solo ed etterno, che tutto O^il cielo move,

non moto, con amore e con disio

(Par. XXIV.130-132)

Introduction 

In one sense, Dante's Commedia may be regarded as a modulated compilation of pre-Renaissance religious and literary texts. A skilled and ambitious reader, Dante appropriates the books he encounters and infuses with his own personal meaning, transcribing them in new forms.[1] In uniquely adopting these texts, Dante foregrounds the reworking of them through allusions, transferences, similes and other rhetorical tropes. Ironically, his spirit of modification is classified under the rubric of imitatio. Dante's imitatio, though, is more free, complex and mordant than the general act of imitation or copying. Dante partially inherits this approach from a long tradition of Christian allegorical interpretation of classical texts which unashamedly reworks the past in terms of the present. Ettore Paratore explains the degree to which Dante takes part in this tradition:

Le reazioni dello spirito di Dante all'eredit?O classica sono pur sempre quelle di un uomo del Medioevo; il suo spirito di fervente cristiano condiziona e foggia tutti i rapporti che egli accetta o individua dalla civilt?O greco-romana.[2]

Dante's medieval Christian spirit conditions his reactions and inscriptions of the greco-roman world. This spirit is particularly detectable in Dante's appropriation of Virgil.

Domenico Consoli explains the nature of Dante's relationship with the classical author:

Perci? abbiamo detto che l'imitatio virgiliana va considerato in un senso molto diverso da quello superficialmente retorico. Cogli O^auctores' [Dante] tiene un rapporto estremamente duttile, piegandone e rifoggiandone i suggerimenti nel calore di una invetivit?O inesauribile.3

Consoli affirms the liberal license with which Dante reworks the auctor in his poetry. Virgil's works, the paradigmatic collection of pagan literature, occupy a central position in the Christian poet's plan to rewrite the past (correct history) for the present, particularly by virtue of the unique challenge that it poses to him.4 The Latin poet's works present Dante with "un'ispirazione ed una sfida--una sfida per la sua abilit?O di poeta e la sua condizione di cristiano."5 Virgil's books pose a poetic and religious challenge which Dante embraces. As scriba Dei, Dante handles the poetic and religious aspects of the challenge in one literary act. Like the prophetic poets of the old testament, his message and mode of revelation are one. Dante considers himself chosen to write a nuovo libro sacro that would embrace both the pagan and Christian world and usher in a cultural rebirth.6 Therefore, success in either the artistic or prophetic endeavor ensures accomplishment in both. Endowed with this sense of a sacred calling, Dante seizes the contributions of classical antiquity and relocates them in a new religious context. Domenico Consoli confirms:

La Commedia ? prima di tutto un poema grandiosamente religioso ed ogni elemento di essa ritrova il suo vero luogo e il suo vero carattere solo se immerso nell'altissima ispirazione sacra che circola e alita per tutti i gradi dell'invenzione.7

The following example serves to demonstrate how Dante more generally recycles Virgilian passages with a religious difference. In the edenic garden of Purgatory, Dante introduces his first encounter with Beatrice with an allusion to Aeneid IV.23: "Conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma" (XXX.48). The new context in which Dante places this Virgilian citation builds upon and transfigures its original meaning. Dido, recalling Aeneas' nobility and beauty, tells Anna, "agnosco veteris vestigia flammae." This flame springs from her awe of Aeneas' achievements and her carnal appetites to possess him. Unfortunately, these desires only ensnare her mind, cripple her city and inhibit the founding of a glorious earthly empire. The poet of the Commedia manipulates the context of the Virgilian statement in order to bring the telos of his poem into relief: ascension to a heavenly, Christian empire. In Purgatorio XXX, Dante the Pilgrim, as opposed to Dido, recognizes the signs of the ancient flame at the advent of the angelic Beatrice. The flame that he perceives also partly derives from the flesh, but its trajectory extends to Paradise, heaven (not a secretive affair in a cave or the frustration of constructing a temporal empire). Beatrice's beauty, in opposition to Aeneas', draws both the pilgrim's body and spirit towards the Divine. Unlike Dido's mad affection, "Dante's love for Beatrice is not a distraction from empire but a means toward God."8 In referring to Virgil's text, Dante shows by comparison how his view of love, God and empire differ from the intellection of the Latin author. Throughout the remainder of his poem, Dante often changes characters and quotations of the past with an eye to furthering a superior Christian theme. Two such moments are the focus of this thesis.

In Purgatorio XVIII and Paradiso XXXI, Dante recontextualizes a Virgilian simile as part of his broader literary and cultural crusade to Christianize and surpass classical antiquity by establishing the reign of the God of Love in literature. Dante borrows Virgil's bees, originally symbols of industry, asexuality and earthly empire, and transforms them in a completely original way.9 In the Commedia, Virgil's bees fly up, as it were, beyond earthiness and sterility to heaven where they become heralds of a Christian empire and agents of Love. The bees abandon their former role as pagan signifier and adopt a novel Christian status defined by medieval conceptions of love and heavenly empire, thus exalting themselves while confirming the centrality of love in its totality. Virgil is deposed in the procedure while Love and the Florentine poet are established.

With the exception of one article, Albert L. Rossi's "The Poetics of Resurrection: Virgil's Bees," little attention has been paid to Dante's treatment of the bee simile. In fact, according to Madison Sowell and Richard Lansing, little attention has been paid at all to Dantean similes.10 This state of affairs is lamentable considering the widespread acknowledgment of the similes' magnitude.11 In light of scholars' recent call for the examination of Dantean similes and the more fashionable examination of how Dante inscribes and challenges the authority of ancient authors, a study of the bees merits consideration. The following citation by John Addington Symond also reinforces the pertinence of this research:

[The similes] form a class of pictures by themselves, chiefly remarkable for their aptness to the subjects illustrated, Dante, having shown the utmost skill in exactly suiting his comparisons to the matters in question, so that they never are merely ornamental [E?L] but are always to the point.12

Likewise, I propose that the bee simile in the Commedia is not merely ornamental but conveys a point which bears the impression of an important ideological mark in the work. This paper will explore how Dante alters the bees and to what purpose. I will pursue and argue my thesis by exploring Virgil's use of bees, how Dante refashions them and finally what effect that alteration achieves.

 

Virgil and Love

To appreciate completely Dante's modifications, it is necessary to elucidate the relevant passages of Virgil's poetry in context. On the topic of love, Dante has Virgil state an opinion which, when viewed against Virgil's own writings, is problematic. In Books III and IV of the Georgics and I and IV of the Aeneid, Virgil sweepingly denounces sensual passions, whereas in Purgatorio XVII and XVIII, the Italian poet makes the classic author piously indifferent towards them. Furthermore, in Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil conjoins bees with the founders of Rome, which union Dante also modifies in Paradiso XXXI. Unsurprisingly, the Florentine intentionally creates these discrepancies. These differences are not blunders on the part of the author but are products of a forceful evolution which alerts readers to a project of Christian poetic appropriation of antiquity.

Dante initially mentions the bees in Purgatorio XVIII.55-60, embraced within a context from which they had traditionally been divorced. En route to the terrace of the purgation of avarice, Virgil instructs Dante on the nature of love. Virgil, whom Dante in Inf. V had only allowed the meager liberty to identify sinners, is here permitted to speak at great length:

Per?, l?O onde vegna lo'ntelleto

de le prime notizie, omo non sape,

e de' primi appetibili l'affetto,

che sono in voi s?g come studio in ape

di far lo mele; e questa prima voglia

merto di lode o di biasmo non cape.

(XVIII.55-60)

(Therefore, whence comes the intelligence of the first cognitions man does not know, nor whence the affection of the first objects of desire, which exist in you even as zeal in the bee for making honey; and this primal will admits no deserving of praise or blame.) 13

Dante has Virgil compare the first appetites of man to the zeal of making honey in bees. Furthermore, Virgil states that these innate tendencies are without praise or blame, being born from nature. This interweaving of desire and bees clashes with expectations of the way in which the historical Latin poet would have presented the topic of sensuality. In his works, Virgil went to great lengths to segregate natural, carnal desires and the virtue of his bees, condemning the former primi appetibili and exalting the latter as if both were distinct, positive entities.

Virgil casts desire, particularly carnal longing, in a sinister light.14 He explicitly reveals this sentiment in the Georgics and the Aeneid. Sensual passion, even its incipient desire, is condemnable as it spawns havoc through the subversion of communal harmony and an abandonment of industria and pietas.

The theme of harmony in the absence of love is first introduced in Book II of the Georgics. Immediately, we sense the exclusion of the pastoral element, love. Ellen Oliensis comments on the scene:

The scene is notable for the disappearance of women and indeed of sexuality as such, which is displaced by the labour of agriculture. No desire complicates these harmonies. Effectively absorbed by the 'chaste house' and the milk-rich cows, emblems of obedient sexuality and maternal abundance, the wife who produced the farmer's 'sweet children' is nowhere to be seen.15

Virgil excludes women and sexuality in favor of achieving a depiction of idyllic perfection, a scene that will serve to contrast with the reality of sexually-driven life which he expounds in following books.

Book III begins by describing the nature of farm animals, which then leads into a discussion on human nature. At the juncture of these two subjects, Virgil conflates animals and humans on the basis of sexual desire. This association drastically degrades man's status. As a result, the entire book exudes the pervasive and negative theme that man in passion is an animal. Directly referring to horses and indirectly to man, Virgil observes:

Sed non ulla magis vires industria firmat,

quam Venerem et caeci stimulos avertere amoris,

sive boum sive est cui gratior usus equorum. (Book III.209-211)

(But no care so strengthens their powers as to keep from them desire and the stings of secret passion, whether one's choice is to deal with cattle or with horses.)16

Virgil's lexical choice creates a bridge between horse and man and also reveals his opinion of carnal desire. His use of industria, defined by Michael C. J. Putnam as "man's diligent care for his charges," is a word usually reserved for the description of human behavior, yet here is used to talk about stallions.17 The word clashes with the fleshy, animalistic passions, caeci stimulos amoris, which debilitate it. The juxtaposition of the two is extremely dissonant. The Latin poet concludes that nothing more strengthens the powers, more favors industria, than the rejection of these desires.

Another passage in Book III accentuates the destructive force of eros. Again, Virgil intentionally confuses human nature with that of the animals to confirm Venus' power to dehumanize:

carpit enim viris paulatim uritque videndo

femina, nec nemorum patitur meminisse nec herbae

dulcibus illa quidem inlecebris, et saepe superbos

cornibus inter se subigit decernere amantis. (Book III.215-218)

(for the sight of the female slowly inflames and wastes his strength, nor, look you, does she, with her soft enchantments, suffer him to remember woods or pastures; oft she drives her proud lovers to settle their mutual contest with clash of horns.)

The sight of the female seizes or saps strength from the male and causes him to forget his duty or pietas. Putnam points out that this is the first place in all of Latin literature that the word femina, usually reserved for humans, applies to a female animal without an expressed substantive.18 Thus, Virgil reemphasizes the belief that romantic love reduces mankind to animal status. Love sucks man's strength and breeds havoc through the abandonment of pietas; the femina compels her lover to forget his task and incite war, a theme more fully explored in the Aeneid.19 Monica Gale in Virgil on the Nature of Things writes of this passage:

At this point, the gap between human and animal has virtually disappeared. [E?L] Love, or sexual attraction, is O^the same' for O^men and wild beasts and the tribes of fish, flocks and painted birds' [E?L] The notion of human superiority to the animals breaks down here. It is not, this time, that animals are admirable or exemplary, but that human beings are fundamentally animalistic at heart, sharing the violent drives and instincts of the beasts.20

Venus debases mankind, and man, fundamentally animalistic, abandons his nobler faculties to lie with her in violence and chaos.

In lines 258-263, Virgil speaks directly to love's influence on humans:

quid iuvenis, magnum cui versat in ossibus ignem

durus amor? nempe abruptis turbata procellis

nocte natat caeca serus freta; quem super ingens

porta tonat caeli, et scopulis inlisa reclamant

aequora; nec miseri possunt revocare parentes,

nec moritura super crudeli funere virgo.

(What of the youth in whose marrow fierce Love fans the mighty flame? Lo! in the turmoil of bursting storms, late in the black night, he swims the straits. Above him thunders Heaven's mighty portal, and the billows, dashing on the cliffs, echo the cry; yet neither his hapless parent can call him back, nor thought of the maiden doomed to die on his untimely corpse.)

Virgil laments the young man who in a flame of passion challenges the angry elements and causes the death of his lover. This tragic story, a reference to Hero and Leander, displays a tone of universality and thus serves as a commentary on the general nature of ardent love. Herein, love associates with "ossibus ignem," "tonat caeli," and "scopulis inlisa," all uncontrollable and destructive images controlled by the gods (even the gods shake the earth against carnal desire).

 

Virgil and the Bees

 

We directly encounter the bees in Book IV. Virgil uses the idyllic creature to promote his harsh view of sexuality in the context of Roman civilization. Relying on a popular notion of the time, Virgil explains that bees do not copulate, a privileged state for which he hails them. This idea derives from the myth that recounts how Jupiter endowed the bees with the ability to regenerate spontaneously as a reward for helping him during his infant exile. Unfettered by love, bees freely dedicate themselves to industria, matters of the state and the service of their king. "Their amor habendi is particularized in an amor florum and in the renown gained from O^begetting' honey, not offspring."21 Eros, if it were to influence the habits of this creature, would cripple industria and eventually destroy the hive.22

Immune from love's influence, Virgil has the bees transform a tragic human dialectic echoed in his works: sexuality and death. With man, sex and death consistently escort each other. But bees succeed in severing the two. In place of sex, bees substitute pietas and industria, thus forming a nobler match with death. They supplant sexual penchants with militaristic fantasies. Instead of writhing in a flame of love and dying like a beast, the bees adopt a sober demeanor and honorably expire in the service of pietas:

Saepe etiam duris errando in cotibus alas
attrivere, ultroque animam sub fasce dedere:

tantus amor florum et generandi gloria mellis.

(Often, too, as they wander among rugged rocks they

bruise their wings, and freely yield their lives under their loadNso deep is their love of flowers and their glory in begetting honey.) (Book IV.203-205)

The industrious, self-sacrificing and ascetic bees are to be lauded and imitated. Stripped of romantic desire, they accomplish their destiny in founding a sound empire via pietas and industria and die respectably. The Georgics' negative way of viewing primal desire and its conversely positive attitude towards communal affection continue in Virgil's later writings. In Book IV of the Aeneid, Virgil's opinion of erotic love fully exposes itself in one of literature's most celebrated, tragic tales.

In the Aeneid, Virgil stages the tragic result of a brief affair between sensual desire and divine destiny. Dido and Aeneas' drama begins in Book I and culminates in Book IV. The following citations describe growing passions in the same terms employed in the Georgics:

At Cytherea novas artes, nova pectore versat

consilia, ut faciem mutatus et ora Cupido

pro dulci Ascanio veniat, donisque furentem

incendat reginam atque ossibus implicet ignem: (I.657-660)

(But the Cytherean revolves in her breast new wiles, new schemes; how Cupid, changed in face and form, may come in the stead of sweet Ascanius, and by his gifts kindle the queen to madness and send the flame into her very marrow.)

 

Nec moritura tent crudeli funere Dido? (IV.308)

(nor the doom of a cruel death for Dido?)

Like the youth in Virgil's nameless tale (Georgics III: 258-263), Dido, wrapped in a flame of love, is doomed to suffer cruelly. Briggs rightly observes that "the impulses that drive these men and animals, the extremes of behavior to which they go, and the often tragic end to which they succumb, are similar in both poems and show a unified conception of sexual passion."23

The Aeneid not only heightens the evils of sexuality but also clarifies the bees' role as a paradigm of Roman citizenry. Throughout the Georgics, though primarily in Book IV, we see Virgil lauding the bees as semi-divine creatures to be emulated. Briggs feels it safe to conclude that the Aeneid makes "explicit this crucial thematic conception for the bees as ideal citizens, a conception which was only implicit in the Georgics."24 This explicit conception appears in the underworld of Aeneid VI, where the gathering spirits of worthy Romans are again depicted by bees in a simile:

Interea videt Aeneas in valle reducta

seclusum nemus et virgulta sonantia silvae

Lethaeumque, domos placidas qui praenatat, amnem.

hunc circum innumerae gentes populique volabant;

ac velut in pratis ubi apes aestate serena

floribus insidunt variis et candida circum

lilia funduntur, strepit omnis murmure campus
[E?L] tum pater Anchises: O^animae, quibus altera fato

corpora debentur, Lethaei ad fluminis undam

securos latices et longa oblivia potant.

(Meanwhile, in a retired vale, Aeneas sees a sequestered grove and rustling forest thickets, and the river of Lethe drifting past those peaceful homes. About it hovered peoples and tribes unnumbered; even as when, in the meadows, in cloudless summertime, bees light on many-hued blossoms and stream round lustrous lilies and all the fields murmur with the humming [E?L] Then said father Anchises: "Spirits they are, to whom second bodies are owed by Fate, and at the water of Lethe's stream they drink the soothing draught and long forgetfulness.") (Aeneid VI.704-715)

The fields of Elysium hum with the bee-like activity of righteous Romans. Briggs' analysis of the scene is particularly relevant to our discussion of Virgil's stance on love. He writes:

The bees in Book 6 are explicit symbols of [E?L] reincarnated harmony, as if Virgil were making the terms of the simile perfectly clear [E?L] The bees, mentioned as immortal in Geo. 4.206-208, partake of ethereal draughts (219-227) as does the shade, the only part of man that remains after the purgation of the body. The purified soul is therefore the soul free from the trammels of passionate love, which does not reproduce itself and has been made famous by selfless sacrifice (6.664), just like the bees of Geo. 4.197-209.25

In the underworld, the Roman elite, like bees, embody the purgation of the passions. They dwell in a celibate, harmonious state. This state of affairs in the underworld further accentuates the privileged status the absence of amor enjoys in Virgil's textual worlds.

We confirm this opinion in the destinies of Carthage and Rome in the Aeneid. It is precisely amor which robs hive-like Carthage and its queen of earthly glory. On the contrary, the hero who flees from eros in Africa carries the harmony, kingship and asexuality of the bee-community to Rome.26 Even with the introduction of Lavinia in Italy, Aeneas steers wide of the bonds of love. The two, at best, share a distant and utilitarian relationship. "If Virgil takes care not to realize Lavinia as a character, one reason is that she is and must remain--for Aeneas if not for Turnus--little more than the hypostasis of the O^Lavinian shores' through which Troy must pass en route to becoming Rome."27 Virgil never permits Aeneas to meet with Lavinia; "Aeneas cannot be allowed the kind of like-minded union Odysseus praises of Nausicaa in Odyssey VI because Virgil's epic regularly construes heterosexual desire as the enemy, never the support, of social order."28 The Aeneid's hero successfully establishes an empire by fleeing from love and reducing heterosexual relations to a dispassionate tool for cultural destiny.

Ultimately, Virgil expresses regret in his texts that man like the common beast is enticed and disarmed by Venus. She makes man pursue her and consequently he looses reason and abandons his true nature and lofty purposes. Virgil avers sexual passion is inimical to harmony and productivity.29 He suggests that if man is to prosper, he must follow the example of the bees and divest himself of these natural, carnal desires. Virgil's view of love is much more narrow and condemnatory than later notions. Accordingly, we anticipate how Virgil's harsh view may pose a great difficulty to Dante, the Poet in love, who must recast and rewrite the Latin author in his Commedia.

 

Dante, Virgil and Love

 

In light of Virgil's antagonism towards love, it seems a strange paradox that the poet celebrated for a treatise on the nature of love (Vita Nuova) would have chosen Virgil as his guide to lead him to the God of Love. This apparent contradiction clarifies itself when we consider how Dante uses this dissimilarity to fulfill his mission as Christian(izing) poet. Though traditionally cherished as the great auctor and a virtual oracle of wisdom, in truth, Virgil lacks schooling in Christian theology and the art of courtly love, two areas in which the Florentine feels he excels. Therefore, the incongruent nature of their partnership presages a schism, a moment of departure when one will leave or surpass the other. That one is, of course, Dante in all his character and authorial functions. Dante utilizes these cultural differences as a means to advance, at Virgil's expense, his personal religious-romantic ideology and his status as poet.

Before the pilgrim ever reaches Paradise, he has long since left the Latin poet behind. But he takes parts of Virgil with him; Dante carries pieces of Virgil's literary works on an exodus to the highest heaven. He does what this ancient author before him could not do: Dante escorts the literary treasures of antiquity from hell to the company of the blessed. The bees are a tiny part of that literary inheritance. In Purgatory and Paradise, Dante converts them or recontextualizes them, weaving them into a new artistic tapestry, a nuovo libro sacro commissioned by the God of Love. In this accomplishment, Dante leaves his finest predecessor, untouched by equal grace, behind him.

Love stands out as the dominate theme and chief converting agent in the bees' cross-over from their pagan past to their new, holy condition. The fact that bees and love are brought together is extremely problematic for two reasons: (1) Dante's understanding of love markedly differs from the classical view, and (2) in Virgil's texts bees are divorced from the romantic portion of love. In order to unite the two, Dante must disturb and overturn his guide's position on love and his use of the bees.

Deus caritas est, is one of the more salient themes of the Commedia: God is love. Love moves heaven and earth, judges men, redeems the elect by grace and inspires the poet to write. In his definitive work, Comparetti summarizes: "All his [Dante's] emotions are summed up in that one word, O^Amore,' to which he gives the amplest significance, including in it the love of the ideal woman, which he comes to understand in a lofty and mystical sense."30 Love extends to every corner of the Florentine's comedy, the bees without exception. As Comparetti has indicated, Dante's amor does not simply comprise caritas. There is a woman. Accordingly, if the bees are to complete the transition from pagan to Christian rank, they must escape Virgil's harsh view of heterosexual love and conform to Deus caritas et eros est. In the Commedia, Dante italicizes the difference between Virgil's notion of love and his own broader, salvific one.

According to Dante, the ancients misunderstood eros. They saw Venus as vocabol, a superficial understanding, but failed to see her greater role as principio, a springboard to holier affection.31 In Paradiso VIII.1-12, he pens:

Solea creder lo mondo in suo pericolo

che la bella Ciprigna il folle amore

raggiasse, volta nel terzo epiciclo

[E?L]

e da costei ond'io principio piglio

pigliavano il vocabol de la stella.

(Once the world believed, to its peril, that the beautiful Cyprian rayed down mad love, turning in the third epicycle [E?L] from here whence I take my beginning the name of the star)

Dante indicates that the classical world misconstrued the true nature of eros and blames that error for perils that descended upon their age. These verses signal Dante's recognition of a key difference between his and the pagan belief system and lead us into a closer investigation of Dante's personal intellection of love.

Dante's view of romantic love extends well beyond the confines of Virgil's regard for the emotion. Steeped in chivalry and cortesia, Dante expresses a contemporary conception of love: a mixture of Chivalry, Christianity and Germanic reverence for women.32  Essentially, the belief is that romantic love aids faith.33 This love teaches that the gallant knight operates from two inner passions: zeal for faith and zeal for love; Dieu et ma Dame.34 Dante lives the role of the chivalrous lover who looks towards God through the window of his lady. She mediates between his soul and the Divine.

Dante animates this notion in the Commedia by fastening himself to a woman who brings him closer to God. Like the chivalrous lover, God is his ultimate object, not the woman (though he truly enjoys her companionship). Nevertheless, communion with heaven can not be made without an intercessor; Dante requires a romantic vehicle to aid him in his ascensionNBeatrice:

Perfection in some strange sense exists, and walks down the street of Florence to meet him. She is O^the youngest of the Angels'; her image in his thought O^is an exultation of love to subdue him' [E?L] she is the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all good'; she is the equivalent of heaven itself. 35

In a sense, Beatrice plays the role of a saviour to Dante who physically enchants and spiritually uplifts him. Accordingly, their relationship is at once salvific and erotic.36

It is important not to overlook eros in Dante and Beatrice's relationship. Doing so would betray the true nature of their bond and distort Dante's vision of man's journey to the Divine. Eros, as Dante understands it, is not associated with a condemnatory, Virgilian outlook. Dante feels eros is naturally good and wholesome. Though certainly not an end in itself, it is a crucial point of departure to higher enlightenment. 37 Caritas and eros are members of the same being, players in "an overlay which both literally and figuratively resound together at once." 38 This unitary understanding of Dantean love is not shared by all critics.39 Therefore, the following citations serve to strengthen this conception of love in the Commedia:

1.     "Eros need not for ever be on his knees to Agape; he has a right to his delights, they are a part of the Way. The division is not between the Eros of the flesh and the Agape of the soul." 40

2.     "Sexual eros is the initial vehicle of spiritual O^soaring'."41

3.     "Dante's innovation is not, in other words, that divine love has replaced erotic desire, it is that finally, in that world beyond earth and beyond time, the two no longer conflict." 42

These statements express the idea that Dante perceives eros as a crucial element of love that aids man's striving for the ultimate good.

In fact, Beatrice's physical beauty assists the pilgrim's comprehension of the Divine. Her carnal presence nurtures Dante's holy vision:

The most beautiful parts of the body, they therefore have in the highest degree the power to arouse desire and to guide the beholder to the heavenly O^place' in which his existence is rooted [E?L] Her beauty is not only a revealing power but a saving power in that it can make a new nature in those who gaze upon it [E?L] The longings which she arouses are thus O^holy longings.'

43

Beatrice's features encourage contemplation of the Divine. She assumes a dual role for Dante.44 Her corporeal beauty enlarges itself to greater immaterial beauty which heightens Dante's desire for the good and carries him to the threshold of Paradise.45 In contrast to Virgil's scenario, Dante, unlike Aeneas, embraces both the sensible and transcendent beauty of his woman in order to fulfill his destiny. The Chrisitan poet does not flee from the desirable woman but flies with her to his destination, the Christian Roma.

Dante and the Bees

 

In Cantos XVII and XVIII of Purgatorio, Dante introduces the bee simile to Love. Ironically, he initializes the encounter through Virgil. Tutoring the pilgrim, Virgil speaks:

N? creatore n? creatura mai,"

cominci? el, "fligliuol, fu sanza amore,

o naturale o d'animo; e tu O^l sai.

Lo naturale ? sempre sanza errore,

ma l'altro puote errar per malo obietto

o per troppo o per poco di vigore.

Mentre ch'elli ? nel primo ben diretto,

e ne' secondi s? stesso misura,

esser non pu? cagion di mal diletto;

ma quando al mal si torce, o con pi? cura

o con men che non dee corre nel bene,

contra O^l fattore adovra sua fattura.

Quinci comprender puoi ch'esser convene

amor sementa in voi d'ogne virtute

e d'ogne operazion che merta pene. (XVII.91-105)

(He began: "Neither creator nor creature, my son, was ever without love, either natural or of the mind, and this you know. The other may err either through a veiled object, or through too much or too little vigor. While it is directed on the Primal Good, and on the secondary goods observes right measure, it cannot be the cause of sinful pleasure. But when it is turned awry to evil, or speeds to good with more zeal, or with less, than it ought, against the Creator works His creature. Hence you can comprehend that love must needless be the seed in you of every virtue and of every action deserving punishment.)

Curiously, these are not the thoughts expressed by the historical Virgil. The categorization of love into natural and elective (naturale and d'animo) originates in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas.46 Dante transposes Aquinas' philosophy onto Virgil. In the end, Virgil teaches that love, in its pristine form, is pure and will always remain pure, even when acted upon by the will, as long as the Primal Good is its goal. Romantic love develops into the destructive sin of lust only after reason, rational love, misjudges its worth.47 Emilio Pasquini, in the Enciclopedia Dantesca, observes: "Virgilio [E?L] riafferma il peso decisivo della volont?O umana, distinguendo la matera di amore dal segno, la sua potenzialit?O dal suo atto."48 Oddly enough, Virgil never makes this distinction in his works; he never expresses that romantic love is innocuous until acted upon by the human will. Instead, Virgil reviles erotic desire even in its incipiency; romantic love enjoys no liminal space in the Latin poet's volume. Nevertheless, Dante remolds his opinion in this manner. Moreover, he leaves detectable clues that accent the contradiction.

Dante inscribes the following episode in order to emphasize his alterations to Virgil's thought. In Purgatorio XVIII, the author interrupts Virgil's lesson with a request from the pilgrim:

Ond'io: 'Maestro, il mio veder s'avviva

s?g nel tuo lume, ch'io discerno chiaro

quanto la tua ragion parta o descriva.

Per? ti prego, dolce padre caro,

che mi dimostri amore, a cui reduci

ogne buono operare e O^l suo contraro.' (XVIII.10-15)

(Therefore I said, "Master, my sight is so quickened in your light that I discern clearly all that your discourse distinguishes or declares; wherefore, dear and gentle father, I pray that you expound love to me, to which you reduce every good action and its opposite.)

Dante the pilgrim asks why the soul would be culpable for sin if love naturally springs from the mind and burns toward pleasure. With this direct appeal to Virgil, Dante slows the momentum of the narrative, allowing the reader to consider carefully Virgil's reply. Furthermore, he has Virgil beckon the pilgrim to pay close attention, an even stronger intimation to the reader:

'Drizza,' disse, 'ver' me l'agute luci

de lo O^ntelleto, e fieti manifesto

l'error de' ciechi che si fanno duci.' (XVIII.16-18)

(Direct on me the keen eyes of your understanding, he said, and the error will be manifest to you of the blind who make themselves guides.)

Surprisingly, Virgil then responds that the appetites and affections of man are without blame. This explanation runs contrary to what he describes in the Georgics and the Aeneid. Moreover, in the very verses in which Virgil is made to cross his own opinion in the Commedia, Dante inserts a key motif from Virgil's works that signals the incongruity. A close reading reveals the trace:

Per?, l?O onde vegna lo'ntelleto

de le prime notizie, omo non sape,

e de' primi appetibili l'affetto,

che sono in voi s?g come studio in ape

di far lo mele; e questa prima voglia

merto di lode o di biasmo non cape. (XVIII.55-60)

(Therefore, whence comes the intelligence of the first cognitions man does not know, nor whence the affection of the first objects of desire, which exist in you even as zeal in the bee for making honey; and this primal will admits no deserving of praise or blame.)

Virgil explains that the original appetites or affections of man are without blame. Curiously, Dante has the Latin poet substantiate this with an allusion to bees and their zeal for producing honey, an image that hearkens back to the Georgics.

            Virgil admits that neither bees' zeal for honey, nor man's affection, including natural desire, can acquire praise or blame before the will instructs them, effectively leveling the argument against sexuality the historical Virgil espouses in his own works. The poet of the Commedia causes Virgil to belie that bees' lack of sexual zeal, superceded by their zeal for honey, is more admirable than sexual inclinations. In Georgics, Book IV, Virgil had clearly affirmed this:

Illum adeo placuisse apibus mirabere morem,

quod neque concubitu indulgent, nec corpora segnes

in Venerem solvunt aut fetus nixibus edunt; [E?L]

at genus immortale manet. (200-208)

(You will also marvel that this custom has found favour with bees, that they indulge not in conjugal embraces, nor idly unnerve their bodies in love, or bring forth young with travail [E?L] yet the race abides immortal.)

Untouched by Venus, bees are praised as an immortal race. Their nature, defined by a sense of community, gives no place to carnal affections and for this they abide immortal. Virgil clearly does not place love and civil service on equal ground, as if they were two manifestations of a single, originary desire for the good.

           In essence, Dante's Virgil espouses that all desires, even carnal ones, issue from a natural, primal need to rise towards God. Therefore, initially, all desires neither merit praise nor blame. Consequently, the Purgatorio's Virgil excuses romantic love's active, pernicious role and places the weight of responsibility and guilt on the will of man (lo libero arbitrio). This explanation differs from how the historical Virgil strongly blames love. Love is the evil that actively rages in Virgil's buccolic poetry. The will of man bears no responsibility therein. In Virgil's works, the will of man never enters into his invectives on love. Heterosexual desire is the sole recipient of his frustrations. Nevertheless, Dante causes his Virgil to formulate an uncharacteristic attitude towards eros: love in the liminal space of non-action is beyond reproach. As a result, love comes off blameless and man is charged for how he loves. Dante has Virgil preach this doctrine by alluding to his own poetry and then crossing its message. This maneuver places Virgil in an awkward, compromising position within the Commedia; he is at once revered and given the privilege to instruct and also curiously undermined by contradiction and weakness.

In this moment, on the mount of Purgatory, Dante once again subverts Virgil's role as poet and instructor. He even constrains the Latin poet to disclose verbally his weakness. After having attempted a definition of love, Virgil defers further instruction to Beatrice. Domenico Consoli accents the magnitude of this gesture:

e?L qui che Virgilio precisa una distinzione mirante a circoscrivere le sue impossibilit?O e il suo mando: Ed egli a me: "Quanto ragion qui vede/dire ti poss'io/da indi in la t'aspetta/pur a Beatrice, che opra di fede." Tra gli accenni al compito delle due guide questo ? il pi? esplicito nel segnare le attribuzioni e le aree delle competenze specifiche.49

Virgil tells Dante to look and listen to Beatrice to understand love in light of free will. Virgil's wisdom reaches its limit when it comes to love. The question then naturally arises: if the guide is incapable of teaching the doctrine of love, be it in his works or in a post-mortal state, what qualifies him to instruct Dante the pilgrim in Cantos XVI-XVIII? Is Virgil meant to be seen, in his own words, as being without "ragion", or one of the blind "che si fanno duci" (XVIII.46,18)?50

In Purgatory, it is my opinion that the uncharacteristic position on love, the inclusion of the bee simile, and the confession of weakness by Virgil, all in the context of a lesson on love, serve only to subvert Virgil's status and earthly wisdom. Naturally, diminishing Virgil's capacity opens up space into which Dante can rise. Dante the Christian writer moves into the stead of the Latin poet as the voice of romantic love (Vita Nuova) and the God of Love (Commedia). In a small way, Dante accomplishes his mission of establishing Love in literature by correcting Virgil's bee simile and at the same time asserting his exalted poetic rank in Paradise.

The bees are mentioned in word only twice in the Commedia: Purgatorio XVIII and Paradiso XXXI. In both cases ape appear hand-in-hand with amor, not in opposition to it as insisted upon in Virgil's writings. However in Paradise, the bees' union with Love is most salient. In heaven, they actively play a part with Love; they are its agents. Essentially, Dante removes the ape from the symbolizing of men acting in accord with pietas in pagan Rome and places them within the Empyrean of Christ's Rome. During this shift, the bee simile undergoes a radical transformation affected by Love.

            Dante implicitly frames this transfer in Paradiso XXXI. Though the bees are not explicitly referred to as symbols of Rome (like the aguglia in Jupiter, Par. XIX.102), their function as segno of Rome is nonetheless verified in the plot. Upon reaching the Empyrean, Dante compares his entrance to that of a barbarian stepping into Rome. He describes the scene:

Se i barbari, venendo da tal plaga

che ciascun giorno d'Elice si cuopra,

rotante col suo figlio ond'ella ? vaga,

veggendo Roma e l'ardY?Na sua opra,

stupefaciensi, quando Laterano

a le cose martali and? di sopra;

?oeo, che al divino da l'umano,

a l'etterno dal tempo era venuto,

e di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano,

di che stupor dovea esser compiuto!

(Par. XXXI.31-40)

(If the Barbarians, coming from such regions as is covered every day by Helice, wheeling with her son whom she delights in, when they beheld Rome and her mighty work, when Lateran rose above all mortal things, were wonder-struck, I, who to the divine from the human, to the eternal from time had come, and from Florence to a people just and sane, with what amazement must I have been full!)

Like a foreigner coming into Rome, Dante gazes upon his new paradisiacal surroundings in amazement. Interestingly enough, upon observing a swarm of angels in the Christian Rome, the pilgrim chooses to describe the host as bees. It is my opinion, that this episode covertly calls attention to the bees' former role as symbol of Roman citizenry as described in Virgil's texts. In Christ's Rome, though, the bees act and signify differently than they do in the context of the terrestrial, pagan capital. Instead of posing as emblems of asexuality and pietas, the bees in Paradise perform their duty enamored by Love.

            The description of the angels in Paradiso XXXI.1-12, awakens us to the full extent of the bees' transmutation. In the Holy One's Empyrean, bees no longer represent asexuality, the ideal Roman citizen (Georgics), or Rome's founding fathers (Aeneid). Instead, they hold the place of the inhabitants of Celestial paradise. Dante describes the center of God's kingdom:

In forma dunque di candida rosa

mi si mostrava la milizia santa

che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa;

ma l'altra, che volando vede e canta

la gloria di colui che la O^nnamora

e la bont?O che la fece cotanta,

s?g come schiera d'ape che s'infiora

una f?oeata e una si ritorna

l?O dove suo laboro s'insapora,

nel gran fior discendeva che s'addorna

di tante foglie, e quindi risaliva

l?O dove O^l sY?No amor sempre soggiorna.

(In the form then of a pure white rose the saintly host was shown to me, which with His own blood Christ made His bride. But the other hostNwho, as it flies, sees and sings His glory who enamors it and the goodness which made it so greatNlike a swarm of bees which one moment enflower themselves, and the next return to where their work acquires savorNwas descending into the great flower which is adorned with so many petals, and thence reascending to where its love abides forever.)

The bees are no longer asexual emblems of an earthly empire. In fact, in Paradise, bees are angels "enamored" by the love of God (the king bee in medieval iconography) who communicate His love to His sposa, the blessed citizens of a heavenly Rome.51

            The explicit language of love Dante finally conjoins with the bees in the text, fully exposes the extent to which he assimilates and remakes Virgil's simile. The apparent subjects in this passage, the angeli, whose actions the bee simile elucidates, are themselves symbols of love and beauty. Fernando Salsano's entry in the Enciclopedia Dantesca reads:

in qualche caso ? solo la figura dell'angelo che significativamente si offre come simbolo di Amore, come in Rime LXIX: [E?L] ebbi tanto ardir, ch'in la sua cera/ guarda, [e vidi] un angiol figurato' (O^Angiol non sar?O la donna, come pure e nel BuinicelliE?Lma piuttosto Amore', Contini).52

Furthermore, the Florentine's lexical choice firmly associates the God of Love and his angels with eros. Firstly, the candida rosa at the center of the Empyrean is itself an icon of sublime erotic love, adapted from the poetic world of the Roman de la Rose.53 Furthermore, other sensual words lace the episode; the bees mingle with sposa, vedere, cantare, innamorare, infiorarsi, insaporarsi, and ultimately amor. These words function as part of that language of eroticism that saturates Paradiso.54 Psaki explains how Dante pervasively uses "language of bodily, sexual love, the love which absorbs mind, body, eyes, heart, soul, skin, and genitals" to describe rapturous scenes such as this.55 Consequently, the bees' new hive in heaven sits inside the fullness of amore, a union of the transcendental and the erotic conceived by Dante's language and ideology.

 

Conclusion

 

            Dante infuses the bee simile with a topic dear to his heart, which Virgil expressly omits, namely Amor. Dante draws the simile from its ancient context as the embodiment of asexuality, industry and earthly empire, and acquaints it with a comprehensive notion of Love and heavenly empire, thus conforming it to a holier purpose: to live with Love and portray the citizens of Christian heaven. In the process, Dante champions the supremacy of Love and his own poetic achievement.

            More specifically, Purgatorio XVIII and Paradiso XXXI furnish the hinges on which Dante swings meaning from the God-less past to the enlightened present. Through his recontextualization, Dante ultimately proves the indespensible role of Love, eros and caritas, in man's (and bees') journey to God. Virgil, though tacitly recognized for having contributed the simile, is finally overridden by the poeta cristiano. In altering the bees, Dante corrects the past, subverts Virgil, and promotes his status as the poet of Love. The bees, having undergone their spritual transformation, are witnesses with Dante that God is "solo ed etterno, che tutto 'l ciel move/ non moto, con amore e con disio" (italics added) (Par. XXIV.131-132).

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