HOW LOVE CAUSES ZEAL
Love seeks the good of the beloved. Love delights in it if the beloved has it. If the beloved does not have the good, love desires and seeks it eagerly for him or her. Love produces hate by which it avoids what is opposed to what it loves. In case the beloved is already affected by evil, love desires and seeks to remove it. If the evil has not yet approached the beloved, love turns it away and prevents it. If the evil can not be prevented or turned away, love does not cease to hate and detest it.
When love is fervent and has reached such an intensity as to desire, to remove, drive away and turn away what is opposed to the beloved it is called zeal. However, to be more exact: Zeal is nothing else than love in its intensity or rather the intensity which is in love. Hence just as love is, such is zeal which is its intensity. If love is good, its zeal is good. If love is bad, its zeal is bad. When I speak of zeal, I intend also to speak of jealousy. For jealousy is a kind of zeal. If I am not mistaken, there is only this difference between the two. Zeal is concerned about the whole good of the beloved to drive away what is opposed to it. Jealousy is concerned about the particular good of friendship to resist what is opposed to it.
When we love intensely worldly and fleeting things such as beauty, honours, riches, ranks, this zeal, that is, the intensity of this love usually ends in envy. The reason is that these trivial things are so little, personal, meager, limited, imperfect that when one possess them completely, another cannot possess them completely. Hence shared among many, each one’s share of it is less perfect. When we desire earnestly to be loved, the zeal or the intensity of this love becomes jealousy. Though human friendship is a virtue yet it has this imperfection because of our weakness: friend ship when shared among many, each one’s share becomes less. Hence the earnestness or zeal that we have to be loved cannot tolerate that we have some rivals or companions. If we imagine that we have some, immediately we become jealous. It has some similarity with envy. But it does not cease to be quite different from envy.
There are five points of difference:
1. Envy is always unjust. But jealousy is sometimes reasonable on condition that it is moderate. For, the married, are they not right in preventing their mutual friendship from becoming diluted by sharing?
2. By envy we become sad that our neighbour has a good greater or similar to ours, eventhough he does not take away what we have. In this envy is unreasonable by thinking that the good of our neighbour is our misfortune.
But jealousy is in no way grieved at our neighbour having some good provided it is not ours. For the jealous person is not sorry that his companion is loved by other women provided that it is not by his wife. Indeed, to speak more correctly, one is not jealous of a rival until he thinks that he has won the friendship of the person loved. Before it, if there was some passion, it is not jealousy but envy.
3. We do not presume some imperfection in him whom we envy. On the contrary, we think that he has the qualities which we envy. But we imagine that the person of whom we are jealous is imperfect, unsteady, corrupt, fickle.
4. Jealousy arises from love. Envy, on the contrary, springs from the lack of love.
5. Jealousy is only in matters of love. But envy extends to all things, goods, honours, favours, beauty. Sometimes, if a person is envious of the love shown to someone, it is not for the love that he is envious, but for the benefits which results from it. An envious person is little worried about, if his companion is loved by a prince, provided he is not promoted and favoured by events.