A pressing question
in Christianity is: how can an all loving God create Hell, and how
can an all knowing God create people whom he knows will sin and will
be condemned forever to Hell?
Dante gives us a schizophrenic view of
God in Canto III. Hell was created by all three aspects of God,
including “primal love.” Then after a few lines we read, “abandon
all hope you who enter here.” Can love talk this way?
Dante tries
to reconcile “love” with this apparent lack of mercy: the damned
souls “want” to cross the river Acheron and reach Hell proper,
apparently because divine justice makes them yearn to be punished.
Anthony Esolen in his commentary goes as far as saying that these
souls would feel very uncomfortable in Heaven. (Many modern people
feel they would not be happy in Heaven themselves). But what is the
alternative, eternal torture?
I learned in a
sociology class that many monotheistic religions, to avoid the
dilemma of an omnipotent God that does evil, reinstated the heretical
dualism of Zoroastrianism: there are two supernatural beings, both
powerful – God and Satan.
Dante rejects this idea. In Dante's time
Thomas Aquinas had finally solved this problem: evil is simply the
absence of God, who is all good. Dante, breaking with the traditional
iconography of the devil, goes all out to espouse Aquinas's theory.
His Satan is not the powerful ruler of the Inferno. He is
immobilized in ice. The mythological monsters who judge and punish
souls are appointed by God, not by Satan.
And here we are again at
square one. Even though God does not dirty his hands torturing the
damned, he has appointed minions who will. Where is mercy? Even the
monk who authored the chant “Dies Irae” beseeches Jesus to
remember that he did not die just to save a small number of people.
No comments:
Post a Comment