Commentary Purg XXXI 47-54

Beatrice's phrasing offers a good example of the cause of the difficulty many have in interpreting her role in this poem.  She tells Dante that her buried flesh should have led him elsewhere from where he elected to go (in this context, clearly other women [cosa mortale, 'mortal thing']).  This is not because she was more beautiful in her fleshly being than they, but because she offered him what they did and could not, 'il sommo piacer' (the highest beauty).  The verbal noun piacer is used only once in the first half of the poem (it describes Paolo's physical attractiveness at [Inf V 104]).  When it is found again (at [Purg XVIII 21]), it then occurs thirty-four times in the second half, twenty-one of these in Paradiso.  It is often used to denote the highest beauty of all, that of God.  The word is used three times in this canto (vv. 35, 50, 52), its densest presence in the Comedy.  The false beauty of Beatrice's rivals ([Purg XXXI 35]) should have been countered by the highest beauty that he had found in her.  The phrase 'sommo piacer' was traditionally interpreted as referring to Beatrice as the most beautiful of all mortals.  I.e., Dante's failure was in chasing after women who were not as beautiful as she was.  This disastrous interpretation, undermined by the very antithesis present in Beatrice's formulations, sommo piacer / cosa mortale, which polarizes divine and human beauty, was intelligently dismissed in Mazzoni's gloss (Mazz.1965.2), pp. 67-72.  Mazzoni demonstrates that Dante is relying upon the Victorine tradition that discussed the beauty of God, even as it was manifest in individual human beings, the summa pulchritudo (highest beauty) in the phrase of Hugh of St. Victor (p. 68).  (For a study of Dante's ideas about beauty see John Took [Took.1984.1].)