At the age of nine, Dante Alighieri fell in love with Beatrice
di Folco Portinari. From that moment on and through the writing
of his The Divine Comedy, begun when he was around age 42, Dante
strove to write a love poem that adequately captured the
fulfillment that came from his relationship with Beatrice. But
writing in the High Middle Ages, when medieval Christendom
presented a structured world with clear hierarchies, Dante was
forced to answer the quintessential question whether human love
could or, more importantly, should be comparable to the love
between humanity and God. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance
Kelly, in their book All Things Shining: Reading the Western
Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, address the challenge
that Dante's love for Beatrice presented to the convention of
that time—that "human beings, in particular, are born to be
fulfilled by the direct experience of God. To let your love be
averted from Him and aimed at anything else—even the Lady
Beatrice—is to have lived an unfulfil