Our Desire for God: Dante's Answer to a Thomist Question

For Aristotle and for Thomas Aquinas, the fundamental purpose of life lies in the contemplation of the highest object, God. Human beings, by their very nature, desire to know God in His essence. However, according to St. Thomas, to know God in His essence also exceeds our natural capacity in every way. No created substance can, “by its own natural power, attain the vision of God in His essence.” Rather, “something must be added to its nature,” which, Thomas calls, “an influx of divine light,” or grace.[1] These two conclusions give rise to the Thomist paradox of the Desiderium Naturale: how can we naturally desire something that we can only supernaturally attain? This question would continue to preoccupy Catholic philosophers for centuries afterwards, up until the present day.

Dante, who was almost contemporaneous with Thomas, gives his own answer to this question. He first affirms the Thomist and Aristotelian conception of happiness at the beginning of his philosophical work, Convivio:

“As the Philosopher says at the beginning of the First Philosophy, all men by nature desire to know. The reason for this can be and is that each thing, impelled by a force provided by its own nature, inclines towards its own perfection. Since knowledge is the ultimate perfection of our soul, in which resides our ultimate happiness, we are all therefore by nature subject to a desire for it.”

However, on Dante’s account, the knowledge that we naturally desire does not include metaphysical knowledge. It is “impossible for our nature to know of God what He is,” He writes, because God’s essence is “not something which we naturally desire to know.”[2] In a manner that anticipates Immanuel Kant’s expulsion of traditional metaphysics on the grounds that we can never know the “thing-in-itself” and should thus stop trying, Dante denies the existence of both our ability and our desire to know the Absolute. Of course, many people would profess such a desire, but Dante could simply discard it as something illegitimate, unnatural: “the increasing desire for knowledge” may be “a sign of imperfection, like the ever-increasing hunger for wealth” (Fioravanti, 43).

Dante’s move to deny our desire to know the unknowable God is highly original and surprising. By doing so, he safeguards perfect happiness as something humanely possible and elevates the place of human agency. If perfect happiness is always fully available to us, it is up to us to obtain it. Instead of passive recipients of grace, we should all become voyagers on the sea of knowledge. Consistently, in the beginning of Book II in Convivio, Dante declares:

“Now that by way of a preface my bread has been sufficiently prepared in the preceding book through my own assistance, time calls and requires my ship to leave port; thus, having set the sail of my reason to the breeze of my desire, I enter upon the open sea with the hope of a smooth voyage and a safe and praiseworthy port at the end of my feast.”

This immediately calls to mind the shipwreck in Canto 1 of Divine Comedy, which Dante wrote only a few years after the Convivio: “like one with laboring breath, come forth out / of the deep onto the shore, who turns back to the perilous water and stares: / so my spirit, still fleeting, turned back to gaze / again at the pass that has never yet left anyone alive” (Alighieri, 27).

It is impossible to deny that Dante, by opening the Comedy in such a way, meant to pass a verdict on Convivio: having set the sail of reason and entered upon open sea “with the hope of a smooth voyage,” Dante suffered a total shipwreck, finding himself lost at the gate of Hell. This metaphorical cohesion establishes Dante as an intertextual figure whose identity is not only contrasted with Dante the author but also with Dante the philosopher in Convivio. Such a tripartite referential apparatus is demanding for any serious reader of the Comedy. In addition to the connections and disconnections between Dante the author and Dante the pilgrim that we may perceive, we must also attend to the connections and disconnections between Dante the pilgrim and Dante the philosopher that Dante the author himself perceived. In this way, the self-awareness of Dante the author becomes an integral part of the poetry and the adoption of his personal perspective a requirement for the disclosure of its meaning.

With reference to this requirement, I wish to highlight the curious Dantesque response to the Thomist problem of the Desiderium Naturale. Because Dante denied that we have a natural desire to see God in His essence, the failure of his voyage upon the open sea of knowledge should not be interpreted to be a consequence of human limitation or hubris and an attestment to our need for divine assistance. Dante did not begin such a voyage by disputing human limitation, but by denying the very importance of the goal of divine union. After all, all our natural desires can be fulfilled in the absence of such a union. It is this postulation that turns out to be the cause of the shipwreck. Dante the philosopher did not err in overestimating human power, but by denying that we have a natural desire to know God.

Since the beginning of the Comedy, the figure of a confused and frail Dante is impressed upon the reader. “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to / myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” “I cannot really say how I entered there, so full of / sleep was I at the point when I abandoned the true way” (27). Escaping from a she-wolf, Dante cries out to a human figure who turns out to be Virgil: “‘Miserere—on me,’ I cried to him, ‘whatever you may be, whether shade or true man’” (29)! “See the beast for which I have turned back: help / me against her.” Virgil responds that the pilgrim must “hold to another path” if he wishes to escape this savage place and the she-wolf, which “has a nature so evil and cruel that her / greedy desire is never satisfied, and after feeding she / is hungrier than before” (31).

The need to see God is no longer irrelevant to a fulfilled human life, but absolutely necessary. Without being united to God, man is in danger of being destroyed by untamed desires symbolized by the she-wolf. Echoing St. Augustine’s words, “our heart is restless until it rests in You,” Dante the pilgrim is now forced to acknowledge the natural desire for God that Dante the philosopher denied. Based on this (dis)continuity between the two Dantes, we can also infer that Dante the author would not see himself as someone having privileged access to divine revelation. Since the necessity of such a journey made clear by Inferno is a statement against Dante’s previous philosophical solution to the Thomist problem in Convivio, the piligrim’s journey does not belong only to himself but constitutes a universal statement about the human condition.

With Comedy, Dante changes his philosophical position in two fundamental ways. First, now we do have a legitimate need to know God. Second, far from placing a limitation on our abilities, what was once impossible—a direct vision of God—is rendered possible. Logically, these two conclusions are separable. Dante could revise his position simply through affirming our need to know God without affirming that the fulfilment of such a need is possible in this life. But the piligrim’s journey in the Comedy holds these two conclusions together from the beginning. Not only will we fail in denying the need for God, but the actual journey to the fulfillment of such a need begins almost as soon as we acknowledge its existence.

In other words, salvation is close and near, so long as we wish for it. In Jesus’ first sermon in the New Testament, he says: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). The Greek word for “repentance” is metanoia (μετάνοια), which means a change or reorientation of mind. Salvation is not a matter of election or outward action, but rather a change in heart and disposition. Consistently, it was important for the Virgil to ask the pilgrim to follow him on a journey that would eventually lead the pilgrim to the “high throne” of the “Emperor who reigns on high.” Since piligrim’s salvation presupposes his own willingness to be saved, Canto 1 ends with his plea for just that: “Poet, I beg you by that God whom / you did not know, so that I may flee this evil and / worse, / that you lead me where you have just now said, / so that I may see the gate of Saint Peter and those / whom you call so woebegone” (33).

Despite the change in his philosophical position, Dante never accepted the standard Catholic understanding of a natural desire for a supernatural end which minimizes the role of human agency in one’s union with God. Instead, for Dante, as much as the desire for God is natural, as much as the reality of actually seeing God was promised, upon the sole condition of a reorientation of one’s own mind and heart.

The immanence of salvation or, union with God, clarifies the nature of sin. Sin is never a particular act or a certain course of events, but rather a spiritual disposition that closes one off from the Kingdom. Rather than a distant possibility that depends on the will of God, salvation is an interior and ongoing event that rests on the choice of man. God does not put anyone in Hell—they chose to be there.

Entrance into Paradise is an ontological process of becoming, rather than a static achievement that could be analytically specified and procedurally followed. Consistently, the reader will never find the reasons for Francesca or Ugolino’s being in Hell if he were to focus solely on their stories, whether subjectively told or objectively verified, because their sin does not reside in their specific actions, but rather in their fixation on the self and its past in place of an interior orientation towards the Good and the present.

Dante the author does not make this clear, but does very much the opposite, by, for example, allowing Dante the pilgrim to faint before Francesca out of sympathy: “for pity I fainted as if I were dying, / and I fell as a dead body falls” (93). In the space between Dante the author and Dante the pilgrim lies all the pedagogical power of Inferno: “it is no accident that we generally side with the pilgrim in his human response to these great figures, against the crushing exigencies of the poet’s structure” (Freccero, 25). Contrary to what a first-time reader may hope for, Dante’s Hell does not provide quick answers to how one can avoid ending up in Hell. With the pilgrim’s failure to comprehend Francesca’s reasons for being in Hell, Dante the author leaves the reader’s expectation unfulfilled and, in this way, like a mirror, forces the reader to see his own intended treatment of Dante’s poetry as a handbook for salvation.

At the same time, because of the objective confines of Hell and the repeated promise of delivering truth throughout the text, Dante the author is able to captivate his reader’s attention, assuring him that there really is something to learn, if only he is willing to let go of his intended hopes and goals that rest on a fundamentally misguided notion of salvation. In this way, Inferno achieves what no syllogistic philosophical-theological text can achieve: it affords its reader the opportunity to directly participate in the immanent salvific journey that motivated Dante to write Inferno in the first place. While some critics may argue that Dante’s Inferno is outdated on the grounds that societal norms and attitude towards certain actions have shifted, this criticism misses the entire salvific message embodied by Inferno and contextualized by Dante’s shift from the Convivio to the Comedy with regard to the Thomist problem of the Desiderium Naturale. And it is this salvific message that makes the Comedy a classic of perennial relevance.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Edited and translated by Robert Durling. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Fioravanti, Gianfranco. “A Natural Desire can be Fulfilled in a Purely Natural Manner: The Heresy of Dante.” Dante and Heterodoxy: The Temptations of 13th Century Radical Thought. Edited by Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

Freccero, John. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

[1] See Summa Contra Gentiles, Book III, Ch. 53-54. [2] See Convivio, Book III.