Plato makes a very clear distinction between the body and the soul. The fact that he believes in the immortality of the soul indicates his belief that the two are different, because clearly the body is mortal, so the soul must be something separable from the body if it is not. In the Phaedo, Plato has Socrates describe the “freeing” of the soul “from the chains of the body” (67d). This shows that, in addition to believing the body and soul are distinct from each other, he believes that the soul is the superior half of the pair, and that the body is an obstacle to be overcome. By emphasizing the differences between the body and the soul, Plato inadvertently helped to cause Christian theologians to invent a false dichotomy between lust and true love. They believed that lust and love are completely disjoint forms of desire, and that it is possible to have one without having any amount of the other. This dichotomy resulted in Augustine’s intense desire to reject of everything bodily, including physical love for another human being. Dante was a bit more accepting of the humanness of lust, but he still believed that the body and soul are separable, and that lust is distinct from love. Even Boccaccio may have believed in the dichotomy to some degree, because his stories can possibly be interpreted as ridiculing the idea that love and lust are really the same thing. However, the progression from Augustine to Boccaccio shows a gradual acceptance of lust as a natural part of being human, something that Plato had openly acknowledged seventeen centuries earlier. Furthermore, none of these authors quite gets away from Plato’s claim that lust and love are both prerequisites for the ultimate love of Beauty itself (i.e. love of God).

While Plato believed the body was an obstacle to be overcome, he also believed that the desire for another body is a form of love that leads to a form of immortality, just as all other forms of love lead to other forms of immortality. In the Symposium, he says, “Love’s function is giving birth in beauty both in body and in mind” (206b). He goes on to say that “sexual intercourse between men and women is a kind of birth. There is something divine in this process; this is how mortal creatures achieve immortality” (206c). The act of sexual intercourse has always been considered primarily an issue of lust, even when it is the physical manifestation of a higher form of love for another person. Love for a single body is at the bottom of Plato’s ladder, which goes through love for all bodies, love for a single mind, love for all minds, love for laws and practices, love for knowledge, up to love for Beauty itself (210a-d). Being part of the ladder makes love for another body no less essential in the ascent to love for Beauty itself than any other step, including love for another mind. That is, even though Plato places bodily love below mental love, neither is ultimately more or less important than the other. Both are necessary steps toward love for Beauty itself, and both must necessarily be overcome by anyone who hopes to achieve the greatest form of immortality provided by the greatest form of love.

Augustine seems to have completely missed this point when he read the works of Plato, despite the fact that he took so much inspiration from those works. He has an overt hatred for all bodily desires. Concerning the desire for sensuous pleasure, he prays to God for the ability to abstain, even in sleep, from “shameful, unclean acts inspired by sensual images, which lead to the pollution of the body” (Confessions X.30). Augustine disdains marriage for its inherent sexuality, and he disdains women for their inherent seductive nature. When writing about the death of his best friend in Book IV, he first explains the conflict between his contempt for life with only half a soul and his desire that his friend not become wholly dead (which would happen if Augustine, the other half of their soul, died). He then soundly admonishes himself for the grief he previously made so understandable to any readers with some level of human compassion. “What madness, to love a man as something more than human! What folly, to grumble at the lot man has to bear!” (IV.7). Augustine makes it clear that love for another human being, while perhaps better than love for a physical body, is only a good kind of love when the other person is loved entirely for the sake of God. “For a man loves you [God] so much the less if, besides you, he also loves something else which he does not love for your sake” (X.29).

Having already rejected love of sensuous pleasures and love of other individuals, he goes on to condemn the love of knowledge (X.35), leaving only love of laws and practices and love of Beauty unharmed in Plato’s ladder. In effect, Augustine rejects love for everything except the Catholic Church (laws and practices) and God (Beauty itself). However, he only does this after having already experienced the other forms of love. He rejects love for the body, but he had previously had sex in a church and carried on relationships with several different mistresses, one who bore him a child. He rejects love for another mind, but he had previously loved his friend so deeply that he felt they were two halves of a single soul. He rejects love of knowledge, but he had previously read every philosophical book he could find and theorized extensively about the nature of time and memory. Augustine spends plenty of time on each rung of Plato’s ladder before he is able to ascend to the next step. When he admits to having prayed, “Give me chastity and continence, but not just yet” (VIII.7), he lets on that, while he was sinning, he did not intend to stop any time soon. While he clearly wants his readers to reject the lesser forms of love as soon as possible, Augustine offers no evidence from his own life that it is possible to do so before experiencing each of them.

Dante seems to believe that the soul and the body are not permanently separable, as he makes several references to souls regaining their bodies on Judgment Day. The bodies of people who committed suicide, for instance, “will dangle to the end of time, each on the thorns of its tormented shade” (Inferno XIII.107-8). However, he does believe that upon death, each soul is separated from its body, which is illustrated by the fact that none of the souls he meets along his journey has physical bodies with any mass. Given that Dante believes that the body and the soul are at least temporarily separable, and given that he was a part of the same Catholic tradition as Augustine, it is not surprising that he, too, makes a clear distinction between lust and love. When Beatrice was still alive, Dante lusted after her body. After her death, he began to see her in a more spiritual sense, but he could only truly love her soul, and she only chose to show herself to him, after crossing through the wall of fire in Purgatory and being cured of the sin of lust. In Hell, Francesca speaks of “Love, which permits no loved one not to love” (V.100), but only after she describes Paolo’s “passion for that sweet body” (V.98). Thus, she admits that their sin was caused by what most would call lust, and not true love. For Dante, lust is one of the seven deadly sins, whereas true love is something God radiates as the sun radiates warmth.

However, he did not think lust was as depraved as Augustine had believed. In fact Dante writes as if lust had a positive counteractive effect on the punishment of those guilty of worse sins. Dido, who we would expect to see with the other suicides in the seventh circle, descended only to the second, because she committed suicide out of an intense desire for Aeneas. Dante seems to believe that the sin of lust is the next most nearly forgiven of those punished in Hell, second only to the “sin” of having been born before Jesus. The same goes for the place of lust in the hierarchy of sins of which souls are cleansed in Purgatory, with the circle of lust immediately below the Garden of Eden. Furthermore, lust is grouped with the other sins involving “immoderate love”, meaning that Dante does see it as a form of love, just not the right kind of love. The fact that he has to pass through the wall of fire in that circle indicates that Dante is guilty of lust, and the way the wall is described indicates that perhaps every soul must pass through it before reaching the top of Purgatory. If this is Dante’s intended message, then he believes that every single human is to some degree guilty of the sin of lust, and therefore that it is a perfectly natural sin for a human being to commit. Being cleansed of the sin of lust is a prerequisite for entering Eden, so there is a sense in which committing the sin of lust is also a prerequisite for entering Eden and ultimately being with God. Even if this interpretation seems unlikely, Dante does not provide us with any more evidence than Augustine that it is possible to avoid lesser (or immoderate) forms of love and still be able to truly love and be with God.

Though only a short time separates him from Dante, Boccaccio’s stories in the Decameron show a radical moral departure from the Commedia. Once a reader gets past the blatant sexuality of most of the stories, he or she will notice that in none of them is the distinction between lust and love made as explicitly as in earlier literary works. Typically, when Boccaccio describes one person as being physically attracted to another, he uses the word love, whereas his predecessors and contemporaries, not to mention some authors today, would be careful to describe such purely physical desire as lust. For example, several of Alatiel’s nine husbands are described as falling in love with her, despite the fact that she is unable to speak or understand a single word of their language (Decameron II.7). Clearly these men couldn’t have known an essentially deaf and mute woman long enough or well enough to feel anything like the true love Augustine feels for God and Dante eventually feels for Beatrice. However, many of Boccaccio’s stories derive their humor from a ridiculous amount of exaggeration. Because of this, it is often very difficult to know just what he himself believes. Is he advocating the values of all the protagonists in the stories? This seems very unlikely, given that so many of them contradict the values of other protagonists. For the same reason, it also seems unlikely that Boccaccio seeks to ridicule all of these values. This leaves the middle choice, that he agrees with some of the values, and seeks to ridicule and criticize others. It would be nearly impossible to determine, with any real certainty, into which category Boccaccio’s equation of lust with love falls.

Regardless of what the historical Boccaccio himself believed, the fictive speakers in each of the hundred stories of the Decameron seem to believe, perhaps more than any author we’ve read since Plato, that the physical desire commonly known as lust is a completely natural part of being human. While nothing is said explicitly about salvation, the ultimate goal of the characters in most of the stories has to do with some object of “love” (or lust). That is, the closest thing to salvation that occurs in the Decameron requires love of another body, just as Plato believed that before one could love Beauty itself, one had to work his way up the ladder, beginning with love of another body.

The fact that Plato and Boccaccio do not make as strict a distinction between the two types of love shows that they might believe both types of love are matters of degree. If a person is considered to be both a body and a soul, then the type of love one has is determined by the fullness with which he or she loves another person. If the love is for the parts of a person that can be seen from the outside, it is labeled as lust. If it is also for the parts of a person that can only be perceived through communicative interaction with that person, it is labeled as love. Augustine and Dante both seemed to believe that true love had only to do with the second set of characteristics, but Plato and Boccaccio were both aware of the unlikelihood of loving a person’s mind without also being physically attracted to that person. On a purely human level, one that does not involve some sense of eternal salvation of the soul, lust is as much a prerequisite of love as love is a prerequisite of salvation on a purely spiritual level.