The Divine Beatrice: Dante Alighieri Seeks a New Life

Abstract

The title of The Divine Comedy is misleading. Dante’s great poem is no comedy at all. In Dante’s time, the Italian word comedìa denoted a literary work that begins darkly but evolves toward more auspicious circumstances. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was exiled from Florence in early 1302. Beginning around 1304, after the failure of his efforts to unite the Florentine exiles and take Florence back from his enemies, Dante wrote his monumental Comedìa, a poetic account of his imaginary journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, first accompanied by the ancient Roman poet Virgil and later by his idealized Beatrice, whose name means “she who makes happy.” This work, known after his death (thanks to Giovanni Boccaccio) as the Comedìa Divina, occupies a foundational position in world literature. It is both the culminating work of the Middle Ages and the starting point of early modern European literature. The comedia began with Dante’s naming at his birth. He was named Durante by his mother Bella after her dead father, Durante degli Abati, a prominent Florentine judge, whose loss she could not mourn and accept. When a child is named after a dead person, he carries what anthropologists and historians call a necronym. The “name of the dead” is a heavy psychic weight that places the child in a “liminal space” between the living and the dead. Bella’s son became, like his namesake grandfather, obsessed with justice and injustice. Dante suffered a series of traumatic losses. His mother died when he was a little boy and the little Dante felt guilty about her death, having been powerless to save her. Dante’s father died when Dante was an adolescent. His beloved Beatrice, whom he hardly knew but idealized beyond all measure, died when he was twenty-five. Psychologically, Dante had three mothers: Bella, Beatrice, and Florence. As soon as he finished his book of mourning for Beatrice, the Vita nuova, he joined a trade guild and became a politician. At the age of thirty-six, following a coup d’état in Florence that drove his White Guelph faction out of power, Dante lost his home, his position, his fortune, and above all, Mother Florentia. He spent the remaining years of his life an exile in the courts of the wealthy and powerful literary patrons of northern Italy, longing for the Florence that he could not return to, on pain of death. Dante’s poetical work was an expression of his superhuman efforts to work through a grief that he could not contain. In his poetical work Dante made desperate attempts to revive and recover that which he had irretrievably lost. Dante’s readers sensed that behind the dramatic imagery of Heaven, Purgatory and Hell and the unprecedented scale of the epic poem were the deeply personal issues of trauma and loss, which were also part of their own lives. The enthusiastic reception of his work, and the fact that it has withstood the test of time and become one of the greatest poetic works of world literature, tell us that trauma and loss, as well as the use of necronyms and “living with the dead,” are vital psychological issues that need to be explored in applied psychoanalytic studies. The key issue of mourning is very clear, both in Dante’s autobiographical Vita Nuova (New Life), written after the death of his beloved Beatrice, and in the Comedìa.