The Courage to Enter the Fire

seized him for the fair body
that was taken from me; and the manner still grieves me.

Love, which allows no loved one not to love,
seized me with such delight in him
that, as you see, it has not left me even now.

Love led us to one death:
Caina awaits the one who took our lives.

*- Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto V

When reason and the heart are at odds, it is hard to find the right words to express what we feel, think or experience.

Sometimes inner struggles leave us lost and disappointed when we realise how hard we have found it to love ourselves and summon the courage to face certain situations.

To follow our hearts, we sometimes lie to ourselves or end up believing what we wish were true.

In these moments, perhaps it helps to listen to someone who has found a way through, or someone who knows how to describe what they have experienced. Or even someone who, like us, is still trying to understand.

The words of great writers can come to our aid.

My wish, for this issue, is to allow myself to have nothing more to say and to draw on the words of those who knew better than I how to describe life, limiting myself to a commentary that is more didactic than expository, as an exercise in style.

Love as the Subject

Looking at the verses of the Divine Comedy, we find some remarkably interesting things that show us that the protagonist is often love, not the people.

LOVE, in the famous lines of Canto V, is always the subject. Seized him, seized me, led us.

Francesca never appears as the agent of an action. Even the loss of her own body is expressed in the passive voice: “that was taken from me”. Not a single action originates with her.

Francesca did not sacrifice herself. Francesca abdicated. Her verse describes, with clinical precision, the heart overruling reason.

Sacrifice is another matter. Sacrifice requires you to see the cost, calculate it, and pay it anyway. It requires a self that stays upright long enough to be given over.

The Wall of Fire

Almost sixty cantos later, Dante wrote the opposite scene, and this time he himself is the protagonist.

Purgatorio, Canto XXVII. The final terrace, that of the lustful. To leave, one must cross a wall of fire. Dante freezes.

Virgil — reason — tries three arguments, each stronger than the last: the fire burns but does not kill; I have already brought you safely past the abyss, trust me; test it yourself with the hem of your robe.

Three impeccable arguments. No effect. In line 33, Dante writes the most honest line in the entire poem:

And I, still motionless, against my conscience.

Against my conscience: I am disobeying what I myself know to be true. Not ignorance. Not doubt. Paralysis. The fragility of making a decision does not lie in the lover overwhelmed by passion: it lies in the man who has reasoned well but cannot move his foot.

Then Virgil stops arguing. He does not find a better fourth argument. He changes register.

Now see, my son: between Beatrice and you stands this wall.

Look at how this line is constructed: no consolation. Just one preposition, between, that places three things in a straight line — her, you, the obstacle. This is not rhetoric, it is topography. And it works instantly. Virgil accompanies him to the summit and bids him farewell: “your will is free, upright and sound… for I crown and mitre you over yourself”. I make you king and bishop of yourself.

The hardest sacrifice is not entering the fire. It is realising that, on the other side, the one who brought you there is no longer there. Whoever chooses one path leaves all the others behind. Sacrificing yourself for love does not mean letting the heart overrule reason. It means using reason right up to the last metre, recognising that beyond that point it can do no more, and crossing anyway. Knowing the cost. Paying it in full.

The fire does not go out when you enter. It goes out when you leave.

Editor's note. This text is an excerpt. The full article appears in the “Amore” issue of Emozioni.

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