Dialogue on Divine and Human Love

...re-union and equality, and this is the third degree of love in the elements. The fourth and last degree of love and friendship that is found in the elements is when they come into the most equal love and the most united friendship that is possible; then, they not only receive within themselves the mixed, vegetative, and sensitive forms, along with the motive faculties, but they are even capable of participating in a form more distant and alien to the sight of these generable and corruptible bodies; indeed, they participate in the form proper to celestial and eternal bodies, which is the intellective soulIn Renaissance philosophy, the 'intellective soul' is the highest part of the human soul, capable of reason and connecting the mortal human to the divine or eternal realm., which alone among all inferior beings is found in the human species. SO. And how was it possible that man, being made of these same contrary and corruptible elements, could have obtained an eternal and intellectual form, annexed to the celestial bodies? PH. Because the love of his elements is so equal, uniform, and perfect that it unites all the contrariety of the elements, and the body remains distant from every contradiction and opposition, just like the celestial body, which is stripped of every contrary; and because of that, it comes to participate in that intellectual and eternal form with which the celestial bodies are usually informedTo 'inform' here means to give shape or essence to matter; the soul is the 'form' that gives life and character to the physical 'matter' of the body.. SO. I have never heard of such friendship in the elements, though I know well that (according to the perfection of the complexionAlso called 'temperament,' this refers to the specific balance of the four humors or elements within an individual body. of those elements) the form of the compound becomes more or less perfect. PH. The complexion of the elements and their friendship—how they remain contraries united together without strife or contradiction—does that not seem like love and friendship to you? Some call this friendship Harmony, Music, and Concordance; you know that friendship makes concordance, just as enmity causes discord. And for this reason, the philosopher Empedoclesoriginal: "Empedocles"; a Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher who famously taught that Love (Philia) and Strife (Neikos) were the two forces that moved the four elements. says that the causes of the generation of all inferior things are six: namely, the four Elements, Friendship, and Enmity. The friendship of the four contrary elements causes all the generations of the bodies composed of them, and their enmity causes their corruption; because according to these four degrees of the generation of love which I have told you about in the four elements—which are the cause of the generation of all composite bodies—in the four degrees of composition, you must understand just as many degrees of hatred, which are the cause of their dissolution and corruption. So, just as every evil and ruin comes from the enmity of these four contrary elements, so every good and generation comes from their love and friendship. SO. I like the discourse you have made regarding the manners and causes of love that are found in this inferior world—that is, in all generable and corruptible things—as much in men as in brute animals, as in plants, and in mixed things that have no soul at all, and also in the four elements and in the first matter common to all,