Beatrice and the Siren

Should pleasure define our sense of beauty or should beauty define our sense of pleasure?

This is the essential cultural question of The Divine Comedy, and that of our lives as well. Every person follows one or the other of its directives. The world treats beauty as the outgrowth of personal preference. Its definitions of beauty are numerous and varied. It might cast itself at Beauty’s feet, but not before it makes her in its image. This is beauty conforming to pleasure. However, it is possible to take another path. It is possible to train our sense of pleasure, as a vintner trains a vine, to grow towards the sun. Both classical paganism and Christianity appeal to a source of beauty exterior to our human experience. Classical art aims at the perfectibility of man. The Incarnation of Christ hits the mark and Christians seek to follow. This is pleasure conforming to beauty. As far as Dante is concerned, this distinction defines a person’s cultural identity. Is he of this world or of another? In this way, the Classical-Christian culture that is manifest in Dante’s epic hinges on the proper definition of beauty as the climactic decision of “our life’s journey.”

More than a statesman, a celebrity, or even a historical man, Dante was a poet. We know him best by his text and his text pursues beauty, which is the poet’s object. In the Comedy, the pursuit of beauty is synonymous with both Dante’s poetic project and his pilgrimage to God. All beauty reflects God’s glory, an assertion that places Dante firmly on the Classical-Christian side of our essential question. Purgatorio, at the center of Dante’s trilogy, carries the reader from the earthen paths of Hell to the airy heights of Heaven. It does so by means of a climb up a mountain—towards the sun—and a discourse on beauty.

The metaphor of light throughout the poem frames the development of Dante’s good taste. I have said that all beauty, in Dante’s mind, reflects the glory of God. His Paradiso, filled with celestial light, asserts this. Its opposite is Inferno, all dark except for fire. The distinction between them takes a concrete form in Purgatorio, where Dante meets two diverse beauties: Sirena and Beatrice. A proper definition of beauty, which directs a healthy culture’s growth, takes shape in this contrast.

Dante meets Sirena in Canto 19 of Purgatorio. His introduction, significantly, follows Virgil’s lecture on proper and improper love. Sirena first appears to Dante as a misshapen old crone, and it is his looking at her that casts a spell upon her. This recasting of the siren myth exemplifies Dante’s main conceit:

I stared at her; and just as the new sun
breathes life to night-chilled limbs, just so my look
began to free her tongue, and one by one
drew straight all her deformities.

Note the simile. Dante likens his look to the sun, describing himself as a source of light. This notion of beauty, so called, is in the eye of the beholder. Sirena morphs to match Dante’s sense of pleasure. Her beauty shapes itself to his preference, her growth directed toward his sun. This models one side of our equation, what we will recognize as the dominant contemporary idea of taste. Yet the poet’s insight penetrates deeper. In one intricately crafted image, Dante pinpoints the original error in man, for Eve saw the forbidden fruit “was pleasant to the eyes.” Sirena illustrates the human condition, prior to the lessons of Purgatory, lost in error as though in a dark wood, the place where Dante’s epic begins. Sirena is the shape and form of sin.

It is Virgil, acting as the voice of reason, who releases Dante from his self-inflicted spell:

He seized the witch, and with one rip laid bare
all of her front, her loins and her foul belly:
I woke sick with the stench that rose from there.

A stench issues from Sirena’s womb. Her offspring are corrupt. Dante prescribes reason to counteract falsehood, implying again that beauty is external to human desire. Plain logic denies the free expression of Dante’s false love. It stands to reason: The pursuit of false beauty—the love of Sirena—can only result in an eternity with oneself and therefore cannot be a productive union. Bent in crooked growth, the vine will die. So Dante must learn to love the higher beauty, which his initial affection would seem to ignore.

In Canto 30, Dante meets Beatrice. Her whole being looks toward a greater light. Hers is the posture of the blessed. Upon meeting her, Dante finds that Virgil has gone. Beauty replaces reason as Dante’s guide. These are her first words to the pilgrim:

“Dante, do not weep yet, though Virgil goes.
Do not weep yet, for soon another wound
shall make you weep far hotter tears than those!”

Dante, she says, I’ll give you something to cry about! Beatrice eclipses Virgil’s influence, his instruction, and his light, as our sun overwhelms a distant star. Even so, a young man will leave his boyhood friends to seek the company of beauty. That is beauty’s captivating power. It demands that the young man change. Beatrice spends the majority of the next canto chastising Dante’s waywardness, playing the role of a jealous lover, forcing guilty tears from his eyes, and even mocking his beard. It is, perhaps, the truest and most delightful moment in Western literature. We laugh because we feel its sting. Yet Dante’s tears will turn to laughter when he grows to be a man. Of course, Beatrice’s assault on Dante’s error places her on the other side of our equation from Sirena. Her beauty is unbending. Preference breaks against it like a wave against a cliff. This is the lesson of Mount Purgatory:

“In any case that you may know your crime
truly and with true shame and so be stronger
against the Siren’s song another time,
control your tears and listen with your soul
to learn how my departure from the flesh
ought to have spurred you to the higher goal.
Nothing in Art or Nature could call forth
such joy from you, as sight of that fair body
which clothed me once and now sifts back to earth.
And if my dying turned that highest pleasure
to very dust, what joy could still remain
in mortal things for you to seek and treasure?
At the first blow you took from such vain things
your every thought should have been raised to follow
my flight above decay.”

How can we follow her flight beyond the grave? By finding in the light that her beauty reflects a proper shape for our pleasure.

Dante’s pilgrimage is really an allegorical quest for good taste. Both Hell and Purgatory specifically act upon the pilgrim’s aesthetic judgment. As a result, his pleasure matures. Not only is this possible, because pleasure has a proper object, but it is necessary. True beauty will not bow to preference. True beauty either uplifts or condemns our pursuit and, in this way, provides both the goal of Classical-Christian culture and the means by which that goal is reached. Beauty must shape our sense of pleasure, if we are to grow toward the sun.