Beatrice And College · Best

College, in its highest form, serves a similar function.

Today’s university is often framed as vocational training: a transactional means to a career. But the deeper, more medieval promise of higher education—rooted in the very universities Dante would have known in Bologna and Paris—is beatrician. It promises an encounter with something that fundamentally reorders your inner life. beatrice and college

So if you are a student now, do not ask only what this degree will get you. Ask: Who is your Beatrice on this campus? And are you brave enough to follow her—even when she leads you out of your comfort zone and into the stars? College, in its highest form, serves a similar function

The famous line from Inferno —“There is no greater sorrow than to recall our happy times in misery” (Canto V)—echoes through every senior’s reflection. College, like Dante’s love for Beatrice, is tinged with necessary loss. It is a temporary paradise. The late nights in the library, the intellectual crushes, the sudden clarity in a seminar—these are not meant to last. They are meant to transform. It promises an encounter with something that fundamentally

Dante ends Paradiso having seen God, but he returns to earth to write the poem. The college graduate ends their commencement not with arrival, but with a choice: to continue the journey, carrying their internal Beatrice forward. The diploma is not the heaven. It is the memory of light that makes the rest of the dark wood navigable.