Throughout this course, we have looked at the hero and saint in several different ways. We have gone over conversion and totalization and what it means but there is a third new passage professor Ambrosio wants us to look at in his lecture: Romanticism. We will look at St. Francis and Dante Romanticism, as well as the famous artist Michelangelo and the portrayal of Abraham through Kierkegaard’s eyes.
At the time, arranged marriages was a common practice and if someone were to merely marry for the looks it would be called spiritual adultery. St. Francis saw it different and went through his own conversion in prison with the thought process of romanticism. He imagined the feminine face of God name “Lady Poverty”. After his imprisonment, he continued his life with the motto of Kenosis because he believes “Lady Poverty” represented that. This changed arranged marriages and based love more as an individual instead. St. Francis was responsible for the end of arranged marriages and brought in the new idea of individuality in love.
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Dante was in an arranged marriage as a young boy and one day saw a girl from afar in a red dress and instantly fell in love with her but never told her of it. He would later write Vita Nuova as a way of his devotion to her and later in Divine Comedy; Purgatorio and Paradiso. Dante was a follower of St. Francis and both saw women as the “romantic object of complete self-dedication”. Dante lifted the oppression of women because of his views of them and also created a new view of a