The Beatrician Moment: Dante Alighieri’s Poetic Transgression Anonymous College

An act of transgression is the start of a new consciousness and for Dante Alighieri the visionary experience is initiated with such an action. La Vita Nuova explores ideas of love, poetry, and expression of the self through the Beatrician moment and the continuous exploration and devotion to Beatrice’s mythology. Dante expresses that the visionary experience is not unlike a poetic or religious experience, where each has the power to transform through an apocalyptic moment. This is known as the Beatrician moment and Dante transgressed the contemporary religious agenda by establishing that it can be reached through poetry. For Dante, the visionary experience can be accessed through love (inspiration), in understanding that a seemingly ordinary person can stand in for grand ideas thus becoming mythologized, that poetry can be a religious experience of both conversion and transgression (perhaps simultaneously), and that it all culminates to the Beatrician moment – a new calling and consciousness.

Dante as a visionary falls at the intersection of paganism and Catholicism – in that his works and theories seemingly adhere to the Catholic tradition, but at the core of his ideas lie a pagan ego. In his Divine Comedy, hell and heaven are...