gs to
the essence of that blessed state to keep within the divine purposes,
that our own purposes may become one also. Thus, the manner in which we
are ranged from step to step in this kingdom pleases the whole kingdom,
as it does the king who gives us will to will with him. And his will is
our peace; it is that sea toward which all things move that his will
creates and that nature fashions."[C]

[Sidenote: If God is defined as the human ideal, apotheosis the only
paradise.]

Such pious resignation has in it something pathetic and constrained,
which Dante could not or would not disguise. For a theism which, like
Aristotle's and Dante's, has a Platonic essence, God is really nothing
but the goal of human aspiration embodied imaginatively. This fact makes
these philosophers feel that whatever falls short of divinity has
something imperfect about it. God is what man ought to be; and man,
while he is still himself, must yearn for ever, like Aristotle's cosmos,
making in his perpetual round a vain imitation of deity, and an eternal
prayer. Hence, a latent minor strain in Aristotle's philosophy, the
hopeless note of paganism, and in Dante an undertone of sorrow and
sacrifice, inseparable from Christian feeling. In both, virtue implies a
certain sense of defeat, a fatal unnatural limitation, as if a pristine
ideal had been surrendered and what remained were at best a compromise.
Accordingly we need not be surprised if aspiration, in all these men,
finally takes a mystical turn; and Dante's ghostly friends, after
propounding their aristocratic philosophy, to justify God in other men's
eyes, are themselves on the point of quitting the lower sphere to which
God had assigned them and plunging into the "sea" of his absolute
ecstasy. For, if the word God stands for man's spiritual ideal, heaven
can consist only in apotheosis. This the Greeks knew very well. They
instinctively ignored or feared any immortality which fell short of
deification; and the Christian mystics reached the same goal by less
overt courses. They merged the popular idea of a personal God in their
foretaste of peace and perfection; and their whole religion was an
effort to escape humanity.

[Sidenote: When natures differ perfections differ too.]

It is true that the theistic cosmology might hear a different
interpretation. If by deity we mean not man's ideal--intellectual or
sensuous--but the total cosmic order, then the universal hierarchy may
be understood