In the high philosophy of the Tuscan poets of the 'sweet new style' that dualism was apparently transcended, but it was by making love identical with religion, by emptying it of earthly passion, making woman an Angel, a pure Intelligence, love of whom is the first awakening of the love of God. 'For Dante and the poets of the learned school love and virtue were one and the same thing; love was religion, the lady beloved the way to heaven, symbol of philosophy and finally of theology.'[2] The culminating moment in Dante's love for Beatrice arrives when he has overcome even the desire that she should return his salutation and he finds his full beatitude in 'those words that do praise my lady'. The love that begins in the Vita Nuova is completed in the Paradiso.
The dualism thus in appearance transcended by Dante reappears sharply and distinctly in Petrarch. 'Petrarch', says Gaspary, 'adores not the idea but the person of his lady; he feels that in his affections there is an earthly element, he cannot separate it from the desire of the senses; this is the earthly tegument which draws us down. If not as, according to the ascetic doctrine, sin, if he could not be ashamed of his passion, yet he could repent of it as a vain and frivolous thing, regret his wasted hopes and griefs.'[3] Laura is for Petrarch the flower of all perfection herself and the source of every virtue in her lover. Yet his love for Laura is a long and weary aberration of the soul from her true goal, which is the love of God. This is the contradiction from which flow some of the most lyrical strains in Petrarch's poetry, as the fine canzone 'I'vo pensando', where he cries:
E sento ad ora ad or venirmi in core
Un leggiadro disdegno, aspro e severo,
Ch'ogni occulto pensero
Tira in mezzo la fronte, ov' altri 'l vede;
Che mortal cosa amar con tanta fede,
Quanta a Dio sol per debito convensi,
Più si disdice a chi più pregio brama.
Elizabethan love-poetry is descended from Petrarch by way of Cardinal Bembo and the French poets of the Pléiade, notably Ronsard and Desportes. Of all the Elizabethan sonneteers the most finely Petrarchian are Sidney and Spenser, especially the former. For Sidney, Stella is the school of virtue and nobility. He too writes at times in the impatient strain of Petrarch: