(Aristotle 6) Limits of Aristotle, cont. Dante and Aquinas, Aristotle Christianized

I have been reading Dante since I first read The Inferno at the age of 18 at Centre College in the course that changed my life (for better or worse): Literature and Philosophy, taught by Professor Milton Riegelman. (I still remember sitting around his fireplace around Halloween drinking Sassafras tea and discussing Dante’s trip through Hell. Since then I have probably reread the epic poem thirty times at least. Fascinated and disturbed. Love and hate. But in this meditation on Aristotle, I think I realize why in the end I hate the religious vision that informs the poem. (You can check the Internet for a summary of the poem, Sparknotes, for example, or Wikipedia.)

   It is known that Dante (1265-1321) was heavily influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas, some going so far as to suggest the Divine Comedy is like a translation of Thomist thought into epic poetry. (I agree with those who point out Dante makes some wild and probably heretic changes to Thomas.) Thomas is a major philosopher and theologian for me, has been for many years. I guess he made it possible for me to come back to Christianity at the age of 33 by offering a Christian vision starkly different from the evangelical protestant version I had known growing up and that by that time meant nothing to me, had meant nothing to me since I was a teen. In Thomas’ thought, philosophy and theology, human reason and divine revelation were married; the Creation received a powerful and powerfully relevant (and true) interpretation; his understanding of reality, reason, knowledge still appeal to me. His moral realism still appeals to me: that is, the belief that the reality of people and the Creation is meaningful and makes claims on me to respect it, etc. His thought gave me the resources to understand and reject the corrosive subjectivism of capitalist culture. I could go on. Thomas was able to speak to me because, as people say, he Christianized Aristotle: transcended the limitations of Aristotle’s own Greek culture, and reinterpreted his thought in a way that left space for love and human dignity, which is to say, for morality, for the Good (in Plato’s sense). Yes, he also reconciled Plato and Aristotle for me.

    And yet, as with Dante, something always held me back. I never “identified” as a Thomist, for example. Dante tells me why. Now I think I understand why. It has shaken up my belief system (not for the first time in my life lol). That is one of the dangers of trying to think.

    So here it is. I’m giving the short version here.

Aristotle’s philosophy implies a gap between those people who by nature and luck are capable of developing into a truly real, valuable human being – of course, only by living in a certain kind of community, a community with the structure of a practice like piano playing, basketball, or teaching - a type of community that is not impossible for us but increasingly out of reach for majorities. And hardly anyone is fully formed by such a community in our time. Especially since such a community came with a political dimension such that you can reveal who you are (as an individual and a human being) through showing your character (loving the good of the community, possessing the character traits necessary to thrive in a community and contribute to making it better) but also through meaningful words and actions. I agree with Aristotle that mere human life is a pretty poor thing outside such a community. That is my reason for thinking it is ‘natural’ for us, that being deprived of such an opportunity violates our nature, our reality, our essence. (Marx draws heavily on Aristotelian thought. So does Wendell Berry.)

     I have pointed out the problem with this kind of thinking for those of us who find it compelling: what to do with those who fall outside it, who remain private egos – whether it be those so oppressed by poverty and social demeaning that life becomes a war of all against all to survive or those super-rich parasites who through their power to command labor and governance have placed themselves outside of the community (and any number of seemingly disparate categories of people). Aristotle, his mind clouded by the injustices of his time (as ours are by those of our time), believed that some people were deprived by nature of full humanity, lacked the capacity to develop the highest potential and participate meaningfully in a political community. We mostly reject this (e.g. we believe it largely of the mentally handicapped, pathological criminals, mental patients, etc.). But some people for Aristotle and us are deprived of this opportunity contingently, through bad luck or injustice (thus social democrats at least believe in using the power of the state to expand such opportunities). But the gap between those human beings who do in a sense ‘bear fruit’ and those who don’t or can’t remains.

   Dante and Thomas apply this aspect of Aristotelianism to religion, to eternity. What the polis (political community) was for Aristotle, the Church was for Thomas, is for Catholics. In the Church you develop in the most perfect, most human way those virtues Aristotle prized: self-restraint (or moderation), courage, justice, and wisdom. But to fully become a living soul, not just a human being who bears fruit in a community, three other virtues, the so-called theological virtues, are necessary: faith, hope, love (of which love is the highest, as God’s essence is ‘Being-and-Love.’ The idea is that only in the community of the Church, the community of the saints, can a person fully activate his full humanity, can become a living soul.

    And this set up the same dichotomy for all eternity between those who are in the community of the Church on their way to becoming saints (almost all of us fall short in this life, in spite of the community life of the Church, and thus need Purgatory, which is the second part of the Divine Comedy) – and those who are not. (A saint is for the Church was the "great-souled man" was for Aristotle: the ideal type of human being brought forth by the best kind of community.) In contrast to Aristotle’s purely worldly beliefs, when those deprived of actualizing their humanity were dead, their suffering was over. In Dante’s Christian universe, that pain is just beginning and it goes on for eternity.

    I cannot accept that. In our human world we have the possibility – by shifting away from an Aristotelian belief system – of keeping those who by nature or bad luck are deprived of living rich, virtuous, meaningful lives with us: through compassion, pity, understanding. Jesus taught us not to judge anyone in some final sense: “He belongs in Hell; may he be punished in Hell forever” is a profoundly sinful thought, one that separates the person thinking it from his soul, other people, the Creation, and his Creator. He taught us that we are all (metaphorically) “God’s children,” that God is our “father.” He must forgive each other. That defines the community of those who want to follow his teachings. Call that “the Church.”

   That goes against a powerful human tendency. Those who do not practice it, those outside the Church, as I said, are cut off from the community, from nature, and from God. In Christian-Aristotelian terms, they fail to realize the point of their existence, to become what they were intended to be. They were created as fruit trees but through. . . what? Their own actions and choices made in radical freedom? Or were they deprived by nature or society? Were they just unlucky to have been born in a world like Aristotle’s where such beliefs were not even thinkable by the wisest? I believe this was the reason Jesus taught us not to “cast the first stone.” We are not angels choosing between good and evil in perfect knowledge, perfect freedom. If any of us becomes halfway good, there is a lot of luck involved. If you understand the biography of most people who fail to be good, who fail to love, who end up violating love, violating nature, you will find grounds to pity them unless they have hurt you so bad your reason is clouded by pain and hate. That is at least part of the reason for “Let he who is without sin or guilt cast the first stone.”

   Some of the Pharisees (as described in the New Testament) rejected that. They cast the followers of Jesus outside of their community, and the followers of Jesus cast them out of theirs. There is always an implicit criterion: group x belongs to the saving or fully human community because of a set of beliefs and virtues; group y doesn’t. Humanity depends on belonging to the right community. Only thus can we acquire the right beliefs and virtues. Only thus can we become fully human. Belonging, whether in Aristotle or Dantean Christianity, is more essential than our common humanity; more essential than what we abstractly call “human dignity.” Christianized Aristotelianism. Every church presupposes an (all-too-human) in-group and an out-group, and this distinction goes deeper than common humanity. This is the toxic thought at the root of Christianity, Islam, and at least some forms of Judaism (and all forms of nationalism).

    Thus you get Hell – one sin at least of which pre-Christian Judaism seems to be free – an idea that transcends in evil anything Aristotle could think. I think Aristotle would be appalled were he to read The Inferno. You get a Christian saint (Thomas) arguing that it affronts God to pity the souls in Hell. Aquinas asserted that God's justice is perfect and infallible. The souls in Hell are there as a result of their own choices and actions, having freely chosen to reject God's grace and commit mortal sins without repentance – no more of ‘there but for the grace of God go you or I.’ Since the punishment of the souls in Hell is a just consequence of their sins, pitying them would imply questioning or opposing God's perfect justice. To pity them would be to suggest that God's judgment is somehow unfair or excessive, which contradicts the belief in God's perfect justice and righteousness. If you feel that the chamber of horrors Dante imagines for the sinners in Hell is positively “medieval”, is why a more humane generation of human beings wanted to outlaw torture and “cruel and unusual punishment,” then St. Thomas would reply that God's wisdom surpasses human understanding. The eternal damnation of souls is part of the divine plan, which is ultimately good and just, even if it is beyond human comprehension. Pitying the damned – even your own parents or children – is a failure to trust in God's wisdom and plan. That implies that those more human people of the Enlightenment had a better understanding of justice and mercy than God Himself.

    I don’t believe Hell is only a result of applying this Aristotelian dichotomy between full humanity in the best kinds of community versus those who don’t have that option, whether self-chosen or not. Hell was a thing before Aquinas wove Aristotelian thought into Christian thought. Jesus himself used Aristotelian-type metaphors for it:

Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. (Matthew 3:12)

 

Jesus does teach that we should not attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff; it is not our job. Judging others is the task of Jesus, and when we try to take this responsibility upon ourselves, we are practicing a form of idolatry by putting ourselves in the place of Jesus. Besides, we are notoriously bad judges. But perfect love, justice, and wisdom judge us, and we end up with Dante’s Inferno.

    I would want to believe that God’s love is greater than ours, not less. Would any father send his child to Dante’s Inferno, any of its circles? Is not our common humanity a gift of the idea that we have a common source, a common Creator, conceived as a loving father? This is what I think Tolstoy understood. I heard Pope Francis comfort a boy whose father - not a Christian -  had died with similar words.

   In the history of Christian churches, two sources of blindness exist that have hidden this from view: importing the attitude of the Pharisees into the Christian church – God gives commands, you are righteous is you obey the commands, hell-bound if you don’t. (Again, this is much worse than the Pharisees – again, as depicted in the gospels – who at least didn’t imagine the adulteresses that got stoned to death would suffer eternally in Hell after the temporary earthly Hell was over.) And the second source was bring Aristotelian worldly thought into Christianity.

 

 [Did Jesus really teach burning the chaff? I don’t know. I hope not. Much of the Gospels – written decades after Jesus lived and died – is church-building. Scholars assume that some of the teachings – the Sermon on the Mound, for example – are genuine. Some words are obviously put in Jesus’ mouth. I think the consensus is that Jesus really did teach that Hell is real and perhaps is much like Dante depicts it. I cannot reconcile Hell with the reality of God as Jesus otherwise reveals that reality.]

     [I take Hell seriously as a possibility of myself, in a spiritual, metaphorical sense: i.e. I believe life can cut a person off from their own body and soul, from other people and community, from nature-as-Creation, from God. I believe we can more or less choose those things, though I doubt choice is the dominant cause of them. I believe I could do things that would result in despair. I have done and thought things that have brought me to the brink of that abyss. But I know that none of us are perfectly free and knowing, like an angel. We shouldn’t cast the first stone because we don’t know what it is like to be the adulteress. Our lives are so much luck, starting with whether we had wise and loving parents, lived in a time of peace and plenty, were not born into a system that oppressed us, etc. We can pity the worst of us. A mother can cry when her son is executed for terrible crimes. Thomas says we can’t pity the damned, no more than Aristotle could pity the slave by nature. We can't be both intelligible objects of love, and therefore pity, and at the same time devils. If God is real and if God is love and if there is a life after death, then there is hope for us all and we need not believe that anyone is in Hell. But the possibility of losing ourselves is probably necessary for us to appreciate the seriousness of how we live. I am not denying that we can and do for all kinds of reasons lose ourselves. They a human being can curse the day they were born. That a human being can find existence a horrible mistake. What I do deny is that we cannot and should not have compassion for them, and ourselves to the extent we feel like that. I deny that a loving father - or mother - real or metaphorical would make Dante's Inferno to eternally torture and punish such souls, any soul.]