the context of her severity and the figure of a mother in which she is cast, establishes at once the tone and manner of Beatrice’s dealing with Dante now, a manner which may come to the reader as a surprise, since Virgil said that Beatrice would come with smiling eyes.8
Dante turned at the sound of her voice and at the calling of his name, and was almost apologetic at having recorded his own name in his poem; he looked up to see Beatrice looking at him from her position in the chariot across the river Lethe.
To name one’s self in a work of literature was, by the standards of the time, considered egotistical and unbecoming.9
Rhetoricians forbid a man to speak of himself, except on needful occasion.
Dante, Convivio I.ii.3
We can look at this naming through the lens of the levels of interpretation that Dante has given his work. In the literal reading, Beatrice is calling for Dante to turn to her, after finding that Virgil is gone. Yet there is another sense, a sense that, although this is a universal journey, the undertaking of an Everyman, in this particular moment, it is also a very personal journey for Dante the man. While Beatrice represented a force that was significant to every soul that journeyed, his relationship with her is individual and personal. Virgil pointed to her universal meaning to mankind as far back as canto ii of the Inferno:
O Lady of virtue, the sole reason why
the human race surpasses all that lies
beneath the heaven with the smallest spheres,
so welcome is your wish, that even if
it were already done, it would seem tardy;
Inferno ii.76-80
Her veil kept Dante from seeing her face clearly, yet he felt her power, even as she named herself, calling out like a Sybil:
“Look here! For I am Beatrice, I am!
How were you able to ascend the mountain?
Did you not know that man is happy here?”
My lowered eyes caught sight of the clear stream,
but when I saw myself reflected there,
such shame weighed on my brow, my eyes drew back
and toward the grass;
xxx.73-79
She inferred his journey was only taken due to her intervention; she almost scornfully asked if he had deigned to finally climb the mountain, that the place where she had led him is the place of human bliss, lest he think too much of himself and his work at arriving there. There is an intimacy to his shame, that bared soul with nowhere to hide from the faults of its past. Her pity toward him was stern and not yet tempered with mercy. She had given her welcome.
The chorus began to sing yet again, informing the moving action as a Greek chorus from antiquity; In te, Domine, speravi-In you, God, I have placed my trust. They stopped, however, at the appropriate place in the Psalm, praying for mercy from both Beatrice and God toward Dante.
Dante’s confidence in his position melted at Beatrice’s words and the song of the chorus, and all the pain of his soul in recognition of himself poured forth:
then did the ice that had restrained my heart
become water and breath; and from my breast
and through my lips and eyes they issued—anguished.
xxx.97-99
Beatrice turned her words to the chorus of angelic beings of the procession, those “awake in never-ending day” of the Empyrean realm; though she spoke to them, her disdainful words were for the benefit of Dante; she pointed out the gifts bestowed on him by birth and by God that he had squandered in the dissipation of his youth:
Not only through the work of the great spheres—
which guide each seed to a determined end,
depending on what stars are its companions—
but through the bounty of the godly graces,
which shower down from clouds so high that we
cannot approach them with our vision, he,
when young, was such—potentially—that any
propensity innate in him would have
prodigiously succeeded, had he acted.
xxx.109-117
She compared his dissipation to weeds gone to seed, and where once her form had inspired him to greatness in life, at her death, he lost his way. Even as she grew more beautiful in her transformation from “flesh to spirit”, Dante followed another, travelling down paths that led away from the truth, the counterfeit of the real.
The sum of all this is that because they can neither produce the good they promise nor come to perfection by the combination of all good, these things are not the way to happiness and cannot by themselves make people happy.
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy III.viii.31-35
From the afterlife, Beatrice had intervened to attempt to steer Dante back to the correct path through dreams; when even that did not approach any resolution, and he was so lost in the dark wood that there was no possibility of returning to the light, she journeyed to Virgil in Limbo and arranged that Dante should pass through hell itself in order to come back to her.
Dante may not obtain forgetfulness of sin without first showing contrition of the heart and confession by the mouth, normally two essentials of the sacrament of penance.10
Dante’s present tears of penitence were the exacting justice necessary in order for him to be worthy of being cleansed of the memory of sin in the river Lethe.
💭 Philosophical Exercises
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
~ Blaise Pascal
We never truly know when we stand at the edge of a cliff. The thresholds we cross in life are nothing like the borders of a new country during our summer travels. The borders of the mind are invisible, blurred, veiled in mist. When we cross national borders, we carry a stamp in our passport, a proof that we have been in a land away from home. But the transformations of the mind, of the soul, of the spirit, leave no such stamps. Here, the only passport is our soul itself.
Dante warns us to expect things that will be difficult for him to express in either prose or rhyme. This is why the canto is so dense with similes. In the first ninety-nine lines alone, we encounter seven of them. And as we know, similes are the perfect tool to describe the indescribable, to give shape to the divine.
As Dante beholds the beautiful pageant and the Lady descending from it, his instinct is to turn back to Virgil, just as we so often turn to a friend, a partner, or a loved one when something stuns us, as if to ask: “Do you see what I see?”
Dante turns but sees no Virgil. Virgil is perhaps already on his way back esilio the Limbo where he must dwell in eternal longing. The words that Dante utters in this scene:
But Virgil had deprived us of himself, Virgil, the gentlest father, Virgil, he to whom I gave my self for my salvation; ~ 49 -51
These words, sharp as a dagger in the reader’s heart, echo the lament of Orpheus in Virgil’s Georgics. There too we witness the agony of a lover who realises Eurydice is lost to him forever, after he violated the single condition the gods had set: that he must not look back as he led her up toward the light of the living world.
But why does Dante turn back to Virgil at the moment of the divine pageant?
When you, my dear reader, encounter something mystical, something unbelievable, your first instinct is to turn to your Reason and ask: Is this true? How can I explain this? That is exactly what Dante does. Virgil is his Reason, the faculty of inner discourse that weighs and measures, that interrogates the things we see. Throughout this long journey, Virgil has repaired the broken mechanism of Dante’s reasoning, and with it, his will.
Yet reason is not the summit of our faculties. Despite what the Enlightenment would later claim, we are more than rational calculators. For Dante, there is a higher power of the soul: intellect - not discursive, but intuitive. Intellect does not argue or weigh - it sees. It is the clear flash of vision that apprehends truth directly. And it is precisely this higher faculty, not reason, that must guide Dante from this point on.
Dante’s tears fall heavy on his cheeks, as heavy as Orpheus’s lament for the vanished Eurydice. Yet Beatrice rebukes him for this weeping. For Dante does not weep as you or I might mourn Virgil, dear reader, grieving the loss of a companion. No, his tears spring from the deeper sorrow of trying to share a vision with his Reason, only to discover that Reason has reached its natural limit.
It is like attempting to explain to one born blind what a cloud looks like. You may describe its shape, its texture, even hint at its colour, but the experience itself, the sight, remains beyond reach. As the Russians say: it is better to see once with your own eyes than to hear a thousand descriptions.
Beatrice rebukes Dante’s tears much as Lady Philosophy wipes away the tears of Boethius at the beginning of his masterpiece. As Boethius’s stern comforter reminds him: there is a time for lamenting, and a time for healing.
In a striking reversal of roles, Dante shifts the expected genders in this canto: Virgil appears almost as a nurturing mother, while Beatrice commands like the stern admiral of a fleet. Virgil had soothed Dante often and rebuked him only sparingly; Beatrice, by contrast, will prove far more exacting: firm, unyielding, and unsparing in her guidance.
This canto is a true climax of the Divine Comedy, one we always knew was coming, and yet it still catches us unprepared. We knew Virgil’s task was to guide Dante only so far, to lead him at last to Beatrice. We knew his role would end. And yet, when the moment arrives, we, like Dante himself, are stunned. Even the pilgrim, who surely expected this parting, is shaken when it comes.
To me, this scene resembles a divine version of the double-helix we carry within us. Reason and Intellect, Virgil and Beatrice, twist around each other like two strands of the same spiral, each necessary, each incomplete without the other. They run in parallel through Inferno and Purgatorio, and continue their dance in Paradiso.
For Reason without Intellect is sterile, and Intellect without Reason cannot exist at all.
This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭
(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)
I. Beatrice’s Colours
The colors that surround Beatrice are not chosen at random; they embody the three theological virtues. At this moment, the four cardinal virtues that guided us through Purgatory give way to the higher light of faith, hope, and charity.
II. Earthly Paradise
All the respected commentators agree that Cantos XXIX–XXXI, where we meet Beatrice, unfold in the Earthly Paradise. That much is clear. Yet, if I may add a personal speculation, I see this space differently. To me, it feels less like a distant mythic garden and more like a state of mind, what it would mean to live free of vice. It is not some far-off place, but our real life as it could be, if only we were to walk the path Dante walked with such courage.
III. Beatrice as Christ, and what happens when your love dies
Hollander observes that Dante masculinizes Beatrice’s speech, and her opening words echo those of Christ entering Jerusalem. Her first rebuke to the pilgrim is direct: his life had gone astray after her death.
The parallels between Beatrice as the woman Dante first encountered at the age of eight (in the ninth year of his life) and Beatrice as the allegorical figure of divine wisdom are extraordinarily difficult to grasp here. Dante is the master of the simile, while I am not.
Yet a careful reading of his own words makes the matter clear: after Beatrice’s death, Dante’s love became misplaced, turned away from its proper object, and in that misdirection, his soul began to wander.
Quotes 🖋️
(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):
“Dante, though Virgil’s leaving you, do not
yet weep, do not weep yet; you’ll need your tears
for what another sword must yet inflict.”
Just like an admiral who goes to stern
and prow to see the officers who guide
the other ships, encouraging their tasks;
so, on the left side of the chariot
(I’d turned around when I had heard my name—
which, of necessity, I transcribe here),
I saw the lady who had first appeared
to me beneath the veils of the angelic
flowers look at me across the stream.
~ lines 55-66, Purgatorio, Canto XXX
Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice 177
Wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, piety, and the fear of the Lord.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Purgatory 312
Sayers 311
Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on Purgatorio 733
Williams 180
Sayers 312
Singleton 742
Sayers 313
Singleton 755
I felt this to be the most emotionally charged canto so far and was quite surprised at Beatrice’s harsh words towards Dante. After all, had he not duly climbed the mountain and had not all the P’s been erased from his forehead by the angels? This will take some time to digest.