The New Life
"In the book of my memory, after the first pages, which are almost blank, there is a section headed Incipit vita nova."
On Wednesday and Thursday, I read Dante's La Vita Nuova, which I'd long been curious about. It's very interesting that Dante feels compelled to explain his own poetry, even in a very formulaic way. ("There are four parts in this sonnet. In the first, I...")
There are definitely some interesting parts in the Vita Nuova. It's good to get the inside story on Dante's love for Beatrice -- something commentators on the Divina Commedia always write footnotes about, something my father has often mentioned, but never something I read a primary source about.
After the vision which I had described, when I had composed the rhymes which Love had commanded me, a number of conflicting thoughts began to contend and strive one with the other, all of them, it seemed, unanswerably. Among them were four which seemed most to disturb my peace of mind. One was this: "The domination of Love is a good thing because he guides the mind of his faithful follower away from all unworthiness." Another thought was this: "The domination of Love is not good because the more faithfully a follower serves him, the more burdensome and grievous are the moments he must endure"; yet another thought was as follows: "The name of Love is so sweet to hear that it seems impossible that it can be anything but sweet in its effect upon most things, for it is known that names are a consequence of the things which are named, as it is written, Nomina sunt consequentia rerum"; the fourth thought was this: "The Lady for whom Love holds you so enthralled is not like other women whose hearts are easily moved." Every one of these thoughts so contended within me that I became like a person who does not know which road to take on his journey, who wants to set out but does not know where to start.(Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, XIII (trans. Barbara Reynolds))
Dante's self-condemnation on account of his love for the "compassionate lady" who appears after the death of Beatrice is remarkable. Dante was a very serious man and really felt things deeply; I think this is something that leads people to compare him with Vergil, whom he put into his own poetry later on as a character or as an inspiration.
People are remarkably divided in their views of Dante's love for Beatrice. La Vita Nuova records that (as has become legendary) he saw her when they were both nine years old -- we could presume before puberty, when they were both children -- and he fell in love and remained deeply in love with her for the rest of his life, although they barely spoke. (Dante remembers being greeted once by Beatrice some years later, and wishes at length that she would greet him again. So they did actually say hello to each other, at least once.) But Dante had a series of visions which convinced him of the validity of his inclination that Beatrice was unique and special and that he ought to love her for his whole life. ("And some in dreams assured were...") And when he did waver from this commitment (after Beatrice was dead!), he couldn't live with himself:
Your levity I contemplate with dread [...]
While life endures you should not ever be
Inconstant to your lady who is dead.(id., XXXVII)
and again: "often I grew angry in my heart and reviled myself greatly [a]nd often too I cursed the vanity of my eyes [...] 'for never, this side of death, ought your tears to have ceased!'". Finally "my heart began to repent sorrowfully of the desire by which it had so basefully allowed itself to be possessed for some days against the constancy of reason; and when this evil desire had been expelled all my thoughts returned once more to their most gracious Beatrice".
So you can see how Dante's view really polarizes people; few people reading this are neutral in their assessment of Dante's behavior. (It's interesting that I say "behavior", because Dante barely did anything observable in the entire book, except visit another city, get sick, cry, and write poems. He's very concerned with his inner life, which continues in parallel to and separate from what people can see about him. It's of consequence to him whether his feelings are noble or base, whether his thoughts are reasonable or unreasonable -- whether inside himself he is virtuous or vicious. Certainly Dante, as a Christian, kept in mind the admonition of the Gospels about looking at women the wrong way, as opposed to the Jewish emphasis on good deeds, what Christians ended up calling "works". In La Vita Nuova, Dante's only works are his poems, and he never does anything that most people today could call "real". This is a source of continuing controversy. Dante's concerns make lots of sense to me; I can relate.)
By the way, there is a company called Vita Nuova which sells support for the Bell Labs Inferno operating system.
I always associated the title of La Vita Nuova with Christian apocalyptics -- "Ecce nova facio omnia", which I remember acutely from a love story of my own, and the New Jerusalem and the New Heaven and New Earth, and then of course in the Symbolum Nicenum where it says "et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi, amen". So the phrase has this really strong eschatological significance for me, which really affects how I would read a book called La Vita Nuova -- but the notes in my edition say, to my surprise, that "[t]he literal English translation, 'The New Life', has religious overtones which are probably not in the original". Hmmmmm.
