What Is This Thing Called Love?

I would encourage people to track down, and read, English poet and mystic Charles Williams' analysis of Dante, "The Figure of Beatrice".  And to contemplate, at the same time, the image of Divine interrelationship that is represented in Anton Rublev's most beautiful of all icons, 'The Hospitality of Abraham'.

Williams recognises and discusses, through a sustained meditation on the work of Dante, that dimension of eros, of love (and indeed, it may be manifest in loves other than the sexual: in what is called 'hero worship', or in the love of a child for a parent, a parent for a child, a friend for a friend) that one might call numinous, holy, theological or revelatory.  The person loving sees *or is, perhaps, by grace or nature, shown* - perhaps only briefly - in the beloved,  nothing less than the imago dei, the particular glory always intended for that particular person by their Creator and Redeemer; what one might call their celestial or angelic self, from which they may fall away, or into which they may steadily grow.

As C S Lewis put it in his book 'till we have faces' - "Goddess? I had never seen a real woman before".

The epigraph of "The Figure of Beatrice" is a line from the Paradiso where the glorified Beatrice - and Williams expounds all the theological Christian reasons why a perfectly ordinary Italian Catholic girl can (like all other persons) with complete propriety be recognised as a vehicle of the divine glory - is imagined, by Dante, as saying to him, in Paradise: "riguarda qual son io". 'Look what I am'.   

'Look what I am'.  See who I am.  Image of God, bearer of God, God-bearer: that is why the Florentine girl, in the magnificent Corpus Christi procession that adorns the final cantos of the Purgatorio, can represent/ re-present the Body of Christ...because that is what,  in a certain sense, according to Christian doctrine, she (or any other baptised believer) actually *is*.   That is why it is not blasphemy when they chant, 'Benedicta qui venit".   (And indeed that same quality or reality, the reflection of the image of God, may just as truly be seen revealed in one who is not a believer). 

Williams, writing about the Vita Nuova, remarks:  "A kind of dreadful perfection has appeared in the streets of Florence; something like the glory of God is walking down the street towards him [Dante].  It appears that this is an experience which has occurred to a large number of young lovers besides Dante.  Their elders do not encourage them to believe that the phenomenon is what it seems; the causes of their elders' hesitation are many, and some of them at any rate are exhibited in the ditches of the Inferno or (if they are fortunate) on the terraces of the Purgatorio"....

"The lord of terrible aspect...is the image of a quality by which the truth of another image is seen, and that other image is a girl in Florence, as it might be in London or San Francisco, in the thirteenth century or in the twentieth.  Through her there springs in Dante this new quality.  But Love also defines himself as that centre of a circle, and as in some sense one with Beatrice herself.  

"This, to make a gloss on Dante, is the beginning of Romantic Theology; that is, of theology as applied to romantic experiences - as Mystical Theology is applied to mystical experiences; and Dogmatic Theology to thought about dogmas.

"In this interpretation, Beatrice is the Mother of Love in Dante; that love has authority; it communicates and demands charity and humility; it can endure without failing the application to it of such words as beatitude and salvation".

"**In its light Beatrice is seen in something of her true celestial state; in which state she is declared by Christian doctrine to be precisely what Dante then sees her as being.** {my emphasis - CM}. 

"She follows her precursor as the way of the Lord followed the preluding voice.  The vehicle of Love moves in Florence as (after an incomparable and yet comparable manner) it moved in Nazareth.  Her 'offspring' is, beyond Dante's first meaning, indeed a lord of terrible aspect.  But the first meaning is not to deny the second implication, any more than the implication of divinity is to negate the meaning of earth. 'Ego dominus tuus'."

Of the Paradiso, Williams writes: "besides being an image of the whole redeemed universe, it is also an image of the redeemed Way.  It is, that is to say, an image of a redeemed love-affair - that is, of an ordinary love-affair, if things went as they ought to go".

To see quite a good artistic exposition of the central points Williams is making,  I would invite people - along with reading Williams and Dante - to watch, in order, the following six films by Australian director Peter Weir: "The Year of Living Dangerously", "Dead Poets Society",  "Witness", "Green Card", "Fearless" and "The Truman Show" and reflect on the portrayal of women, and of romantic love, in each and all of them, but especially in 'Witness' and 'Fearless'. (Further note: before watching 'Green Card', I advise a reading of 'The Song of Solomon').

Weir, whether consciously or simply intuitively, at certain critical points in each of these works, catches perfectly the quality of that 'riguarda qual son io', the moment of contemplation, illumination, recognition, and holy awe  - 'ben sem, ben sem, Beatrice' - 'we are, we are indeed, Beatrice".