From Essays After Montaigne
I am no good Naturalist (as they say) and I know not well by what springs feare doth worke in us: but well I wot it is a strange passion: and as Physitians say, there is none doth sooner transport our judgement out of his due seat. Verily I have seene divers become mad and senselesse for feare: yea and in him, who is most settled and best resolved, it is certaine that whilest his fit continueth, it begetteth many strange dazelings, and terrible amazements in him. I omit to speake of the vulgar sort, to whom it sometimes representeth strange apparitions, as their fathers and grandfathers ghosts, risen out of their graves, and in their winding sheets: and to others it sometimes sheweth Larves, Hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellowes, and such other Bugbeares and Chimeræs.
The more feeble-minded among us seek the comfort of superstition in its many forms, but even a mind as great as Dante's was driven to fantasy by the fear of his own extinction. His Vita Nuova is a very strange memoir in prose and verse that tells the story of his hyperbolic love for a Florentine girl, her death, and his subsequent transfiguration. It begins with the ardent declarations of love and and flattering descriptions of his beloved that one would expect of a man in his situation, couched in the grand poetic language that one would expect of his time and place ("Love is encompassed in my lady's eyes/Whence she ennobles all she looks upon."). But with his beloved's death, the tone changes, to a despairing sort of prophecy ("From the fair person which on earth was hers/her noble soul departed, full of grace,/To dwell in glory as befits her state." and "...As it nears/Its goal of longing in the realms above/The pilgrim spirit sees a vision of/A soul in glory whom the host reveres."), finishing with this final vision:
After writing this sonetto a miraculous vision appeared to me, in which I saw things which made me decide to write nothing more of this blessed one until such time as I could treat of her more worthily.
And to achieve this I study as much as I can, as she truly knows. So that, if it pleases Him by whom all things live, that my life lasts a few years, I hope to write of her what has never been written of any woman.
And then may it be pleasing to Him who is the Lord of courtesy, that my soul might go to see the glory of its lady, that is of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously gazes on the face of Him qui est per omnia secula benedictus: who is blessed throughout all the ages.
The miraculous vision that appeared to him would presumably have been the subject of his Commedia, or at least his first premonition of his epic poem. And in writing it, he succeded in writing of her what had never been written of any woman. Seven-hundred years on and we still have no example of writing that is at once so audacious and so compelling. As Harold Bloom puts it:
Nothing else in Western literature, in the long span from the Yahwist and Homer through Joyce and Beckett, is as sublimely outrageous as Dante's exaltation of Beatrice, sublimated from being an image of desire to angelic status, in which role she becomes a crucial element in the church's hierarchy of salvation.
I do not see how we can disengage Dante's overwhelming poetic power from his spiritual ambitions, which are inevitably idiosyncratic and saved from being blasphemous only because Dante won his wager with the future... The poem is too strong to disown; for a neo-Christian poet like T. S. Eliot, the Comedy becomes another scripture, a Newer Testament that supplements the canonical Christian Bible.
He wrote not just a poem for a girl whom he loved from afar and who died as a teenager, but an epic poem that places that teenage girl in the most profound company in Catholic belief and convinces all who read it, thereby achieving a status akin to canonical scripture. And it's my surmise that he was driven to this triumphant audacity by his inability to accept his beloved's (and thus eventually his own) extinction, by his inconceivable fear in the face of that fate. He spun his fantasy, one of the greatest masterpieces in literature, to sublimate that fear for himself and anyone else who would believe with him.
11:26:11 AM 
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