We find our happiness in loving Him who is worthy of our complete love. We are created by God in order to know and love God-that is what we are for, that is the rationale behind the whole ordering of this world.
The goal of life is to love perfectly Him who is Himself perfect Love. Those in purgatory have chosen well, but need that choice to be purified so that they can join those who love perfectly.
The damned in hell are there because they want to be there-they have decided to love something beneath their dignity, and so are eternally ruined. Dante walks through the afterlife, but what determines his destiny is what he chooses to love. However, we make this journey not by walking, but by loving. Just as Dante shows that only those in heaven are truly happy, so Aquinas starts his treatment of the moral life at Dante’s destination. He argues that the only goal that can satisfy man’s hunger for happiness and fulfillment is God. A journey is determined by its destination, and so Aquinas begins his treatment of man’s life by discussing possible destinations one can live for. Man’s freedom leaves open the possibility of taking the route to happiness or not-where in the poem do you want to end up? And that journey toward your final place within the cosmic order is the epic journey of life. While the order is the stage, the action is the journey. Dante’s own path through the poem is a journey toward becoming more human.
#Dante path to paradise how to
The Divine Comedy is a how-to book: given the reality of what it means to be human, this is how to live a human life. This knowledge enables Dante to show his readers how to live. The spiritual order that Dante sees shows him how to be human, just as the physical order tells an engineer how a plane must be built. Just as a doctor knows which symptoms are signs of what diseases, and which medicines will counteract those diseases, so too does Dante see which actions lead to happiness and which do not. That happiness is attained within an order. What Dante finds is the road to true happiness. Most importantly, he sees what it means to be fully human and how to lead a life of true freedom as a human. He sees what happens if one leads one type of life or another. We have freedom, we determine what we do and who we will become, but what is the framework for those decisions? What happens when we choose to love one thing rather than another? From the standpoint of the afterlife he sees the final consequences of human actions, where they ultimately lead. He wants to describe what it looks like to be truly human. Thomas Aquinas describes in his great Summa Theologiae, in which he lays out the structure of the spiritual world as richly as any great cathedral.ĭante’s journey through the afterlife is an exploration of the ultimate meaning of human life. That spiritual order is what Dante explores it is the same order that St. And within that world of willing and loving there is another order.
We have minds that understand and wills that love mere atoms can neither will nor love. Scientists study the physical rules of the universe, and the rules they discover are so precise and unchanging that we implicitly trust their findings-no one questions whether the science underlying airplanes is sound or not before boarding. It is clear to all that there is order within the world, that the world follows certain rules and fits together in a definite way. The world is truly ordered and orderly, and yet within it there is great movement.
#Dante path to paradise series
This is the fifth of our series The Summa in Verse.ĭante’s vision of the afterlife centers upon two features: order and motion.
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