SUBSECTION 2 Love’s origin, object, definition and divisions

“Love’s territory is broad and vast, with a spacious path beset by thorns,” and therefore, as Scaliger rebukes Cardan, “it must not be passed over lightly.” To avoid the same criticism, I will examine every kind of love: its nature, origin, differences and objects; how it is honourable or dishonourable, a virtue or a vice, a natural passion or a disease; its power, its effects and how far it extends.

Although I said something about it in the First Partition, in the sections on the passions—for “love and hatred are the first and most common passions, from which all the rest arise and on which they attend,” as Piccolomini holds; or, as Nicolas Caussin puts it, they are the first moving sphere of all the other affections, carrying them all around with them—I shall now discuss all its parts and branches more fully. In this way it may become clearer what love is, how it varies with its objects, and how its deficiency, or more commonly its immoderate excess, causes melancholy.

Love, taken in its broadest sense, is defined as desire, a word of wider meaning. Although Leone Ebreo, the most expansive writer on this subject, makes no distinction between them in his third Dialogue, in his first he distinguishes them again and defines love through desire: “Love is a voluntary affection and a desire to enjoy what is good.” “Desire wishes; love enjoys. The end of one is the beginning of the other: what we love is present; what we desire is absent.”

“It is worth the effort,” says Plotinus, to consider love carefully: “whether it is a god, a spirit, a passion of the mind, or partly god, partly spirit and partly passion.” He concludes that love shares in all three and arises from desire for what is beautiful and fair, and defines it as “an action of the mind desiring what is good.”

Plato calls it “the great spirit” because of its force and mastery over all the other passions, and defines it as an appetite “by which we desire some good to be present.” Ficino adds the word “fair” to this definition in his commentary: love is a desire to enjoy what is good and fair.

Augustine expands this common definition, taking love to be a delight of the heart “in something we seek to gain or rejoice to possess, reaching out in desire and resting in joy.” Scaliger, in Exercise 301, criticizes these earlier definitions and refuses to define love through desire or appetite: “when we enjoy the things we desire, appetite no longer remains.” He defines it instead as “an affection by which we are either united with what we love or maintain our union with it.” This partly agrees with Leone Ebreo.

This love varies as its object varies, and its object is always good, lovable, fair, graceful and pleasant. “All things desire what is good,” as the Ethics teaches us, or at least what seems good to them. “For what bad thing do you want,” as Augustine aptly asks, “tell me? Nothing, I think, in all your actions.” You wish for no harm, I suppose, no evil in any of your actions, thoughts or desires: “you want nothing bad.”

You do not want bad grain, bad soil or a worthless tree, but everything good: a good servant, a good horse, a good son, a good friend, a good neighbour, a good wife. From this goodness comes beauty; from beauty, grace and comeliness, which shine like so many rays from their good qualities and make us love and thus desire it. For if it did not seem pleasing and graceful to our eyes, we would not seek it.

“No one loves,” says Aristotle in book 9, chapter 5 of the Ethics, “unless first delighted by comeliness and beauty.” As this fair object varies, so does our love; for, as Proclus holds, “everything beautiful is lovable.” Every fair thing is lovable, and what we love is fair and graceful in our eyes, or at least that is how we perceive it and continue to regard it.

“Loveliness is the object of love; its aim and end is to obtain that for whose sake we love and which our mind longs to enjoy.” It seems especially fair and good to us, for goodness, beauty and unity cannot be separated. Beauty shines, Plato says, and its splendour and radiance cause wonder; the fairer the object, the more eagerly it is sought.

For, as Plato himself defines it, “Beauty is a living radiance or glittering brightness flowing from goodness poured forth through ideas, seeds, formative principles and shadows, stirring our minds so that through this goodness they may be united and made one.”

Others take beauty to be the perfection of the whole composition, “arising from the harmonious symmetry, measure, order and arrangement of its parts. The comeliness that proceeds from this beauty is called grace, and hence all fair things are graceful.” Grace and beauty are so wonderfully joined, “so sweetly and gently win our souls, and attract them so powerfully, that they confound our judgement and cannot be distinguished. Beauty and grace are like the beams and radiance of the glorious, divine sun.” They differ as they proceed from different objects to please and affect our several senses.

“Forms of beauty are received through our eyes and ears, or conceived within our soul,” as Plato discusses at length in his dialogue On Beauty, in Phaedrus and Hippias. After refuting many sophistical errors, he concludes that beauty is a grace in all things, delighting the eyes, ears and soul itself. Thus, as Valesius infers, whatever pleases our ears, eyes and soul must be beautiful, fair and delightful to us.