The Last Circle of Hell

                                                        Dante

                                                 If you imagine

                                                 others are there,

                                                you are there yourself. 

                                                                     -Wendell Berry

       

   I know a woman, very well in fact, who was as a young teen the victim (‘willing’ in an attenuated sense) of a sexual predator. The man was a teacher in a Catholic Gymnasium (German academically elevated high school to prepare students for university) who came to a city in the former German Democratic Republic from the West German state Bavaria to teach, returning to his wife and children on the weekend. This man came into a situation of great dislocation and disorientation in the new federal states. He projected a very likeable and caring image, and was correspondingly popular, acquiring great authority as a representative of the new system. Many of his students were from families falling apart during this time. The woman I know was first deprived of a father when he broke his marriage and family to be with another woman; his ex-wife complicated matters by doing everything she could to cut him off from his daughter. Compounding this (and part of it) was the tragedy of having lost a three year old daughter to disease. The mother then married a man who beat her – a terrible place for the girl to be in. Add to that the fact that the mother worked for a theater, and thus was often gone in the evening, that alcohol abuse was part of that world.

        This is just a brief sketch to indicate the woman had less than an ideal situation to grow up in, and indeed suffered lifelong damage (who would not have). How he made his move on this girl, 14 at the time, I cannot recall, but managed to create an emotional and sexual dependence that lasted about three years, and in a way still continues in different ways as the woman cannot really confront what happened in its ugly truth as it would expose her to the full extent of her exploitation and defilement. The man projected a lying image, and used his power over an extremely vulnerable adolescent to sexually violate her when as a teacher and indeed a public “Christian” it was his sacred obligation to do good to her who was in his care. There is something sickening in this sustained evil. That she fights with personality disorders to this day, that her life has not exactly gone smoothly, and that she has hurt people along the way is no surprise. The man returned to Bavaria, became principal of an all-girls school, and lived happily ever after – or that is the problem.  The man was never caught, and in all probability refined his technique and continued to exploit vulnerable adolescents as long as he was able, though even if he has been a model teacher, husband, and father after this would not undo the evil he did and the evil man he thereby became.

     Now imagine how a parent (or anyone who loved the woman) would respond on learning what happened. This following reaction would be at least understandable to all of us: outrage that the man did that and got away with it; a strong desire to see him suffer for his crimes; anger and a wish for payback; a desire to take him out of circulation to protect other vulnerable girls. It is almost unbearable the thought that this monster did what he did and gets away with it. And to his wife, daughter, colleagues, perhaps also to the pupils he is responsible for he is this lying image of a caring, Christian, charismatic teacher, a force for good in the world. Thus the familiar theme: the evil living happily ever after, if they can get away with it. The ‘If the Nazis had won the war, future generations would have a very different understanding of World War II’ theme.

      In this connection, I recall Socrates’ conversation with Polus in Plato’s Gorgias. Polus, a student of the reputable Sophist and teacher of rhetoric, Gorgias, is incredulous that Socrates believes that precisely the evil-doer is most miserable and pitiable who does not get punished and indeed in his or her own mind sees themselves as ‘happy’ precisely because they got what they wanted by placing themselves beyond good and evil. Polus cites as his example a Macedonian tyrant, Archelaus, who is in the (for Polus) enviable position of having absolute power to fulfill his desires without fear of punishment or opposition. He came to that power by betrayal and murder, and maintains it with fear and violence. Polus more or less assumes that if any of us were free of the fear of punishment, then ‘moral’ restraints would lose their force (be revealed as mere social constructs to protect us from the ill-will of others, perhaps ingrained as taboos) and our true ‘nature’ would be revealed – an infantile self that lusts for precisely the license to fulfill every desire and wish, sexual and otherwise (a very Freudian picture). He asserts everyone secretly admires men like Archelaus whether or not they are too ashamed to admit it in public or even acknowledge it to themselves. Thus he can only understand Socrates’ view that evil-doers are the most miserable and pitiable people of all, even more so when they appear to others to be wonderful human beings and do not get punished.

     Why does Socrates think this? Because such people are in truth base and wretched, however they appear to others or to themselves. It is a contradiction to be base, wicked, and truly happy. This is obviously a different conception of ‘happiness’ than Polus’ understanding of it as the power to get all you want according to your ‘nature.’ He finds it absurd that anyone could think Archelaus would be happy suffering the punishment for his crimes rather than having all his wishes fulfilled and being admired by the masses; indeed, for Polus it would be extremely terrible for him to be punished, since the penalty would be death. The idea of being better off with pain and death being inflicted on him in punishment than being admired and free to pursue his every whim makes no sense to him precisely because he can only see morality as a pragmatic restraint on human nature, which is revealed in all its truth precisely when someone has absolute power. Remorse, then, or bad conscience could only be understood by Polus as regret at getting caught or limited in one’s ‘pursuit of happiness.’ He prides himself on having the courage to openly acknowledge this, which he thinks everyone believes in their hearts – basically agreeing with Voldemort from the Harry Potter stories that ‘there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.’ He assumes that suffering pain is bad, and experiencing pleasure is good; the evil-doer who can fulfill his desires with impunity experiences pleasure; the victim suffers pain and damage – therefore, the evil-doer is in a more enviable position than the victim. If the evil-doer must be punished (meaning suffer pain), then to that extent he is not ‘happy’ or enviable – and more or less enviable than the victim depending on who suffers the most pain.

     Now think back to the woman who was sexually victimized by the predatory teacher who ought to have cared for her and helped her to the extent to was able, and think back to the understandable response that most of us would have: we want him to suffer more than she did; that would define ‘justice’ for us, and ‘punishment.’ Given that her life probably can never be whole again, one might wish for drastic punishments – burning the son-of-a-bitch at the stake, for example. That may appeal to one’s righteous anger. What Plato’s Socrates in a sense discovers in the Gorgias is a whole other dimension than pain and pleasure, and the weighing and balancing of each. The grounds for pitying the wretchedness of the evil-doer is not the pain he suffers (or should suffer): “to do evil is worse than to suffer it through an excess of evil (Gorgias, 475c).” The distinctive evil of what the predatory teacher did to his victim cannot be understood in categories of pain, pleasure, reward, retribution – or any social category. The teacher has become evil, has revealed himself to be evil, the kind of man who would abuse a sacred trust and exploit a most vulnerable adolescent girl to live out some perverse sexual fantasy. This is so whether or not anyone knows it, including himself (people are experts at self-deception) – and not just according to some social norm in place to make social life possible or some taboo from deep in our prehistory.

     And for Socrates there is only one help – just punishment, which includes recognizing the truth of the monster he has become: I say ‘monster’ because such a man has in a way separated himself from humanity, has shown that he is willing to prey on humanity to fulfill some perverted infantile desires. Or as another great teacher said: the truth will set you free. Of course, it is a terribly painful truth; but not all pain is evil. The pain of pulling a tooth is necessary to relieve an underlying, permanent source of suffering –though that metaphor doesn’t quite capture what I am after here. As Socrates puts it: only justice will remove the evil from the man’s soul. And by implication: the worst thing that could happen to him would be not removing the evil, which would then completely take him over and cut him off from any source of good, of salvation. I could try to describe with other words what this evil involves – perverting his true nature by destroying his capacity truly to love, to be just, and so on. It could be described in different ways, but no explanation does any more than say with different words (more abstract, i.e. farther away from the evil done) what we mean when we say the man has become evil. If he ever really came to understand what he did and what he had become he would suffer remorse and seek penance: ‘Oh my God, what have I done!’

       Now the understandable reaction to the teacher – anger, the wish for payback, he should suffer! – also reveals itself to be on the same plane as the evil doer himself. The horror and fear that he ‘lives happily ever after’ and escapes punishment turns out to make sense only if one assumes that the good is the happy and the happy is the pleasure of fulfilled desires (uninformed by any higher standard) and evil is unhappiness and unhappiness is pain. The outrageous injustice is the belief that the evil-doer made himself happy at the cost of making another, one we love, unhappy. Thus we want to balance the scales in her favor. The problem for ‘us’ is that we in effect become complicit in the same evil attitude. By judging things according to this scale, we give it legitimacy, and somehow mask the distinctiveness of the evil involved. The evil-doer who gets paid back, with interest, might rightly think our vindictiveness expresses the resentment of the weak; or a secret wish to do what he dared; or that the desire for revenge shows that deep in our hearts we do not believe in the reality of good and evil, but only pleasures and pains. In a way, it is a nihilistic response. Wendell Berry wrote a little poem on Dante’s Inferno: “If you imagine/ others are there,/ you are there yourself.”

       Something else altogether is going on. The distinctive terribleness of what it means for that predatory man to do that to that vulnerable girl is not reducible to or explainable solely by the pain or corrupt pleasure involved – if that were the case, then it would be no different from, say, him accidentally doing something that damaged her (e.g. through his inattention during an excursion she was badly injured and disabled for life). That a person would suffer over that is also intelligible, but it is a very different kind of thing than evil done to the vulnerable girl by that teacher. In addition to the damage, or rather part of the emotional damage is that he did evil to her: he abused his position of trust and authority and exploited her vulnerability to slake a base lust, and thereby transformed himself into a wicked, base human being. That his wife at home, his daughter, the pupils at that school still all believe he is the most wonderful man in the world just deepened the shamefulness and wickedness of what he did and who he has become. Even if nobody knows it, he at some level knows it. Can he ever really go back to the person he was before the crime? He can rationalize, he can concoct an ideology like Voldemort’s, he can construct some kind of sentimental love story, it was meant to be, or society’s prejudices as made us into star-crossed lovers, or our souls were joined in another life – whatever it takes to hide.  Perhaps he can even train himself to believe whatever lie he tells himself and in a corrupt sense ‘live happily ever after.’

    I think Plato and Jesus would both think: that would be the worst possible thing that could happen to any human being; a human being thus reaches the bottom of wretchedness; he is defined by the crime;  he has truly lost his soul; the voice of God in him has been silenced forever; he is cut off from reality, unhinged from what supports us – that, and not some form of pain inflicted by someone else on him, be it through God or man,  is the last circle of Hell. It is life situations like this that give force to Plato’s insight (and presumably Socrates’) that evil essentially involves ignorance – a willful ignorance, a not wanting or caring about truth.

        The lesson is not: ok, now my thirst for ‘justice’ or revenge is satisfied; he is in the last circle of Hell; I am comforted. This is the lesson I want to learn from Plato’s Socrates and Jesus: Hell is not vicarious revenge –when it becomes that, then it is the person who however subconsciously enjoys the idea of the criminal being in Hell that, as Berry grasped, is already there themselves. ‘I wish he would burn in Hell’ – then evil has drug another person down with the first. Pity is the right response – Aquinas and Dante were wrong: the response of love for the damned is pity, though an unsentimental pity that does not mask the reality of the evil-doer beyond redemption. Or perhaps no one is absolutely beyond redemption? We must indeed hope Hell is in the end empty (I certainly do for very personal reasons!). For the evil-doer, coming out of the closet is the only chance.