Master, the light you shed has made
my sight so keen that now I clearly see
all that your words mean or what they imply.
So I beseech you, father, kind and dear,
define love for me, please, which is, you say,
the source of every virtue, every vice.
Purgatory XVIII.10 ff
In the last Canto Virgil began his discourse on the nature of love. Here Dante gets right to the point: "define love for me". Easier said than done, one may think. So Virgil leads Dante through several steps in order to explain more fully the nature of love. Cast aside Hollywood and Hallmark if you wish to follow Virgil at this point. Love in its infancy is the soul's movement toward that which pleases it. There is in humaniy an "apprehensive power" (22) which forces the mind to be "attentive" to the thing it desires. And if the mind is attentive, the mind inclines toward the object it desires: "that inclination is love" (26) Virgil tells Dante. So we begin with an inward image of the thing we wish to love, and then we incline toward the thing itself.
This first movement of the soul is what Dante will call "natural"; we are created to love. The example given by Virgil here is of fire moving upward to its natural place: "inspired by its own nature to ascend, seeking to be in its own element". (28) Language here might be a problem for us. We contemporary westerners tend to use the word "natural" in different senses that what Dante means. Sometimes "natural" means "what I want". For Dante, humanity is created by God with certain characteristics and certain purposes, so what is "natural" really means according to our nature as intended and created by God. "Natural", then, is not necessarily what I want, but what God intended for me at my creation.
It is with this in mind that Virgil says to Dante:
It should be clear to you by now how blind
to truth those people are who make the claims
that every love is, in itself, good love.
(34-36)
Next up: what then is "good love", and what distinguishes it from "bad love"?
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