For YL: Lecture notes, partie deux

Here is the second installment of lecture notes for the two lectures I gave for EK's Dante in English class. Delivering these lectures was one of the hardest but most rewarding things I have done in graduate school yet. I think I'm finally done with D, though I still have a draft with the last few lines of Paradiso-- and they're telling me that I know they're among the most beautiful lines of poetry ever written.

VITA NUOVA, PART II

•    Start with where we ended last time, and the figure of the old.
•    Love= misery, nosos, Cavalcantian view, there was no allegory in love.
•    Love in this way was non-transcendant. Today, we’re going to look at how it becomes T.
•    What didn’t get across last time: Love, no matter which one, still has a premise in physical beauty. Idea that dates back to Plato. How this physical beauty is processed is then dependent on the kind of love. If Beatrice= Medusa, this love, not happening. What enters for Dante is the essence of beauty, through Beatrice, and what enters for C. is love itself.
•    Purgatory XXX, pg. 368 and Beatrice’s reprimand. Fits in perfectly with this idea of Dante mistaking B in VN—Dante had a chance to benefit from her physical beauty and turn it into a spiritual love, but instead the D of the VN doesn’t understand and falls under the spell of Love and not B.
•    Purpose of lecture today: Arrival. We embarked from the old. By the end of the lecture we should be able to look back at the old from the view of the new. Dante arrives at the figure of Beatrice and love. To say the same thing in terms of the self: we’re journeying back to the pre-Lapsarian moment, after recognizing how we exist in the post-Lapsarian. To do this:
•    Vita Nuova, death of Beatrice, entrance of another feminine figure, look briefly at the Convivio, and then form an idea of Beatrice.
•    We’re going to do this in the following way:
1.    The presence of dreams and visions as suggestive of Prof. C’s idea that D had always been aware of the nature of B, and the love she represents—he just needed to understand it.
2.    Dante’s Boethian moment—and think of this as the moment of movement from his despair to salvation. Love can become transcendant. This is briefly visted in VN, so we’re going to talk a little bit about Convivio—interim work, not about B.
3.    And then arrive at the figure of B, and try to make a decisive statement. B as a secular figure. If there is time, we’ll take a quick look at how D was received by his peer, GC.
•    DREAMS: Beatrice’s death and the final VISIONS: (SHOW IMAGE). Try to form a hypothesis about how they relate to D’s greater idea of love.
•    Three dreams, conveniently to fit in with 3s that encompass B.  B and Love, eating the heart; the dream in which love instructs him to clear up his priorities and decide who it is he really loves; and the dream of Beatrice’s death.
•    Dream takes precedence over actual narration of he event. Prophetic nature of the dream. Often seen as religiously significant. Dream is prophetic, but its form becomes a means to express the literal, the non-allegorical love. This Love has a figure in the dream—D and L can communicate—interesting to think about how this old figure of Love has a space only in an unreal space—but what’s more interesting—how the nature of the dream changes in Purgatory, becomes prophetic, but also instructive. 
•    The dream of Beatrice’s death stands in utter contrast of the Purgatory dreams. Whereas they address the nature of the self, this one has a sense of the self obliterated, D is ruled by love, and on Pg. 623, wants to join B in death, in the bodily death, not realizing what he can do with the legacy she leaves him.
•    If the dream isn’t transformative, than what is? The vision. D borrows this from Boethius who in C of P has a vision of being visited by Lady Philosophy, and St. Augustine who in Confessions is moved to read the Bible when a mysterious voice speaks to him.
•    Two visions. The first, pg 645, in which D is reminded of HER, as opposed to of LOVE. Element of this vision, SHAME, the first stage in a conversion. First step towards being saved. Also first inkling that D is writing love poetry to a dead woman, something that Cav is not going to like. This is the vision in which D understands the utter disconnect he has, but because he feels shame, he can transform.
•    Second vision, pg 649, where we don’t know what he sees. But it goes along nicely with this idea of not knowing how to write either. In other words, only when he can see inside himself, will he be able to write about B.
•    Difference between a dream and a vision in VN: dream is prophetic, tool of the artist, means of representation. Vision completely rocks the text, and the world. It makes people take U-turns. Augustine. D on the road of love, feeding his body, makes a U-turn and heads back to the pre-lapsarian.
•    ON THE WAY to the pre-Lapsarian, there has to be something that will make love transcendent. Something that will make him understand the true nature of love. Comes in Section 35, pg. 640, The “gracious lady” or the “donna gentile,” who “has seen into the nature of my darkened life.” Crucial line. She had seen, and she makes him see. She makes three appearances and D doesn’t get it. Who is this woman?
•    Her story older than D’s and she is a reconfiguarion of Lady P. We’ve already seen Boethius in the Sphere of the Sun, along with St. Thomas Aquinas. B, 5th century Roman, charged with treason, finally executed, but during imprisonment wrote a work called Consolation of Philosophy. Last influence on Christian ethics. Lady P visits him moaning and groaning in prison. Over a series of sonnets and lectures, Lady P leads B back to himself and to God.
•    How Boethius mapped out existence? Four levels of existence, sensation, imagination, reason and divine. Humans on the level of reason.  One that what is in this world is material good. Often this material good isn’t controlled or reflective of our actions. But FREE WILL can help reach for a divine good, and go from the human level of reason to the divine. It is through the here and now that we can eventually be divine.
•    D’s Lady P—appears in moment of distress. Though her role is undeveloped in VN, D will devote an entire work to her—Convivio. Beatrice mentioned only once in C, because he still hasn’t found the words. Focuses on the “donna gentile” philosophy instead.
•    What is the gist of it? For one, it apologizes for the VN, calling it “fervid and passionate” and tells us that Convivio will be “tempered and mature.”
•    He also declares that it is inspired by Boethius because it is a desire to defend himself, he was in exile. And by Augustine, because he desires to spread virtue.
•    In the C, D tells us to love Philosophy, which in itself is a love of wisdom. When a human being loves wisdom, he is being the best earthly being he can be. And because this love of wisdom is an infinite process, once you have become the best earthly being, you transcend into harmony with the divine. Partially derives this idea from St. Thomas
•    Now this idea of being in dialogue with a divine creator isn’t purely Christian, it’s actually pretty flexible. St. Thomas—reconciled pagan philosophy with Christian ethics. Aristotle with the Christian world. Suggested that the two look for the same end, and can complement each other. Philosophy and theology are basically different starting points of getting to the same end, he argued, God. The nature of a human being, or the idea of goodness, can be explained both through religion, and through logic.
•    Other important St. Thomas idea, that allows us to read the Comedy as a book about the here and now, human soul is separate from the human body. Not to say that two have nothing to do with each other, but the soul is what makes the body a human body. When the body dies, the soul goes on living possibly. That’s how figures like Cunizza can make it to Paradise—because despite enjoying their sensuality, they don’t lose grip of their soul. She never loses her soul to Love, the independent figure. She is able to forgive herself, ie she knows she’s sinned and is willing to pay for it.
•    And now, finally, after these travels, we can arrive. WHO IS BEATRICE? 

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Blessed Damozel")

•    Here’s the argument we’re going to make: She is constructed as a figure of Catholic salvation, but in truth, she’s deeply secular.
•    From the VN on, we’ve seen her surrounded by 9s and 3s. Explained in terms of the trinity. 9, prime number. There is the image of a pilgrim pg. 649.
•    Pg. 625, he has compared her to Christ. READ this Joan derives from John the Baptist, he who comes first, and she is Christ. This, to footnote, is still before he actually realized her meaning.
•    She is what we call a figure Christi or a Christ Figure. She dies for his salvation. She is not a saint, but she has come into her role of beatifier. 
•    What makes her secular with all this theology? She is Dante’s personal savior. Her numbers occur in relation to Dante—for example, she meets him at nine and then after nine years. She changes as he changes. Her narrative does not exist without his,
•    Later on, she chooses to take him through the three stages of the Comedy. Why Dante? Because in a way, she would not be Beatrice the beatifier without him, for she can only save the figure who loves her, not just anyone.
•    In other words, there is a Beatrice for everyone, if they are willing to find her. It isn’t necessary that she be the exact same as Dante is, just as Paradise is not the exact same as Dante imagines it to be. Beatrice’s nature as imagined, I think, more and more highlights the idea of Paradise as characterized by how each person in it sees it. In this life, the here and now, our actions must signify the desire to move up this path, to be looking for a connection with the divine, whether we do it by embracing our sensuality or whether we do it by defending the principles we stand for.
•    At this point of arrival, we have more symmetry, VN, Convivio, Comedy together also form a kind of trinity—the individual’s journey to his end goal.
•    LASTLY: If we float down to earth. Yes, in the VN, we have the new Dante writing in the old, the new converted Augustine calling the old Augustine a sinner, we have a confession which leaves the old D behind, but what does the Old think of the New?

•    Cavalcanti’s response: Sonnet XXIII
To Dante rebuking him for his way of life after the death of Beatrice
I DAILY come to thee uncounting times
And find thee ever thinking over vilely
Much doth it grieve me that thy noble mind
And virtue's plenitude are stripped from thee
Thou wast so careless in thy fine offending
Who from the rabble always held apart
And spoke of me so straightly from the heart
That I gave welcome to thine every rime
And now I care not sith thy life is baseness
To give the sign that thy speech pleaseth me
Nor come I to thee in guise visible
Yet if thou It read this sonnet many a time
That malign spirit which so hunteth thee
Will sound forloyn  and spare thy affrighted soul