Essay about The Hierarchy of Happiness in Dante’s The...

Ask anyone you know what their ultimate goal in life is, and the answer will unanimously be, â€Å"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†¦show more content†¦This is the perfection of the possible intellect and is called Faith. The other human potential is the intellectual appetite, also known as free will. This is the ability to accept being as good, also known as love, and move towards it. For Dante, the perfection of free will is in sacrificing one’s life to God, which is known as caritas, or charity. Since happiness is being fully, then being a happy person requires both having faith and doing acts of caritas. Dante, being a devout follower of Western philosophy, had a hard time imagining paradise as non-hierarchical. For Dante, if every person in paradise were perfected equally, then nothing would set them apart. If they all had equal intellectual appetites, then they would all do the same acts, and thus be indistinguishable. This vision of paradise seems to be the same as the Eastern imagination of â€Å"nirvana,† in which individual beings are illusions which are really one whole. Staying true to his Greek philosophical roots, he devised a hierarchy based on differences in acts of caritas during life. He proposed that people have different innate potentials to love, and that these account for the differences in paradise. Dante starts with those who tried to do good acts but could not, then those who did but for less noble reasons, followed by the wise, the warriors of God, and a few other categories of acts of