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In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:
Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation. Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue. Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled. But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ. They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved. There can be no exceptions. An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.
This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms. He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances. Dante simply knew. This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.
This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational. But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth. Kant was well aware of this. Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life. The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.
I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution. Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible. The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.
Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us? Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil? Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.
Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework. We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values. In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled. There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well. Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good? Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads? It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.
At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists. Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving. But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not. I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces. There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.
There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid. From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures. In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change. It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace. This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.
It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":
(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)
It's hard to be very optimistic. The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:
The first circle of Hell is Limbo, and it is a place "of perfect natural felicity". That is, it is our world when all the bad things are solved - war, sickness, poverty, greed and so on. But it is without hope. It is deprived of the supernatural, of the vision of God which is what the enjoyment of the saved and blessed consists of.
It is true that the Church has softened on Limbo and really you never hear of it anymore today. But it was never formally a doctrine (something that has to be believed); rather, it was grappling with the problems of justice and mercy; if infants die before they can be baptised, how can they be condemned to Hell? What about the virtuous pagans and those who never got the chance to hear of God?
On the other hand, if you can be saved just by living a good life, then there was no need for the Incarnation and, crucially, the Crucifixion. If you can be saved without believing in Christ, without ever hearing of Him, then what does that mean for the Great Commission?
So Limbo was a technical solution: a human paradise (for the righteous but unsaved) without the supernatural.
Which is why Limbo, in the Divine Comedy, is on the outskirts of Hell and is a place of sadness, even though there is no pain or sickness or the rest of our earthly woes there. They can never enjoy the bliss of the Divine Vision. And why Purgatory, even though the souls there (by one reading) suffer pains as grievous as the damned in Hell, is a place of hope - because it is where the saved work off the earthly penalties for sin, before they go to Heaven (and it's not a matter of "second chance" or 'earning a place in Heaven' - the souls in Purgatory are already saved).
C.S. Lewis had a somewhat different take on it in his The Pilgrim's Regress, but he too took the view: a place not of suffering, except the suffering of being without hope.
I've often thought about the contrast here - we on earth want an earthly paradise, no more tears or grief or loss, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. And the Church says "yes, you can have that - but it's in the map of Hell, not of Heaven. You can have the secular ideal, but never the supernatural one."
And some people probably would be very happy with that bargain. I never watched The Good Place, but a while back there it was all over social media. And my understanding - SPOILERS - is that in the end, after uncounted millennia of perfect happiness, the characters finally choose non-existence because they've had it all. The writers seem to have presented that as the most desirable end, and not true eternity. But I think it's interesting that even there, the same message is in the water: without the supernatural, purely natural felicity will eventually pall and satiate.
it's very interesting how you recognized the problem at the heart of the show the good place without having seen it. i put off watching for years because the only thing i knew was its setting in heaven and i had doubts on how that was going to be handled. eventually i did watch it, all the way through but not as a binge, i enjoyed it until the ending.
the mistake ZHPL made, the same as @self_made_human, and one that's understandable but not in the best way from people who didn't watch it, is thinking it's an atheist work. if ZHPL did watch it and missed it, bad look. it is ostensibly atheist: heaven with no God, hell with no devil, what's going on? it makes no sense, to disregard God is to disregard the source of objectivity and in the context of a show about the domain of God it renders that show nonsense, it destroys everything. i don't mean this on a level of modern soullessness or even just logically. the grand narrative of the show has a God-shaped hole, it's nothing without it. thing is, the hole isn't supposed to be there.
imagine a fan cut of fight club. the sole purpose of the cut is removing the last reveal of tyler durden's identity. it would leave in everything it could without it being explicit that "pitt is norton's alter-ego." this cut would probably work well enough, it would seem off, like it was building to something and the bombings at the end don't quite resolve that feeling, but it'd have beginning middle and apparent end.
that's what happened with the good place. the show lacks the fundamental truth of the world of the story, and in a show about heaven and hell that can't just be skipped. michael schur is a smart guy, he wasn't ignoring this, it's there the whole time, i think the writers didn't know how schur intended for the show to end because schur didn't want to accidentally ruin the show with a cliched and bad ending.
i'm certain it was supposed to end one of these ways:
the whole show was eleanor in purgatory. the ending was going to be her realizing something was still missing, but how can heaven be missing something? so we get the final twist: she's still not in heaven, she was never in heaven, and what she's missing is God. she'd pass through the door, find herself in actual heaven, and meet God.
reality in the show--hell, mundane, divine--is a simulation, and when eleanor passed through the door at the end she would have met those running the simulation.
the season 1 finale is famous and the narratively perfect bookend with the s4 series finale would be her meeting God, or "god", contrast with the dissonant ending we get. ZHPL criticizes parts of the show as escalating soullessness, like the character of the judge, but it's so obvious as meta-level escalating absurdity. schur takes it farther and farther into nonsense to the point the judge character is as good as schur screaming at the audience "You still don't get it! The characters still don't understand what's actually going on! They still don't see the fundamental truth!" The first intended ending has to be done perfectly or it nukes the show's legacy. The second is the choice if he can't pull off the first, but then it becomes the "too smart for its own good" ending.
schur went with door to oblivion, why risk the legacy of it-was-all-a-dream-ing his show? but that's the problem with the good place: it's so damn obvious it was all a dream.
I don't think I ever claimed it was an atheist work, I'm entirely agnostic on the point!
I can easily see a "Cultural Christian", someone who mouths the words but doesn't actually have anything but belief in belief, concoct such a bad story.
I don't know the actual religious orientation of the writers, but what I'm getting at is that I can see a self-professed "Christian" writing it.
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