단테의 『신생』: 새로운 사랑, 새로운 삶

Abstract

In Vita Nuova, Dante begins his love of Beatrice with the tradition of the stilnovisti (dolce stil nuovo) which adds philosophical dimension to the troubadour lyrics (canso). While drawing upon the philosophy of love by such poets as Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti, however, Dante renovates it to be a new idea of love. By opening up the blockage of love as death (Cavalcanti) and extending the concept of the angel-like lady (Guinizelli), Dante elevates Beatrice to be a channel of divine love and thus a new life. The first half of Vita Nuova consists of three encounters and visions: 1) Dante meets Beatrice who answers his attention with greeting, and afterwards, he suffers from the stilnovisti phenomena of erotic illness; 2) due to the misunderstanding caused by Dante’s having the screen ladies, Beatrice refuses greeting to him, and the God of Love stops using the screen (“simulacra”) to hide Dante’s love for Beatrice. 3) Beatrice’s death, as a postfiguration of Christ’s death, induces Dante to have a glimpse of the love of divine nature. It can be said that by the three visions Dante’s soul experiences the outward/inward/ upward movement. In the process, Dante transforms Guinizelli’s poetics of simile to his own poetics of metaphor, or the incarnational poetics: for Dante, the lady is no more like an angel, but she is a divine being. And this new love and new life of Dante serves as a reply to Cavalcantian definition of the love as “death.” But this is not to say that Dante’s soul advances in an orderly fashion from the exterior realm via the interior to the superior, or from the typical stilnovisti manner of love as death via Guinizelli’s angelic lady to Beatrice as a mediatrix to redemption. Not only does Dante relapse into the love of a substitute for Beatrice (a noble lady at the window) in the latter half of Vita Nuova; the mode of “simile” is also prevalent in Vita Nuova as a whole. The God of Love, the two screen ladies and the lady at the window, all represent simulacra of Christ or Beatrice. Further, the human language is always lame, falling short of the divine entity of Logos, which Dante might be able to learn how to express in the Divine Comedy. In Vita Nuova as a realm of memory and visio imaginativa, Dante’s attempt is, at best, to find a way to caritas, being oftentimes astray from it.