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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 problem that religions face regarding hell is that the adherent can pick whether or not to believe in it, and whether or not to go to church or believe in anything at all. Hell as a concept is ultimate punishment in the psychological sense; it is ultimate deterrence, so the point is to modify our present behavior. As a method of ultimate deterrence it can’t be triumphed over by good deeds. Why? For too many reasons to list really, but the big ones are: doing good deeds for their own sake puts the focus on an action, whereas morality comes from focusing on the Good which is God, and there would be no need to focus on the Good if a simple ToDo list saves all eternal ills; not every person can immediately do good deeds, even if they are essentially on a perfect moral path given their past behavior, which could lead to people like alcoholics and the infirm to feel that they are damned until they are cured; it reduces a person‘s interest in all religion, if all Good can be received from a simple checklist, and Christianity is a religion designed to socialize morality communally within the fully human Christ.
If hell is perfect deterrence, a huge problem arises in how to condition a person into this deterrence who is not seriously religious. A serious Christian sees the options as heaven or hell, but someone less religious sees it as “non-hell and probably heaven” vs hell. In other words, they are deterred from buying into the deterrence. Why have a fear of hell, when I’ll have less fear if I don’t believe it at all? So in order to even buy into the punishment of hell, you need to first buy into religion generally; in the same way that first you need the boy to sign up for the Great War, and only later can you force him to walk through no man’s land at the battle of the Somme.
This is very ironic, but hell is only for the believers. It is for the believers in the sense that the believers reap the full harvest of fearing hell. But in order for the magic of hell to work, you need to be always and perpetually saved from it by knowing the next moral action or step. And, in an ideal variant of Christianity, this is Christ — the socialized Good — and every step in your moral life would be his very steps on his path.
I am a big fan of hell, as an idea. It should be conceived of as not an additional thing to fear, but instead the One True Fear. So the kids today who are afraid that their zoomer haircut isn’t perm’d well enough, or that the Taylor Swift tickets are sold out — all of their petty fears would be sublimated to one great fear, the fear of evilness (which in Christian thought is eradicated from believing and imitating Christ).
Hell is not purely deterrence, if you believe in some form of penal substitutionary atonement. If any part of Christ's death was to take on the penalty for sin, then it is not at all clear why that would be necessary or good, under a deterrence model—punishing Jesus doesn't really deter anyone, and it is mostly unclear what doing it in someone else's stead would accomplish, instead of just dropping the punishment.
Should people be trying to get away from fear, or from hell?
The proper model of hell is of it not being primarily about deterrence, but about retribution, not about setting up incentives, but that punishment for evil is a thing valuable in itself. I'm sure there are better quotes out there, but it was the martyrs in Revelation that came to mind: "They cried out with a loud voice, 'O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood upon those who dwell on the earth?'"
What I mean by deterrence is that the excellent philosophers of antiquity (probably including Philo) crafted Christianity in an attempt at an optimal way of life, which included the essential concepts of reinforcement and punishment baked in — or, incentive and deterrence. As in, the concept of hell has a utility. This is why the living philosophy of Christianity matches so well an optimal prosocial reinforcement model of behavior; because that was the point.
What would be the purpose of Christ in a narrative seeking to be the best possible reinforcement / punishment model of behavior? There’s a lot accomplished here. For one, if Jesus saves us from hell then it increases love for Jesus optimally. Second, if imitating Jesus is the way to heaven, then the person imitates an optimally prosocial and wise way of life. Third, a community gathered together to mourn our Perfect Martyr is a community which has perfect guidelines, a perfect exemplar, a perfect story, and a perfect friend and mentor in spirit, or in persona et spiritus Christi. Fourth, we see the damage of sin on display when humans killed God. Fifth, we see the holiness of God on display that he bore man’s sin while forgiving him. Sixth, we see the eternity of God in that he is resurrected.
Importantly, at least IMO, a Christian must fear Hell. This is literally commanded of us:
But that isn't really the case, at least, universally across Christianity. Protestant strains of Christianity separate works from reward in a way that removes much of the incentives. Protestants do of course believe that you should do good things, and they do believe that those who are changed will be sanctified, not remaining in the mire of sin to the same extent, but salvation in the end is not based upon the quality of the subsequent works. This lessens the incentives, and ends up with good works being done more out of duty or gratitude or, well, just thinking that it's a good thing to do.
I guess I also don't really see why you identify as a Christian (which I assume you do by the final us), if you seem to think of it as a merely human sociological phenomenon. Do you think it's beneficial, but not true? A noble lie?
This view of Christ is sorely lacking. You seem to view Christianity as an attempt to make people good. And so, it seems that Christ is useful, but not essential.
I see Christianity as the manifestation of the divine work of reconciling God and man. Christ cannot be dispensed with in this, he is at the center of everything. The second Adam, our substitute, the mediator between God and man, our intercessor, the firstborn from the dead. In Ephesians, this is shown powerfully, as over and over again we are told that every blessing that we have, from predestination to adoption to redemption to our inheritance is all "in Christ." Our being made better is merely one (important) aspect of that work.
Protestantism is a strange case, because iirc the original Protestants (Luther et al) believed that works followed nearly intrinsically from proper faith. Today, I don’t think this is really the case among Evangelicals. I find this impossible to square with the contents of the Gospel, for instance that those who say “Lord, Lord” but do not help poor brothers are damned and in fact never knew him. This is one of the last things Christ said before the Passion and it is clearly explicated in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. I think what happened is a kind of superstition where “believe in Christ” turned into “believe I don’t have to do anything because Christ will do it”, whereas the original believe/faith meant in assenting to the whole of Jesus as a living message from God. As Jesus clearly says for us to do things, “believe in Jesus” would very much mean that we have to do things. But it’s more expansive than that, and also means that we have to imitate him.
If I could be most charitable to early Protestantism, I would say they were trying to prioritize motivation from love with no fear of hell and no care for conscious imitation. The atonement works through pure spectating, with none of the “carry our cross daily”. Instead of imitating Jesus, the focus is purely on how Jesus healed your sins. This should turn into maximal thanks and gratitude; the gratitude then naturally leads you to follow Jesus because he suggests you do, but you do it with zero faith. I think such a theology could work if a person has a perfect love for Jesus. But that perfect love is hard to come by. I think contrite repentance, continual thanks, and some fear is much more likely to develop a perfect love over time than a “once and for all” Herculean spectator crucifixion.
I definitely think Christianity is beneficial, provided it is explored in the right way. I consider it something like… “clothed philosophy”. The Logos becomes Man, to ease the yoke and lighten our burdens. Because I think if a person is able to see how maximally joyful human life could be, they would consider their current lives to be approximately hell. Religion is about the perfection of human life, so it turns philosophy into story and ritual. So I see everything in Christianity as intended to make us better, not just morally but in emotion (spirit) as well. I think without this in mind, religion is apt to become superstitious and then wasteful and ultimately deadening.
I don't see how that example is at all difficult to be squared with the beliefs of the early protestants (If I'm parsing that correctly). (Feel free to model me as an early protestant.)
Right, believing in Jesus is not separable from doing things, though it would not itself be the doing of those things.
Are we reading the same early Protestants?* Here's Calvin:
and
So there certainly is a carrying of your cross. But if your point is that that is not the means by which the atonement applies, that is correct.
What do you mean by "you do it with zero faith"?
Am I correct in reading this that you don't think that Christianity is true, merely beneficial?
*a rhetorical question
Going to use bullet points just for ease of replying to individual things
If Protestants hold that “believing in the crucifixion is sufficient to save us from the punishment of sin and guarantee the new life”, then they can’t also hold “Christ says you must perform certain actions to be resurrected into the new life”. Christ specifically says that those who believe in him but do not perform certain actions will be thrown into hell, because Christ is found in the poor-off brother, and so whatever you do to him you do to Christ. These two conceptions of the Judgment are mutually exclusive. If anyone holds that “believing alone” guarantees salvation at the judgment, or that the crucifixion alone as something one agrees happened, they have to deny what Christ said on numerous actions: that certain actions are required to be saved from hell. Now, if instead you take “faith” to mean “assenting to every word Jesus says”, then this expansive-defined faith is sufficient. Because under the umbrella “faith” you find “must do certain actions to be freed from hell”. These actions are in Christ in the sense of spirit, they spring up from the Christ in a person versus a person’s identity. Yet, they must be performed using your mind and body and heart.
Re “it would not itself be the doing of those things”, Christ specifically says that it is the doing of those things. If Christ wanted to say that simply professing he is God saved, then he would say that. But he says certain things just be done, else hell.
The Protestants you posted do not believe that imitating Christ is what grants heaven and the new life. Instead they suggest you do it. This is actually what I wrote by the way. The problem is that there is hardly a motivation, because simply believing that Jesus died for sins is sufficient to save someone from damnation.
Re: truth of Christianity, no. Truth does not necessarily mean historicity or literalism. Literalism is not the way many early Christians interpreted scripture. A thing can be true because it represents greater truth.
Re: what faith is, the historical protestant definition involved both knowledge and trust, not knowledge purely.
And he does express, several times, that faith is sufficient.
Protestants usually understand the passages about what sorts of people enter eternal life either to be true because those who are justified by faith are also sanctified by the work of the Holy Spirit, or to be talking about what the law requires, which Christ has satisfied.
Ah, but look at what Paul says:
So Paul, at least, thinks that the actual literal claims are important, in at least one particular.
Jesus also consistently takes scripture seriously.
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