Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

“Our Desire is a Gift From the Stars,” A Unitarian Universalist Blogpost

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“The word desire comes from the Latin desiderare: ‘to long for,’ but the Latin desiderare comes from de sidere: ‘from the stars.’ From the stars.

“I find this extraordinary: to think that somehow our desire, our longing, is connected to the very stars in the sky. The stars, which share their light with us across such impossible distances of time and space. The poets might say our desire is a gift from the stars and is ultimately for them and the beauty and mystery and the creative fire and energy of which they are for us a sign.

“I’m reminded of the very last line of Dante’s Divine Comedy — Dante, the great medieval poet guided by his love for a human woman, Beatrice. In his imagination, his love and his longing for her lead him on a great journey all the way to Paradise and to a final vision of the love which moves and connects all things: l’amor che move il sole e le altre stelle… ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars.’

“This love that moves the sun and the stars is with you too, body and spirit, and with everything and everyone. If we can live out of that, the rest will take care of itself.”    –Laura Horton-Ludwig, “Our Desire is a Gift From the Stars,” Unitarian Universalist Association

“The Love that Moves” Card Drawing by Meredith Eliassen

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“‘L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle.’ (The love that moves the sun and the other stars.) from Paradiso by Dante Alighiere [sic], 1265-1321. Image motif inspired by a card design by Robbin Rawlings. Drawing by Meredith Eliassen, 2016.”

–Meredith Eliassen, “Dante… on Love,” MME Designs’s Weblog, February 11, 2016

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love (2006)

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eat-pray-love“The Italian we speak today, therefore, is not Roman or Venetian (though these were the powerful military and merchant cities) nor even really entirely Florentine. Essentially, it is Dantean. No other European language has such an artistic pedigree. And perhaps no language was ever more perfectly ordained to express human emotions than this fourteenth-century Florentine Italian, as embellished by one of Western civilization’s greatest poets. Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in terza rima, triple rhyme, a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating three times every five lines, giving his pretty Florentine vernacular what scholars call a ‘cascading rhythm’ –a rhythm which still lives in the tumbling, poetic cadences spoken by Italian cabdrivers and butchers and government administrators even today. The last line of the Divine Comedy, in which Dante is faced with the vision of God Himself, is a sentiment that is still easily understandable by anyone familiar with so-called modern Italian. Dante writes that God is not merely a blinding vision of glorious light, but that He is, most of all, l’amor che move sole e l’altre stelle. . .

“‘The love that moves the sun and the other stars.’

“So it’s really no wonder that I want so desperately to learn this language.”

– Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love (2006)

“The Love That Moves The Sun and Other Stars” (2015)

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blue-circular-stained-glass-window“Today I invite you to reflect on these final lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I would recommend reading them many times, contemplating what it must be like to experience the presence of God through the heavenly beatific vision.

“According to Boethius, love works like physics. It’s an elemental force. In fact, desire (eros) is an animating impulse that governs the entire universe, moving the sun and all the stars.

[. . .]

“God’s love is true love precisely because God knows we have the ability to spurn that love. Otherwise, grace changes from gift to entitlement. Love isn’t love until you give it away! This sort of love, in the final analysis, is the reason why a totally sufficient and perfect God would create something else and allow it to participate in him. If you find yourself suffering today – from end-of-semester stress, work problems, or anything else – try to remember that the source and summation of your created existence is to love. This love is necessarily a movement outside of self, a movement that ultimately affirms your identity in a new and revelatory reality. In this reality, ‘our image fuses/Into the circle and finds its place in it.'”   –Benjamin Winter, “The Love that Moves the Sun and the Other Stars,” Conciliar Post, April 17, 2015

“The love that moves the sun and other stars” (2019 Blogpost)

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“‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.’

“That’s how Dante Alighieri terminates his Master Piece the Divine Comedy.

“This quote has popped in my mind a lot recently, I’ve tried to substitute the word ‘love’ with many other (abstinence, caffeine, fear), but nothing works as well as it does.

“Dante had already understood in the XIV century, love is the strongest of all forces. 

“Will we be able to stop loving? Or to prevent loving from hurting us? Probably not. A few times in my life I’ve experienced having a broken heart. I thought that was just a metaphor, until I felt it happening in my chest, in my head, or actually in my heart. [. . .]

“So, I need to remember to be the center of my own solar system, I need to keep in mind that I’m the sun. And maybe, when love will move the sun, the other stars will move along.”   –Flavia, “The love that moves the sun and other stars,” ClassicFlavia, February 12, 2019

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Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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