Ten years ago or more, I read the Inferno, the first volume of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. It didn’t make too much of an impression on me, seeming to be at least in part a matter of Dante taking shots at some of his enemies, a lot of people he didn’t admire (often, for good reasons), and a few friends who led disordered lives and didn’t even try to repent or reform.
After the past 9+ years of working out my worldview, a Christian understanding of created being, which necessarily included an understanding of human being, of its relationships to God, and, hence, of salvation and damnation, I wished to read all of The Divine Comedy—Singleton’s prose translation with heavy annotations. In a not so short sentence: I wished to see how much sense Dante’s theory of salvation and damnation made from the viewpoint of one who had struggled with both Christian teachings and with modern empirical knowledge and had produced a worldview which makes sense of both as compatible and mostly overlapping descriptions of the same world.
Dante doesn’t seem to have believed in the main teaching of the Bible: the Old Testament teaches that the members of the People of Israel will be saved as members of that community and the New Testament teaches that members of the Christian Church will be saved as members of that community. In Dante’s Paradiso, even those saved to live on the outermost realm of Heaven live as a gathering of individuals who are not in communion with the other souls who made it to regions closer to the center of Heaven; they are gathered together as they might have been at the hearth of a warm and well-run tavern. (That outermost realm is the everlasting home of souls who lived good lives but didn’t live up enthusiastically to their vows or presumably other serious commitments.)
Looking back, I can see that Hell and Purgatory were little different in the presentation of human beings as individuals—though I could appreciate a presentation of the damned as those who refused to properly engage with their communities and are bound not to ever do so. In any case, Dante’s poetic masterpiece doesn’t so much as hint of that ultimate community which is the Body of Christ, or rather it presents communities as mere gatherings of the `true’ human beings who are individuals.
On the other hand, I teach that we human beings, at least those who will achieve full membership in the Body of Christ, are like the three Persons of God and that Body, as I said, is like God. This is to say that, as true images of the Trinitarian God, individual human beings remain fully so while being also fully the Body of Christ. Each and every one of those who are saved to share God’s life for time without end. Dante has no such sense. Certainly, he can’t be blamed for not seeing much that history and modern biology and other sciences has brought into view or into more clear view in the past few centuries. Evolutionary biology and history and sociology supports the idea that we have a strong communal component to our human being—we aren’t just individuals who travel in groups or enter into voluntary relationships of a contractual type, though perhaps tinged with deep feelings.
Dante seems to me to be someone already on the path toward Hobbes and Locke and Jefferson and Nock—all admirable men, but dangerous men whose ideas are worth investigating and contemplating and whose ideas on human being must be rejected by any who have a Biblical faith or who are making sense of modern empirical knowledge of men and their various communities.
I’d even say that it’s pretty clear an individual human being of the sort found in Hobbes and other Liberal thinkers, finite in many ways and only displaying some of the virtues and gifts of human being even as we know it in this mortal realm, couldn’t tolerate life without end. We don’t have enough to draw on and would soon enough be praying for an end to time.
Dante is simply wrong that an individual human being could forever be satisfied, let alone in a state of bliss, by adoration of God—when that worshiper has to rely on the stuff of an individual. We can see the way to a solution when we posit a rich and complex Body of Christ in which we all share in the gifts and accomplishments of St Paul and St Augustine and Alfred the Great and St Thomas Aquinas and Blaise Pascal and John Henry Newman and Leo Tolstoy and Flannery O’Connor. But that’s still not enough. Not to fear. The Body of Christ has more—Jesus Christ, Son of God and true God. We can share in the fullness of God’s own Being and live God’s own life along with the Son and, through Him, the Father and the Holy Spirit.
As individuals standing outside of God and adoring Him, we would not be able to tolerate life without end. It is only by sharing God’s own life that we could enjoy life without end and we could share that life only through full membership in the Body of Christ and full communion with its Head: the Lord Jesus Christ.
Peter Frost, a paleoanthropologist who is well-versed in genetic issues, has been writing for at least several years of the ways in which ethnic communities have characteristics which reflect their unique histories. One of the strong findings of modern research is that the ethnic groups which have inhabited much of Europe in recent centuries have personality characteristics consistent with their political and economic and cultural systems; these characteristics, especially a stronger sense of individual self which can be extreme in some, are said to be especially strong in northwestern Europeans, but seem to exist throughout Europe, possibly because of migrations of related peoples into all regions of Europe over the recent millenia.
The more recent immigrants from Asia and Africa to the countries of Europe and North America seem to have different characteristics, sometimes consistent enough with `Western’ characteristics that assimilation is possible at least in the public marketplaces, economic and political. Many of the more recent immigrants from eastern Europe and some from east Asia and southern Asia exhibit behaviors consistent to some major extent with the political and other systems of Europe, even the most Liberal (collectivist or classical) of countries. Even European styles of collectivism rely on pulling together mobs of individuals rather than the long-term development of complex, often kin-based relationships—Marx and Dante have similar assumptions about human communities so far as I can tell, though I admit I haven’t studied either writer too much and have no interest in doing so. Combining ethnic groups which have evolved in radically different environments can work but problems might develop between Europeans and even those groups of Chinese and Jews who have more respect than most Europeans for the accomplishments of Newton and Shakespeare and Mozart. (“Damn it, there’s some guys in tuxes playing crap music. Somebody must be broadcasting the national championships of the Women’s National Mud-Wrestling League (WNMWL).”)
In other words, as I stated above, there is now even scientific information that all that shallow speculation found in Locke and the classical liberals of the 19th century and forward is wrong but was worth pursuing but only with regards to some human beings at the extreme end of the spectrum for northwestern Europeans, themselves seeming to be at a fairly extreme end of the spectrum for mankind in general. Other peoples with equal or better accomplishments in politics and economics and culture and science aren’t even interested in the ways of the West. And they shouldn’t be.
And these wonderful northwestern European traits in their more moderate form showed up at least by the time of Dante, as did a blindness to their uniqueness and also the contradiction between an unqualified acceptance of those traits and the Biblical teachings on salvation as well as modern, scientific understandings of human being. Wonderful so long as we realize we are at the extreme end of certain human characteristics and then go on to understand, and act as if, other ethnic groups can be much different. We should also remember that many from that northwestern European population, or the European population in general, have far weaker individualistic traits.
This evolutionary stuff, including gene-culture co-evolution, is for real. The Bible is for real. Neither evolutionary thought nor the Bible should just be mined for verbal bullets to shoot at our enemy of the moment, only to be put back in the closet until another such opportunity. Both evolutionary knowledge of human being and Biblical knowledge of that same human being have to be fully accepted in understanding the fullness of human life or fully rejected.
See my freely downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, for a little bit more on human being as I understand it. More will be coming, God willing. See The Struggle Between the Individual and the Community in the Body of Christ for one of my recent efforts to move beyond that book.