Courtly Love In Dante's Paradiso

Dante, an Italian poet during the late middle ages, successfully parallels courtly love with Platonic love in both the La Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy. Though following the common characteristics of a courtly love, Dante attempts to promote love by elevating it through the lenses of difference levels. Through his love affair with Beatrice, although Beatrice has died, he remains his love and prompts a state of godly love in Paradiso. Dante, aiming to promote the most ideal type of love, criticizes common lust while praises the godly love by comparing his state of mind before and after Beatrice’s death. PJ Klemp essay “Layers of love in Dante’s Vita Nuova” explains the origins of Dante’s love in Plato and Aristotle themes that designate

On the other hand, the Inferno centers on those who turned their back to their “creator” and “source of life” in the fulfilling of earthly desires, and are thus damned for eternity. In between these two extremes is Purgatorio, which deals with the knowledge and teaching of love, as Beatrice and others help outline love for Dante so he can make the climb to paradise and be worthy. For the reader to understand the idea of Dante’s love, one must understand the influence of Aristotle, Plato, and Dante’s “love at first sight” Beatrice in transforming his concept of will and of love in life. In his Divine Comedy, Dante gains salvation through the transformation of his will to love, and hopes that the reader will also take away the knowledge and concept of love he uses to revert to the right path of

In Purgatorio that describes Virgil’s psychology of love as “an explicitly Aristotelian character: the intellectual soul…feels a natural love for all that appears to promise happiness.” (122). Even though the intellectual soul may chose to feel love for certain things, the human soul more importantly has an “inborn and essential craving for happiness,” and this “craving can only in fact be fulfilled by God”. This idea of a craving for happiness in the soul and the intellectual soul feeling love for things that inspire happiness corresponds to the idea that man has sense and reason in their will. In Purgatorio further illustrates the influence of Aristotle and Plato in developing free will into the concept of love with “So, man cannot know where his cognizance of primal concepts comes from – or his bent for those primary objects of desire” (55-57). Virgil is telling Dante that each man has free will by the fact that each man’s loves and desires are divided into natural (reason) and cognitive (sense). The natural inherently loves the ultimate good (God), while the mental love can desire whatever attracts it, and must be trained to desire only worthy things. Natural refers to the primal concepts in Virgil’s direct quote and bent is his cognitive or actual free will. The natural can also be referred to as the primary