(she is discussing Dante and the perspectives on love).
The love of Dante and Beatrice is, then, a love that respects subjecthood *ular manner in which it is mingled here with passivity, with what we might call the romance of grace. To that extent, it recognizes the fact that each person is a distinct individual, having only a single life to live. Is it also a love of the qualitatively particular? It is among the poem's most central concerns to establish that it is. In taking this stand, Dante's Thomistic view argues against the Augustinian tradition, according to which much of the qualitative particularity of persons - their flaws and faults, their idiosyncrasies, their very bodies and their histories - are all incidental accretions from the world of sin, to be disregarded in the context of redemption. Augustine still wishes to maintain that each soul is a distinct individual, a new beginning, having its own life to live.29 And yet, he omits so much of the lives individuals have actually led that we wonder, in the end, whether the integrity of their distinctive individual engagements has been preserved. Here we see a link between the two components of individuality: insofar as our qualitative particularity expresses wnat we have made of ourselves, the distinctive lives we have led, to treat those particular traits as inessential is to fail to respect the integrity of our personal distinctness. Reacting against Augustine's treatment of persons, Dante emphasizes these components of particularity throughout the poem, as he does most strikingly in the scene with which I began. page 572
