«DANTE SPECCHIO UMANO»: La lettura dantesca di María Zambrano

The two essays María Zambrano dedicated to Dante – Dante, espejo humano and El infierno (Dante) – are the result of a long acquaintance with the great poet’s work, which took place especially in her exile years in Italy. Zambrano’s approach to Dante is that of a woman who lives in exile; the first element she has in common with the poet is, indeed, the experience of the exile (with its multiple meanings). In fact, for both Dante and Zambrano, the exile event goes beyond the sphere of a dramatic personal history to become the cypher of a peculiar initiatory ritual. Zambrano reads Dante in a mystical-esoteric key, as a mirror that puts “in relation” all existing things – the high and the low, the beast and the angel, the divine and the human, the visible and the invisible – and that marks a path of loving knowledge based on the alchemical transformation of oneself. For the Spanish thinker, Dante has experienced something more than human love. It is on this peculiar loving knowledge that Beatrice (both the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova and that of the Commedia) watches over. Dante’s initiation into loving knowledge is the aspect that most fascinates Zambrano; hence stems the closeness of her approach with some “heterodox” readings of Dante such as René Guénon’s one.