Love at First and Last Sight
By Doug Talley

Some time ago my wife related to me the results of a survey taken of adults regarding the first person they wished to see in heaven. According to the survey, approximately 30% said they wanted to see their mother first, 18% said they wanted to see their father, and only 11% said they first wanted to see their spouse. Remarkably, for whatever reason, the survey suggests a preference for one’s mother over one’s spouse by a measure of almost three to one. 

Likewise, when one of the world’s greatest poets wrote one of the world’s finest poems about love, it is also remarkable that the object of that love was not the poet’s wife, but rather a woman he had loved unsuccessfully as a youth — the story of Dante Alighieri and Beatrice de Folco Portinari. 

I feel a particular empathy for Dante, notwithstanding a common criticism that his opinions were often fierce and severe. He had, for example, cast his own best friend, Guido Calvacanti, into a circle of hell as an unredeemed infidel. On the other hand, he enjoys universal praise for his command of refined psychological insight, including the disordered tenderness of “love at first sight.” 

Love at the First

From the time of her first greeting, Dante felt for Beatrice a holy attraction as described in Section III of the Vita Nuova (the translations that follow, for better or worse, are mine):

In Section XI he attempts to “to convey in what manner her greeting worked so wondrously within” him:

I can somewhat identify with these sentiments, because on the occasion when I first met my wife at a church young adult dance I was moved both by her smile and, when I asked her name, by her reply — “April.” Something sounded within me like a small fanfare of celestial trumpets. Her voice and name resonated with a spirit of graciousness, mystical and exalting. 

And so I can empathize with Dante in the range of emotion he describes in his experience with love at first sight. I did feel a measure of “sweetness” at that first mention of my wife’s name, although I do not believe it reduced me physically to a slug. Nevertheless, my experience was of the same order, and has since led to something both similar and different to what Dante later worked into his masterpiece, La Divina Commedia. 

Similar, in that I firmly believe my love for my wife is exalting, as was Dante’s love for Beatrice. Different, because unlike Dante I succeeded in drawing this woman into my life, marrying her, conceiving children with her, sharing with her all the necessary and mundane press of life, thereby intending to work out my salvation and exaltation with and through her in a way that Dante never experienced, nor even conceived. His own theology would have bristled at the idea. 

He did not conceive of exaltation through the homespun task of weeding a flowerbed together, or changing a child’s diaper together, or perhaps even through physical intimacy. All this touch of flesh would have been too earthen; it would have dirtied his hands and corrupted his own spiritual designs. Yet common experience convinces us, there is joy in the flesh, both spiritual and exalting. 

Dante’s passion for Beatrice was never requited physically or emotionally. She married another man and died at the age of twenty-four. And so it might be said he constructed his elaborate architecture in the Commedia as a means to requite his passion spiritually, but even this theory is replete with irony. After she had already abandoned him in both life and death, the Commedia becomes the account of her return to him, but it is a return for his salvation, not his companionship. 

That return inspires one of the most beautiful passages of poetry in all of literature, the descension of Beatrice from heaven in a cloud of flowers found in the thirtieth Canto of the Purgatorio. Whatever hyperbole Dante allowed in earlier descriptions of Beatrice’s salutation, he shed for a more compelling, non-rhetorical precision:

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Dante feels the old love rekindled at the approach of Beatrice, but all he receives for it is her censure. He is allowed none of his earlier sentiments, but must abide her strict guidance into more exalted realms of love found only in Paradise. Yet to the last, Dante would seem just as separated from Beatrice on this heavenly venture as he was on earth. At the same time her smile upon him leads to ever greater sanctification, she continues to chide him like a displeased mother. Any spiritual intimacy that might suggest love between them is always countermanded by repeated spiritual chastisement. 

Love at the Last

As Jorge Luis Borges has noted in a compelling essay, Beatrice’s Last Smile, Dante’s final encounter with Beatrice in Paradise culminated in profound separation.  In Canto XXXI of the Paradiso, Dante saw Beatrice return to her final place in heaven, in one of the supernal circles of the mystic Rose, and then observed:

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Abandoned by Beatrice in life and death, Dante will remain abandoned even in the afterlife.  The great physical separation between the two is described both with the hyperbole of ocean and sky and with an overtone of “abandonment” (as literally translated from the Italian s’abbandona). This separation is then subtly compounded by the statement that Beatrice’s “image”, despite the distance, remained unblurred, suggesting that altogether time worn irony – “so near and yet so far”. He offers her a final orison of gratitude for her power, bounty, grace and virtue, but with matured restraint says nothing of love. He prays at the last she might safeguard in him her own magnificence, so that the soul she has healed might be pleasing to her once he has shed his body. An initial reading might suggest that Dante here intended a spiritual unity with Beatrice. Perhaps he has, but he has left the final judgment on this point decidedly unclear. And the vivid clarity of her image, as Borges notes, only seems to make this final scene with “the irrecuperable Beatrice” both “appalling” and “horrific”, and the irony deepens when after his prayer, Beatrice merely smiles and turns away from him one final time even in Heaven:

  Così orai; e quella, sì lontana
 come parea, sorrise e riguardommi;
 poi si tornò a l’etterna fontana.   

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 So I prayed, and she, so far away,
 as it seemed, smiled and regarded me
 and then turned to the eternal fountain.

This quiet separation at the last sight of Beatrice is so poignant it feels to the reader almost like punishment. With such an understated departure one can only wonder what Dante must have been thinking, not only in the imagined episode, but also in the act of writing it. The defining characteristics of his relationship with Beatrice forever bear the blemish of what was wanting. 

In some respects this separation feels little different than the eternal punishment meted to the shadows of two lovers, Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, forever united in hell. The story of Paolo and Francesca is related in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno. There in the second circle of hell where the lustful are forever swept away in a whirlwind, Francesca explains to Dante how she fell into adultery with her brother-in-law Paolo, because one day, while innocently reading a book together, their eyes met and their feelings succumbed to longing and their longing then succumbed to a fatal kiss. 

The agony of hell for Paolo and Francesca is not separation, because after all, Francesca acknowledges that Paolo is never separated from her (“mai da me non fia diviso”) and, to be sure, when Dante first sees them they are traveling together — (“‘nsieme vanno”). Rather, the agony is eternal proximity without shared joy and without mutual fulfillment. Dante’s irony in Canto V is that love does not abandon Francesca and Paolo even in hell, as Francesca relates :

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And it is not simply memory of past love that torments the lovers, but a sentiment of present love. Dante’s teacher Virgil had first instructed him to summon the couple from their whirlwind torment by that love which leads them still (“per quello amor che i mena”). Dante refers to Francesca’s sufferings as “i tuoi martiri,” literally “martyrdoms,” suggesting that their pain and grief touches on the holy. These are brutal ironies indeed. Divine judgment finds a way to torment lovers in hell precisely with some shadow of love itself. No wonder Dante faints at the telling of it. 

Chagrin in Heaven

This irony of love in hell seems the mirror image of chagrin in heaven. If Paolo and Francesca share the agony of eternal proximity in hell without mutual fulfillment, so it would seem Dante shares a similar agony for Beatrice in heaven, an eternal distance bridged only by a pious spiritual sentiment that still falls far short of requited love. 

Beatrice enjoys her felicity in fullness; Dante seems left only with a joy tainted with regret. The love he expresses for her at last sight, however refined and exalted, will always be marred by physical distance, while the spiritual proximity of her “unblurred image” would almost exacerbate the separation like a nightmare.

And perhaps this is not even the greatest irony of the Commedia. An even greater irony may be buried in the nagging question — where is Dante’s own wife in this great scheme of afterlife? Why did she not become his great symbol of exalting love? 

All this irony begs for that singularly Latter-day Saint doctrine, the principle of eternal marriage. 

The regrets that haunt Dante in heaven may in some way approximate the chagrin that potentially pulls at those who have become “angels” because they “did not abide [the] law” of eternal marriage and, therefore, “cannot be enlarged, but remain separately and singly, without exaltation, in their saved condition, to all eternity; and henceforth are not gods, but angels of God forever and ever”. (Doctrine &Covenants 132:17). 

This would be Dante’s and Beatrice’s state in heaven, separate and single, albeit in a saved condition, but this state echoes as well with the exquisite irony and grief of Paolo and Francesca in hell. As Elder Bruce R. McConkie explains of such angels in Mormon Doctrine, despite their felicity, “[t]heir eternal condemnation is to have limitations imposed upon them so that they cannot progress to the state of godhood and gain a fullness of all things” — “never completely free from the lingering remorse that always follows the loss of opportunity.”

One can only guess how Dante’s poem might have differed, if his theology allowed for the principle of eternal marriage. Such a theology would have informed him that the most exalted joys and blessings of celestial life are obtained only in the company of a spouse.  The refinement he had to experience on his trek with Virgil through hell and purgatory that led him to the fringes of paradise would have then continued in his meeting a very real wife, not an imagined emblem of ideal love. There would have been complete reunion and reconciliation — spiritual, physical, emotional and intellectual. 

The idea of spiritual refinement at the hands of a woman other than his wife would not have amounted to even a mote possibility. Beatrice would have been as nameless in such a poem as Dante’s wife was in the Commedia. One great poem, saturated with the irony of eternal separation, would have been lost, but perhaps an even greater poem would have surfaced in its place. That poem hopefully awaits the imagination of some Latter-day Saint filled with sublime visions, from first to last, of the glory of eternal marriage.