Dante's Divine Comedy, Augustine's Confessions, and the Redemption of Beauty.

Enright, Nancy

Oh where, where, shall I find you, my truly good, my certain loveliness?

AUGUSTINE, THE CONFESSIONS (1)

Into the yellow of the eternal Rose that slopes and stretches and diffuses fragrance of praise unto the Sun of endless spring, now Beatrice drew me as one who, though he would speak out, is silent.

DANTE, PARADISO (2)

Toward the end of PARADISO, Dante experiences a vision of the Empyrean, the highest level in heaven, where among "the great patricians" of the faith, including Sts. Francis and Benedict, sits St. Augustine of Hippo. How fitting it is that Augustine is part of Dante's final vision since Augustine's Confessions offers meaningful insight into Dante's depiction of the redemption of beauty. Lovers of beauty, both physical and literary, Dante and Augustine share a similar need for its redemption. (3) Clearly, neither of them would argue that beauty is evil. On the contrary, The Confessions and The Divine Comedy reveal that beauty is from God and is, in itself, essentially good. A key concept, however, that both men show as necessary to experience the fullness of salvation is that beauty must be acknowledged as coming from God and loved as a vehicle of his grace. Any other kind of love of beauty can lead to damnation, but to follow beauty's lead to the One who created it is salvation. The key to experiencing this salvation--in The Divine Comedy and in The Confessions--is grace; the only way to ascend is through the humility of descent.

Augustine's depiction of himself as a boy and as a youth suggests a sensitive--though as he would say "sinful"--person attracted to the beautiful in both its verbal and physical forms. Physical beauty and physical love distract the young Augustine, despite his ambitious dedication to his studies. "It was a sweet thing," he says in book 3, "both to love and to be loved, and more sweet still when I was able to enjoy the body of my lover" (1.52). When he matures, Augustine takes a mistress to whom he is faithful until the time approaches for his marriage, when she is taken from him in Italy and sent back to Africa. He agonizes over his separation from his mistress, but--unlike her--is unable to remain faithful to her memory. While waiting for his intended wife to come of age, Augustine says, "I found another woman for myself--not, of course, as a wife. In this way my soul's disease was fed and kept alive so that it might reach the domination of matrimony just as strong as before, or stronger, and still the slave of an unbreakable habit" (6.16.133). Though Augustine does not refer to the word "beauty" in these accounts, clearly his attraction to the women mentioned here is physical in nature, despite his mistress having offered him a love that was apparently more than mere physical gratification. Even the converted Augustine struggles against temptations involving "images" from his sexual past, leading to erotic dreams; he says, "These images, though real, have such an effect on my soul, in my flesh, that false visions in my sleep obtain from me what true visions cannot when I am awake" (10.30.237). For Augustine, one of the key things that make a misdirected love of physical beauty sinful is that it deflects the soul from the love of God. Physical beauty is not, however, sinful in itself.

Augustine makes this point very clearly when he discusses as a temptation even those physical beauties that are not sexual in their attraction. He says, "The eyes love beautiful shapes of all kinds, glowing and delightful colors. These things must not take hold of my soul; that is for God to do. Certainly God made these things very good, but it is He Himself, not these things, who is my good" (10.34.243). For Augustine, the main focus of all love should be God, and anything--no matter how good or beautiful--must be loved only in connection with God. In book 4, chapter 12, Augustine explains how to love physical beauty in the right manner, in God: If bodies please you, praise God for them and turn your love back from them to their maker, lest you should displease Him in being pleased by them.... The good that you love is from Him; but its goodness and sweetness is only because you are looking toward Him; it will rightly turn to bitterness if what is from Him is wrongly loved, He Himself being left out of the account. (81)

The focus of The Confessions is how to love God and all of creation rightly, that is, in God; as John Cavadini points out, "Augustine is obsessed with God, not sin." Therefore, according to Augustine, physical beauty must be loved in its relation to God, in and for God.

More complicated for Augustine in The Confessions is the love for verbal, literary beauty. Augustine tells us that he loved literature in his youth, preferring it to the study of grammar and rhetoric. Once enraptured with Virgil's Aeneid, for example, he looks back on this passion with disdain: What indeed can be more pitiful than a wretch with no pity for himself, weeping at the death of Dido, which was caused by love for Aeneas, and not weeping at his own death, caused by lack of love for you, God, light of my heart, bread of the inner mouth of my soul, strength of my mind, and quickness of my thoughts? You I did not love. Against you I committed fornication, and in my fornication, I heard all around me the word: "Well done! Well done!" (1.13.31)

Clearly, the beauty of the literature is connected for Augustine with the love of worldly praise and with alienation from God. As a youth, he chose both of these things--the pleasure in the literature itself and the praise that this interest won for him--over God, and as his pride grew, so did his alienation. Unlike Dante, who, as we shall see, is able to see a love for the beauties of literature redeemed, Augustine, in The Confessions at least, does not come to that conclusion. In The Confessions, the beauty of literature, unlike physical beauty, is too much entrenched in paganism and the pursuit of empty ambition to be redeemable. Nevertheless, Augustine's use of language shows that in his writing his love of literature is redeemed indirectly. Robert J. Forman argues that Augustine's renunciation of fiction in The Confessions book 1, chapter 13 is balanced or undercut by his "assertion of the worth of secular literary techniques and devices" in his De Doctrina Christiana. (5) Indeed, while Augustine does not explicitly mention works of poetic fiction in the passage to which Forman refers, his comments with regard to pagan philosophers and in general "all branches of heathen learning," and the analogy he uses to make his point certainly apply to works of literature: For, as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use, not doing this on their own authority, but by the command of God, the Egyptians themselves, in their ignorance, providing them with things which they themselves, were not making a good use of; in the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which every one of us, when going out under the leadership of Christ from the fellowship of the heathen, ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them. (6)

In fact, Forman shows that Augustine uses his background in literary classics to serve the God he once despised because of his prideful dedication to them. He describes Augustine as converting epic conventions to a new model of Christian narrative (not fictitious but based in historical reality). (7) Forman sees parallels between The Aeneid and the details of Augustine's life: the search to fulfill one's destiny, culminating in Italy after a renunciation of carnality, in both cases associated with Carthage (though in Augustine's case, not limited to that city). While Forman never argues that Augustine falsified his life story to match that of Virgil's hero, he contends that Augustine must have noted similarities in his own true story and the fictional account of Aeneas' journey. The Aeneid also would have given him an awareness of epic conventions and the sense of what makes for a good story and would have influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, his telling of his own story, though he would "baptize" these conventions, using them to tell what really happened, not what was "empty," as he refers to fiction. (8) A similar danger--as well as a similar redemption--is attached in The Confessions to beautiful rhetoric. Augustine, whose own rhetorical skill has earned him praise and even some fame as a professor, recalls professors whose delight in their own beautiful language, rooted in pride, blinds them from appreciating the value of their fellow creatures. In book i, chapter 18, he recollects this wrongful focus on language as exhibited by his early masters: A man who is trying to win a reputation as a good speaker will, in front of a human judge and surrounded by a crowd of human beings, attack his opponent with the utmost fury and hatred, and he will take great care to see that by some slip of the tongue he does not mispronounce the word "human"; but he will not be concerned as to whether his rage and fury may have the effect of utterly destroying a real human being. (1.19.37)

Again, it is not the beauty of the words that is the problem but the overemphasis on them, rooted in pride, that leads to the great sin against love of one's neighbor, even as the misdirected love of verbal or physical beauty can lead to a neglect of one's relationship with God. In contrast, after his conversion, Augustine uses his rhetorical skills, his beauty of language, to serve God and the Church, and in this sense they are redeemed for him. Forman argues that Augustine "never actually stopped being a rhetorician. It is this secular past which catapulted him to the hierarchy of the infant Church and impelled him to write so prolifically." The process of transforming Augustine's rhetorical skills from an evil to a good use involves a series of steps.

A pivotal point in Augustine's development occurs in his encounter with Faustus, the famed Manichean teacher who came to Carthage in Augustine's twenty-ninth year. "What charmed people," Augustine says of Faustus, "was the smoothness of his language, and I certainly admired this myself; but I was able to distinguish between it and the truth about those matters which I was so eager to learn; I was interested not so much in the dish and adornment of a fine style as in the substance of the knowledge which this celebrated Faustus of theirs was setting before me" (5.3.91-92). At this point in his life, Augustine is looking for truth, a search that will culminate in his conversion some four years later. His disillusionment with Faustus and his impressive words show Augustine's own movement away from the prideful love of beautiful language for its own sake. In his past, this sort of pride is what led him to disparage the Scriptures when he read them as a young man. He recalls, For when I studied the Scriptures then I did not feel as I am writing about them now. They seemed to me unworthy of comparison with the grand style of Cicero. For my pride shrank from their modesty, and my sharp eye was not penetrating enough to see into their depths. Yet these Scriptures would grow up together with a little child; I, however, thought too highly of myself to become a little child; swollen with pride, I was, in my own eyes, grown-up. (3.5.57)

Pride, as Cavadini says, is the root, the original sin of all the sins mentioned in The Confessions. (10) The love of beautiful language, misdirected and not used for either God or humanity rightly loved, is part of the seduction of pride. Summing up the sins of the Manichaeans, Augustine defines the essence of human sin altogether: "They do not know this way; the way to descend from themselves to Him, and by Him ascend to Him" (5.3.3 3).

Augustine's terminology of ascent by means of descent is apt phrasing for the experience of conversion described by Dante in his Divine Comedy. In fact, The Divine Comedy can be helpfully read as a narrative depiction of many of the key theological truths conveyed by Augustine in his Confessions, one of these truths being the redemption of beauty. Like Augustine, Dante, as depicted in The Divine Comedy and perhaps representing the typical scholar/poet of his day, is also a lover of beauty in both its physical and literary forms. Alluded to many times in The Divine Comedy and certainly expressed in La Vita Nueva, Dante's love of physical beauty, particularly the beauty of lovely women, is manifest. Though Beatrice remains his central image of beauty, young Dante was very much aware of the other lovely young women in Florence, as Charles Williams points out. (11) And also like Augustine, Dante was a great lover of poetry, of the beauty of language, and the one he places at the pinnacle of his pantheon of great poets is the same Virgil mentioned by the repentant Augustine. The Aeneid, which caught the imagination of the young Augustine with its moving story of Dido, causing him to weep, also inspired Dante, the poet, causing him to choose Virgil as the guide for himself as the pilgrim /protagonist in his journey through hell and purgatory. Meeting Virgil at the threshold of hell, Dante exclaims,

"And are you then that Virgil, you the fountain that freely pours so rich a stream of speech?" ... I answered him with shame upon my brow.

"O light and honor of all other poets, may my long study and the intense love that made me search your volume serve me now.

You are my master and my author...." (12)

Defining from the start the limitations of his office--"If you would then ascend as high as these [i.e., the blessed in heaven] / a soul more worthy than I am will guide you" (Inferno, 1.121-22)--Virgil represents poetry or, perhaps, human reason, rightly used as a means toward grace, but not able to save in itself." Though Dante shows Virgil's powers as limited, he (unlike Augustine) never disparages him or his works and shows him as a worthy guide throughout the first two worlds of the dead.

In Inferno, Dante comes face-to-face with a wrong expression of the love of beauty in the Second Circle, where the Lustful are forever punished for their misdirected love. Dante the pilgrim (not the poet) reveals his own confusion regarding wrongful love of beauty in his sympathetic reaction to Paulo and Francesca, the tragic and adulterous lovers killed by Francesca's husband, Paulo's brother. The reader must be careful not to confuse the sympathy of Dante the pilgrim, expressed in his swoon after Francesca's moving speech, with a criticism of their status in hell. On the contrary, the theologically correct attitude toward these sinners is expressed by Dante, the poet, who is the one, after all, who is placing Paulo and Francesca in hell. The seductive quality of Francesca's speech can even cause the reader to miss the reasons, clearly given, for her damnation. Using the language of the poetry of courtly love, Francesca tells her story: "Love, that can quickly seize the gentle heart, took hold of him because of the fair body taken from me--how that was done still wounds me. Love, that releases no beloved from loving, took hold of me so strongly through his beauty that, as you see, it has not left me yet. Love led the two of us unto one death. Caina waits for him who took our life." (Inferno, 5.100-107)

It sounds very beautiful, but what Francesca reveals is a love rooted in merely physical attraction (i.e., lust). Her words clearly reveal that Paulo's love for her developed "because of the fair body / taken from me" (ibid., 101-2), and her love for him resulted "through his beauty" (ibid., 104). As lovely as her words make it sound, this was a love that consisted of two human souls treating each other as physical objects, at the risk of the loss of salvation and at the risk of offending God. As pitiful as she seems and as beautiful as her words make their sin sound, according to Dante (like Augustine), a misdirected love that puts the creature ahead of the creator is damnable. In The Figure of Beatrice, Charles Williams says, "The circles of hell are what is left of the images after the good of intellect has been deliberately drawn away." (14) Francesca and Paulo have not taken the necessary steps to move beyond the initial pleasures of love to understand its deeper meaning. In Williams's terminology, they have failed to act in accordance with "the theology of romantic love" that enjoins all lovers--married or single--to look well at their beloved but, then, to look beyond her or him toward the Good the beloved represents, in other words, to God. To linger too long, as these two lovers did, is "lussuria," Dante's word, used here by Williams to refer to the excessive indulgence of gratification offered by the beloved: "In the Francescan moment each of the lovers had delight in the image of the other, and both of them had a mutual delight in their love. But lussuria cannot stop there; the mutual indulgence is bound too soon to become two separate single indulgences." (15) We see an example of the separateness of this type of false love in Dante's dream of the Siren, to be discussed later on, in connection with Purgatorio where she appears to Dante in the Terrace of Sloth. Though Paulo's and Francesca's indulgence is rooted in appreciation of another real being, it objectifies the other person in terms of physical beauty only, and this deficiency renders the love sinful.

A similar condemnation for wrongful love of beauty, in this case the beauty of language and literature, is seen in several other instances in The Divine Comedy, most notably in the inclusion of Virgil among the damned--though noble--pagan poets. If anyone could have been saved by beautiful language and the resultant poetry emanating from it, according to Dante, it would have been Virgil. Dante, however, does not depict Virgil as being saved. One might argue that Dante is merely following the theology of his times, that his heart--by honoring Virgil as his guide and as his great mentor--undercuts his placing of Virgil in hell. Nevertheless, Dante shows in many places of The Divine Comedy that Virgil (representing unredeemed humane letters at their pinnacle) cannot be "saved" unless converted, unless "baptized." In canto 4, Dante shows Virgil among a select group of poets whose honor is indeed acknowledged by him in their being allowed a special place in hell, but they are still unsaved; besides Virgil, the others are Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan (Inferno, 4.91-93). Dante is honored (and honors himself!) by being included among them. Their world, in limbo, is the only place of dignity in hell. However, because they were not saved, they do not enjoy the presence of God, who is the life of heaven and the goal of purgatory. As Virgil leads Dante through hell and purgatory we also see that his abilities as a mentor, great though they are, decrease on the way to heaven and at its gates are limited altogether.

Besides Virgil, Dante encounters another literary mentor (in the sense of influence) Brunetto Latini in canto 15. With him, Dante says, "I walked with head bent low / as does a man who goes in reverence" (44-45). Dante acknowledges his literary debt to Latini: "Within my memory is fixed--and now / moves me--your dear, your kind paternal image / when, in the world above, from time to time / you taught me how man makes himself eternal" (ibid., 82-85). Dante clearly shows the importance of Latini in his life, but, again, it must be pointed out here, as in the case of Francesca, that it is Dante, the poet, who places Brunetto Latini in hell for his sin of sodomy, even as Francesca is in hell for her sin of adultery. The beautiful language that Latini conveyed to Dante, as in Virgil's case also, is not enough to redeem him. Similarly, in Purgatorio, we see very clearly the limitations, even the seductive quality of the beauty of poetry in canto 2, at the very entrance to purgatory. Here Dante meets fellow poet Casella whose beautiful song enchants the newly arrived souls, including Dante and even Virgil. Nevertheless, clearly, this love of beauty is faulty, as Cato's rebuke shows: "What have we here, you laggard spirits? / What negligence, what lingering is this? Quick to the mountain to cast off the slough / that will not let you see God show himself" (Purgatorio, 2.120-23). In fact, even Dante's positive description of his own and the others' enjoyment of Casella's song reveals an inherent problem: "My master, I, and all that company / around that singer seemed so satisfied / as if no other thing might touch our minds" (ibid., 115-17, emphasis added). In both The Confessions and The Divine Comedy a love for anyone or anything--no matter how beautiful--that keeps one from looking beyond it to its source is potentially damnable and should necessarily be purged.

As Dante moves throughout purgatory, Virgil remains his guide and friend and a source of great wisdom, but by the end of Purgatorio he is ready to let Beatrice take over his role as Dante's guide. For Virgil, great poet though he is, remains unsaved, without the spiritual insight that comes from grace. And Dante in order to experience salvation needs grace, not simply reason or poetic genius, as Charles Williams points out in The Figure of Beatrice. (16) Throughout Purgatorio, however, Virgil has much to teach Dante, as when Dante encounters the Siren in canto 19. On the Fourth Terrace, where the slothful are punished, Dante has a dream of "a stammering woman ... her eyes askew, and crooked on her feet, / her hands were crippled, her complexion sallow."" But Dante's gaze renders her beautiful; as he says, "with the coloring that love prefers / my eyes transformed the wanness of her features" (Purgatorio, 19.14-15). Charles Williams discusses in great length the danger of this kind of seductive beauty. Most significantly, it is not even "real"; that is, it is not created beauty. Therefore, any "love" for it cannot be real love. Dante's "love" for the Siren is really a love of illusion, a choice of fantasy over reality, precluding any possibility of real love. The Siren represents all the false and hopeless dreams of "perfect love" that stand in the way not only of the love of God, the creator of the real, but also of connection with a real "other," a person who might be loved in God. A holy woman from heaven (perhaps St. Lucy?) calls upon Virgil to rescue Dante from this seduction; Virgil, in turn, seizes the Siren, ripping open her belly, revealing a stench that awakens Dante to reality." This scene is most significant in showing the dangers of the wrong kind of love of beauty. Ultimately, to love anything or anyone outside of God is to love falsely, even when the object of love is an actual person. However, the love of a falsely created beauty is even further removed from the source of love, says Williams, since the "lover" is not only separating a created being from its Creator and loving it as if it were an end in itself but is actually stepping into the role of creator, making an illusion that is more palatable than a real creature. Unlike illusions, real creatures require genuine interaction, forgiveness, and understanding; "if Sloth overtakes Love, Beatrice is lost in the image of the Siren, the romantic Image in the pseudo-romantic mirage." (19) As Augustine's waking mind frees him from his own erotic dreams in book 10, chapter 30, of The Confessions, so Dante is awakened by Virgil, here embodying reason.

At the very top of purgatory, Virgil himself prepares Dante for the end of his guidance, telling him that another (Beatrice) will lead him throughout heaven: "My son, you've seen the temporary fire and the eternal fire; you have reached the place past which my powers cannot see. I've brought you here through intellect and art.... Await no further word or sign from me: your will to act is free, erect, and whole--to act against that will would be to err: therefore I crown and miter you over yourself." (Purgatorio, 27.127-42)

Virgil recognizes the limitations of "intellect and art"--beauty of language and literature--that he so powerfully personifies. A different kind of beauty will be necessary to bring Dante to salvation.

In Beatrice we see physical and spiritual beauty united. As described according to Charles Williams's "theology of romantic love," Beatrice is a vehicle of God's grace and love for Dante, a means of salvation. She can only fill this role for him because he is now capable of seeing her in God--that is, not simply as a lovely being pleasing to his senses or even to his soul's faculties but as a created being, reflective of the Creator and imaging his love. Her rebuke of Dante--for neglecting her image after her death in his following of "lesser" images that were beautiful but did not lead him toward God-leads to his confession and ultimately his redemption (canto 31). Specifically, she explains to Dante that he has sinned with regard to a wrongful love of beauty so that, confessing his sin, upon "hearing the Sirens, you may be more strong" (ibid., 45); like a theologian she outlines for Dante how her own physical beauty ought to have been used by him: "Nature or art had never showed you any beauty that matched the lovely limbs in which I was enclosed--limbs scattered now in dust; and if the highest beauty failed you through my death, what mortal thing could then induce you to desire it?...." (ibid., 49-54)

Earlier she had said, "In the desire for me / that was directing you to love the Good.... /what chains were strung, what ditches dug across your path? ..." (ibid., 22-30). In other words, the true purpose of beauty is to lead to the Good, to God. In an inversion of what happened in Eden, Beatrice had offered Dante the fruit of salvation, and he had walked away from it. Now he is being given a second chance to enjoy it, once he has recognized the sinfulness of failing in response to the loveliness of Beatrice as a sign of God's ultimate beauty.

The redemption of beauty in The Divine Comedy involves a turning back to an original image of grace, Beatrice, and recognizing her for what she is--an embodiment of the love of God, reflective of his grace and glory. In Augustine's Confessions, the redemption of beauty does not involve a particular image, certainly not in the sense of a female beloved like Beatrice, though it might be argued that Augustine's mother, Monica, serves a similar function for her son. Monica, however, does not receive the same poetic focus in The Confessions as Beatrice does in The Divine Comedy. As Charles Williams says, Dante is a master of the Way of Affirmation; his Divine Comedy "is the greatest expression in European literature of the way of approach of the soul to its ordained end through the affirmation of the validity of all those images, beginning with the image of a girl." (20) Nevertheless, Williams acknowledges that the way "most familiar in the records of sanctity" is the Way of Rejection, involving the "renunciation of all images except the final one of God Himself...." (21) Though Augustine does not become a hermit or a monk, his repentance does involve a letting go of marriage, family life, and several false images of himself (such as the famous professor, the skilled rhetorician, and the lover who could not exist without physical love). In the garden (in book 8), what happens to Augustine is really a final letting go of the remaining cords holding him back from surrender to God's love and grace. His acceptance of God's help in receiving chastity as a gift (and of salvation itself as a gift) is an act of surrender to grace. He is admitting that he cannot save himself, and the grace of God then leads Augustine to God himself, the source of all beauty. "Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty, so ancient and so new!" (10.27.235). Rather than returning to a single lost image of beauty, Augustine is drawn into the source of all beauty. This movement--though depicted in its pivotal moment in the garden--was led up to by a series of stages of surrender to grace. And even after his conversion, Augustine continues to develop in grace, in need of God's sustenance.

For Augustine in The Confessions, a right kind of humility is the key to experiencing salvation. As John Cavadini explains, in Augustine's view pride is the crucial obstacle keeping humans from admitting they are creatures, who did not create themselves, in need of a Savior. (22) Augustine describes his preconverted self: I was not humble enough to possess Jesus in His humility as my God, nor did I know what lesson was taught by His weakness. For your Word, the eternal truth, high above the highest parts of your creation, raises up to Itself those who are subdued; but in this lower world He built for Himself a humble dwelling out of our clay by means of which He might detach from themselves those who were to be subdued and bring them over to Himself, healing the swelling of their pride and fostering their love, so that instead of going further in their own self-confidence they should put on weakness, seeing at their feet divinity in the weakness that it had put on, wearing our "coat of skin"; and then, weary, they should cast themselves down upon that divinity which, rising, would bear them up aloft. (8.18.155)

To come to humility, Augustine has to let go of his desire to have "the reputation of a wise man"; as he says, "I was puffed up with my knowledge" (7.20.157). Opposed to pride is charity. In The Confessions, love is the root and source of all beauty. It is this love of God that draws Augustine, and when he encounters God in the garden, it is his love that Augustine is able to trust. It is God's love that will enable him to stand, to be continent, and his acceptance of this fact, in faith, is the last surrender necessary for Augustine's salvation. Like Dante at the top of Mount Purgatory before the wall of the fire of chastity (Purgatory, canto 27), Augustine hesitates. He describes his attitude regarding continence prior to conversion: I never thought of your mercy as a medicine to cure that weakness, because I never tried it. I believed that continency was something which depended on one's own strength, and I knew that I had not enough strength for it, for I was such a fool that I did not know that it is written that no one can be continent unless you give the power. And undoubtedly you would have given it to me if with the groans of my heart I had beaten upon your ears and if in settled faith I had cast my cares upon you. (5.11.129)

But God's grace enables Augustine to make this surrender to the fire of his love. As he puts it in book 9, chapter 2, "You had shot through our hearts with your charity" (185). Once converted, Augustine enjoys the beauty of God's love. For him, now, all of life, including its natural beauties, is subsumed in the central beauty of God. He describes his transformation: You were with me, and I was not with you. Those outer beauties kept me far from you, yet if they had not been in you, they would not have existed at all. You called, you cried out, you shattered my deafness: you flashed, you shone, you scattered my blindness: you breathed perfume, and I drew in my breath and I pant for you: I tasted, and I am hungry and thirsty: you touched me, and I burned for your peace. (10.27.235)

All beauties are wrapped up, for Augustine, now in God: "He is the light, the melody, the fragrance, the food, the embracement of my inner self" (10.6.215). Still, despite the newness of life he is experiencing, Augustine struggles with the temptation to put the creature ahead of the creator. The grace experienced in the single moment of conversion is also ongoing, necessarily so due to the fallen nature of all humans. For instance, Augustine says, "And sometimes working within me you open a door into a state of feeling which is quite unlike anything to which I am used--a kind of sweet delight which, if I could only remain permanently in that state, would be something not of this world, not of this life. But my sad weight makes me fall back again; I am swallowed up by normality; I am held fast and heavily do I weep, but heavily I am held" (10.41.253). John Cavadini points out that passages like this one, made by the converted Augustine about his state after conversion, offended Pelagius, but for Augustine, the reality of his own weakness simply helped him to lean on God for help, to be more aware of his grace. (23) This continuing dependence on God, the need for his grace, helps Augustine to keep from falling back into the self-sufficient pride that characterized his unconverted life. Continually, he turns to the Savior, recognizing his presence in his heart and in the Eucharist: "Let not the proud speak evil of me, for my thoughts are on the price of my redemption; I eat it and drink it and give it to others to eat and drink, and, being poor myself, I desire to be satisfied by it among those that eat and are satisfied, and they shall praise the Lord who seek him" (10.43.256).

Dante also, though washed and on his journey through Paradise, must experience continued cleansing and regeneration. Conversion, for him as for Augustine, is both focused in time and ongoing. Though one might say that he is "saved," when he experiences repentance and cleansing in purgatory (canto 31), he continues to be transformed, beginning with these last books of Purgatorio and throughout Paradise. An important part of his transformation involves a change in his attitude toward beauty, particularly that of Beatrice. Just after he is washed in Lethe, in a ritual suggesting Baptism, Dante experiences an epiphany of beauty, rightly loved and used. Looking at Beatrice, he sees in "those emeralds" (i.e., her eyes) the reflected image of the griffin, the two-natured creature emblematic of Christ (Purgatorio, 31.1 15-29). (24) Then, surrounded by nymphs representing the cardinal and theological virtues, who encourage Beatrice to reveal this sight to him, Dante experiences a vision of "the Second Beauty," the smile of Beatrice. Overwhelmed by the lovely sight, offering Dante's eyes "satisfaction for their ten / year thirst," he focuses totally on her, noting that "my eyes were walled in by / indifference to all else" (ibid., 32.2-5), a dangerous thing when no beauty is to be a distraction from its source. Quickly, the nymphs representing the theological virtues warn Dante: "You stare too fixedly" (ibid., 9), showing that he is, as Allen Mandelbaum succinctly puts it, "concentrating too long on the lovely human form of his lady." (25) The newly repentant Dante is already guilty of falling into a wrong kind of love of beauty. However, through the grace working within him, he quickly recovers and looks at the procession consisting of "all the troops of the celestial kingdom" (ibid., 22). In other words, beauty is to be enjoyed as reflective of God's love and as part of a larger community of loves, two things that Dante will become increasingly able to do throughout Paradiso.

By the time he has nearly reached the Empyrean, Beatrice herself withdraws and is replaced by St. Bernard, who will be Dante's guide for the final visions. Beatrice's nearly last words to Dante focus on love and light, even as he is enveloped in radiance: "The Love that calms this heaven always welcomes / into Itself with such a salutation / to make the candle ready for its flame" (Paradiso, 30.52-55). Unlike his separation from Virgil, Dante's "loss" of Beatrice reflects his newfound wisdom and ability to love beauty rightly and in God. Dante thanks Beatrice: "You drew me out from slavery to freedom / by all those paths, by all those means that were / within your power" (ibid., 31.85-87). She smiles at him a final time, and then "she turned back to the eternal fountain" (ibid., 93). As she turns away, and Dante accepts it and turns to St. Bernard, Dante, the pilgrim, shows that, for him as for Augustine, beauty has now become completely wrapped up in God. He has experienced what the beauty of Beatrice originally offered him and toward which her beauty had pointed but which he had misused and neglected after her death. Now he is ready to experience the ultimate beauty.

First, Dante sees those great saints and patriarchs seated in the Empyrean, among them, most fittingly, Augustine himself, and then Mary, the mother of Jesus, "the face that is most like the face of Christ" (Paradiso, 32.85). Dante is overwhelmed by the vision but continues to look until finally he sees a vision of God himself: Eternal Light, You only dwell within Yourself, and only You know You; Self knowing. Self-known, You love and smile upon Yourself! That circle--which, begotten so, appeared in You as light reflected--when my eyes had watched it with attention or some time, within itself and colored like itself to me seemed painted with our effigy, so that my sight was set on it completely.... ... I wished to see the way in which our human effigy suited the circle and found place in it. (Ibid., 33.124-38)

Finding himself unequal to the task of intellectually understanding the mystery of the Incarnation, Dante is given what he seeks by grace: "My own wings were far to weak for that. / But then my mind was struck by light that flashed / and, with this light, received what it had asked" (ibid., 139-41). The ultimate beauty can be experienced only through grace; it even takes grace to use rightly the lesser beauties that reflect it.

John Frecero associates Dante's depiction of the Divine in terms of a circle (the Trinity suggested by the interconnection of three circles) with the platonic theory of the revolving spheres, the stars, each of which, in Plato's view, "is a being with a soul, which is to say, a self-moving principle: arche' kineseos." (26) Frecero explains that like the angels who are also depicted in terms of "circles of fire around God, the point from which all light radiates" Dante, the pilgrim, also eventually revolves around the holy center; "he is moved by love to whirl around the Divine Essence, but his ability to do so is governed by his ability to see that essence. His final blinding vision is the fulfillment of his intellectual desire by the grace of God, to which his will subsequently responds with the revolution of love." (27) The redeemed Dante now has God at the center of his soul, as Frecero argues, echoing Georges Poulet, whose argument he cites in his discussion of this transformation. Poulet hearkens back to Dante's reference to the circle in La Vita Nuova, where Beatrice withdraws her greeting and the young Dante is heartbroken. (28) In a spiritual dream, Dante sees a young man, representing Love, who comforts Dante thus: "Ego tanquan centrum circuli, cui simili modo se habent circumferentiae partes; to autem non sic" ("I am the center of a circle to which all points of the circumference are equidistant; you are not," Poulet's translation). (29) Or, as Charles Williams translates it, "I am the centre of a circle to which all the parts of the circumference are in a similar relation; but you are not so" (30) Poulet sees this passage as the first of several references to the image of the circle, culminating in the vision of the Trinitarian God at the end of Paradiso," and connecting it with the ancient definition of God--"God is a sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere." Poulet traces this definition to The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers and acknowledges its importance to theological and philosophical thinking for centuries. (32) Charles Williams, who also connects this definition with the passage in La Vita Nuova, attributes it to St. Bonaventura, arguing that the two statements, taken together, sum up "almost the whole of the Way of Images-and indeed of the Rejection of Images also. In La Vita Nuova and, indeed, throughout Inferno, Purgatorio, and some of Paradise, Dante is not in the center; he feels great emotions varyingly; only some parts of the circumference impose goodwill."" Nevertheless, by the time Dante has reached the end of Paradiso and experienced the fullness of salvation, he has now opened his heart to love for whom "in the centre all parts are equal." (34) As Poulet also describes it, "Dante's journey, like all mystical journeys, is an inward one. Its final goal is a God in which the soul sinks into itself.... This still center of the heart is reached by Dante in a moment which is at the same time the final moment of his journey and of his poem." (35)

For Dante in The Divine Comedy the experience of conversion involves a transformation from an incorrect use of beauty to the redemption of beauty in all the fullness of the beatific vision, and this transformation happens through grace. The movement from the circumference to the very center of the circle involves opening his heart to the God of love, to whom all the parts on the circumference are the same. "The divine Point is the very center of the soul, it is God interiorly possessed in a human moment." (36)" If God dwells in the soul, then God is the center of the soul, even as he is also the Center of the cosmos, and beauty, like all of creation, can be experienced in proper connection to God. (37) Dante's poetic depiction of conversion parallels that of St. Augustine, who also inclined toward the love of the beautiful, whether in words or in visual images, particularly the image of a beautiful woman. The converted Augustine is often depicted--wrongly I would argue, at least as far as The Confessions is concerned--as being polemical against sexuality and/or women. However, he is, in The Confessions, more accurately described as being against anything wrongly used as a distraction from the ultimate beauty. By the end of The Confessions and The Divine Comedy, both Augustine and Dante have come to a state where all beauties are reflective of their source. The ascent is deeply connected with the descent into the humility of repentance and dependence upon grace, both of which are rooted in the Incarnation of Christ. As Poulet says, "For eternity has incarnated itself in time and the infinite sphere within the boundaries of the human sphere," noting that Dante's descent connects with that of Christ, who in humility descended not only from heaven to earth but also into hell for our sakes. (38) Augustine similarly describes this kind of descent. Augustine's own brilliance and even his ability to appreciate and to create beauty (in terms of language) were aspects of his own self-reliance that had to be renounced in order to experience salvation.

However, like Dante, Augustine comes to a place of recognition that everything, even his own gifts and good works, are from God; he says, speaking specifically in reference to his mother but making a general statement overall, It would go badly indeed with any man, however praiseworthy his life, if you were to lay aside your mercy before examining it. But because you do not look too rigorously into our sins, we confidently hope to find some place with you. But if a man recounts to you all the real merits he has, he is only telling you of your gifts to him. If only men would recognize that they are men, and that he that glorieth, would glory in the Lord. (9-13.207)

For both Dante and Augustine the recognition of the need for grace is crucial. Though both were masters of beautiful words, lovers of poetry and of women, neither Dante, the pilgrim, nor Augustine, the sinner turned saint, could be saved by any of these things in themselves; their salvation, like that of all of us, had to involve the humility of being dependent upon God's grace, and only this path allowed them to rise to a vision of beauty, "rooted and grounded in love. (39)

Notes

(1.) St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1963), book 10, chap. 17, p. 228 (hereafter cited in text with references to book, chapter, and page number).

(2.) Allen Mandelbaum, trans., The Divine Comedy, Paradiso (New York: Bantam, 1982), canto 30, lines 124-28 (hereafter cited in text as Paradiso with references to canto and line numbers).

(3.) I was prompted to write this article by the discussion at a seminar on St. Augustine conducted by Dr. James Cavadini of Notre Dame University, held at Seton Hall University in May 2005. In this article "beauty" does not refer to the abstract concept in the platonic sense, but to concrete expressions of beauty: physical beauty, particularly feminine beauty, and the beauties of literature, of humane letters.

(4.) John Cavadini, "Augustine on Culture," Catholic Studies seminar at Seton Hall University, May 2005.

(5.) Robert J. Forman, Augustine and the Making of a Christian Literature in Text and Studies in Religion 65 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995). See also Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana in the online Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College, http://wwwccel.org/ (accessed October 5, 2006).

(6.) Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, 2.40.60.

(7.) Forman, Augustine, 44-49 passim.

(8.) Ibid., 51-59 passim.

(9.) Ibid., 7.

(10). Cavadini, "Augustine on Culture."

(11). Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (New York: Octogon, 1980; first printed Noonday Press, 1961), 39.

(12.) Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1982), canto 1, lines 79-85 (hereafter cited in text as Inferno with references to canto and line numbers).

(13.) Williams, Figure of Beatrice, 166 (where he refers to Virgil thus: "Virgil, like all intelligence and all great art....")

(14.) Ibid., 114

(15.) Ibid., 119.

(16.) Ibid., 111-112.

(17.) Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Purgatoric, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1982), canto 19, lines 7-9 (hereafter cited in text as Purgatorio with references to canto and line numbers).

(18.) Williams, Figure of Beatrice, 166.

(19.) Ibid.

(20.) Ibid., 8.

(21.) Ibid.

(22.) Cavadini, "Augustine on Culture."

(23.) Ibid.

(24.) Charles Williams says of this moment when Dante sees the Griffin in the eyes of Beatrice: "Romantic Love is seen to mirror the Humanity and Deity of the Redeemer" (from He Came Down from Heaven and The Forgiveness of Sins [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984]).

(25.) Mandelbaum, Purgatorio, note 400.

(26.) John Frecero, Dante, the Poetics of Conversion, edited and with an introduction by Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Harvard, 1986), 252.

(27.) Ibid., 253.

(28.) Georges Fouler, The Metamorphoses of the Circle, trans. Carley Dawson and Elliott Coleman, in collaboration with the author (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1966), xiii.

(29.) Ibid.

(30.) Williams, Figure of Beatrice, 25-26.

(31.) Pouler, Metamorphoses of the Circle, xiii, xi.

(32.) Ibid., xi.

(33.) Williams, Figure of Beatrice, 24.

(34.) Ibid.

(35.) Fouler, Metamorphoses of the Circle, xix.

(36.) Ibid., xviii.

(37.) Frecero, Dante, 256.

(38.) Fouler, Metamorphoses of the Circle, xxi-xxii.

(39.) Fphesians 3:17, The New American Standard Bible (Lockman Foundation).