Dante encounters a convention of famous minds moving circularly in unison, like the sun, an image of perfect intelligibility. He focuses on Aquinas’s synthesis of faith and reason, which purports to resolve those perplexities that vex previous Heavens. Dante’s doubts disrupt the harmony; he wonders how it’s possible to err, to “wander” from “the straight way,” as he had done. “Thomas of Aquino” addresses Dante’s wonder.

Dante’s verdict on Aquinas’s synthesis turns on the difference between the “Angelic Doctor” and Solomon. Their relative rank reflects the capacity of prudence and poetry versus law and deduction from abstract principle to understand and guide humanity. These alternative views of wisdom rest, in turn, on the question of happiness or the true good, the prior, shared concern that both faith and reason address. Aquinas’s thought answers to a particular view of good, one that makes this Heaven’s inhabitants exult on hearing that their “desire for their dead bodies” will be fulfilled.Dante thus brings readers to ask if the intrinsically individual good of resurrection can be the supreme good for a being that can ask the question of happiness, a being that can “wander.”