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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Even in Medieval times, when the average person believed devoutly in Christianity, which one might think would suffice to provide a why, nonetheless there arose a notion of supplementing it by devotion to an individual human being,.

Dante Alighieri wrote in La Vita Nuova, around 1290:

Nine times, the heaven of the light had returned to where it was at my birth, almost to the very same point of its orbit, when the glorious lady of my mind first appeared before my eyes—she whom many called Beatrice without even knowing that was her name. She had already been in this life long enough for the heaven of the fixed stars to have moved toward the east a twelfth of a degree since she was born, so that she was at the beginning of her ninth year when she appeared to me, and I saw her when I was almost at the end of my ninth. She appeared, dressed in a very stately color, a subdued and dignified crimson, girdled and adorned in a manner that was fitting for her young age.

At that time, truly, I say, the vital spirit, which dwells in the innermost chamber of the heart, started to tremble so powerfully that its disturbance reached all the way to the slightest of my pulses. And trembling it spoke these words: "Here is a god stronger than I, who comes to rule me."

Granted, Dante Alighieri was unusual for his time. But there is a reason why the notion of fervent romantic love became such a prominent feature of those times' literature. I really do wonder if back then, they really fundamentally had any more of a strong sense of why in their hearts than we do. They probably did, but I am not sure that they had it a great deal more than we do.

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