Dante, the great love and the story of Paolo and Francesca part 4

Dante, the great love and the story of Paolo and Francesca part 4

Can the love story of Paolo and Francesca put philosophical and existential questions? I think so.
Dante is deeply moved by their tragedy, because he knows that it could have happened to him too; indeed, he admits it openly, because in the Purgatory he is submitted to the same punishment of the lustful, passing through the fire. But he is touched mainly because Paolo and Francesca ideally represent our desire for absolute love. A love materialized in human life, down here, but hooked to the absolute. To God.

                                              Paolo and Francesca, Ary Scheffer, 1855

The human and poetic journey of Dante, from his work Vita Nova (New life), dedicated to Beatrice, who had just died, until the Comedy, is also a philosophical and theological one, aiming to find the meaning of life through love. Beatrice is a reference point to reach God (therefore she is celebrated as "woman-angel"), Beatrice inspires him after her death, Beatrice introduces him to Heaven and then she drives him up to the vision of God. After the death of his beloved, since 1290, Dante finds solace through the study of philosophy, through the way of human wisdom, but always pondering issues related to love and nobility inextricably linked to love; love becomes the way to moral improvement, towards raising himself, and must lead Dante from evil, represented by the "dark forest", where he gets lost at the beginning of his poem, to his purification, through the three realms of the underworld, to the beatific vision of God. God is love (the love that moves the sun and other stars, as the poet says in the last verse of his poem, Par.33,145), in the terms used by S. Thomas Aquinas, the highest good: supreme Goodness, supreme Truth, supreme Beauty.

                                                  

George F.Watts, Paolo and Francesca

Then Dante puts in an exemplary way the fundamental questions of existence: love, the desire of it, ethics, our inner improvement, our aspiration to absolute Good. His response, as a Christian of centuries ago, however, is adamant: love, properly experienced, leads to God and God is the absolute Good, giving the highest happiness (in fact, supreme Goodness, supreme Truth, supreme Beauty). Therefore, he says, in his letter to Cangrande della Scala, his patron and Lord of Verona, he wrote the Divine Comedy to lead back humans to conversion, then to God and so to true happiness ("the goal of the Comedy and of this work - Paradise - is taking away the living, during their existence, from the state of spiritual poverty, to lead them to salvation", says the poet in his epistle).

                                          G.Previati, Paolo and Francesca (Ferrara, 1901)

And here comes perhaps a first explanation for an apparent inconsistency: why did two so noble lovers end in Hell? Dante's most obvious moral answer is that, once lost the connection with God, the only source of true love, even Paolo and Francesca's degenerates and becomes idolatry: so, even the eternal bond of the two lovers can be transformed into a form of prison (each form of idolatry becomes obsession and prison: and so you might understand as well their eternal bond...).
And yet ... And yet, there is something wrong, something that the poet, accustomed to his society of the time, did not mind. Paolo and Francesca, in the end, look also like victims: victims of a cruel murder, carried out by her husband, but also victims of unnatural obstacles and constraints, which deprived them of their freedom, of the possibility to blossom : some misunderstood, social obligations or arranged marriage, inconceivable for us today, and that was very common among the upper classes, but that was often also an intolerable constraint, if not the ruin of those who contracted it. Then the teaching of Dante may embrace our age and experience: love, even when leading to the absolute, can be corrupted, it can become perdition, when selfishness prevails: our selfishness or others'. Love loses its nature when it loses sight of its goal: Love, that is God, the only source of all beauty.