Heaven: Some distinctions in Dante

Dante speaks of the afterlife, and not all of it is bad. In general, people get what they want in Dante. As I have been discussing this with other readers, the example of CS Lewis's The Great Divorce keeps coming up. 

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.” - CS Lewis, The Great Divorce

What I take from this comparison is that the theme of getting what you want, what is often talked about in Dante commentary as "the will" is central to how the souls experience the afterlife. This has different effects at various places along the pilgrimage. Some of these are versions of heaven that end up not really being heaven at all. I want to focus on two of those places in this short reflection.

Limbo: 

Dante arrives in limbo after crossing the river Acheron defining the boarder of Hell. A type of limbo is the area on one side of the river, but that area is for the neutrals. They are molested by torments though. Dante tells us that we have to make a decision and trying not to do so will not be rewarded. The fact that to be neutral is to be in hell is a fairly deep condemnation of the non-conflict strategy of living our lives. There are so many people that take this strategy including 1/3 of the angels that sat on the sidelines at the fall of Lucifer.

The area on the outside of inferno, on the earthly side of Acheron is a place of torment. This makes the comparison of Limbo even more confusing. There is no real torment here, even if there are sighing babies. Much of this area are where the great people of history reside in the afterlife. These people pursued truth. They are surrounded by others that did so. We are told that the righteous Hebrew people who waited on the arrival of the Messiah are harrowed from hell, but they too were in this circle prior to the coming of Christ. Some might liken this area to Sheol rather than Gehenna, the difference being that one is a waiting place and the other is a place of torment.

So what is this area really like. It seems like everything my High School self wanted college to be. Lots of smart people talking about ideas all day long. At first glance, this is a bearable eternity and since it looks like a secular person's version of heaven, it is hard to reconcile that it is the first circle of hell. It is distinct from the area for the neutrals. None of us would want to be left in-between heaven and hell, so this area seems like a reprieve by comparison.

To describe what is missing in Limbo is to start the process of unpacking what Dante gives us. What would Sheol look like when the righteous Hebrews were still there? Would it have been an even nicer place to be? Talking to David, the Psalm writer, for instance, would almost be like a Heaven of its own. I mean, even the greatest library in the world is made better by the addition of more books. There must have been a felt loss when hell was harrowed. Dante gives us some glimpse of this through the eyes of Virgil.

When I think back on my High School version of heaven, to be able to talk to all the really great people that I missed on this earth, John Lennon, for one teenager example, I quickly recognize that this is just another insatiable desire. It came from a time where I thought people could be perfected on this earth and that I could imagine myself as being perfected if I worked hard enough to emulate those that seemed like exemplars.

Dante seems to present these individuals as reaching some union of virtues and having earned their right to be in a place what was as nice as it could be, absent the knowledge of Christ. I have been thinking about that the entire time I have been following him on this pilgrimage. These souls can't be perfected, at least not according to the plan that Dante follows on the journey up from inferno. That is a type of damnation. The hell for these people, like for a High School student is that they haven't dreamed of anything that points toward the ultimate source of life and all of creation. They have mastered smaller challenges, and while this type of torment is harder to describe, it seems that it would be its own type of torment.

How to describe what is going on here? Probably the best I can do is suggest that it is a type of smugness that doesn't know it is being smug. It is the belief that your own virtue is enough, or that you are exemplary based on your own record and account. The more I think about it, the more alike limbo is to other areas of hell. The neutrals thought they were so smart not taking sides, and they were all lumped in together in an eternity of torment. Those that loved, but loved things lesser than God, can get trapped into the fate of Francesca in the second circle of hell. They rationalize their small vision and get stuck in their smugness.

What makes this such a deceptive kind of hell is that it is like a prison where the walls are only in your imagination. If you could see through the illusion, then you escape. It is the belief in your own virtue that keeps you from doing anything else. As soon as Jesus appears in hell to harrow it, those that anticipated the coming of a Messiah can see through the illusionary walls. Those that cannot, can no longer see reality and are left with the smug vision that they constructed.

Purgatory:

In Purgatory we know something about the souls that we didn't know about those in Limbo. We know that they understand the ultimate goal. In Ante Purgatory, Canto II, the souls are all gathered before climbing the mountain. Dante came out of hell with Virgil and has been cleansed. The other souls arrive by boat, and some after taking their own sweet time to get in the boat in the first place. The souls have identified the task, climbing the mountain, but are confused by what steps to take. It may seem obvious, but it is really relatable that they are lost. Knowing where you want to go is only one part of this process. By the time that Casella shows up we are given a very clear lesson by the old man, Cato. The souls are all very happy to rest in this area and listen to music. We are in danger of thinking that arriving in Purgatory was the goal all along. It doesn't seem to be the case that what Dante wrote and what Casella put to music is objectionable in itself, but it is interfering with the soul's progress.

I think this is a useful comparison to the vanity and smugness of the souls in Limbo. The souls here have clearly overcome some of their vanity, at least enough to find a way here in Purgatory in the first place. The imperfection of these souls is threatening to hold them up forever just as they arrive. They are seeking after the good, but not the kind of good that they ought to be seeking. The good that they should be seeking is a better version of the good that their habits taught them on earth.

Again, comparing this with Francesca from Canto VI in inferno is useful. She was very interested in romantic love, and so much so that she betrayed her husband with his brother. The example is the ideal of anti-romantic. It tells you that your duty to someone you married does not change just because you don't love them and you actually love someone else. Duty has a special resonance in that story. It is the kind of duty that we seldom fault people for rejecting. In fact, If someone were to say that they plan to stay in a loveless marriage because they thought it would be better for the kids, you might expect a response like, "And teach them that sense of love?". We dispense with duty for things that please us all the time, but in this case, can we really teach people to hold to duty like this? Enter Cato, the enforcer of the laws (sometimes).

Cato reminds us that we have duties that are above those duties to ourselves. Cato's suicide was a duty to live free rather than to preserve one's own life. That is certainly a sense of duty that is hard for us to understand, much less accept. It is this sense of duty and freedom, though, that makes us understand what Dante is doing here with progress. We have to keep seeking something higher, even when something good enough is right here. We can't merely want to be satisfied, but we have to want to join our will to that of God's, the whole finale of the comedy will end in this pursuit being approximated.

The entire notion of Purgatory seems to be that of taking good desires and perfecting them with a clearer understanding of the good underlying what we so easily accepted as a version of the good. When we focus on the good as defined by humans we are still blind to the good that is more reflective of the will of God for us. Our true freedom is found in uniting ourself to the will of God. If God created us to have a purpose and a goal, we have no better option than to go along with that. The progress of moving in that direction is to recognize when a good thing can be improved by seeking after something higher.

A great quote is: "Man wants liberty to become the man he wants to become" -- J.M. Buchanan. That seems to capture something of what is going on here. We have to not only get what we want, but want to better understand our wants so that we want what is right for us.

If the duty of Francesca led to something higher, she would have been right to follow the dictates of duty. Despite the anti-romantic notion, many people do choose to follow duty rather than pleasure. A more flattering version of this is the spouse that nurses their life-partner at the end of life. This can be a devastating blow to a person on a number of levels. To watch the person you love deteriorate and ultimate succumb to affliction is not a pleasurable end. Some people follow the dictates of duty to perform this kindness, however. Those that do often cannot imagine doing anything else. It isn't only the matter of having no one to unload the burden on, but it is about wanting to share this part of life with the person you love.

To understand why the souls are told to hurry along by Cato, we have to understand something about the ability of people to choose painful growth with the final aim of becoming the type of person they want to be. In the story of Canto II of purgatory, Dante tells us that we could consider Ante-Purgatory a type of heaven. There are good things here. Everyone is saved. We know where we are supposed to go. The problem though is that to truly understand where we are supposed to be we can no longer sit still and amuse ourselves to death (to steal from Roger Waters).

I imagine that the souls that are standing here and finally start to move again are like those that decide one day to give up an addiction. Once you have overcome the lies and visualized a world without your addiction, you have to change. You can't delay. You have to seek after what is good for you, rather than what you previously thought was good because it made you feel good.

Purgatory isn't heaven either.