Love In Dante's Commedia

LOVE IN COMMEDIA

In the Medieval ages, the lyric poem had three main themes: “loss and exile”, “love” and “religion”. The one that matters us to most in Dante’s Commedia being love, it can be said that the concept of love at the time, wasn’t associated with the understanding of “romantic love” that now we have come to love and use in majority of literary pieces. At the time, marriage was mostly considered to be just a business deal that one participate in so that one can assume a title and improve his/her economical status. In the circumstances, men and women were encouraged, in a sense, to have relationships with other people, outside their marriages. In other words, marriage had almost nothing to with romantic love and that’s why the theme

With all the involvement of other heavenly and divine figures in the chain of commands who feel obligated to inform Dante on his journey and Beatrice being the guide that will lead Dante to find a higher love – divine love- , it can be said that Beatrice’s love can be seen as deriving from the ultimate love of God. So, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that we witness God’s love through Mary, Lucia and Beatrice. However, what stands out here is that Beatrice goes beyond human love for divine love, which makes her a source of revelation for Dante. She also makes divine grace accessible to him with her selfless acts. Another significant point in Canto II is that we can see some characteristics of “dolce stil novo” through Virgil’s description of

This also demonstrates us, the readers, why Beatrice is the one that is chosen to lead Dante to God. Even though the love between Beatrice and Dante starts out as your run of the mill “courtly love”, we don’t consider it as a bad thing in the end. In contrast, we not expected to show the same sympathy towards the story of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo. In the Canto V, Dante is in the second circle of Hell: the Lustful. The people who committed the sin of bodily passion are put here. Francesca da Rimini is a married woman who had an affair with her husband’s brother when she was on earth; this is again a classic story of courtly love. Even though Dante the narrator shows sympathy towards their story, clearly Dante the poet doesn’t share the same feelings because he puts them in Hell. As we can see courtly love is not always considered to be romantic or, in the eyes of God, acceptable. In Canto V, we are given a lot of examples of what happened to those who loved or surrendered to their earthly and bodily cravings: Semiramis whose “vice of lust became so customary that she made license licit in her laws to free her from the scandal she had caused”, that other spirit who “killed herself for love and betrayed the ashes of Sycheaus”, Cleopatra who is a “wanton”, Helen “for whose sake so many years of evil had