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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:
I think I should remind you that Dante was not, in fact, a theologian. He never claimed that his work was theological in nature and was not received as such. It was meant as entertainment: it's original title was "Comedy" and large chunks of the book are spent on trivial political diatribes where Dante "wins" the argument by portraying himself as the Yes Chad and his political opponents as crying soyjaks tortured by devils.
Just to underline how much his views did not reflect the official views of contemporary Christianity it's worth remembering that one of his other books, De Monarchia, was declared heretical shortly after his death, burned on the stake and 200 years later it was entered in the very first edition of the Index where it stayed until the late 1800s.
He wasn't held in especially high regards in literary circles either, he did have his own small fan club but generally intellectuals considered Boccaccio and Petrarca to be the better (vulgar) italian authors. His contemporary fame is mostly due to being rediscovered, at the end of the 1800s, as part of the founding myth for the italian language.
On the topic of the Church having softened on the topic of hell... probably. However consider that the idea of Purgatory was very prevalent throughout the middle ages and I suspect most people expected to get that, rather than hell, for their minor infractions. If that wasn't the case it would be hard to explain all the money they made off of indulgences.
Furthermore the concept of universal reconciliation (in some form) isn't alien to old christian theology, Origen (~200AD) being the early example. You can find more examples by reading the history of Apokatastasis. I like Eriugena's version, the theological big crunch: you can use it to make a transhumanist version where we all get eternal life through being part of a LLM.
I'd say that the idea of infinite punishments (or rewards) being dished out for finite transgressions is psychotic and possibly betrays the fact that nobody ever truly believed it. As Borges puts it:
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one’s own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive
I think you should seriously consider the possibility that people used to do those things because of the immediate material rewards that they entailed and they don't do them anymore (as much) because the calculus has changed. It's likely that "be responsible" is just an easy cudgel to reach and beat people over the head with when they are not doing what you want them to do.
Commedia in the 14th century didn't mean light or frivolous. It just meant any story that isn't a tragedy. It would probably be more accurate in today's English to translate Divina Commedia as 'The Divine Story' or 'The Divine Narrative'.
Could you summarize this? I'm very curious.
Sorry wrong person - @aaa?
The bible is vague on a lot of things, so early theologians filled in by borrowing from greek philosophy, mystery cults, etc. The idea that an infinitely good god will eventually save everyone, and therefore that hell is temporary (i.e. apokatastasis), is not that far fetched (certainly less so than a hierarchy of angels, or the trinity) and thus it circulated, pretty much for all of the history of christianity.
Eriugena's version is explained in his book de divisione naturae and it's a very abstract philosophical theory where creation starts in god as ideas (he thinks platonic forms) which eventually become material. Because god has to be the ultimate form of all aristotelian causes he's also the ultimate final cause so everything returns to him through an inverse process.
Thank you! This is a form of Christianity I might actually be able to believe in. Boy the Catholics really ruined a lot of things huh?
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