Canto XXVII. Dante, Statius and Virgil are called by the angel of the cornice to walk through the flames to attain the pass. Dante is terrified, but Virgil urges him on, telling him that Beatrice is on the other side. The angel pronounces the benediction of the pass. Dante’s brow is now clear of all the ‘P’s. With the setting of the sun the poets have to spend the night on the pass, where Dante dreams of Leah and Rachel, the wives of Jacob and types of the active and reflective life. With dawn the poets press on, and Virgil pronounces Dante now master of his own soul.

Iris Murdoch wrote that `Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.’ Love of another person can draw us out of self-obsession into an awareness of the reality, the needs and the flourishing of another person. For Dante it does not, or need not, stop there. Love can draw us on to an awareness of the One who created the beloved, and of whose glory the beloved is a reflection. This is why his boyhood encounter with Beatrice in Florence was a pivotal experience, providing the key dramatic mechanism of the Divine Comedy. It is by Beatrice’s intercession that Dante is granted his salutory experience of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, and it is Beatrice, as the figure of theology and the Church, who is to conduct him almost as far as his momentary glimpse of the beatific vision. At this stage we see how Dante’s love for Beatrice enables him to overcome his fear of the fire of the lustful, through which all souls must pass to leave Purgatory and attain the earthly paradise.

Dante’s theology of love is radical and audacious. A young woman of Florence becomes a type of theology, of the Church, of Christ himself; a God-bearing image for Dante in Dorothy Sayers’s expression. This idea is not unique. Perhaps something of it lies behind Chesterton’s words in the dedication to the Ballad of the White Horse:

`Lady, by one light only
We look from Alfred's eyes,
We know he saw athwart the wreck
The sign that hangs about your neck,
Where One more than Melchizedek
Is dead and never dies.

Therefore I bring these rhymes to you,
Who brought the cross to me,
Since on you flaming without flaw
I saw the sign that Guthrum saw
When he let break his ships of awe,
And laid peace on the sea. ….

And I thought, " I will go with you,
As man with God has gone,
And wander with a wandering star,
The wandering heart of things that are,
The fiery cross of love and war
That like yourself, goes on."

O go you onward ; where you are
Shall honour and laughter be,
Past purple forest and pearled foam,
God's winged pavilion free to roam,
Your face, that is a wandering home,
A flying home for me.’


The idea was developed by Charles Williams in his Arthurian Poems Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of Summer Stars. For Williams the vision of the beloved can be a `Beatrician moment’ of insight, which can draw us on to God. Consider, for example, the experience of the saracen Palomides, when he sees Isolde theQueen of Cornwall:

`Blessed (I sang) the Cornish queen;
for till to-day no eyes have seen
how curves of golden life define
the straightness of a perfect line,
till the queen's blessed arm became
a rigid bar of golden flame
where well might Archimedes prove
the doctrine of Euclidean love
and draw his demonstrations right
against the unmathematic night
of ignorance and indolence’

For Williams geometry is a figure for knowledge of God, here, as elsewhere in his poem, glimpsed in the form of the beloved.

But Williams is not naïve. His account of love, like Dante’s, is not shallow and vacuous, in the manner of John Lennon and the Beatles. He knows that a gap can emerge between the love of the person and the love of God to which the glory of the beloved can point us. How this is handled is critical. For Palomides there is initial failure and conflict, only eventually redeemed (in his baptism) after he has missed the central quest of the Table, for the Holy Grail. By contrast, for the court poet Taliessin, and his beloved the Lady Dindrane, love leads on to a deeper engagement with the demands of life: for him in his household, the court, and the quest; for her in the cloister and a final quest of her own.

We have seen on the mountain that all movements of the soul towards goods are love, which can go astray. This is why all souls must pass, if only briefly, through the fire of the seventh cornice. At its best the love of another person can be the means by which all our loves can be opened to Divine charity, and so become integrated, and the foundation of our wholeness.