The theme of divine love as told in Dante’s great classic, The Divine Comedy, is interwoven with the extraordinary story of Harriet Rubin. Harriet traveled to Rome to write a book about Dante, by walking the path that Dante took from Florence to Rome.

By chance, during her first few days in Rome, she met Steven, a Virgil scholar at the gates of the American Academy where both had fellowships to work on projects. They immediately felt a deep connection. “My love was a clap of thunder. Dante already had me in his story,” she related. Soon after, they decided to marry and set the date for their wedding and found a home. Suddenly, Steven suffered a seizure. Rushed to the hospital, he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Harriet was devastated. Despite his condition, they married—in his hospital room — and he died soon after.

During this time, Harriet completed her research and her book, Dante in Love, was published. She came to recognize and experience Dante’s definition of “divine love,” as the pure love one feels when one can transcend one’s own limitations and see God and the whole universe in another’s eyes.

Most people use the word “love” to refer to their feelings about another individual, or that person’s love for them. Mystical love, while it is expressed in our love for another, is an all encompassing love that extends to all beings and is experienced as a sense of unity with all reality. Communion with the Divine is part of all religious traditions. People in churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples across America—as well as people who are not part of a religious, but a spiritual, tradition—experience it through chanting and music and through ritual and worship.

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