Our culture is consumed with romantic love. Admittedly, sexual gratification is often confused for love. Even so, pop songs are filled with promises of eternal happiness in the arms of another, romantic comedies remain a perennial favorite for moviegoers on dates, and the Valentine’s Day industry is as strong as ever even amid massive inflation and economic turmoil. However, such understandings of love are extremely shallow.
Love is the core of our relationship with God and serves as the root of our obedience or disobedience to His law. The fourteenth-century Florentine poet Dante Alighieri explores the contours of this truth in his most famous work, La commedia, by examining the myriad ways that disordered love produces sin and destruction, which can be healed only by the soul submitting to the will of God. In this essay, we will consider Dante’s insights for our own edification in love and obedience.
Dante Alighieri
The first decade of the fourteenth century was nothing like Dante had hoped it would be. When the century began, he had become a prominent political leader in his hometown of Florence, which had recently developed into a burgeoning center of trade and finance. Still in his mid-thirties, he had published a major work of poetry and prose, the Vita nuova, which received much praise. He and his literary friends, Guido Calvalcanti and Guido Guinizelli, were developing a new literary movement, which he called the Sweet New Style (Dolce stil novo), that idealized the romantic love of troubadour poetry, turning it into a celebration of divine love through reflection on the beauties of human love and the female form.
But in late 1301, the political tide turned in Florence, and Dante, who had been working to moderate the intense political infighting, found himself falsely convicted in absentia of embezzlement, forgery, and opposition to the pope. As a result, his political opponents stripped him of his property and exiled him from his hometown on penalty of death. In fourteenth-century Italy, “there was no provision for ‘naturalization’ into some other community,” which meant that Dante spent the rest of his life relying on the kindness of friends in other towns to provide him with housing and food.[1] As Dante put it,
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wilderness,
for I had wandered from the straight and true.[2]
During his years of physical wandering, Dante also began a spiritual journey trying to understand how his life had unraveled so spectacularly. Along the way, he produced one of the greatest masterpieces of poetry ever written—La commedia or The Divine Comedy. This epic poem follows Dante on a spiritual journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. His account of this journey was not meant to explain what the afterlife actually looked like, but to examine how sin, sanctification, and glorification work upon the soul. Along the way, Dante and the reader explore the depth of human depravity, the grace of justification and sanctification, and the immeasurable glory of God, all the while discovering that these spiritual truths give meaning to the specific events in fourteenth-century Florence. More, they give meaning to all specific events, or, as Augustine understood the matter, these eternal principles give significance to the data of history.[3] Thus, for Dante, theology, morality, and metaphysics serve as the terms of analysis for all reality rather than a contemporary obsession with social, economic, and cultural influences on events and people.[4] Further, Dante saw the thoughts and deeds of men and women as fundamentally moral actions pursued out of love.
Disordered Love Is Hell
In the first part of his journey, Dante follows his guide, the ancient Roman poet Virgil—who, to some degree, represents reason—through Hell (Inferno) where he learns about the manifold wickedness of our fallen nature. As he descends each circle of Hell, Dante holds conversations with the damned who speak with him about the political, social, and moral state of fourteenth-century Europe and the Roman Catholic Church. He also discovers (and we through him discover) that the root cause of sin is disordered love.
In one of Dante’s most well-known interactions in Inferno, he talks with an adulterous couple, Paolo and Francesca, who were murdered by Francesca’s husband and condemned to the circle of the lustful in Hell. Because they allowed desire to control reason in life, they are now caught in an eternal wind that drives their souls uncontrollably through the air like leaves in an autumn gale.
The couple are allowed to rest briefly while Dante questions them about their sin. They take turns relating how they fell into adultery, while the other weeps, wracked with sorrow. At the last, reading tempting romantic poetry together was their undoing, but, more importantly, Francesca asserts,
Love that allows no loved one not to love,
seized me with such a strong delight in [Paolo]
that, as you see, it will not leave me yet.
Love led us to one death.[5]
Even now, the couple are unwilling to take responsibility for their sin. Francesca accuses the author of their reading material of being a pander, or pimp, for encouraging them to sin. But more, love was at fault. As far as she is concerned, romantic desire cannot be gainsaid. Reason must bow to the power of desire. If she lived in modern America, she would have a bumper sticker on her car that read, “Love is love.”
As Dante sees it, ungoverned and disordered love is precisely the problem. Paolo and Francesca should have loved one another as good neighbors in relation to their love for God. However, they allowed their desires to elevate their love for one another against the divine order. This misalignment is the foundation of sin.
Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
We have been designed for an eternal relationship with God, Whose glory shines with unmatched brilliance (Mt. 17:2) and from Whom all goodness flows (Jas. 1:17). God is love (1 Jn. 4:8), and His love led Him to give His Son that we might be saved (Jn. 3:16). All the goodness and beauty of creation and the sacrificial Gift of God call us to our ultimate end—God.
In our fallen estate, however, our love for creatures persistently tends to overshadow our love for the Creator (Rom. 1:25). Such disordered love is sin and traps us within a closed circle of blind, sterile torment, cut off from God. Of course, the ultimate experience of such disorder is Hell, but, as C. S. Lewis explained in his own literary spiritual journey, The Great Divorce, sin has the power to begin this process of damnation even now. An inordinate love for food can lead to an obsession with pleasuring our taste buds to the exclusion of our responsibility to care for our bodies well now. An inordinate love for our national and familial identities can cultivate a dominating pride that will not permit us to see anything of worth beyond ourselves.
The solution to this problem is to bring all our loves under the submission of our love of God. Saint Augustine also understood love to be “the essence of moral law.”[6] However, he noted that we are unable to order our loves rightly on our own. Rather, only through the reformation of our wills through divine grace can we then bring order to our desires through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Dante agrees with Augustine’s assessment, though he would have argued that acts of penance were necessary to complete the work of the Holy Spirit in teaching us to submit our wills to God’s will. As Dante begins his ascension through the cosmos that makes up the various levels of Heaven, he stops to learn from and increase the love of the saints who reside on the lowest level, which he associates with the Moon.
During his conversation with Piccarda, the deceased sister of a friend, Dante asks a wonderful question. How can these gloriously redeemed souls be satisfied with the lowest station in Heaven? Piccarda explains that true happiness is learning to submit our wills completely to the will of God.
Brother, the virtue of our charity
Brings quiet to our wills, so we desire
But what we have, and thirst for nothing else.
If we should feel a yearning to be higher,
Such a desire would strike disharmony
Against His will who knows, and will us here.
. . . .
For it is of the essence of this bliss
To hold one’s dwelling in the divine Will,
Who makes our single wills the same, and His.[7]
Happiness is to love what God has willed us to love in the way that He has willed. To love is to obey, and to obey is to experience the greatest pleasure because we have submitted to the divine will. While Protestants, such as myself, would reject Dante’s medieval Roman Catholic practice of penance, he is right about the end of our sanctification. As we grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ, we are learning to love properly and enjoy God forever. We are learning that our love of Him must excel all other loves.
Conclusion
A half millennium after Dante’s death, James Sammis wrote a popular hymn titled “Trust and Obey.” Sammis also saw that obedience is connected to following the will of God. As he noted, we can prove the delights of His love only when we surrender completely to His will. For to be happy in Jesus, we must learn to order our loves as He wills. Once every love has been crucified and submitted to our love for Him, we will have learned to find our pleasure in obedience. Only then can we love and obey, for there is no other way.
[1] Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling, “Introduction,” in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Volume 1, Inferno, by Dante Alighieri, trans. Robert M. Durling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9.
[2] Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Anthony Esolen (New York: Modern Library, 2005), 3: canto i, 1–3.
[3] Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy: Volume 2, Medieval Philosophy (New York: Image, 1993), 85–86.
[4] Martinez and Durlin, 4.
[5] Dante, Inferno, 51: canto v, 103–106.
[6] Copleston, 84.
[7] Dante Alighieri, Paradise, trans. Anthony Esolen (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 29: canto iii, 70–75, 79–81.
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