HEAVEN AND HELL

I surprised myself recently by getting hooked by Dante's Inferno. A bookclub I am in is reading The Dante Club by Matthew Pearle, a good murder mystery. As I started to read this book, where the murders mimic a punishment from the Inferno, I became more intrigued by comments about Dante and decided to just to read the commentary sections of a copy of the Inferno we have here at home. Got to reading and now I am hooked - Just entering Canto where Dante and Virgil are entering Lower Hell.

I can well imagine some poor, purely post-modernist 19 year old in Freshman lit having to read this poem and being completely repulsed by the whole affair - those people in the Middle Ages were so barbaric. So why am I so intrigued by this medieval poem?

From a purely literary point of view, Dante is a masterful writer who in so little poetic language is able to convey so many layers of meaning. I like all the allegory and multiple meanings that are happening as the poem progresses. It is just an interesting story - poet is losing his way so Divine Messenger is sent to save him.

Dante of course is writing from a thoroughly medieval Catholic perspective but foreshadowed also the rise of what we later would term the Renaissance in this work. So from a historical perspective the work is also interesting.

But the real key to my interest is the subject matter. Nobody writes about Hell anymore. Heaven yes. Hell no. (double meaning here, did you get it?) I realize it is thoroughly puzzling to the average modern person why I would have any regret about the lack of writings about hell. Morbid preoccupation with punishment for wrongdoing is so puritannical, so medieval. The thought that God would eternally punish people anyway? How retrograde!

I think this atttude gets to the crux of why classical Christianity has such a hard time fitting in our post-modern world that sees everything in shades of grey, and why I find Dante so intriguing. Modern people have a historical snobbery that blinds us to our faults and that has lead us to endorse actions that people throughout history would have found at best strange and at worst horrifying. We have made progress in many cases over what Dante's world was like, but not uniformly so. There is much we have lost as well.

First, he takes ultimate matters much more seriously than most modern people do. Your eternal destiny is serious stuff. Not something to joke about.

Then, he has no trouble consigning people to really, really awful punishments for things we think are peccadillos, minor matters. Carnality (sexual sins), gluttony, hoarding (being greedy and materialistic), or simply being pagan - born before Christ came and not knowing Divine Truth -- certainly God could not punish these things, our modern minds argue?

But that's just it. If what the Bible says is true - which of course is quite a matter of debate in today's world -- then these things are not just minor matters but are real evil in our midst.

I believe in our world today that we take sin far too lightly, and we way underestimate the depth and breadth of evil at work among us. Since pointing the finger at others is such bad manners, let me just give you an example from my own life. Okay, so I am a pastor's wife, pretty decent person overall, model citizen - just in the last week I have been tempted by or had to confess the sins of pride, gluttony, anger, lust, spite and greed. Notice these are all things that people wind up in Hell for in Dante's vision. Hmm. And, with and through God's grace, I have been working for more than 20 years as a Christian to root these things out of my life. So that tells you something - these things run deep in the human soul. We just don't want to recognize them because they are too painful and difficult. It is much easier to work on our self-actualization strategy.

Now, I don't think that Dante gets it right across the board - that this is really what Hell is like. But in many ways he is so much closer to getting the heavenly and hellish vision right than we generally do in our modern world. (I ask you to contrast this with The Five People I Met in Heaven or other popular spiritual books today.)

Okay, kids are waking up. Time to leave my literary and theological commentating and get back to work. Let me know your thoughts.