Dante and Homosexuality

What happens to Christian understanding when they fuse with Aristotle? Another dimension is added. Though you should obey God’s commands (as interpreted by the Church, of course) because they are God’s command, you can also through human reason – after all, created by God, a finite version of his infinite reason – understand God’s reason. Nature is Creation, God’s ideas flowed into Nature. Human reason, finite and fallible though it is, darkened by sin though it is, can with the right education and community (i.e. the Church) be formed to a limited but real extent by Ideas in the mind of God used to create nature.

     We can recognize trees as trees and love as love because they are intelligible. Being is intelligible. This is pure Aristotle. But it becomes sublime when you consider that in apprehending nature you are thinking the thoughts of God after him (as Newton put it). That this thing and that thing are both ‘birch trees’ because they share the same intelligible structure means that an Idea of God – ‘birch treeness’ – gets translated into material reality and our reason is able to abstract at least a shadow of that Idea (a shadow is still an image of something real, even if we can’t see what is projecting it): we are in contact with the mind of God! That is an exciting thought, though hard for us to experience it as did Aquinas and those of that time. It is a thought made possible by Aristotle (and Plato).

    But it had unfortunate consequences regarding homosexuality. According to Thomas, natural law is the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law of God. Human reason can grasp natural law by apprehending the natural purposes (or ends – the telos) of natural phenomena – like sex. Sexuality thus has natural ends: procreation and the unity of a man and woman within marriage. It is understood today in the Church exactly as Aquinas and Dante understood it. Anything that violates these natural ends is seen as irrational because it goes against the divinely instituted natural order. Since reason is the means by which humans comprehend this order, actions that violate it are considered insults not only to God but reason and nature. The “Sodomites” are in Dante’s Hell not only because they violated a commandment – as conservative protestants still believe today – but also nature and reason: a double-barrel sin.

  In The Inferno Dante places sodomites in the Seventh Circle, among those who commit violence against nature. This categorization reflects the view that their actions disrupt the natural and rational order established by God. The punishment of enduring a barren, fiery desert symbolizes the perceived sterility and destructiveness of their actions, contrasting with the life-giving potential of procreative sexual acts. Dante encounters his former mentor Brunetto Latini among the sodomites, which adds a personal dimension to his depiction, since he at least seems to have much affection for his former teacher. His affection and pity – some readers see this as a mean-spirited shaming of his mentor, but I don’t buy it – shows that the “sodomite” Brunetto Latini did have individual virtues apart from the sin, that he was indeed loveable from a purely human standpoint. But there he is, in Hell.

    We see this tension over and over in the Inferno: Dante has pity for those condemned to Hell and yet he should have no pity. According to Aquinas himself, to pity the damned is an affront to God, as though a microbe human with his limited mind and wisdom dare call into question the infinite wisdom, goodness, love, and justice of God Almighty! Dante later shows he is advancing spiritually when he relishes adding to the suffering of a no doubt unlikable sinner. He and his guide Virgil (symbol of human reason!) are crossing over the river Styx, which separates the carnal sinners of the flesh from the more serious sinners of the mind and spirit. The walls of the City of Dis are there to keep God (love) out. In this river the souls destroyed by wrath are punished. These souls are immersed in slimy muck, striking one another with hands, feet, and heads, as well as biting one another for all eternity. [As a symbolic image of wrath this is perfect; as an eternal punishment for a human being, sickening, though by far not the most sickening in the Inferno.]

 

And as we ran on that dead swamp, the slime

Rose before me, and from it a voice cried:

“Who are you that come here before your time?”

 

And I replied: “If I come, I do not remain.

But you, who are you, so fallen and so foul?”

And he: “I am one who weeps.” And I then:

 

“May you weep and wail to all eternity,

For I know you, hell-dog, filthy as you are.”

Then he stretched both hands to the boat, but warily

 

The Master shoved him back, crying, “Down! Down!

With the other dogs!” Then he embraced me saying:

“Indignant spirit, I kiss you as you frown.

 

Blessed be she who bore you. In world and time

This one was haughtier yet. Not one unbending

Graces his memory. Here is his shadow in slide.

 

How many living now, chancellors of wrath,

Shall come to lie here yet in this pigmire,

Leaving a curse to be their aftermath!”

 

And I: “Master, it would suit my whim

To see the wretch scrubbed down into the swill

Before we leave this stinking sink and him.”

 

And he to me: “Before the other side

Shows through the mist, you shall have all you ask.

This is a wish that should be gratified.”

 

And shortly after, I saw the loathsome spirit

So mangled by a swarm of muddy wraiths

That to this day I praise and thank God for it.

 

“After Filippo Argenti!” all cried together.

The maddog Florentine wheeled at their cry

And bit himself for rage. I saw them gather.

 

Imagine if Dante had seen his own father there. He would have been expected to show just the same sadism. He would have been praised all the more for showing it to the damned soul of his own earthly father. That’s some sick, perverted stuff.

     I saw a video showing Pope Francis – the most Christian Pope probably of all time – in an audience with the public. A young boy came up to him and told the Pope his father had died and was an unbeliever. His father was a good man. The boy obviously loved him. The boy – a Catholic – was upset by the thought of his father in Hell because he was an unbeliever. I know Christians who would have told the boy that his father was in Hell because he did not believe, and no one enters Heaven without “believing.” The Pope answered: “Do you think God would be able to leave a man like him far from Him?” If God is Love, that is the true answer. But that the Hell story so tormented this grieving boy made me angry. Dante obviously applied a different logic from a very different God to his mentor.

. . .

 

I am ambivalent about Dante’s Inferno and about Hell.

 

Even if God plays no role in your life, just suspend your disbelief as you do when you read a fantasy novel like The Lord of the Rings: image a real God as a boundless, eternal, unlimited, self-aware and transparent to itself – whose being was love, who was pure goodness. Imagine the Creation spontaneously radiated every second of its existence from this divine energy according to Ideas formed in its unlimited consciousness. Imagine that.

     That is a picture of God that is at least compatible with the image of God presupposed by the Pope in his comforting of the grieving boy. Is that compatible with the image of God in the Inferno, the Divine Comedy? Could the God who is Love use his infinite imagination to visualize symbolic punishments to such a degree of perfection, and then condemn those who fit those sins to live out these fantasies eternally, without any hope of redemption? I can’t. To me the God that condemned Brunetto Latini to Hell and that punishment is more a devil than a god.

     If the boy had come to Dante, he would have discovered that his father was in the 6th circle of Hell, in the city of Dis, burning in eternal fire while locked into a coffin. Atheism was a form of heresy for Dante. The coffins signify their spiritual death. Just as tombs separate the dead from the living, these fiery tombs symbolize the heretics' separation from the true faith and from God's grace. The closed nature of the tombs reflects the heretics' self-imposed isolation from the community of believers and their rejection of communal truths upheld by the Church. Fire often represents divine justice in biblical and medieval literature. The heretics' fiery tombs symbolize the consuming nature of God’s justice, punishing them for their rejection of divine truth.

     Unlike the purifying fire of Purgatory, the fire in the heretics' tombs does not cleanse but rather eternally torments, signifying the irredeemable state of those who die in heresy without repentance. The detail that the tombs will be sealed shut on the Day of Judgment underscores the finality of the heretics’ condemnation. Their punishment is not only eternal but also irrevocable, with no hope of redemption. This sealing symbolizes the ultimate and unchangeable nature of divine justice that will be fully realized at the end of time. Heretics, many of whom denied the resurrection of the body or other core Christian doctrines, are punished in tombs that symbolize death without resurrection. This serves as an ironic commentary on their beliefs, emphasizing the consequence of their doctrinal errors. The eternal flames within the tombs symbolize perpetual death, contrasting sharply with the Christian promise of eternal life. Thus might Dante have spoken to the boy.

     If God is love, then Hell doesn’t exist. Dante’s God is not Love but a totalitarian ruler, a divine Big Brother.

 

. . .

 

If I just focus on myself, I know that everything I do or say or think moves me either closer to love (because done in the spirit of love, and thus with God somehow present, if God is love) or further away from love. I have betrayed a good woman. I have no trouble using a Dantean image of betrayal as a symbol of the state of my soul as I betrayed her. Had I died, unrepentant (I repented even as I did it, contradictory though that seems), I would have been punished in the 9th (lowest) circle of Hell in Dante’s vision. I would be frozen in ice, a fitting retribution for my cold-hearted betrayal. (Well, it wasn’t really cold-hearted. Stupid-hearted. But I’ll run with this.) This icy imprisonment symbolizes the severity of betrayal, the coldness and the lovelessness involved in abandoning a good woman to her suffering.  The ice tomb also symbolizes the permanent rupture of the familial bonds. In remorse, I can almost feel that suffering.

      While alive, we can hope for forgiveness. Sometimes we can do things that help heal the damage. We are not absolute spirits but rather all “cracked vessels” (Donne) – some with more cracks than others. This explains the possibility of forgiveness. Were I a center of absolute consciousness, like the autonomy lovers believe, I would have to own my deed absolutely, which would indeed put me beyond forgiveness. [I suppose Hell might make sense for a fallen angel?] But had I died, say, in a car accident, I’d be in the ice, if Dante’s vision were true. My father might be in the 6^th circle. Most of us would probably be in some circle. In this sense, it is reasonable to fear “Hell” myself: to fear losing myself, to fear becoming a person that no one (except perhaps God) can find lovable, and thus whom I could not find lovable. A person of whom one could say, as far as this life is concerned: better he had never been born. A person who could curse the day he was born. In this spirit, I take Hell very seriously. Hell is part of this life. You can destroy your soul, you can damage the souls of other in this life. 

 

   

   I believe a person can be so lost that he loses all connection to what is lovable in himself, all ability to love, thus all ability to have faith in anything good, to have hope in anything good; thus all ability to care about justice. You can destroy your soul in this life: that is so obvious that I hardly need to say it. Through the deeds of those who have destroyed their souls in this life – most SS concentration camp guards, for example – the souls of other people can be destroyed. That none of this matters eternally is also a hard thought to bear. If I imagine that the soul survives this world and the death of the body – whatever that means – then I can imagine the dead soul awakening and understanding their lives on earth as God does, the God who is Love. I can imagine an unbearable remorse. I can imagine those souls feeling all the pain from all the souls they harmed in life. I can imagine a kind of Purgatory, which is to say I can imagine the suffering of those who lost their souls in life when they understand the truth of what they became. A bit like the Sean Penn character did – however imperfectly – before his execution in Dead Man Walking when his victims finally became real to him and he was able to understand the true evil of his deeds.

    I can also imagine that this life is our only life and that wasting it on sin - on making a Hell here in Heaven's despite - is to lose everything. 

I cannot imagine that if two people love one another who happen to both be men or women that they should have reason to curse the day they were born. That makes no sense to me. 

    If there is a God of Love, there is no Inferno. A God of Love might not be able to prevent us from making an Inferno of our own lives. But if there is an afterlife, a God of Love will not further punish those of us who have wasted the gift of life and damaged other lives by throwing us in the Inferno. A God of Love would open our eyes and let us understand our lives from the perspective of love, and help heal us. That is what a good father would do.

I would never condemn my children to the Inferno no matter how badly they went astray. I can’t believe God, if God is love, would send his children (his creatures) there. He would reach out and pull us back.

. . .

 

     The fear of Hell is part of the so-called conservative Catholic and Protestant discourse on homosexuality today. The belief that homosexual people are by virtue of their homosexuality alone destined for Hell. They fear their own loved ones might cease to believe that and also end up in Hell. Many probably enjoy imagining homosexuals in Hell, but others are just trying to save their souls by scaring them with that possibility.

   Hell can be a kind of spiritual toxin. It separates absolutely one soul from other. As in Dante, it puts a group of souls beyond compassion (as in Sodom and Gomorrah). As Wendell Berry wrote: he who imagines others there are there themselves.

     There is no more reason to imagine that all homosexual people are like those depicted in Sodom than to imagine all heterosexual people are like those in a porn film. A porn film - that is an image of Hell; utter degradation; utter unlovability. If our self becomes reduced to the souls in a porn film, well, that is as close to the Inferno as we are likely to get, although that would leave the soul in the upper circles. The betrayer is lower down, even if the ice is not as visible as the body degraded to a porn object. 

  Where there is love, there God is. If there is a God, I hope at least he is not like Dante’s. I would not choose to be born in such a universe.