Dante Alighieri · Philosophy
The doctrine at the heart of the <em>Purgatorio</em>: that every action a creature performs springs from love, so that virtue is love rightly ordered and every sin is love gone wrong - misdirected, too weak, or too strong. To be saved is not to love less but to love rightly.
At the exact centre of the Divine Comedy - the middle canto of the middle book, on a ledge halfway up Mount Purgatory - Virgil stops and delivers the philosophical core of the whole poem: a theory of love. His claim is sweeping. Nothing a creature does, he says, is done without love. Love is not one motive among many; it is the motive, the engine behind every choice, every virtue, every crime. The soul is made to reach toward what appears good to it, and that reaching, that being-drawn-toward, is love. Even the sinner sins out of love - a love pointed at the wrong thing, or held with the wrong intensity. This is why Dante can build an entire moral universe on a single principle: understand a person’s loves, in their direction and their measure, and you understand everything they will do. Where the Inferno showed love frozen and perverted, the Purgatorio shows love being healed.
Virgil draws a crucial distinction. There is a natural love - the built-in inclination every creature has toward its own good, the way fire tends upward and a stone falls. This love, Virgil says, is always without error; it is simply how God made things to seek their fulfilment. But there is a second kind, the love of the rational soul, which chooses its objects - and here is where freedom, and therefore sin, enters. This chosen love can go wrong in three ways: it can fasten on an evil object (wishing harm), or it can pursue the good with too little vigour, or it can chase secondary goods with a hunger that should be reserved for the highest good alone. Because this second love is free, we are responsible for it. Dante is careful here to protect human liberty: we are not helplessly swept along by our desires, because reason has the power to approve or restrain what love proposes. The soul that lets love run unexamined is the soul that sins; the soul that governs love by reason is the soul that grows.
Behind Dante’s whole scheme lies an image he inherited from Augustine: love as a kind of spiritual gravity. Just as a physical body is pulled toward its natural place - flame leaping up, a stone dropping down - so the soul is drawn toward whatever it loves, and cannot rest until it arrives there. ‘My weight is my love,’ Augustine had written; wherever I am carried, it is my love that carries me. Dante makes this the deep logic of the entire Comedy. The damned are weighed down, sunk to the bottom, because they loaded their love onto heavy, earthbound things. The saved rise, because their love has been made light and true, tending upward toward its real home in God. And the poem ends, in its very last line, not with a doctrine but with a force: the Love that moves the sun and the other stars - the same gravity of love that draws every soul, now shown as the power that turns the whole cosmos. To be saved is simply to let your weight be true.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that in the Purgatorio Virgil teaches that love is the seed of every virtue and of every act that merits punishment, and that the mountain is organized by three kinds of disordered love: love perverted (aimed at a neighbour’s harm), love deficient (too little zeal for the good), and love excessive (too muc…
Leads to Augustine of Hippo.
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