The Figure of Beatrice Quotes

“The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“Eros is often our salvation from a false agape, as agape is from tyrannical eros. Redemption is everywhere exchanged.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“The chief business of man is at any moment to be realizing his powers of intellectual apprehension—to understand, to the utmost of his capacity, things as they are.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“That moment may last for the flash of her smile or for an evening or for six months. But it desires more than such a miracle; it desires the total and voluntary conversion of the lover.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“The forest itself has different names in different tongues — Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“What then are those fruits? They are, according to Aristotle, eleven; they are: (1) Courage—which controls rashness and timidity. (2) Temperance—which controls indulgence and abstinence. (3) Liberality—which controls giving and receiving. (4) Magnificence—which incurs and limits great expense. (5) Magnanimity—which moderates and acquires honour and reputation. (6) Love of honour—which moderates and orders us as regards this world’s honours. (7) Mansuetude—which moderates our anger and our overmuch patience with external evils. (8) Affability—which makes us ‘con-vivial’ or companionable with others. (9) Truthfulness—which prevents us in our talk from pretending to be more or less than we are. (10) Pleasantness (eutrapelia)—which sets us free to make a proper and easy use of amusement (‘sollazia’—solace). (11) Justice—which constrains us to love and practise directness in all things. These are the eleven virtues of largesse; these are the powers which are provoked into action by the girl’s challenge, because they are the ‘valore’ of a man. It is indeed these which Beatrice, consciously or unconsciously, encourages, and in which she takes delight.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“He who does not merit—Beatrice? say, ‘salute’, salvation—need not hope to find her. But this is to identify Beatrice with salvation? Yes, and this is the identity of the Image with that beyond the Image. Beatrice is the Image and the foretaste of salvation.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“He was also a poet, and a particular kind of poet; what kind he describes in the Purgatorio (XXIV, 52-63) Io mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo che ditta dentro, vo significando. ‘I am one who, when Love breathes in me, note it, and expound it after whatever manner he dictates.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante