f the inequalities of this life--a
Heaven of such happiness, e.g., that the poor will love poverty or be
resigned to it in the hope of possessing the riches of this Eternity? Is
Dante's Heaven one in which happiness is so alluring that innocence will
gladly submit to calumny and faith will lovingly welcome the sword or
stake, in the certain confidence of gaining unending glory or bliss?
The Paradiso does reward poverty, crown innocence, glorify martyrdom,
but it was never intended to be an account of what takes place in the
real Heaven, or to be a description of the particular acts of goodness
which win Heaven for the soul, or a rapturous picture appealing to the
emotions of the believer and alluring him from earth.

Does Dante place the happiness of Heaven in the bliss and glorification
of family reunion?

He is too good a theologian to place the essential happiness of Heaven
merely in the joy of family reunion. He does not ignore that feature of
eternity, but he does not stress it, because temperamentally he is moved
less by sentiment of family and ties of friendship than by his curiosity
for knowledge, by his yearnings to behold Eternal Wisdom. Only once does
he mention Heaven as the state of reunion of families and friends, and
that is when he comments upon the action of the twenty-three spirits in
the Heaven of the Sun, in expressing their agreement with Soloman's
discourse as to the participation which the human body will have, after
the Resurrection in the glories of Paradise:

"So ready and so cordial an Amen
Follow'd from either choir, as plainly spoke
Desire of their dead bodies; yet perchance
Not for themselves, but for their kindred dear,
Mothers and sires and those whom best they loved,
Ere they were made imperishable flames."
(XIV, 65.)

For Dante, Heaven must be the beatitude of the intellect and that
primarily by the intellect's having an intuition full of joy in the
Divine Essence, and secondly by its possessing full light on all those
vexatious problems and mysteries which baffle us in this life.

"Well I perceive that never sated is
Our intellect unless Truth illumines it,
Beyond which nothing true expands itself.
It rests therein, as wild beast in his lair
When it attains it and it can attain it."
(IV, 125.)

In insisting upon the power of the mind to know the truth and to find
perfect happiness in the supernatural act of beholding God face to face,