3 - The Symbolist view of Dante as a poet of Sophia

Summary

Vladimir Solovyov's teaching on Sophia was one of the most important influences on the world-view of the religious Symbolists and on their understanding of love and poetry. In a way which is often characteristic of emergent movements, the new poets sought to consolidate their position by establishing a tradition of predecessors with roots reaching far back into the past. Solovyov had already set a precedent for the sense of a tradition of poets of Sophia in his essays on various Russian poets of the nineteenth century. The Symbolists carried this tendency a step further; they developed it to include not only the poets whom Solovyov had written about, but also two of the poets whom he had translated: Dante and Petrarch. Both these poets had loved earthly women, Beatrice and Laura, and through them had risen to the mystical love of the Virgin Mary and ultimately of God. It was easy for the Symbolists to see in this a manifestation of Solovyov's ideal of love of Sophia through the love of an earthly woman, celebrated in poetry, particularly since Solovyov had associated Sophia with the Virgin Mary and had introduced both Petrarch and Dante into a Sophiological context by translating their poetry.

Through Solovyov, the Symbolists therefore reached back to Petrarch and Dante as their spiritual and poetic precursors. Since, however, the immediate source of their ideas was in Solovyov, not in Dante, this in effect meant that they were either applying Solovyovian concepts to their understanding of Dante, or simply borrowing images from the Catholic or Dantesque traditions and using these to express essentially Solovyovian ideas.