The Anglican theologian Charles Williams’ “Theology of Romantic Love” in his 1943 classic The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante offers a theological interpretive lens to understand the dynamic and animating love that Dante experiences for Beatrice throughout the Paradiso. It is Dante’s experience of romantic love for Beatrice that allows him to journey upwards in perfection to ultimately allow him his capacity to gaze upon God directly (Williams, Cambridge 1994 reprint, 16). Further, and more crucially, it is loving Beatrice qua Beatrice (i.e. in herself) that serves as the pilgrim’s first mode of loving God. Even in the Empyrean Heaven, this particular love that the pilgrim has for Beatrice does not slip away, but rather, is retained in the vast patchwork of identities that comprise the Divine Life.

As the canticle progresses, Dante the pilgrim becomes increasingly transfixed on Beatrice’s particularizing and enhancing beauty. We see illustrated the simultaneity in knowing and loving as Beatrice’s beauty becomes enhanced as she increases in perfection. The pilgrim begins with love for her beauty, which then progresses into loving her for her knowledge that she shares with him (in some moments, even to the point of ‘forgetting’ her beauty). Beatrice’s gaze, both physically and intellectually, is directly upon God, and it is this orientation towards God as object that both enhances her physical beauty and inspires her cosmological orations.

Williams suggests that it is by virtue of having God as one’s “constitutive object” that allows for one to love both God and their neighbor simultaneously. As Williams brings out through a reading of Augustine, to love God is to love one’s neighbor in their neighbor’s particularity; as their neighbor is always already oriented towards God (18-19). Thus, as the pilgrim loves Beatrice, Beatrice is always already gazing upon God as her constitutive object, and thus we have a crystallized illustration of the pilgrim loving God as he loves Beatrice, whose object is God.

As Beatrice and the pilgrim approach the Empyrean Heaven, Beatrice’s particularity, and the particularity of the pilgrim’s attraction to Beatrice, does not dissolve into increasing abstraction, but rather, these particularities becomes more distinct in their growing perfection. Rather than dissolving, it becomes more clear how it is that Beatrice’s beauty (and the pilgrim’s love for her) is but one of a patchwork of identities and relations that comprise the Divine Life. In Beatrice’s radiance, qua herself, Dante the pilgrim first learns to love God. Within the vast patchwork of identities within the Divine Life, there is room even for the retention of the pilgrim’s particularized love for Beatrice. Even when the pilgrim gazes upon God directly towards the canticle’s end, the radiance of Beatrice’s particular identity remains within the Divine Circle, and emphatically does not dissolve into indiscriminate light.

Indeed, in Augustine, each created thing is given form by the Creator, and the “shapeliness” (or, distinctiveness) of that created Being is necessary of its being created. As the creature comes to know their shape (or their particular distinction relative to all other created beings), they come to understand their “createdness” or identity in God. From this graduated standpoint, the pilgrim is able to see the multiplicity of goods, all encompassed by the singular Divine light that sustains all. In making the neighbor the sum of one’s joy, one is loving and enjoying their neighbor in its full and strict sense. When the pilgrim enjoys Beatrice’s beauty and intellect as object, and makes it the object of his enjoyment, he is loving Beatrice rightly, and in doing so, loving God. It is for this reason that, even once the pilgrim gazes on God, he is still able to “remain in” his delight of Beatrice.