Dante and Human Contentment in Paradiso

What expresses the fulfillment of the highest hope for human existence?  One way to answer this question is to examine conceptions of blessedness such as heaven or nirvana.  Both are, traditionally conceived, dimensions in which there is no more striving, in which there is true contentment. In Paradiso 3.63-66, Dante observes that there is a hierarchy in heaven, and he asks Piccarda Donati whether she longs to be higher in heaven than she is and closer to the blazon light of the empyrean, God:

But tell me, do you, who are here content,

Desire to achieve a higher place, where you

Might still see more and make yourself more dear?

          (Paradiso 3.63-66; trans. Hollander)

Her response tells us, who might wonder about real joy in our lives, something about where true joy might be found, not only in heaven but also here and now.

This is, I dare say, a line of thought with which all of us have contended, if we are honest, in the rough and tumble of daily routines, in the struggle against illness, in providing a living, and in the pondering of other potential paths.  Can I be fully content where I am?  Do I wish to “trade up”?  Piccarda Donati provides one answer to Dante’s question as he thought about her situation -- and perhaps as we think about our own.

Along with the other shades, she smiled,

then answered me with so much gladness

she seemed alight with love’s first fire:

‘Brother, the power of love subdues our will

so that we long for only what we have

and thirst for nothing else.

          (Paradiso 3.67-72)

It could be easy to view the tiers in heaven and to worry, as Dante does, about being dissatisfied or unsatisfied in the very place where such things are supposed to be absent.  Piccarda Donati emphasizes two points in her response. First, divine love is a force that overcomes a human’s selfish resistance to God and the good He bestows.  Importantly, before she tells Dante this truth about Paradise she shows him.  She demonstrates the effusive force of love in her own life, as the canto unfolds: “… she smiled, / then answered me with so much gladness / she seemed alight with love’s first fire.” She embodies, she instantiates, the truth that she conveys, which reinforces, we might say, its veracity in the flesh.

Vincenzo Morani (1809-1870),
Piccarda Donati, c. 1862

Second, humans in Paradise do still have real longings, real emotions, real desires; however, they are transformed “so that we long for only what we have / and thirst for nothing else.” How beautiful!  What she is saying, in other words, honors humanity’s psychophysical constitution:  there are real longings; the emotional life and the willing elements are real; and they are satisfied.  Paradise, whatever the tiers involved and whatever the explanations for those tiers, is a dimension of true, lasting, and full contentment. What is more, it is not that humans no longer have desires, but rather that humans and their desires are transformed by being conformed to God’s will, and they are fully and perpetually satisfied. Paradise involves not the absence of desires. No; it involves the right expression of them by us and the complete satisfaction of them by God.

This conformity of willing and satisfaction is one expression of the alignment of the human with God that Dante has been at pains, literally and figuratively, to depict throughout the Commedia from Inferno through Purgatorio and into Paradiso.  It involves a metanoia, a change of mind, not only a change of desires: "I shall now reshape your intellect, / thus deprived, with a light so vibrant / that your mind will quiver at the sight" (Paradiso 2.109-11). This blessed state is a sort of union that humans can hope to have with God:

‘No, it is the very essence of this blessed state

That we remain within the will of God

So that our wills combine in unity.

‘Therefore, our rank from height to height,

Throughout this kingdom pleases all the kingdom

As it delights the King who wills us His will.

‘And in His will is our peace.

           (Paradiso 3.79-85)

The picture that the poet paints is a unity of wills within community. Human satisfaction is not isolation, and it is not inversion.  It comes by seeking and finding and conforming to another. There may be ranks from height to height within this kingdom, but those who occupy the ranks do not envy others in different ranks above, or scorn those in ranks below. Conformity to the will of the King dispatches ill will.  When or because filled by that royal will in the particular station to which one is assigned in the presence of the King, a person finds neither excess nor deficiency, only complete fitness: "in His will is our peace."

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously says that the highest good is eudaimonia, often translated as happiness but better rendered as flourishing.  For him, roughly speaking, human flourishing involves pursuing with balance, prudence, and virtue that beyond which there is nothing better to desire. It involves cultivating those habits, activities, and relationships that both make life worth living and that complete the human life.  The virtuous life that flourishes is one that expresses the human nature and function so well that there is complete contentment.

In his own way, Dante is, I believe, saying something similar, not only about Paradise but also about the present:  true contentment involves conforming our wills to the divine purpose and being grateful for the wonderful gifts that we have here and now.  Dante, indeed, is saying more than this.  But the path to true contentment involves cultivating gratitude for the divine love that we already have, a love that will radiate to others, just as it does from Piccarda Donati to Dante.  It is a love that prompts an insatiable but always satisfied desire for the highest good imaginable. This is the hope for the highest human existence possible, one that never envies others or seeks to trade up, because it finds its fulfillment in relationship outside of itself.