Love In Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio

Often, especially in the most modern and current times, love is regarded as a secondary objective that occurs without special heed in life. However, in a religious context, love can be interpreted as an entity that should be necessarily deliberate. For example, in Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio– an exploration of the purgatory preceding heaven, or ‘Paradiso’– Dante aligns the evolution of sin with how or towards what love is directed. Love is more complicated in Dante’s framework than most would suppose, and ultimately love can be heinous if not practiced correctly. In addition, several eras before Dante’s livelihood, a great influencer of Western Christianity by the name of Saint Augustine made analogous suppositions. Though less outlined, so …show more content…
This is not a “natural love” (Alighieri 281), whereas an abundance can be regarded as an unhealthy obsession, and a scant bit would border or arrive at depreciation. The concomitants of this figuring are sloth (or accidia), greed, gluttony, and lust, symbolic manifestations of indecision and then misguided coveting in that respective order. That being established, Virgil also says, “As long as [love] is directed to the first Good and / moderates its love of lesser goods, it cannot be a / cause of evil pleasure” (Alighieri 281). In this vein, he confirms that love can be righteous too.
Saint Augustine, on the other hand, is more inconspicuous with his allusions to love. Still, many of Augustine’s writings have centered on love unabashedly. In his Confessions, for one, some statements he makes about love are comparable to Dante’s Purgatorio. To quote Confessions Book X, “He loves Thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake” (Hedges). Such a platitude sounds strikingly similar to how one can love something that is good in an evil way, spurring on sloth, greed, gluttony, or