Clarifying the Darkness of Despair: The Virgin Mary, Dawn of the New Creation from Irenaeus to Dante”

Abstract

In the opening canto of the Inferno, having spent a long, desperate night wandering in the dark wood, Dante catches a brief glimpse of the dawn rising over a mountain. Hope rising briefly in his soul, he attempts to climb upwards out of the wooded valley but is driven back by a leopard, whereupon “the hour of the day and the sweet season”, (43) once again give him a moment of hope, before a further two savage beasts impede his passage and he is forced to take the downward road to Hell, a place which he defines in terms of its utter lack of hope: “Abandon all hope, you who enter” (Inf. 3:9). Having passed through the realm of despair, he eventually emerges onto the shores of Mount Purgatory, where he beholds the sky hued with the, “sweet colour of oriental sapphire” (Purg. 1:13), as hope dawns anew at the beginning of the second cantica. In the third realm of the poem we will encounter two further dawns (Par. 23 and 31), both of which Dante links to these earlier auroral events through a series of subtle intra-texts that all point to the Virgin Mary.