ABSTRACT
Judging from the literature of the period, the twelfth century was an age of love. Songs of troubadours and minnesingers, the emergence of the “romance” among court poets, and an outpouring of sermons and commentaries on the Song of Songs by monastic theologians: such diverse sources celebrate love as central to human experience, extolling its joys and honoring its sorrows, plumbing the depths of its anguish and measuring the heights of its delight. The trajectory of this literature reaches its apogee with Dante’s Divine Comedy, an epic masterpiece narrating a pilgrim’s journey through the pit of Hell, up the terraces of Mount Purgatory, and into the heavenly sphere of Paradise. At the end of this epic journey, the pilgrim surveys the heavenly realm with an often uncomprehending awe, and in his confusion finds himself in the presence of one whom Dante describes as an “elder in the robes of heaven’s saints” whose eyes were “filled with the divine / joy of the blest, his attitude with love / that every tender-hearted father knows.” He identifies himself as Bernard of Clairvaux, the saint who becomes his final guide into heaven’s mysteries. Dante opens the final canto with Bernard’s prayer, the last speech the pilgrim “hears” before the entire scene turns from the mediation of language to interior reflection and the immediacy of pure vision. These words lead the pilgrim-and, by inference, the readerinto an understanding of love, which Dante describes as “a beauty
which was joy in the eyes of all the other saints” who found themselves in paradise.
