The Three Degrees of Charity: Reading Dante’s Long Climb as a Change of Priorities

The three degrees of charity sound like a ladder. In Thomas Aquinas, they are closer to a change in what a person worries about most. A new essay published on 3 November 2026 in the journal Religions takes that distinction — beginners, those progressing, and the perfect — and uses it to reread Dante’s Commedia, arguing that the pilgrim’s journey is best understood not as a tour of three realms but as a slow change in his formative priorities: what he attends to, what he resists, and what he finally rests in (Religions).

It is a reading with a built-in warning label. The essay offers the framework as a heuristic, a lens to test against the poem — not as a claim that Dante composed the Commedia to a Thomistic code.

The three degrees of charity, in Aquinas’s own terms

Aquinas takes the scheme from Augustine and gives it systematic form in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 24, a. 9). Charity, he argues, grows the way a body grows: through stages marked by different chief pursuits. “At first it is incumbent on man to occupy himself chiefly with avoiding sin and resisting his concupiscences, which move him in opposition to charity: this concerns beginners,” he writes; the progressing person’s “chief pursuit is to aim at progress in good”; the perfect “aim chiefly at union with and enjoyment of God” (Aquinas, via CCEL).

The Latin names are incipientes, proficientes and perfecti. The point that matters, in both Aquinas and the new essay, is overlap. Beginners already make some progress. The perfect still grow. What shifts is the studium principale — the principal concern that organises a life at a given stage (Religions).

Beginners: learning to distrust a beautiful story

Read this way, Inferno becomes a school of discernment rather than a catalogue of punishments. The beginner’s task is to resist what opposes charity, and Dante’s problem is that the things opposing it arrive speaking beautifully.

Francesca tells her story so that “Love” does everything and the lovers do nothing — love seizes, love compels, love permits no refusal. The essay lingers on that grammar. Growth, for the pilgrim, means holding two things at once: compassion for a woman whose life ended in dynastic violence, and scrutiny of an account of desire that quietly dissolves responsibility (Religions). Ulysses poses the same test from the other direction. His speech to his crew — you were not made to live like beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge — is magnificent, and it talked men into a fatal voyage, past every obligation he owed his father, his son and his wife. The question the Thomistic lens asks is not whether knowledge is good. It is what the desire for it did to the people standing next to him.

Progress: a mountain that gets lighter

Purgatorio is where Dante’s moral transformation becomes physical. The penitents pray for each other and for the living — “This last prayer, dear Lord, is not made for us, for we have no need of it, but for those who remained behind us” — and intercession turns private improvement into mutual assistance (Religions). As each of the seven marks is erased from the pilgrim’s forehead, the climb itself grows easier. He notices it with wonder: lighter than through the other openings, he goes up without effort. The essay reads that lightness as the poem’s image of rightly ordered desire — freedom not as indifference, but as wanting the good without being dragged the other way.

Perfection: adherence without rivalry

In Paradiso, the concern of the perfecti — adherence to God — gets tested by a question a modern reader asks instinctively: don’t the blessed in lower heavens want more? Piccarda’s answer dismantles the premise. Charity, she explains, quiets the will; the blessed desire only what they have, and “in His will is our peace” (Religions). Fulfilment here is not a prize held against anyone else. And when the pilgrim’s love concentrates so fully on God that Beatrice is “eclipsed in oblivion,” her smile sends his attention back out to the blessed around him. Contemplation, in this poem, keeps handing you back to other people.

Analysis: the reading’s strength is also its exposure. Dante scholarship has long resisted tidy Thomistic overlays — George Corbett’s work, which the essay engages directly, traces the Purgatorio‘s moral ordering to an older, vice-centred penitential tradition rather than to Aquinas’s virtue scheme. The essay concedes the point and narrows its claim: the degrees illuminate the pilgrim’s experience inside an arrangement built from other materials. That modesty is what makes the lens worth picking up. It explains something readers genuinely feel — that Dante ends the poem able to do things he could not do at the start: judge a seductive story without cruelty, accept help, give it, and finally describe his own love under examination in Paradiso XXVI without flinching. Whether that change is Aquinas’s map or simply the shape of any serious moral education is a question the poem, characteristically, leaves open for the reader walking behind him.

Sources

1. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/17/11/1294
2. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.SS_Q24_A9.html
3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/moth.12988