The Nature of Love and Free Will — Divine Comedy

Virgil ends and searches Dante's looks for content. Outwardly mute, inwardly Dante fears his questioning offends. The true father marks the secret wish and gives him boldness. Master, my sight gathers such virtue from thy beams that all thy words convey is distinct: unfold by proof that love from which as from their source thou bring'st all good deeds and their opposite. Direct thy ken, Virgil says, and thou shalt see how much those blind have erred who make themselves the guides of men. The soul, created apt to love, moves whichever way aught pleasing prompts her, once pleasure wakes her into act. Apprehension forms a counterfeit of substance; the ideal shape attracts the soul; if she incline, love is that inclining, and a new nature is knit by pleasure. Then as fire points up toward its birth-place, the captive soul enters desire, a spiritual motion that never rests before enjoyment of the thing it loves. Enough to show how hidden the truth is from those who aver all love praise-worthy in itself. If the wax be good, it follows not the impression must.

New doubts: if love is offered from without, and the spirit knows no other footing, is there desert of hers, right or wrong? What reason discovers, Virgil can show; what lies beyond, expect from Beatrice. Spirit joined to matter has a specific virtue felt only in its work, as vegetable life by the green leaf. Intellect's first notices, and the appetites' first affections, you know not: such in you as zeal in bees to gather honey; at the first, volition meriting neither blame nor praise. But over each lower faculty you have that virtue whose just voice utters counsel and should keep the threshold of assent. Here is the source of merit, as she takes or severs affections, winnowed as the chaff. Those who went deepest in reason marked that innate freedom and left their moral teaching to the world. Grant that from necessity arise all love that glows within you; to dismiss or harbour it, the power is in yourselves. Beatrice, in her style, names free choice the noble virtue.

The moon, well nigh midnight, makes the stars wink; her disk seems a crag on fire, up the vault the sun warms when Rome sees him set between Sardinia and Corsica. The weight on Dante's thought is lightened by the spirit who raises Andes above Mantua's name. He stands musing as in dreary slumber, not long: a multitude rushes from behind, curving rapid steps, like Ismenus and Asopus when Thebes needed Bacchus at midnight. Two at their head cry weeping: Blessed Mary sought with haste the hilly region; Caesar darted from Marseilles to Spain. The others: let not time be lost through slackness of affection; hearty zeal to serve reanimates celestial grace. Virgil asks the nearest rifted rock for a man who yet lives. Come after us; we may not linger. An abbot of San Zeno in Verona, in Barbarossa's day, names a soon-dying lord who will rue setting his ill-compact son in place of the true pastor. In the rear, two with sharp remorse: first they died to whom the sea opened ere Jordan saw his heirs; and they who with Aeneas endured not, and chose life without glory. Thought follows thought until the eye closes, and meditation changes to dream.