Ask someone 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, the state of flourishing 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 are the main theme of Dante's poem, The Comedy. In this poem, Dante begins his journey into Hell where he sees the souls of those who have 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 this. In the final part, The Paradiso, Dante encounters the souls of truly happy people. However, there is a peculiarity in Dante's version of paradise, namely that the souls are arranged in a hierarchy. The implications of a hierarchy of happiness would be that some people's fulfillment is less than others', meaning that some people have less potential to be happy than others. If there really was a hierarchy of human potential, it would certainly contradict Catholic principles such as divine grace and justice. So it would be logical to say that there is no hierarchy in heaven. Before understanding Dante's motivations behind the hierarchy and why it doesn't make sense, it is first necessary to understand the philosophical tradition behind Dante's writings. The Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed that there are two powers that make humans human. The first is what he calls possible intellect, or the capacity to know. To realize the possible intellect, one would have to know everything. Still according to Aristotle...... middle of paper ......e consequences of what he wrote. However, until Paradise, Dante's themes fit together beautifully, his imagination of Hell and Purgatory perfectly complementing his Western philosophical background and Catholic theology. So Dante probably knew what he was doing when he established the hierarchy. It seems that the most likely reason Dante used it is that it would have been very boring to read 33 cantos about a paradise with no difference between the levels of humans. This would probably be incredibly boring for Dante to read and difficult to write. It is therefore possible that the hierarchy is simply a literary device intended to spice up Dante's poetry. Whatever the cause, it seems that Dante's hierarchy of happiness is a creation that should be left aside when studying philosophy, as it contradicts many of the elements upon which philosophy itself is based..