Dante in the _Vita Nuova_ calls Beatrice "the destroyer of all evil and
the queen of all virtues."
The very thought of the beloved makes a good man of the lover:
"I cannot sin when I am in her thoughts."
asserts the sincere Guirot Riquier, and he prays Christ to teach him the
true love of woman.
While it was a generally accepted theory that love was the source of
man's perfection, I know of only one passage (by Raimon of Miraval)
contending that woman, also, was perfected by love; everywhere else we
meet the universal and silently accepted opinion that the essence of
womanhood is something unearthly, unfathomable and divine. Perhaps the
most classical formulation of the new doctrine, to wit, that spiritual
love is the begetter of all virtue and the mother of chastity, outside
which there is nothing divine, is to be found in the poems of the
somewhat pedantic Montanhagol:
The lover who loves not the highest love,
Is like a fool polluting precious wine.
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