The Hierarchy of Happiness in Dante’s The Paradiso

Ask anyone you know what their ultimate goal in life is, and the answer will unanimously be, “to be happy.” According to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, a state of fulfillment is the ultimate goal of all beings. This is how they define happiness: a state of being fully. Happiness and the means by which humans can achieve it is the main theme in Dante’s poem, The Comedy. In this poem, Dante starts his journey in the Inferno where he sees the souls of those who rejected the possibility of happiness by not knowing or refusing to know God. He then ascends to Purgatory, in which he observes souls who want to be happy, but must purge themselves of sin to achieve it. In the final installment, The Paradiso, Dante meets the souls of people who are truly happy. However, there is a peculiar feature in Dante’s version of paradise, which is that the souls are arranged in a hierarchy. The implications of a hierarchy of happiness would be that certain peoples’ fulfillment is less than others’, meaning that certain people have less potential to be happy than others. If there really were a hierarchy of human potential, then it would certainly contradict Catholic tenants such as divine grace and justice. Therefore it would stand to say that there is no hierarchy in heaven.

Before understanding Dante’s motives behind the hierarchy and why it does not make sense, it is first necessary to understand the philosophical tradition behind Dante’s writings. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed that there are two potencies that make humans to be human. The first is what he called the possible intellect, or the ability to know. To fulfill the possible intellect, it would require one to know everything. Also according to Aristotle...

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...e consequences of what he was writing. However, up until The Paradiso Dante’s themes go together beautifully, with his imagination of Hell and Purgatory perfectly complementing his Western philosophical background and his Catholic theology. So Dante probably knew what he was doing when he made the hierarchy. It seems like the most likely reason Dante used it is because it would have been very boring to read 33 cantos about a heaven with no difference between the level of humans. It probably would be incredibly boring to read and difficult to write for Dante. So it is possible that the hierarchy is simply a literary device intended to spice up Dante’s poetry. No matter the cause, it seems as though Dante’s hierarchy of happiness is a creation that should be left behind when studying philosophy, as it contradicts many of the things on which philosophy itself is based.