Dante, Lewis, von Balthasar: Hell in Art and Life

 

   

  Another person’s cruelty or selfishness can seem so complete that we are tempted to see them not merely as flawed, but as lost. At the same time, deeper knowledge of human beings often complicates judgment (I am thinking, for example, of both the film and the book Dead Man Walking). The more we understand a person’s fears, wounds, history, and limitations, the harder it becomes to imagine them as simply evil. Between these two experiences of moral seriousness and compassion for finite creatures lies one of the oldest and most difficult questions for me and many others.

  What I want to explore here by examining an aspect of Dante’s Inferno and C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is whether such images illuminate enduring truths about human beings: our capacity for self-deception, resentment, alienation, moral blindness, and resistance to love. Also the limits of judgment in a world inhabited by finite and wounded creatures. The question of what really happens in a possible afterlife is not my interest here.

. . .

  I wrote in my last entry that I have a lot of ambivalence to Lewis' The Great Divorce, as I do to Dante’s Inferno for the same reason. I think both portray the damned soul or the lost way in a chilling, compelling way, that is not the source of my ambivalence. I find these two pictures of the lost soul scary because they do make sense of my experience of certain people and aspects of myself – and to an extent of House, as I wrote. My ambivalence stems from sense that for a creature, man, mortal to image actual souls damned is a terrible thing (thus my ambivalence also to Dante, whom I love and hate in equal measure). A little Berry poem entitled Dante nails it:

                                If you imagine

                               others are there,

                               you are there yourself.

                               

That seems to capture a central aspect of Christ's love you enemy and judge not lest you be judged teaching. I have the sense that both Lewis and Dante were not just imagining and thinking about the form of a lost soul but imaging Hell full of lost souls, partly, I suspect, to scare non-Christian readers, which inversely makes Christian readers feel good.

     My concern is not skepticism about evil or the possibility of self-destruction. In fact, I think Lewis’s idea is profound, that souls can become closed, hardened, trapped in resentment, pride, fear, unreality. That is why House, and certain real people, aspects of my own life, strike me as spiritually frightening rather than merely mistaken. I do fear ‘losing my soul,’ have come close to that precipice more than once, and I think it is a rational fear.

     The issue for me is whether a finite, fallible human being can rightly place others within a final vision of damnation without spiritually implicating himself in the very judgment he renders, as Berry says in his poem. The force of the poem is spiritual more than doctrinal. The moment one begins imaginatively to inhabit the standpoint of ultimate judgment over others, which you do when you imagine others in Hell, something toxic enters the soul: the feeling of superiority, the hardening of the heart, the loss of pity, the feeling of satisfaction in being included in the elect – in short, the temptation to divide humanity into the saved and the damned with oneself tacitly among the former. And that is deeply connected to Christ’s warnings Judge not, that ye be not judged and Love your enemies. Not because judgment completely disappears – Christ plainly speaks of good and evil, and a rational person recognizes moral reality – but because the stance appropriate to fallen human beings is radically different from detached condemnation. The Christian is called to see even the sinner (i.e. everyone, oneself included) under the aspect of possible redemption and shared fragility.

    This is where my ambivalence toward Dante begins. The Divine Comedy is magnificent as poetry, metaphysics, moral vision, symbolic architecture. But it can also tempt readers into precisely the posture Berry warns against: the imaginative enjoyment of seeing others fixed eternally in their sins. That is even a theme of the poem, the inappropriacy of pity for the damned. Actually, it is bit more complex in the Inferno.

    Thomas Aquinas argues that the blessed in heaven do not grieve over the damned (and their torments in Hell) because their wills are perfectly aligned with divine justice. The damned are not viewed as unfortunate victims in the modern sentimental sense but as persons who have definitively rejected the good. To pity them against God’s judgment and God’s chosen punishments would imply that divine justice is somehow regrettable or mistaken. Aquinas even says that the blessed rejoice in the manifestation of divine justice, though modern readers often recoil from that formulation. It is true that Aquinas also distinguishes kinds of pity. Compassion for sinners in this life is entirely appropriate and indeed necessary. Mercy is one of the highest virtues for creatures like us living within history, uncertainty, weakness, and the possibility of repentance. The issue concerns the final state of souls after judgment, where, in the traditional picture, repentance is no longer possible.

    Dante turns this theological principle into drama. Early in the Inferno, the pilgrim Dante repeatedly pities the damned. He faints over Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, weeps, hesitates, and responds emotionally to suffering. But as the poem progresses, this pity is increasingly presented as spiritually immature or confused. Virgil often rebukes him. One of the clearest moments comes in Canto XX, where Dante weeps for the diviners whose heads are twisted backward. Virgil sharply tells him: “There is no place for pity here (Ciardi translation).” The meaning is severe: in hell, pity becomes impious if it refuses to acknowledge divine judgment. To continue reacting merely sentimentally, which in Dante’s theological framework is all rationally Dante’s response can be, is to misunderstand reality itself. And yet Dante’s poem simultaneously does seem to invite (and perhaps discipline) pity. The reader is not simply trained into hardness. After all, the Inferno is filled with psychologically vivid, tragic, even recognizable human beings. Dante the poet gives them immense reality and often enormous pathos. One could even argue that the power of the poem depends on our inability fully to extinguish compassion.

     That said, I cannot ignore thinking of Filippo Argenti in the Inferno, Canto VIII, one of the most disturbing moments in the poem precisely because Dante the pilgrim not only ceases to pity but actively delights in the sinner’s humiliation. And this is still early in the journey. Argenti appears among the wrathful submerged in the Styx. He rises from the black marsh and confronts Dante aggressively. Dante responds with open contempt. When Argenti tries to climb into the boat, Virgil pushes him away. Then the other wrathful souls attack Argenti, tearing at him savagely in the mire. What is shocking is Dante’s reaction. He does not merely accept the punishment as just. He expresses satisfaction at seeing Argenti destroyed. Virgil praises Dante for this response, embracing and kissing him as though he has achieved moral progress. Dante even says he still praises God for what happened to Argenti.

It is impossible for me not to see this as evil sadism. The scene, according to many commentators, marks a transition: Dante is learning not merely to suspend pity but to participate emotionally in divine judgment, i.e., righteous indignation replacing sinful softness. Argenti was traditionally understood as a violent, arrogant political enemy of Dante’s faction in Florence, so the scene also carries a personal dimension. So much for loving your enemies and not judging. (I also can’t help of the Nazi attitude toward the condemned souls in their death camps. That fact that the SS knew those deemed unworthy of life were condemned did nothing in many cases to evoke pity but the opposite, encouraged sadism.) Dante stages the argument of Aquinas, and the pilgrim learns to distinguish compassion for the living with hardness toward the damned, learning not to confuse love with sentimental refusal of judgment. I come away haunted by another possibility: that the refusal of pity itself risks becoming spiritually dangerous. I would feel polluted if I shared in Dante’s glee on Argenti’s fate. 

     This is where the poem becomes potentially toxic spiritually and morally. Dante is not merely presenting abstract doctrine. He dramatizes what happens when a human being learns to see reality through the lens of eternal judgment. The question becomes: does this purify love, or corrupt it?

Berry’s belief as expressed in his poem Dante – that imagining others in hell places oneself there – pushes against the emotional logic of the Argenti scene. Berry rightly fears the spiritual deformation that can arise when hatred or contempt are baptized as justice.

     I expect that a defender of Dante would likely answer that modern sentimentality often refuses to take evil seriously enough. Argenti is not merely “flawed.” He represents a soul wholly consumed by wrath and self-assertion. Dante’s hardening reflects the conviction that evil cannot always be met merely with therapeutic compassion. Granted. That does not erase the distinction between hating the sin (and its poisoning of a soul) and the possibility of compassion contained in Christ’s teaching. What is it to love your enemies? Not to have affectionate warm feelings for them. Not to try to like them in spite of their faults and what they are doing to you. Aquinas hits the nail on the head here: to love anyone is to will their good. Pieper takes it to an existential level: to love anyone is to will their existence. Now assume that Argenti was indeed irredeemably wicked, beyond any hope of recovery. He has become an enemy of his neighbor, of nature, of community, of God. He is incapable of love at any level. What can it mean to will his good? To will his continued existence even? Is this where the Christian command to love one’s enemies finally reaches a limit at the threshold of damnation? Or does perhaps the very idea of willing the good of another reveal something deeper about reality than the profane imagination can understand?

    For Aquinas, the answer is relatively clear within his metaphysical framework. To will the good of a person is to will the fulfillment proper to rational nature: union with God, truth, beatitude. If a soul has definitively rejected that end, then the order of justice requires assent to the consequences of that rejection. One no longer wills for the damned what cannot now be had. One wills the order of the universe as a whole, including justice. The existence of the damned manifests something real about freedom, sin, and divine order.

     But the Berry poem that speaks to me presses beneath this framework. It asks whether there remains some residue of love irreducible even to justice. Pieper’s formulation sharpens the issue enormously: to love someone is to say, “It is good that you exist.” Not merely that they possess this or that quality, nor that they are useful, nor even morally admirable, but that their being itself is a good.

    If Argenti has become pure self-assertion, pure hatred, a destroyer of community and neighbor, then two possibilities seem to present themselves.

Either his continued existence itself has become an evil. In that case, love would seem to reach its limit. One might still acknowledge the justice of his punishment while no longer willing his being as such. This seems close to the emotional logic of parts of Dante. Better that he just cease to exist, however, than to subject him to eternal sadistic tortures than the elect are supposed to rejoice over.

   Or his existence remains metaphysically good even if morally ruined. Evil would then never become a positive substance, never fully erase the ontological goodness of creaturehood. Even those deserving damnation – as in a sense we all do according to some theologians – would remain, in some terrible and wounded sense, beings whose existence proceeds from divine love. This second possibility seems closer to the Berry poem. For if existence itself is a gift grounded in divine love, then to will the annihilation or even the sheer non-being of another person seems close to consenting to hatred itself. One can condemn the corruption of the soul while still trembling before the mystery that this being was called into existence at all.

   This may partly explain why some Christians have affirmed universal hope (more on this below), even when refusing dogmatic universalism. Not because evil is unreal, nor because justice is sentimentalized away, but because love seems metaphysically deeper than condemnation. The Cross appears not merely as judgment but as divine solidarity with ruined creatures. That is perhaps the crucial difference between tragic diagnosis and self-righteous condemnation.

     But this example is not the right one because we assumed for the sake of argument that Argenti had lost his soul. In real life, we cannot know any such thing. We might suspect that certain individuals (Hitler, Stalin, on a different plane Trump; or even Dr. House, who cannot choose to love) have lost their souls but we are in no position to know such thing. We cannot finally stand outside the human condition as neutral observers. The line between clarity and pride is thin. To imagine ourselves fully capable of seeing who belongs in Hell already involves a spiritual distortion, a forgetting of our own dependence on mercy. That is why Dante’s (and Lewis’, who I will discuss next) audacity is so disturbing. They poetically imagine Hell full, in Dante’s case of real individuals like Argenti. And perhaps this is why figures like Wendell Berry, Raimond Gaita, or Iris Murdoch appeal to me more deeply than some harder-edged apologetic traditions. They tend to preserve moral seriousness while resisting the temptation to convert insight into superiority.

    I think Berry’s poem could function as a spiritual rule against metaphysical pride. It does not imply a denial of evil, nor does it imply sentimental universalism. At bottom it is a refusal to let one’s vision of judgment eclipse compassion, humility, and awareness of one’s own vulnerability to blindness.

 

. . .

 

   The Great Divorce tries to solve precisely the problem that troubles me in Inferno: how can damnation exist without turning heaven into cruelty? Lewis softens the emotional and metaphysical structure of hell compared to Dante. Hell in The Great Divorce is not primarily a place of externally imposed torture or divine vengeance. It is a condition above all of self-enclosure; thus of resentment, pride, illusion, and refusal of joy. The damned are not mainly punished by God; they increasingly imprison themselves within habits of soul they refuse to surrender. That is why Lewis’s famous line is: “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.” The ghosts are repeatedly invited toward reality, joy, and communion. Almost all refuse because they cling to some ruling attachment: self-pity, control, intellectual vanity, possessiveness, resentment, erotic fixation, artistic ego, or the desire to preserve the autonomous self against transformation. As I said, I think that is a profound insight.

  So Lewis removes the overt sadism or punitive triumph one sometimes feels in Dante. There is no equivalent of the Filippo Argenti scene. The saved do not delight in torment. Indeed, many of the heavenly figures are gentle, patient, sorrowful, and loving toward the ghosts. The heavenly figures always seem lucid, stable, and ultimately correct; the ghosts are often recognizable caricatures of moral or intellectual failure. The reader is subtly maneuvered into consenting to the rejection of the ghosts. One begins by sympathizing with them, then gradually sees why they “cannot” remain in heaven without surrendering the very thing constituting their identity, their ruling passion, so to speak. That process can feel spiritually coercive. The alternatives are framed so starkly that refusal appears tragic but also somehow inevitable. The damned become intelligible as damned. Thus no overt sadism, but a metaphysical setup in which certain forms of soul become progressively incapable of love, reality, or joy. Hell becomes psychologically believable. And once hell becomes psychologically believable, a terrible implication emerges: one can begin to recognize actual persons – perhaps even oneself – in these patterns of refusal. That is where the book becomes frightening. I saw this happening to House. Lewis’s damned souls are often not monsters but persons whose self-protective structures harden into metaphysical barriers. Pride, irony, intellectual superiority, grievance, the refusal to become vulnerable become eternalizing tendencies. Lewis’s horror is not medieval torture but spiritual ossification.

   I have always thought Lewis gets closer to Hell than Dante. Why then does the book still feel somewhat sadistic to me? Because the narrative can seem to require the reader to assent emotionally to the exclusion of certain souls. Even if no one is actively tortured, the structure still asks the reader to acknowledge that some persons may forever refuse love and thus separate themselves from reality itself. And there can be a subtle satisfaction in recognizing the ghosts’ evasions and watching them exposed. That is what Berry rightly fears, i.e., the moral danger of imaginatively consenting to another’s damnation at all. Lewis seems aware of the danger. The book is suffused less with triumph than with sadness. But the metaphysical confidence of the setup – the apparent inevitability with which souls reveal what they truly are – is still spiritually chilling, especially to someone deeply committed to charity and the mystery of persons.

 

. . .

 

The line of thought I am trying to pursue here is less a denial that hell could exist and more like a moral suspicion toward the artistic representation of damnation, especially when it invites the spectator into a stable perspective of judgment over others. Good art normally deepens reality by deepening vision, sympathy, participation in being. Even tragedy does this. In Sophocles or William Shakespeare, terrible suffering does not finally strip characters of their humanity. Tragic art tends to preserve some mysterious remainder: pity, grandeur, vulnerability, lost possibility. The spectator is enlarged through compassion and fear.

    But a fully realized hell seems to resist this. Why? Because the damned, if truly damned, would no longer be tragic in the classical sense. Tragedy presupposes remaining humanity, remaining depth, remaining possibility of recognition. But a soul wholly fixed in hatred or self-enclosure becomes difficult to portray without either turning evil into spectacle, inviting contempt, or aestheticizing damnation itself. Perhaps that is what troubles me about Dante and Lewis. Not just that they portray hell, but that the reader risks acquiring a quasi-divine vantage point over souls. The idea is that finite creatures should perhaps tremble before the mystery of judgment rather than imaginatively inhabit it too confidently.

   That does not imply that art cannot imagine hell indirectly. Some of the greatest modern works do that by refusing closure. Think of Dostoevsky, where damnation appears as spiritual isolation, resentment, or refusal of love, but without final certainty; or Kafka, where judgment becomes opaque and terrifying precisely because no secure moral standpoint is granted to the reader; or T. S. Eliot in “The Hollow Men,” where spiritual emptiness is rendered as exhaustion and fragmentation rather than infernal spectacle; or even aspects of House, where self-protective irony and wounded intelligence threaten to calcify into incapacity for communion. These works often feel morally safer because they do not ask the audience to rejoice in exclusion.

    Perhaps what I am trying to get at is that hell may be representable only under conditions of radical humility such that the artist never fully claims the authority to see another soul as definitively abandoned by love. I might even want to argue that the Christian imagination is safest artistically when portraying hell phenomenologically rather than ontologically: i.e., not “these people are damned,” but “this is what alienation from love begins to look like.” That preserves warning without requiring imaginative triumph over the lost.

 

. . .

 

I think theologically Hans Urs von Balthasar's little book Ein kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle expresses the view I judge to be most Christ-like. He attempts to preserve simultaneously the full seriousness of evil and damnation, the reality of human freedom, the warnings of Christ, and yet the Christian obligation never to cease hoping for the salvation of every person. He refuses both easy universalism (“of course everyone is saved”) and the spiritually dangerous confidence of assigning persons to damnation. His position, often simplified as “dare we hope that all men be saved?”, is not really a doctrinal assertion about the final population of Hell. It is more a discipline of hope and charity. The Christian must never presume salvation, but neither may he cease willing and hoping the good of every soul. That fits very closely with the Berry poem and my unease before Dante’s and Lewis’s imaginative certainty.

   Balthasar recognizes that the moment Hell becomes psychologically satisfying, imaginatively populated with one’s enemies, or integrated into a posture of superiority, something toxic has entered the soul. And yet he also refuses sentimentality. He does not deny the terrifying possibility of radical self-closure, the reality of evil, or the possibility that freedom can reject love. Indeed, in some ways his account may make Hell more frightening, not less, because it is understood less as externally imposed punishment and more as the mystery of a creature refusing communion with the Good itself, which is literally demonic. That connects  to my last entry on House and The Great Divorce. The danger is progressively losing the capacity to receive reality as gift, to love, to trust, to rejoice in what is outside the self.

    Balthasar adds an essential corrective to certain imaginings of damnation: the Christian stance toward even the most lost person must remain one of sorrow, hope, prayer, and humility and not metaphysical triumphalism. This is probably why his view feels spiritually safer to me than some stronger infernal traditions. It leaves judgment to God while preserving existential seriousness. And this also is consistent with my attraction for thinkers like Raimond Gaita and Iris Murdoch. There is in all of them a refusal to sever truth from love. One does not truly see another person while ceasing to see them under the aspect of pity, fragility, and possible redemption.

My position seems neither liberal sentimentalism nor rigid orthodoxy in the caricatured sense. It is closer to a theology of radical seriousness joined to radical humility.

     And as we are all finite, that is radically conditioned, that is not angels (pure unconditioned spirit, little centers of absolute consciousness), mercy corresponds to our nature. We are indeed responsible for our lives, but not in an absolute sense that precludes mercy. Humans cannot really be demonic except analogously. A human being never becomes pure negation, pure hatred, pure spirit. Even the worst person retains traces of creatureliness: dependency, fragmentation, vulnerability, some wounded relation to the good. Human evil is parasitic and unstable. It lacks the terrible purity attributed to fallen angels in traditional theology.

    If this is true, then one implication is that final damnation becomes extraordinarily difficult to imagine concretely for human persons. Not logically impossible perhaps – one could still say freedom includes the fearful possibility of radical refusal – but existentially mysterious in a way that should produce trembling rather than confident imaginative representation. For how could a finite, radically conditioned creature perform the kind of utterly lucid, total, irrevocable self-enclosure that eternal damnation seems to require?

   This does not lead straightforwardly to universalism. One may still insist, as I do, that human evil is real, that freedom matters, that persons can deform themselves terribly, that alienation from God is possible. But it shifts emphasis away from infernal certainty and toward humility, mercy, and hope. It also sheds light on why the harsh infernal imagination is spiritually dangerous. It risks treating human beings as though they were already pure moral essences rather than tragic mixtures of freedom and woundedness.

      Thus mercy may correspond not merely to divine kindness but to metaphysical truth about what human beings are. Perhaps this is why the Incarnation matters so much here. Christianity does not proclaim salvation through an angelic judge standing outside human frailty. It proclaims God entering finitude itself: hunger, exhaustion, temptation, abandonment, bodily suffering, historical existence. The Cross then becomes not merely a legal mechanism satisfying justice, but divine solidarity with conditioned existence.

    Perhaps the final judgment, whatever else it may be, cannot simply resemble the moral sorting procedures imagined by finite and frightened creatures. Perhaps that is contained in Christ’s teaching of loving your enemies and not judging other people.

 

. . .

 

   The question of hell is inseparable from the question: what kind of beings are human beings? Even someone who does not believe in God, revelation, or a literal afterlife can still recognize the underlying anthropological issue. Are human beings best understood as radically autonomous centers of choice, wholly responsible for themselves in isolation from history, psychology, embodiment, and social formation? Or are we finite, vulnerable, conditioned creatures whose freedom is real but always entangled with dependence, blindness, need, and woundedness? Once posed in those terms, the discussion ceases to be merely “religious.” It becomes a meditation on guilt, responsibility, mercy, punishment, resentment, forgiveness, and the limits of judgment, which are questions unavoidable in every human society.

    Modern culture often adopts a harshly moralistic language of condemnation, treating persons as though they were reducible to their worst acts or beliefs. On the other hand, psychology, sociology, and trauma theory increasingly reveal how deeply human action is conditioned by forces not fully chosen by the self. The result is tension: we continue to judge absolutely while simultaneously recognizing how little of ourselves we fully author. That tension is already present in the theological problem of hell. The line of thought I am trying to work outcould therefore be framed not as a doctrinal dispute about the afterlife but as an exploration of the moral meaning of finitude. To what extent can finite beings deserve absolute judgment? What would an utterly lucid and final rejection of the good even look like in a creature whose consciousness is never fully transparent to itself? Can mercy be something deeper than the suspension of justice: namely, a truthful response to the kind of beings we actually are? In ordinary life we condemn, yet when we come to know a person deeply – their childhood, fears, loneliness, humiliations, confusions – condemnation often becomes more difficult without disappearing entirely. Understanding complicates judgment.

    This does not abolish moral seriousness. In some ways it intensifies it. Evil remains real. People can become cruel, manipulative, destructive, spiritually deadened. But the more concretely human a person appears, the harder it becomes to imagine them as a pure embodiment of evil. That may be the deepest anthropological challenge this line of thought poses to certain infernal imaginations, i.e., they risk presupposing a conception of the person more angelic or demonic than human.Again, this partly explains why thinkers as different as Dostoevsky, Weil, Murdoch, Gaita, and even von Balthasar continue to matter even outside explicitly religious contexts. They treat moral life not as the operation of isolated wills but as something woven through attention, suffering, love, blindness, formation, and the overall fragility of human life.

. . .

 

 I read the Inferno or The Great Divorce symbolically. In my reading, as I suppose for nearly every other reader, I don’t see hell not first as a geographical afterlife location but as the imaginative unveiling of spiritual and anthropological truths already partially visible within ordinary human existence. Perhaps Dante wrote it in that spirit. I want to understand what truths about the soul, freedom, love, self-deception, and alienation are being disclosed through these images. Dante’s punishments are symbolic enactments of inner realities. The poetic justice – the punishment mirroring the sin – expresses the idea that actions form the soul from within. Sin is not merely rule-breaking followed by external punishment. It is a way of becoming. The wrathful tearing at one another in the Styx symbolize anger taking over one’s soul. The fraudulent are trapped in worlds of deception because deception has become their mode of being. The frozen hell around Judas Iscariot symbolizes the absolute coldness of betrayal and lovelessness. Read symbolically, the poem says that you eventually inhabit the moral and spiritual reality you cultivate.

    Likewise, in The Great Divorce, the ghosts symbolize structures of soul recognizable in ordinary life such as resentment that cannot relinquish grievance, intelligence that uses irony to avoid vulnerability, possessive love that consumes the beloved, self-pity that secretly enjoys its own suffering,

aestheticism detached from reality, and moral superiority masking fear.

The point for me as a reader at least then is not that these particular people are literally damned but these tendencies, if absolutized, cut us off from reality, joy, communion, and love. Hell becomes less a divine torture chamber than a vision of what radical self-enclosure would mean existentially.

    This kind of reading allows me to love the works in spite of my deep ambivalence about them. If we read Dante and Lewis as literal cartographers of eternity – and they did not see themselves as such – we pressured into adopting a quasi-divine standpoint over souls. We start classifying the damned. Compassion becomes spiritually suspect. The imaginative act itself can feel morally dangerous. The damned are not “other people.” They are possibilities within the self and within human communities. Then Filippo Argenti is not merely a man in hell, for instance; he is wrath becoming flesh. The frozen traitors are betrayals of love hardened into spiritual paralysis. Lewis’s ghosts are evasions of reality already putting pressure on ordinary consciousness. Such a reading preserves the moral seriousness of the works without requiring certainty about final judgment. And symbol itself may be the proper mode here given that the realities involved exceed literal comprehension. Symbol allows us to approach truths too large, inward, or terrifying for straightforward conceptual language. A symbol both reveals and protects mystery. It points without fully possessing. A symbolic inferno can picture alienation, self-deformation, and resistance to love without claiming exhaustive knowledge of any actual soul’s final state. Dante and Lewis are at their greatest not when read as phenomenologists of spiritual possibility.

    This lessens but does not remove my ambivalence.

Existential Take on Reductionism, Scientism (and House again)

   I suppose I see something of my earlier self in House, not as unhappy or nihilistic to be sure but sharing something like his metaphysics, feeling at some level the despair it implies, and longing for an escape at some point, though an escape consistent with reason and integrity. Thus in trying to understand and refute metaphysical scientism and reductionism, I almost seem to be performing an late exorcism, through the House character. Perhaps this explains why these episodes affect me – not much to the right of Adorno when it comes to mass culture – more deeply than a merely intellectual debate about religion versus atheism would. I understand it in this way: what I am responding to in House is not simply a set of philosophical propositions but a way of inhabiting reality. And because I once partially inhabited it myself, I think I recognize both its force and its cost from the inside.

     Reductionism is not just an intellectual error, like getting a chemistry problem wrong. It is existentially formative, which is to say, it is a metaphysics that shapes what can appear as real, meaningful, lovable, or worthy of trust. And therefore the movement beyond it feels more like liberation from a constriction of vision. That is why I feel inclined to use the metaphor of an “exorcism.” House dramatically externalizes temptations I know intimately: the temptation to reduce reality to what can be controlled, explained, translated into profit-making technology; the temptation to treat meaning as projection; and the temptation to protect oneself from disappointment by refusing transcendence in advance. And because House is intelligent and emotionally honest, he gives that worldview its strongest form. He does not decorate reductionism with optimistic humanist rhetoric. He lives its implications.

      That is probably why I respect him even while rejecting his metaphysics. My engagement with the character is almost dialectical, not simply condemning him from outside, rather watching a version of my earlier orientation carried toward conclusions I no longer accept but can still understand sympathetically.  I hope that sympathy shows by preventing my critique from becoming mere apologetics. I know why intelligent people are drawn to it. It promises intellectual cleanliness. It protects against gullibility, sentimentality, and comforting illusions – all core values of my own to this day. It also is in line with scientific explanation, that is, with at least our best approximation of truth at the purely material level. But I also know from experience the pressure it exerts toward despair once it becomes totalized into a worldview. My phrase “an escape consistent with reason” is especially important to me. I am not describing a leap into irrational consolation. Rather I assert that reductionism itself is not rational enough: that it covertly excluded dimensions of reality it could not account for such things as goodness, beauty, conscience, love, meaning, the irreducibility of persons, perhaps even the very experience of truth. The “exorcism” is thus not the rejection of reason but the rejection of a narrowed conception of reason. 

   I am attracted to the show partly because it repeatedly hints – sometimes consciously, sometimes not – that House’s worldview is sustained not only by argument but by woundedness and fear. His reductionism is emotionally functional. It protects him from vulnerability, dependence, reverence, gratitude. I understand that dynamic for the best of all epistemological reasons: because recognize traces of it in myself. As I understand my own process of understanding, it has been a very different thing from simply “becoming religious.” It is closer to what philosophers like Iris Murdoch or Raimond Gaita describe: a gradual recovery of the ability to see reality as intrinsically meaningful, rather than as neutral material onto which value is projected. And perhaps that is why House remains spannend to me. He dramatizes a mind that cannot quite stop longing for a world richer than the one his own metaphysics permits him to acknowledge.

 . . .

     I also think of a book by C. S. Lewis, perhaps my least favorite book of Lewis, The Great Divorce, where the soul in Hell simply cannot choose love, reality; has lost that horizon. I think of House because part of him clearly longs for transcendence as suggested many times in the series. But he can't, I suspect not only because he cannot open up out of fear of being hurt (refusal of vulnerability, of the fragility of goodness) but partly out of intellectually honesty, which I admire greatly. He cannot doubt his metaphysics. He seems imprisoned by philosophy. (I think of the later Wittgenstein's 'therapeutic' approach to philosophy.)

   The central ideas in Lewis’s book, one I find insightful, is that damnation is not an externally imposed punishment but an incapacity for reality resulting from one’s fate and within that fate one’s life choices, especially for joy, dependence, forgiveness, and love. The souls in the Grey Town interpret everything through the logic of self-protection (ego drama), resentment, autonomy, or abstraction. They do not simply reject Heaven; they become less and less able even to recognize it as desirable. That is close to what I see in House, except in an unfinished and tragic form. Unlike Lewis’s damned souls, House is not wholly closed. The longing remains alive in him. He still has a soul. That is why he suffers, why he hesitates, why moments of beauty or tenderness break through his defenses. A fully flattened consciousness would not experience transcendence as absence.

    And fear alone does not explain him. Yes, the psychological dimension is part of the picture: the fear of intimacy, the childhood wounds, the fear of betrayal, the self-entitlement, the emotional avoidance, etc. All this is supported by his metaphysical reductionism and scientism. But House is also trapped by what he experiences as intellectual honesty. He cannot simply will himself into belief unless he is convinced that it is true and, because his metaphysics determines in advance what can count as real, rational, or admissible – and keeps the door to self-transcendence closed – he is trapped by his own intellectual virtue.

    I think this is behind his frequently accusing his secular-humanist friends (Wilson and Cuddy) of hypocrisy. This shows that he is not simply a hedonist, cynic, or nihilist in the shallow sense. If he were, inconsistency would not matter so much to him. But it matters intensely. He experiences self-deception almost as a cardinal sin. In his eyes, Wilson and Cuddy want the moral vocabulary of meaning, dignity, love, goodness, and hope, while simultaneously inhabiting a worldview that, as he sees it, cannot rationally ground those things. He sees this as evasion. In other words, House is not mainly enraged by unbelief in transcendence. He is enraged by what he perceives as sentimental inconsistency: wanting the existential fruits of a richer metaphysics while denying the metaphysical roots. He would rather inhabit a bleak world honestly than a comforting world dishonestly. That gives the character his unusual dignity. Many television skeptics are merely fashionable skeptics. House is willing to follow his premises toward isolation, despair, and meaninglessness if he thinks reason demands it. He is almost ascetic in this regard.

    But the irony is that his own position contains unacknowledged metaphysical assumptions: that only empirical explanation discloses reality; that meaning must be reducible to mechanism or else be unreal; that transcendence is intrinsically suspect; and that vulnerability to illusion is worse than existential impoverishment. So House becomes both a critic of hypocrisy and, at a deeper level, a victim of a concealed philosophical picture he mistakes for pure rationality. House thinks he is simply “seeing reality clearly,” but he is already operating within a grammar of intelligibility inherited from scientism and reductionism. The “therapy” would not consist in refuting a scientific theory, but in loosening the grip of a picture that determines in advance what counts as real. And because House is intellectually serious, this loosening cannot occur through mere emotional consolation or wishful thinking. He would immediately reject that as dishonest.

     That is why moments in the series that affect him most are rarely arguments for God or meaning. They are encounters with realities his worldview has difficulty fully accounting for such as genuine forgiveness, sacrificial love, loyalty, grief, moral courage, and uncalculated goodness. These are not “proofs,” of course. They are pressures upon the picture itself.

Indeed, one might say the tragedy of House is that his commitment to honesty becomes entangled with an unnecessarily narrow conception of reason, and therefore with a conception of reality too impoverished to sustain the very human longings he continues to experience.

     That is what makes me think of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. For the later Wittgenstein, philosophy often imprisons us not by false empirical claims but by pictures: deep conceptual pictures that determine how we interpret everything. We become “held captive” by a way of seeing. And argument alone frequently cannot free us, because the picture governs what even appears intelligible. House is held captive by several such pictures: by the picture of reality as fundamentally mechanism, of reason as empirical verification, of transcendence as projection, of vulnerability as weakness, and of meaning as self-deception. Within that framework, openness to transcendence feels not courageous but dishonest. To abandon the framework would feel, to him, like betrayal of truth itself. Thus the tragedy is intensified. He longs for more than his worldview permits yet he experiences fidelity to that worldview as moral and intellectual integrity. That is not the same thing as cynicism though it overlaps. Wittgensteinian philosophical therapy is the liberation from confining pictures that distort our relation to reality. One is not argued into a new metaphysics so much as released from a conceptual constriction. That is the main reason I value Wittgenstein so much.

     House repeatedly encounters all the phenomena that strain anyone’s reductionism: love, loyalty, beauty, sacrifice, forgiveness, grief, awe, moral seriousness. But because his governing picture translates these realities into lower-level explanations, they cannot fully disclose themselves to him. He is imprisoned by philosophy.

      And perhaps this is also why the series appeals to me. As I wrote, I am not merely rejecting reductionism from outside. I recognize what it feels like to inhabit such a picture sincerely and intelligently, to feel both its explanatory power and its existential narrowing. Which also explain my ambivalence toward C. S. Lewis. Lewis presents the choice between Heaven and Hell too starkly or allegorically for my taste. I feel closer to Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory), Raimond Gaita, Iris Murdoch, and of course the late Wittgenstein: people are often trapped not by cartoonish evil but by wounded vision, partial truths, conceptual captivity, fear of illusion, and genuine intellectual conscience. House embodies that kind of captivity. It is not that he simply hates transcendence. He just can’t see how to affirm it without betraying what he takes to be reason itself, and thus his integrity. His repressed longing for it torments him. Whenever a patient evokes it, he moves to stamp it out and one would apply ice to a burn.

 . . .

 I often think of the early Wittgenstein as well in connection with House, in particular one passage from the Tractatus: "the world of the happy man is different from the world of the unhappy man." (I think the later Wittgenstein may have been doing something similar with his earlier self as I am with mine, though the early Wittgenstein was no House and left conceptual space for transcendence in the form of the mystical. But in the way he saw the world.)

   The proposition from the Tractatus does not mean that two people inhabit different physical universes. It means that reality appears under a different aspect. Meaning, possibility, significance, even what counts as important or real, are transformed by one’s orientation toward existence. House is almost a perfect illustration of this because his reductionism systematically strips reality of intrinsic depth. He sees through illusions, but mostly by reducing higher realities to lower-level explanations: love becomes chemistry, for example, or morality becomes strategy or conditioning; religion becomes projection and hope denial; meaning becomes narrative self-deception. Reductionism, in its broadest sense, is precisely this tendency: the attempt to explain richer or higher dimensions of reality entirely in terms of more basic processes, such that the higher level loses independent reality or significance. The important phrase is “nothing but.” Reductionism does not merely analyze complex things into components, which science legitimately does. It claims that the components are the whole truth. So, for example, consciousness becomes “nothing but” brain states, moral obligation becomes social conditioning of traces of what worked during our evolution, religious experience becomes neurochemistry, and persons become biological machines.

    Scientism is closely connected but slightly different. Scientism is the philosophical belief that the methods of the natural sciences are the only path to genuine knowledge and rationality. Under scientism what cannot be measured tends to be treated as unreal or subjective. Qualitative realities are subordinated to quantifiable ones whereas metaphysical, moral, aesthetic, and religious claims are either marginalized or translated into scientific categories. And House embodies this almost perfectly because he unconsciously turns a method into a metaphysics. Medicine and empirical inquiry require skepticism, causal analysis, falsifiability, and methodological naturalism. But House extends these habits into a total vision of reality: that is, only what can be empirically explained is finally real. Therefore, meaning is suspect, transcendence is illusion, and value is projection.

    The tragedy is that he cannot fully live inside this vision. He retains his soul, which by definition must be unreal for him, and so he suffers from it.

    A pure reductionist machine would not suffer metaphysical despair because it would not experience the loss of meaning as loss. A purely mechanical intelligence such as  AI in The Matrix would be a perfect translation of this metaphysic into life. A machine can operate entirely within instrumental rationality because it does not long, mourn, love, or yearn for transcendence. House, by contrast, continues to desire intimacy, be drawn to goodness, truth, and beauty. At some level he desires to belong. Perhaps even hopes for grace. But his metaphysics forbids him to trust these realities as objectively meaningful. So they return in distorted or painful form. That is why he often appears simultaneously brilliant and spiritually claustrophobic. He can diagnose almost everything except the inadequacy of the worldview doing the diagnosing. 

     And here the Wittgenstein passage kicks in. The “world” of House is not merely physically different from that of, say, the priest in “Unfaithful.”  It is existentially different. Coincidence appears as accident rather than providence. Suffering appears as brute fact rather than possible vocation. Love appears as neurotic dependency rather than participation in the good and death appears as annihilation rather than mystery. In later Wittgensteinian language, House inhabits a different form of life, one in which the grammar of transcendence has collapsed. And yet – and this is why the character is powerful – the collapse is incomplete. He still experiences the pull of realities his worldview cannot comfortably contain. That tension is the drama.

      The happy and unhappy man do not merely feel differently about the same world; they inhabit different horizons of significance. House’s unhappiness is metaphysical before it is psychological. His world has become thinner, flatter, less radiant with meaning. And because he is intelligent enough to sense the loss, he suffers from it all the more intensely.

 

Wedekind's Frühlingserwachen in the schools

 

My 14-year-old son has to read Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen: Eine Kindertragödie for school. It is a late nineteenth-century German play, first published in 1891. It became famous partly because it dealt openly with adolescent sexuality, repression, suicide, abortion, corporal punishment, and the failures of bourgeois education at a time when such themes were largely taboo on the stage. Shock value. It seems the wise folk of the Ministry of Culture have deemed it essential reading for adolescents. I think this play is inappropriate and unhelpful for him and I have my reasons.

 

The Play

   The subtitle, “A Children’s Tragedy,” is ironic and bitter. The “children” are adolescents standing at the threshold of adulthood, full of longing, confusion, imagination, fear, and bodily awakening, but trapped within an educational and moral system incapable of speaking honestly to them. The central figures are Melchior, Moritz, and Wendla. Melchior is intellectually gifted, skeptical, and sexually curious. He distrusts conventional morality and represents a kind of dangerous enlightenment. Moritz is anxious, sensitive, overwhelmed by school pressure and by the mysterious changes of puberty. Wendla is innocent in a disturbing sense: not naturally innocent, but deliberately kept ignorant by adults who refuse to explain sexuality to her.

   One of the most highlighted parts concerns Moritz. He is terrified by erotic dreams and by academic expectations. The school system treats failure as moral disgrace rather than human difficulty. Unable to cope with examination pressure and inner turmoil, he eventually commits suicide. The adults respond not with understanding but with moralizing and bureaucratic concern for reputation. Meanwhile Wendla, genuinely ignorant about sex because her mother refuses to tell her the truth, enters into a sexual encounter with Melchior that is somewhere between seduction, mutual longing, violence, and tragic incomprehension. Different productions interpret the scene differently. Wendla becomes pregnant but does not even fully understand how it happened. Her mother arranges an abortion, which leads to Wendla’s death. Melchior himself is condemned by the adult world. The school authorities and parents interpret the tragedy primarily through the lens of moral corruption and improper literature rather than through their own dishonesty and rigidity. Melchior is sent to a reform institution.

     The play ends in a strange, semi-symbolic manner. Melchior encounters the ghost of Moritz in a graveyard, and also a mysterious masked figure, “the Masked Man,” who urges him not to surrender either to death or to cynical despair. The ending is ambiguous. It gestures toward the possibility of maturity and humane understanding, but without sentimentality. The play shocked audiences because Wedekind strips away the sentimental image of childhood. Adolescents are shown neither as pure innocents nor as miniature adults, but as beings awakening into desire, shame, imagination, cruelty, idealism, and loneliness while surrounded by institutions incapable of genuine guidance. So much for the plot.

 . . .

  The play is neither comforting nor morally stable in the ordinary sense. The adults are ridiculous or spiritually dead, yet the youthful rebellion is not simply celebrated either. Melchior’s intelligence can become cold and abstract. Desire appears both natural and destructive. Education deforms souls. The atmosphere moves between satire, lyricism, cruelty, expressionistic dream, and social critique.

 

My Critique

    The play’s original cultural function has changed. In Wedekind’s time, the work attacked (fairly or not) a suffocating silence surrounding sexuality, emotional life, and adolescence within rigid bourgeois culture. The scandal was the repression. But contemporary adolescents are instead immersed from a very early age in sexualized imagery, emotional instability, fragmented family structures, irony, and the collapse of meaningful moral authority. That is their reality. Sexualized from a very early age. Under those conditions, a work whose primary energy lies in exposing repression cannot really liberate; it is much more likely to intensify confusion or premature self-consciousness.

     The play lacks a positive vision of maturation. The adult world in the drama is largely hypocritical, incompetent, frightened, or spiritually dead. But the youthful alternative is not clearly wiser. Intelligence becomes cynicism; liberation becomes destabilization; innocence becomes vulnerability. For some mature readers, I can imagine, this ambiguity can be artistically powerful. For younger adolescents still forming their moral imagination, the play mainly torpedoes trust in authority, education, family, religion, and restraint without adequately depicting what healthy guidance, chastity, love, or humane adulthood look like. It is soulless. Education (properly) forms the emotions and imagination before abstract critique. Thus exposing young teenagers too early to emotionally charged depictions of sexual confusion, suicide, alienation, and institutional corruption risks cultivating fascination, precociousness, or despair before the students possess the moral and intellectual resources to interpret such realities properly.

    I also object to a broader modern educational assumption behind teaching such works: namely, that “critical exposure” itself constitutes maturity and good thinking. The idea is that confronting taboo subjects automatically deepens students. But the soul is shaped by what it dwells upon imaginatively. Not every truth is pedagogically beneficial at every stage of development.

    Furthermore, the play’s anthropology is incomplete. It sees highlights hypocrisy and repression but it lacks a richer account of love, virtue, reverence, stable community, or spiritual transcendence. Thus the adolescent awakening it portrays occurs largely within an atmosphere of instinct, social power, and psychological suffering. Human flourishing requires more than liberation from repression: namely, it requires an initiation into truth, beauty, goodness, and meaningful forms of life. The play seem to offer a diagnosis for some but it is spiritually impoverished. I am not saying the work lacks all artistic value. But even granting that it might be appropriate for graduate students of German literature (where I read it), it does not follow that it is fitting as formative reading for fourteen-year-olds. It is not merely whether something is “true” in a narrow sense but whether it is spiritually illuminating, deforming, partial, prematurely exposing, or ordered toward human flourishing. That leads me to judge educational works less by shock value or ideological usefulness and more by what kind of vision of the human person they implicitly cultivate.

  In a graduate Germanistik context, Spring Awakening was presented to me not primarily as a work of moral formation but as a historically important breakthrough text: anti-authoritarian, proto-modernist, psychologically daring, socially transgressive, perhaps linked to fin-de-siècle culture, repression theory, or the genealogy leading toward expressionism and psychoanalysis. But as a father and teacher of the young,  I question the value of a purely “demystifying” or “transgressive” literary framework. Even if I appreciated critique, I must ask before forcing onto the young questions like What conception of the human good replaces the thing being criticized? What kind of soul emerges from this vision? What is being cultivated imaginatively? Many contemporary literature departments since my student days have focused on diagnosing hypocrisy, repression, ideology, exclusion, and power structures. Much less attention is often given to questions like wisdom, spiritual health, virtue, reverence, moral beauty, or the formation of love. A student sensitive to those absences could easily experience works like Wedekind less as liberating revelations than as emotionally and anthropologically thinning. The adults in the play – rather like The Dead Poets Society – really are disastrously incapable of speaking truthfully and humanely to the young. Silence, shame, mechanized schooling, and moral hypocrisy genuinely wound souls. But it does not follow that liberation from repression by itself educates desire or leads toward flourishing. In that sense, my disagreement is not so much with Wedekind’s diagnosis but with the implied adequacy of the modern therapeutic value that later readers often attach to him., often translating into encouragement to play with that most unsafe of energies (Eros) as though it were a harmless toy. 

    Again, I am reminded of The Dead Poet’s Society, though that film is not quite as problematic as Spring Awakening. In both works, many of the adult authority figures are presented less as fully realized human beings than as embodiments of repression, conformity, institutional deadness, or bourgeois spiritual suffocation. They function dramatically as obstacles against which youthful authenticity, spontaneity, imagination, eros, or selfhood must struggle. The pedagogical and parental world becomes symbolically flattened. In Wedekind, the flattening is harsher and more grotesque. Teachers, pastors, and parents often speak in rigid formulas, moral clichés, bureaucratic abstractions, or hysterical evasions. They can feel almost expressionistic before expressionism proper: masks of social authority rather than thickly rendered persons. In that sense, they are like orcs; they are frequently constructed to evoke alienation and indignation more than sympathetic understanding. What troubles me in both cases is not simply that authority is criticized. It is rather the simplistic binary anthropology behind both: institution versus authenticity, conformity versus freedom, repression versus self-expression. The adolescents become bearers of vitality and inward truth.

     But real educational life is tragically more complex. Parents can genuinely love their children while also misunderstanding them. Discipline can deform, but lack of discipline can also destroy. Tradition can suffocate, but it can also protect and initiate. Adolescents can perceive truths adults have forgotten, yet they can also romanticize impulse, mistake intensity for depth, or lack the experience to judge consequences.

 

First of May Reflections on Work, Marx, and Christianity

 

I have long thought that, up to a point, Marx’ understanding of labor and the capitalist system of production and consumption was consistent with Christianity, which should not be surprising given he was still part of a largely Christian culture. Still, he is treated by many theologians and Catholic philosophers as diametrical opposites (are there protestant philosophers? Luther’s “reason is a whore” has left Protestantism largely bereft of philosophers unless one counts Kant, whom Luther would have hated more than he did Aristotle; is Kierkegaard really a philosopher or an anti-philosopher? Not surprisingly, he is a kind of fideist, at least as I read him).

    If human life is sacred, then human labor cannot be understood merely as a commodity among commodities. For labor is not simply an external object exchanged on a market. Human work proceeds from the person himself:  from his intelligence, body, creativity, time, relationships, and ultimately from finite mortal life. To reduce labor wholly to market value is therefore to risk reducing the worker himself to an instrument within an impersonal economic mechanism. Which is largely what has happened.

     This is where the early Karl Marx’s critique of alienation retains moral force even for a Christian thinker. Marx perceived with extraordinary clarity that industrial capitalism tends toward a condition in which work becomes external to the worker rather than an expression of meaningful participation in reality. The worker experiences himself as replaceable, abstract labor-power. For Marx, alienation is the condition in which human beings become estranged from their own labor, from the products they create, from other persons, and ultimately from their own human nature because their work is no longer experienced as meaningful self-expression or participation in communal life, but as externally imposed labor performed for survival within an impersonal economic system. The worker’s activity and its products confront him as something foreign and dominating rather than as extensions of his own creative and social being. Technology itself, developed of, by, and for capital, in its essence capitalist, literally physically embodying capitalist imperatives, subordinates human rhythms and communities to the demands of production and profit. Most social relations themselves come to be mediated by exchange value. And consumption functions ideologically, promising fulfillment through acquisition while leaving deeper forms of human flourishing starved.

     Moreover, for Marx capitalism tends toward the immiseration of the worker because competition and the drive for profit continually pressure capitalists to reduce labor costs, mechanize production, and extract more surplus value from workers, while simultaneously rendering them increasingly dependent, alienated, and replaceable. Even where material living standards may rise for some (invariably at the cost of others), the deeper form of immiseration lies in the worker’s reduction to labor-power within a system in which human activity, relationships, and even consciousness become subordinated to the imperatives of capital accumulation (“growth” – sick metaphor here). We need not accept Marx’s metaphysics (historical materialism) or revolutionary conclusions to recognize the descriptive truth of much of his thought.

    A Christian account should deepen rather than reject this critique. For Christianity already is anti-reductionist to the core, certainly with respect to the human person. The person is not merely a producer, a consumer, a unit of labor, an economic maximizer, or an interchangeable component of a technical system. We are beings made for truth, love, contemplation, community, worship, creativity, and participation in the good. Labor therefore possesses dignity not merely because it produces wealth but because it is an activity of a person whose life is sacred. Thus the commodification of labor spiritually disfigures (literally) the soul. Under capitalism, the worker no longer experiences work as meaningful participation in creation or communal life but as survival within an abstract machinery whose ends he neither controls nor fully understands. One sells not simply products but hours of life itself. Time becomes monetized existence.

     The critique of consumerism then follows logically. If persons are alienated from meaningful labor, family, locality, religion, craftsmanship, and communal belonging, consumption easily becomes compensatory mythology. The market promises transcendence through acquisition: identity through brands, fulfillment through novelty, meaning through lifestyle, salvation through consumption. In this sense commodity fetishism is not merely an economic illusion but a spiritual disorder. Objects appear invested with quasi-sacred significance precisely because genuine forms of transcendence and participation have withered. The shopping mall or now Amazon is a parody of liturgy.

    A Christian critique would likely go further than Marx here. Marx often treats religion primarily as ideology masking material relations. But Christianity can instead interpret capitalist alienation as a deformation of the person’s orientation toward the Good. The problem is not simply unequal distribution of resources or ownership structures, but a deeper spiritual reduction of reality itself: 

• nature reduced to raw material
• labor reduced to a commodity
• community dissolved for self-advantage
• culture degraded to bare entertainment
• people reduced to human capital
• even attention becomes monetizable data. 

(I can already see ties here with thinkers I treasure, such as Josef Pieper and Simone Weil. Pieper warns against the “world of total work,” where human existence is reduced to function and utility. Weil writes with direct truthfulness about factory labor as spiritual affliction when the worker becomes subordinated to mechanized necessity.)

    The Christian affirmation of the sacredness of life therefore places limits upon economic systems just as it places limits upon political violence. If the human soul possesses irreducible dignity, then no system, whether capitalist, communist, technocratic, or nationalist, may legitimately treat them merely as instruments for production, efficiency, profit, or historical progress. Capitalism is a violation of the first article of the German Basic Law: die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar / the dignity of the human being may not be violated. Of course, there are or have been states, the Federal Republic of Germany among them, that have tried to humanize the beast. But with globalization (opening to China, NAFTA, etc. All policy-driven choices. The state promoting the interests of capital), that project has died. Now all the workers of one town, one region, one country are in competition with all other workers in a deadly downward spiral.

 

Judge Not

 

“Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
— Matthew 7:1–3

 

Holiday. I have some freedom to write today. I have thought about this passage before but guess I still don't understand in full. 1) I am more inclined to judge men of the present than the past. I want to say Trump and Netanyahu (not only them, not by a long shot) have blood on their hands. I guess so do Churchill and Roosevelt but it is not as natural to say that for me. 2) How can it make sense to say x is evil because it destroys that which is sacred but I (following Christ's injunction) do not judge the evil-doer?

 

    What I am circling around is an old and very deep distinction between judging acts and judging souls. We can hold firmly that certain actions are objectively evil while also recognizing that the interior reality of the person who committed them exceeds our knowledge and moral competence to assess fully. Thomas Aquinas makes this distinction but it is also in the Gospels themselves (see passage above). Christ repeatedly judges actions – hypocrisy, cruelty, exploitation, betrayal, hardness of heart – yet simultaneously warns against the spiritual arrogance involved in placing ourselves in the position of ultimate judge over persons: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” The warning is not that moral distinctions disappear but that finite, wounded beings do not fully know the depths of circumstance, fear, ignorance, psychological deformation, historical pressure, self-deception, or suffering that shape another soul.

     That connects directly to my earlier reflections on finitude. If human beings are radically limited knowers, then moral knowledge too must contain humility. We may sometimes perceive with clarity that a particular act – deliberately bombing civilians, murdering hostages, torturing prisoners – violates the sacredness of life. But we do not stand in a position to comprehend fully the inner history and condition of the agents involved. This helps explain the asymmetry between past and present. Historical distance softens immediate moral reaction because we no longer experience those actors as living antagonists within our emotional world. Churchill and Roosevelt have become historical figures embedded within narratives of catastrophe, exhaustion, fear, propaganda, incomplete information, and civilizational struggle. Time widens perspective and allows tragedy to appear more clearly alongside guilt. Contemporary figures, by contrast, confront us in the immediacy of outrage, media cycles, partisan rhetoric, and living consequences. The passions are active rather than cooled by historical contemplation.

     There is also another factor: we inherit the moral atmosphere created by victors. The Allied cause in WWII was genuinely tied to resistance against monstrous evil, and this moral reality understandably shapes emotional perception. To say the Allied bombing campaigns were wicked in themselves can therefore feel emotionally dissonant because it partially disrupts a deeply ingrained narrative of moral clarity. Yet I am trying to preserve two truths simultaneously: 1) the Allied struggle against Nazism was just in its fundamental defensive aim; 2) certain means employed within that struggle violated the sacredness of innocent life. That is not incoherent. It is tragic realism.

    I also want to resist a temptation present in many moral systems: the tendency to reduce persons entirely to their worst actions. If life is sacred, then even the wrongdoer remains more than his crime. That does not abolish responsibility. Rather, it means the person retains a depth that cannot be exhausted by moral classification. In fact, I believe the refusal to condemn souls absolutely follows from the same root conviction as the opposition to the destruction of innocent life. Both arise from the sense that human beings possess a depth and mystery that exceeds political, legal, ideological, or even moral reduction. To destroy innocent life is evil because the person is not merely a means or a number. But similarly, to imagine ourselves as capable of fully seeing and judging another soul may also involve a kind of spiritual overreach, as though we possessed God's vantage point.

     This does not mean abandoning ordinary moral language. We can still say this act was evil; this policy was gravely unjust; these leaders bear responsibility; or indeed these deaths cry out morally against those who authorized them. What humility forbids is the final metaphysical judgment that collapses the whole person into the evil act and claims transparent access to the state of the soul itself. Therefore, because human life is sacred, certain acts are objectively evil regardless of political ends. Yet because human beings are finite, wounded, and often formed within conditions of fear, ideology, ignorance, and historical tragedy, we are not competent to render ultimate judgment upon the souls of those who commit such acts. That position is neither moral relativism nor moral absolutism in the harsh ideological sense. It is a kind of chastened moral realism grounded in both the sacredness of life and the finitude of human judgment.

 

. . .

 

I agree with Gaita and Murdoch that judging these acts to be evil does not depend on faith in a living God (I do suppose it presupposes something like Plato's Good). The prohibition to judge may make sense within a Christian framework, but how does it make sense if we doesn't inhabit this framework?

      Outside an explicitly Christian framework, the prohibition against judging persons can still make sense if rooted in the recognition of the depth, opacity, and fragility of human beings rather than in divine command alone. We need not believe in a personal God to see that there is something morally dangerous, even corrupting, in the tendency to reduce another person to a moral category and imagine ourselves capable of fully “seeing through” him.

This is close to what I understand from Murdoch and Gaita. For both, moral life begins not in abstract rule-following but in attention: that is, a just and loving perception of reality. The opposite of morality is not merely rule-breaking but forms of blindness, fantasy, simplification, and egoism that prevent us from seeing persons truthfully. Condemnation easily becomes one such simplification. It tempts us to transform another human being into a fixed object: monster, villain, barbarian, fascist, terrorist, imperialist, orc. Sometimes these descriptions capture something terribly real about actions or ideologies. But the danger lies in allowing the category to consume the person entirely.

     Even secular people can know how partial our understanding of others is. We do not know fully things like the fears that shaped them, the wounds they carry, the ideological worlds they inherited, the pressures under which they acted, the degree of self-deception involved, the possibilities for repentance or transformation, and so on. Recognizing this opacity can ground humility without requiring theology. In fact, we could argue that modern ideological violence often depends precisely on the loss of this humility. The revolutionary, nationalist (e.g., MAGA), racist, the self-righteously politically correct, or technocratic mindset frequently assumes transparent moral vision: we know what these people are. Once persons are fully reduced to categories, extermination, humiliation, or cruelty become psychologically easier.

    This is why the refusal to judge persons absolutely follows naturally from my earlier reflections on finitude. If human knowledge is radically finite, then moral knowledge of persons must be finite too. I may see clearly enough that a bombing campaign or massacre is evil, because the act itself is public and its violation of human dignity manifest. But the interior totality of the human being remains partly hidden.

     Plato’s idea of the Good may indeed help here. The Good transcends every finite formulation and every human standpoint. To possess complete moral vision would require a kind of godlike perspective that finite creatures do not have. Thus humility before persons is partly humility before reality itself. Human beings exceed our conceptual grasp. We might even say that to judge acts is often necessary for moral clarity; to judge souls absolutely is often a failure of metaphysical humility.

      And there is another, more existential reason this prohibition persists even outside religion. Hatred and moral self-righteousness deform the soul of the one who judges. Murdoch especially emphasizes this. The fantasy that we belong simply among “the good” looking upon “the evil” nourishes vanity, cruelty, and blindness to our own capacity for wrongdoing. The twentieth century repeatedly showed how easily ordinary people, under fear, ideology, humiliation, or tribal passion, become participants in horrors they once thought unimaginable. Thus the prohibition on judging may arise not only from compassion for others but from truthful knowledge of ourselves and human nature. The line between victim and perpetrator, courage and cowardice, humanity and brutality, does not run cleanly between groups; it runs through every finite and wounded soul. I think Jesus, whether you think him God-man or only man, understood this more deeply than any other. To me at least it seems like something God would say. Plato got close to it but no mortal that I know of had ever understood such a thing in its full truth before Jesus.

 

The Sacredness of Life, War, and Evil

 

I wrote in a recent entry that I hold that life in sacred and thus abortion as birth control evil. I would like to extend that thought briefly. If life is sacred, then it is evil to factor in a certain number of horrors like bombing an Iranian girls school in pursuit of political-power objectives. Sickening. Horrifying. Absolutely so. If that is the price for a political objective, it may not be done. Thus I was also against the war in Afghanistan as retaliation for 9/11, because it factored into the action the possibility killing whole families at weddings, for example. That happened. Two thousand, nine hundred and seventy seven innocent people were cruelly murdered by the fanatics of 9/11; my country killed at least 70,000 innocent people in Afghanistan and perhaps 500,000 innocent people in Iraq, the other 9/11 war.  There was a real grievance against the Taliban regime but if life is sacred, then some violent actions are morally absolutely, unconditionally forbidden. Or the Hamas committing those murders against people at a music festival. The Palestinians have real, deep grievances against the injustices and murders inflicted on them by the Israeli regime. But if life is sacred, that was evil as are all the murders they in their desperation have carried out in retaliation to the injustices they have suffered. And the Israeli retaliation evil: perhaps 100,000 or more civilian deaths (mostly old people, women and children) in their arguably genocidal retaliation. (I think of the Gandhi thought: if an eye for eye, the whole world would go blind.) That seems the clear consequence of the idea that life is sacred – even ours, wounded creatures that we are, not pure innocent beings, except perhaps as children. My point is that this is unconditionally wrong, always, whoever does it, for whatever reason. 

 

    I can already hear the voices of realism telling me that, while that thought is morally admirable in sentiment, it is delusional in political reality. I hear the voice of reason argue that all political action involving force carries foreseeable civilian deaths, and that refusing such actions absolutely would amount to paralysis, allowing aggressors, terrorists, or tyrannies to prevail unchecked. The reasonable might further argue that leaders have obligations not merely to abstract humanity but to protect concrete communities, and that tragic “collateral damage” is sometimes the lesser evil in a fallen world.

     A second line of criticism would come from consequentialist reasoning: if refusing military action allows even greater atrocities later, then absolute prohibitions may perversely increase suffering overall. Thus the bombing that foreseeably kills innocents may be defended as justified by a sufficiently important end: preventing future massacres, deterring aggression, preserving national security, and so forth.

 

   Building on the earlier reflection about finitude, hinges, and faith, I would respond by questioning precisely this moral framework of calculation. Once innocent human beings become variables inside strategic arithmetic, something spiritually catastrophic has already occurred. The issue is not whether tragic deaths sometimes occur in a world of conflict – they inevitably do – but whether one may intend, authorize, normalize, or knowingly incorporate the destruction of innocent life into one’s political method. To really believe that life is sacred – and what loving parent could deny this – means that there are moral boundaries that cannot be crossed even for enormously desirable outcomes, because the value at stake is not commensurable with political advantage, national glory, ideological victory, or even historical justice. My position is not naïve optimism about politics; it is not a denial that governments have responsibilities of defense. It is rather the claim that realism without moral absolutes becomes spiritually self-devouring. As though Gandalf would have taken the ring of power to defeat Sauron, thus becoming Sauron. The modern state, revolutionary movement, or empire easily begins speaking the language of necessity: some innocents must die for security, liberation, stability, history, civilization, resistance, progress. But once that logic is accepted without limit, every horror becomes potentially justifiable under sufficient pressure. Hiroshima, October 7th, wedding bombings, torture chambers, terror bombings of cities, starvation sieges – all can be redescribed as regrettable necessities within a larger calculus.

    Human beings are radically finite not only intellectually but morally and politically. We do not possess the godlike standpoint required to calculate history infallibly. Leaders repeatedly justify atrocities in the name of future goods they cannot truly foresee. The twentieth century is filled with examples of regimes convinced that temporary horrors would produce permanent liberation, the Hitler regime included. Recognition of finitude should therefore deepen humility about consequentialist reasoning, not weaken it. The more uncertain our grasp of outcomes, the more dangerous it becomes to suspend absolute moral limits for supposedly greater goods.

      The voice of reason and realism will still press the hard question: what then should one do in the face of aggression or terror? My answer need not imply pacifism in every sense. One may perhaps use force in defense under strict conditions while refusing actions whose means intrinsically violate the sacredness of innocent life. Historically, this is close to strands of the just war tradition associated with Thomas Aquinas and later moral thought, though I suppose I radicalize its prohibitions more strongly i.e., understand the consequences of the sacredness of life a bit more with my heart. Under modern conditions of warfare, I am still not completely a pacifist. I think Poland’s resistance to Hitler’s invasion was just, for example. Though bombing German cities would have been evil, had Poland had that capability. Though I do not morally judge the men of that time and have pity for all that the men who flew the bombers had to endure – actually Christ forbade us to morally judge at all, knowing our finite, wounded hearts and minds: a great truth whether one is Christian or not –  I objectively think the Allied bombing campaign on Germany and Japan during WWII (and the dropping of the atomic bombs) was wicked because I believe human life is sacred.

 

    Underlying this whole reflection is a deeper anthropological claim: modern political consciousness tends to treat persons as units within systems: that is, as populations, demographics, strategic assets, collateral damage, human capital. The affirmation that life is sacred resists precisely this reduction. It insists that every child at a school, every family at a wedding, every teenager at a music festival possesses a depth of value that cannot be translated into political arithmetic without deep moral wounds.

. . .

One of the things that puzzles me about myself and others who think of themselves as Christians is the fact, based on my experience of life and my study of history, that Christians (and indeed Muslims and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists) are not clearly more virtuous, do not embody more goodness, than the non-religious. Virtue, vice, and goodness seems to be rather equally distributed among humanity regardless of belief system, unless the belief system is an ideology of evil, of which Naziism may serve as a paradigm case (Naziism was premised on the idea that much human life – basically, all “non-Aryan” life –  was unworthy of existence.) It disturbs me that the men who started the recent string of wars in West Asia/Middle East professed to be Christians. But why should it? I profess to be Christian (at least profess to being a not-very-good Christian) and I have done things unworthy of a soul, even if not on the scale of starting wars. I don’t have and power or authority, but if I did, who knows? And all of these wars involved securing the oil supply for a global economy based on luxury consumption, and economy that is burning up the world (among other evil things like created mass poverty and exploiting producers – treated as a commodity – more of less brutally). And here I am, really against my better judgment, on my laptop, using the Internet, all dependent on the same damn oil at some level that these wars were at least partly about. Thus I am also “in a small way” implicated.

    Still it disturbs me that I in my “small way” and presidents on a larger scale profess to be Christians and treat life as though it were no sacred. I recall a question Thomas Aquinas deals with in the Summa Theologiae I, q. 20, a. 2: “Whether God loves all things?” His answer: 

God loves all existing things. For all existing things, in so far as they exist, are good, since the existence of a thing is itself a good; and likewise, whatever perfection it possesses. Now it has been shown above that God's will is the cause of all things. It must needs be, therefore, that a thing has existence, or any kind of good, only inasmuch as it is willed by God. To every existing thing, then, God wills some good. Hence, since to love anything is nothing else than to will good to that thing, it is manifest that God loves everything that exists.

 And later in the same article: 

Nothing that exists can be evil formally as existing, but only so far as it is deprived of some good; and thus evil cannot exist except in something good. 

This answer is relevant to my reflections on the sacredness of life. Aquinas argues that God loves all things that exist because existence itself is good, and whatever exists participates in goodness insofar as it exists. God’s love is not merely emotional affection but the willing of the good. Indeed, for Aquinas, God’s love is the cause of the goodness and being of things: “To love is to will the good of another.” And the first good of all is existence. And because God is the source of all being, Aquinas concludes that God loves all things insofar as He wills their existence and goodness. He even cites Wisdom 11:24–25 (a book of the Bible that Protestants exclude for reasons I am not certain of): “Thou lovest all things that are, and hatest none of the things which Thou hast made.” True, God does not love all things equally. Rational creatures participate more deeply in goodness than stones or plants, and some creatures receive greater goods than others. But being loved by God even such things make a claim to exist and be valued. How much more the human soul, made in the image of God.

      The metaphysical idea is that evil has no independent being of its own. Evil is a privation or corruption of good. Thus God loves the being and goodness even of damaged or sinful creatures, while not loving the privation, disorder, or sin itself. That distinction is what I have been circling around in your reflections: the sacredness of human life, the refusal to reduce persons entirely to evil acts, the distinction between condemning actions and refusing absolute judgment upon souls. For Aquinas, even the wrongdoer retains goodness simply in existing as a creature. That goodness is never wholly annihilated. Hence one may hate murder, cruelty, or injustice while still affirming that the murderer, as a being, is not pure evil. Evil parasitically depends upon a good nature it wounds.

     This is also why your my judgment that indiscriminate bombing is objectively evil fits into a Thomistic framework. If existence and life themselves participate in goodness and are loved by God, then treating innocent lives as expendable variables in political calculation violates something metaphysically profound, not merely socially agreed-upon norms.

    I also think this philosophy-theology makes explicit truths that are scriptural: that God is the source of being, that God is love, that God loves the world and keeps it in being through love, that he gave part of himself, his “son”, to show us the way. 

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p.s.

I found this in the Internet 

• Afghanistan (2001–2021): the best-known estimates place civilian deaths roughly between 46,000 and 70,000+, depending on methodology and whether indirect deaths are counted. The Costs of War Project estimate for direct civilian deaths is around 46,000, but many scholars believe the real toll is substantially higher once indirect mortality is included.
• Iraq (especially after 2003): estimates vary enormously because methods differ. Conservative counts based on documented deaths are in the low hundreds of thousands, while excess-mortality studies have produced estimates reaching into the hundreds of thousands or even above one million total war-related deaths over time. Civilian deaths alone are commonly estimated somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000+ depending on what is included. There is no universally accepted single figure.
• Gaza (since October 2023): this is currently one of the most disputed casualty questions in the world, but increasingly even external demographic and epidemiological studies suggest the official counts were probably underestimates rather than exaggerations. Recent peer-reviewed and demographic studies place direct deaths roughly in the 70,000–100,000 range or higher by late 2025/early 2026, with women, children, and elderly people comprising a very large proportion of the dead.
• Iran (current war in 2026): reliable figures are much harder because the conflict is ongoing. Multiple organizations, including the Iranian human-rights group HRANA, currently estimate roughly 1,400–1,700+ civilian deaths in Iran so far, including hundreds of children, though these are explicitly described as minimum or provisional figures likely to rise.

This is so horrible that my mind cannot really process it.