Dante Alighieri made his name in Florence by writing love poems, especially poems that sang of his beloved Beatrice in the courtly style of the late thirteenth century. And while his master work, the Divine Comedy, is a dramatic epic, it is not a departure from his earlier form. Indeed, we best understand the Commedia if we read the poem as an audacious elevation of love poetry into a narrative of human salvation. At the heart of Dante’s mature poetic and theological vision is his conviction that God’s love is the force animating the whole of creation, “the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars” (Paradiso 33.145; tr. Hollander and Hollander, 2008).

Love is, quite literally, at the heart of the Commedia. In the central cantos of the Purgatorio, Dante’s guide Virgil presents a philosophical anthropology of love. Because Dante places this discourse at the heart of the Commedia, the poet invites his readers to use love as key to the whole. While Dante’s account of love is complex and his philosophical inheritance eclectic, he owes much of his understanding here to Augustine. The diverse streams of influence on Dante’s poem have long been noted, but perhaps not enough attention has been given to the fact that Augustine’s famously restless heart lies at the center of the Divine Comedy.

In Book 13 of the Confessions, Augustine says that we are moved by love, much as a stone is moved by weight toward its natural place. Augustine goes on to clarify that by “weight” he means a purposive movement toward a goal: while a stone moves downwards by its weight, we could just as well say that fire tends to move upwards by its weight. Weight in the Confessions is a metaphor for seeking balance, order, equilibrium; weight is what pulls everything toward its proper place.

For Augustine, human beings are essentially lovers, moved by delight in our encounter with some good. Insofar as we are still striving for our ultimate good, we are restless; but as we ascend in praise, confessing both our iniquity and the goodness of our created contingency, we strive to find our place—our rest—in the transcendent source of our being. The motion of the soul, in other words, is love; and Augustine identifies this love with weight: “My love is my weight,” Augustine writes. “Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me” (conf.13.9.10; tr. Boulding, 1997).

When Augustine speaks of love this way, he does not envision an emotional capability opposed to an intellectual faculty. For Augustine, love is more like an integrated orientation of the entire human person. Moreover, our love involves not just a longing for the good (the “pull” of my weight), but also the binding of the self to the object that is loved (the “rest” of finding my place). We experience such “binding” as delight or enjoyment, in which we receive what is given as the good that necessarily brings us joy.

The experience of delight is thus a kind of necessity—but it is a “free necessity” since what we love determines us not through extrinsic coercion but rather through the intrinsic consent of our will. True freedom, for Augustine, consists not in a proliferation of options, but rather in the power to abide in the good. Augustine’s account of love weaves together activity and receptivity: love is a response elicited by a good, but one that actively gives its “yes” to this good.

In Purgatorio 17 and 18, precisely at the heart of the poem’s journey, Virgil unfolds a theory of moral motivation based upon this Augustinian account of love. Like Augustine before him, Virgil asserts that to be a human being is to love what is good. This love is natural to us, so that all of our choices intend something good (this intention is Augustine’s “weight”); but we are also capable of misusing our love. When we sin, according to Virgil, we direct our desire toward a good that fails to make us truly happy: often by loving too much; sometimes by loving too little; and, in the more pernicious cases, by loving a counterfeit, twisted image of the good. Virgil, like Augustine, urges Dante to allow the beauty of more perfect goods to draw his soul’s natural love upwards, “as fire, born to rise, / moves upward in its essence” (Purgatorio 18.28-29; tr. Hollander and Hollander, 2004). The penitents on the various terraces of Purgatory purify their love by means of humble acts meant to redirect their desire in just this way. Their goal, and ours, is the attainment of a perfect freedom in which the heart sets itself on that which is truly good and fulfilling. Loving-desire will thereafter serve as an infallible guide for right action.

Although eight centuries separate Dante and Augustine, what unites them is more than a shared anthropology of love. The true heart of the Commedia—and the true heart of the Confessions—is the burning desire with which each author writes to bring about a radical transformation in the minds and hearts of its readers. Intending to move us from disordered love to an ordered love of ultimate things, the Commedia, like the Confessions before it, invites us to perform the interior transformation that the text dramatizes in verse, symbol, and narrative. In the Divine Comedy, the beauty of poetic image, the gradual conversion of the characters’ affective and volitional faculties, the progress from ignorance (Inferno) through awareness (Purgatorio) to intellectual contemplation (Paradiso)—all function to effect in the reader a love for ultimate things. In short, Dante intends to awaken in his readers not only a desire for the beauty of his poetic creation, but also a desire for the beauty described therein. In this way, the poem seduces the reader for the sake of a conversion—a conversion occasioned by the very experience of love enacted in our encounter with the text.

What could be more Augustinian than that?

This essay is adapted from “Educating Desire: Conversion and Ascent in Dante’s Purgatorio,” published by Religions in 2019.