단테의 사랑: 성(聖)과 속(俗)의 교차

Abstract

The problem of the relationship between the sacred and the profane leads us to highlight Dante’s world in terms of the concept of love. Dante’s world consists in the unique and persistent endeavor to question how such diverse oppositions as human reason and divine providence, physical desire and spiritual love, political power and sacramental authority, the vernacular-peripheral language and the Latin-central language, are all harmoniously intermingled. We may take the concept of love as the most proper way to approach Dante’s world for which the problem of the relationship between the sacred and the profane offers a platform to discuss the subject of ‘Dante in love’. Eliade’s book The Sacred and the Profane provides us with the starting point for our discussion although he tends to advocate the Sacred exclusively; in contrast, the love, for Dante, seems to derive from the associative relationship of the sacred and the profane. Saint Augustine and the Roman poet Vergil are noteworthy for my work of classifying Dante’s love in those two properties, and further, Beatrice, Francesca, Odyssey, and the Virgin Mary are all analyzed in order to show that the sacred and the profane are associated with each other in Dante’s poetic writings (the Divine Comedy and the Vita nuova) so as to make him move toward salvation successfully. In his pilgrimage, Dante never assures us that his love is completely pure; rather his love can be contaminated and corruptible. It is from this affirmation that he is substantially faithful to Augustine’s belief on the way of our ‘good’ existence and at the same time for his guide adopts Vergil who was the Roman pagan poet, and shows an ambiguous attitude to Beatrice, Francesca and Odyssey that can hardly belong to any pre-fixed category between the sacred or the profane. The Virgin Mary is certainly the origin of the association between the sacred and the profane in that She dispatches Lucia and Beatrice to save the pilgrim Dante in the dark wood, and more importantly, she employes her free will for the incarnation of Jesus Christ which implies that the Virgin Mary plays the role of mediating God and human. Now on the summit of the paradise, the pilgrim gets united with the God but he invites us to refer to the whole process of his pilgrim from the dark wood to the eternal happiness. The salvation is here suggested as his experience of uniting the sacred and the profane rather than directing toward the completely pure status of the sacred.