o
love Him, and to serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him
forever in the next." With the satisfaction of the intellect's boundless
yearning for knowledge attained by intuition of the Essence of God, a
consummation that will somewhat deify us--"Who shall be made like to
him, because we shall see him as he is" (I John, III, 2.), the happiness
of man will be primarily intellectual, being as Dante beautifully says:
"Light intellectual full of love, love of the true good, full of joy,
joy that transcendeth all sweetness." (XXX, 40.)

His Heaven, then, is no Nirvana, for each spirit will for eternity have
its individuality, and its activity will be unremitting in seeing God
face to face--a vision that will cause the spirit increasing wonder in
an act that will have no flagging nor satiety. "What, after all, is
Heaven," says Bulwer Lytton, "but a transition from dim guesses to the
fullness of wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, but knowledge of what
order?" To that exclamation of the nineteenth century writer the
medieval seer answers with conviction that the _summum bonum_ is to be
found only in the intellect's attaining Truth.

Let us now join Dante in his mystic journey to the Heavenly Kingdom. We
left him after three days and three nights in Purgatory, standing with
Beatrice on the summit of the mountain in the Earthly Paradise, where he
remained six hours. At noon he begins his ascent through space, a feat
accomplished by Beatrice's looking up to the Heavens and by Dante's
fixing his eyes upon her. At once his human nature is supposed to take
on agility, the supernatural quality which makes the body independent of
space, and he begins to rise with incomprehensible velocity. Though they
are travelling without conscious movement at the rate of 84,000 miles a
second, there is time for Dante's mind to operate in desire to know how
he can ascend counter to gravitation and for Beatrice to discourse upon
the law--Dante's invention--of universal (material and spiritual)
gravitation.

"The newness of the sound and the great light
Kindled in me a longing for their cause
Never before with such acuteness felt.
And she began: 'Thou makest thyself so dull
With false imagining, that thou sees not
What thou wouldst see if thou hadst shaken it off.
Thou are not upon earth as thou believest;
But lightning, fleeing its appropriate site,
Ne'er ran as thou, who thitherward returnest.'"
(I, 88.)