My New Breakfast Club--Jewish Draft-Era Veterans

In November of last year, I started going to the Wednesday morning Minyan prayer group at a synagogue in Lancaster City--Congregation Shaarai Shomayim. After Minyan, several of the men in the group meet at a local restaurant north of the city, Olde Hickory Grille. I joined them.

The month before, I met with the Rabbi of the Synagogue, Jack Paskoff. In the wake of the White Supremacist and Nazi rally that ended in murder, I feared anti-Semitism getting worse, especially after the President said these racists were "fine people."

One friend said, "You should see a Rabbi."

Another said, "You should see my Rabbi."

I met with Rabbi Paskoff. He invited me to come to services and hoped it would help me find peace.

The next week I went to Friday evening Sabbath service. When I got up to leave a man named Rick walked up to me and introduced himself. He asked, "Are you a cop or a soldier?" I said soldier. He was both. A retired police officer and a retired Army Command Sergeant's Major. His wife Kathy is also former military, serving as a Medic in the 80s and 90s.

Rick invited me to Minyan the following Wednesday.  At the breakfast, Rick introduced me to the other four men at the table. During breakfast, I realized that four of us served during the draft.  Rick was too young for the draft but was a Gulf War veteran and had served in many conflicts from the early 80s to the Iraq War.  The only guy who did not serve was in ROTC after the draft and decided he did not want to complete the program. Five of the six of us are veterans. I did not expect that.

The oldest veteran, Herb, had served before the Vietnam War as a cook, roughly the same time that Elvis Pressley was in the Army.  The other two were reservists who served during the Vietnam War, but were not sent to the war.

Over the last several months of going to the breakfast every other week or so, I have met a few more veterans who are members of the congregation.

I did not go to the prayer group expecting to find a veteran's group.  All of my work experience after the Vietnam War said that middle class men from the northeast did not serve.  I met one veteran in fifty in the white collar jobs I held from the mid-80s to my retirement three years ago.

Each of the men in the Breakfast Club told a funny story about how strange the Army was for them and how glad they were to be discharged.  Which is how most people feel about the Army. Rick and I are the only members of the group who ever wear an Army t-shirt.

This week three of the veterans--Rick, David and Harvey--were at one end of the table talking intensely about congregational business. Jim and I at the other end of the table talked about documentaries and podcasts. Jim said he was nearly out of memory on his phone.  I showed him how to free up some storage on his 5-year-old iPhone so he would have room for podcasts.

At this weekly breakfast, I almost felt as if I entered a time machine.  I was sitting with a group who meets every week because they have faith in common and they are nearly all veterans.  My Dad's generation had that experience. If a dozen men got together to go bowling or to coach football, the majority would be veterans. And like the men who served during World War II, we seldom talk about the Army, except to make jokes.

On Memorial Day: Visiting the Grave of Major Richard "Dick" Winters

Major Richard Winters, 1918-2011

This morning I got a message on Facebook from Sarah Frye Gingrich. She was asking about a gravesite of a soldier to visit on Memorial Day.  I immediately answered with the grave of Major Dick Winters, one of the soldiers I most admire, and who is admired by even the most cynical of my fellow soldiers. 

The Winters family grave at Bergstrasse Lutheran Church

Ephrata, Pa.

 In suggesting the visit to Sarah, I was aware I had never visited Dick Winters grave.  Sarah took her six kids to cemetery at Bergsrasse Lutheran Church in Ephrata, Pa.  An hour later, I put on my uniform for the first time since I left the Army and went to visit Winter's grave with my youngest son Nigel. 

Nigel at the Winter's family grave site.

For those who don't know the story of Dick Winters, I cannot recommend more highly the book Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose and the HBO miniseries of the same name.   

First time in my uniform since 2016

There are many memorials to the men who participated in the Normandy invasion. The airborne museum at Sainte-Mere-Eglise tells the story of those who flew into the invasion in gliders and with parachutes.  And the American Cemetery at Normandy where more than 9,000 soldiers are buried on the cliffs above Omaha Beach.

Nigel and I after the visit.

Rest in Peace Major Winters.

Faith in the Military: Chaplains During the Cold War and the Current Wars

Army Chaplain with Armor Unit

In the Cold War Army of the 1970s, the Protestant Chaplains were very different men than most of the Chaplains I met in Iraq in this century.  For one thing, they were all men. In this century a few of the Chaplains were woman. 

Between the 70s and the 2000s a big gap opened between the kind of person who was a Protestant Chaplain and those who were Catholic Chaplains.  All of the Chaplains I knew in the 70s were from what are now called mainstream denominations.  They were men with advanced degrees: masters or doctorates of Divinity.  Catholic Chaplains then and now were graduates of Catholic seminaries, also with advanced degrees. The only Orthodox Chaplain I met was a college chaplain. All were educated men who were approved by their national denominations for service.

But somewhere between Cold War West Germany and Camp Adder, Iraq, the standards for the chaplaincy and the people who were Protestant chaplains changed.  Most of the Protestant chaplains I met in Iraq and in the Army in this century were Evangelicals. They had undergraduate degrees from Bible Colleges and other Christian Colleges.

The 21^st Century Catholic Chaplains were no different than the 1970s, or, I imagine, from the 1870s.  Chaplain Valentine, the Catholic Chaplain on Camp Adder, Iraq, was teaching Philosophy at Fordham University on September 11, 2001. He saw the attack from his office window and joined the Army as soon as he could.  His story is here.

How different were the Protestant Chaplains in 1977 and 2009?  In 1977, I was a sergeant in a tank unit in West Germany. I attended chapel services and had a lot of questions.  The chaplain gave me C.S. Lewis’ book “Mere Christianity.” I loved the book. I read it, re-read it and asked for a book about C.S. Lewis.  The Chaplain gave me Lewis’ autobiography “Surprised by Joy.” I stopped reading at page 13 and did not try to read it again until I was in graduate school five years later.  The book has 246 references to authors and books I had never heard of. I eventually made an index of the books and authors Lewis mentions.  At that time, I had only a high school education and Lewis’ autobiography was beyond me.  The chaplain gave me other books by Lewis when I told him how difficult the autobiography was.

Thirty years later, I re-enlisted was again a sergeant. But this time I was a sergeant with a master’s degree in literature that had read and re-read all of 39 books C.S. Lewis wrote.  I started a C.S. Lewis book group on Camp Adder.  We read several of Lewis’ most popular theology books.  

The core of my book group was three Chaplains and an Air Force Colonel.  A few enlisted soldiers came and went, but only one of them stayed. It was weird for them to be in a book group with mostly officers. The Chaplains had heard about C.S. Lewis but never read any of his works except the Narnia Chronicles.  I know that a 56-year-old sergeant with, as soldiers say, “more degrees than a thermometer” was not typical.  But the Chaplaincy had clearly changed.  Evangelical Chaplains better reflected what the soldiers in the Army believed, but they were much more spiritual guides than experts.  The Chaplains had not read C.S. Lewis, or any leading 20^th Century religious thinkers outside the Evangelical world.

Before Iraq, I was tempted to think this change made sense.  Mainline Protestant Denominations were in decline; Evangelical Churches were growing. Does a Chaplain really need an advanced degree? 

No. But the most popular services on Camp Adder, the only ones that filled the seats of the stone-floored chapel, were when the Chaplain Valentine, the Fordham Professor turned Catholic Chaplain, was leading the service.  Soldiers respect expertise.  More than once, I heard a soldier say, “Chaplain Valentine really knows his shit!”  He did. And he made me nostalgic for the Chaplain who introduced me to one of the leading Christian writers of the last century, not the Chaplains who had me introduce them to the same writer.  

Comments:

Vinnie Vinanti I had a good chaplain in Germany, he was a Methodist. A few years later they were all evangelical and pushy about their faith; I did not appreciate that. Throughout the rest of my career the chaplains were all evangelicals. I usually avoided them. I always fell I was being judged for having a difference in faith.

Another from Facebook: 
I found a difference in Chaplains over the years too. Back in the day, the unit Chaplain was the spiritual leader of the unit. He could easily transition between religious services for different faiths & denominations. If he was unfamiliar with the faith of soldier in his command, he was tell connected to other religious resources, both military & civilian. In Iraq in 2004, we had a National Guard evangelical chaplain. We all hated him. If you didn't follow his faith, you were going to Hell. He was also the racist & jealous type. Many of us gravitated towards a young Korean-American chaplain from the 1st Cav. He was Christian & that was about how much we knew about his own spiritual beliefs. He supported all of our needs. He even made sure the Rabbi chaplain came by to visit our Jewish unit members. The Guard chaplain viewed the Rabbi like Satan himself. I prefer the old school chaplains. They were there for the soldiers, not to spread their own beliefs.

The German Evangelical Church Backed the Nazis in 1932 Then Turned on Their Jewish Members

In Charlottesville in 2017 Nazi flags and Rebel flags

flew together. Jim Crow laws in the American South 

inspired the German race laws that led to the Holocaust.

In 2016, the Evangelical Church in America voted overwhelmingly for a President who is openly racist and has bragged about breaking all the Commandments.  Depending on how you count Evangelicals they are one quarter of the U.S. population. The same people who, less than 50 years ago, did not smoke, drink, dance or watch movies and called on their followers to separate themselves from the world, now grasp for money and power as ruthlessly as the worst Medieval Popes and Cardinals. 

By backing Trump, the Evangelical Church in America abandoned faith for political power. The Evangelical Church in Germany did the same thing in the 1930s.

In 1932 Germany’s state church—the German Evangelical Church—was by far the largest Church in Germany with 40 million members. Another 22 million Germans were Catholic. Jews numbered fewer than a million and about ten percent of them were converts who were members of German Churches. 

Throughout the 1920s, the Evangelical Church was increasingly influenced by German nationalist ideologies. German Evangelicals voted for the openly racist Hitler because they feared communism more than Hitler's rabid racism. Nazis stoked fears of communism and said Hitler would Make Germany Great Again.

With Hitler’s rise to power 1933, most Protestant clergy willingly accepted Hitler’s racist views. The Nazi regime issued the Edict of April 1933 called the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.” Many Protestant clergy consequently agreed with the Nazi policy and chose to eject all pastors who had Jewish parents, grandparents or great-grandparents. The Church voluntarily “Aryanized” itself, immediately firing all pastors of Jewish descent in 1933; by 1935, all congregants of Jewish descent were expelled.

Nazis used Luther’s anti-Semitic writings “with scarcely a word of protest or contradiction" from the leaders of the Protestant Church.

Theologically and politically, the fates of Christians and Jews should have been bound together. But most Germans, including those within the church, put an even greater distance between themselves and the Jews. The Church turned its back on its own Jewish believers, which made it easy for Nazi leaders to segregate them, and then kill them.

Theresienstadt, a small city in the German-occupied part of the Czech Republic, was a Jewish ghetto and concentration camp during World War II.

One witness said:

From the end of 1941 to the beginning of 1945, more than 140,000 Jews were sent to this ghetto, which for many, about 88,000, became a transit camp to the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Approximately 33,000 died in this ghetto. When it was all over and the ghetto had been liberated on May 8, 1945, there were about 19,000 survivors.

Among those who died in Theresienstadt, or were deported from Theresienstadt to the death camp Auschwitz or survived the horrors in Theresienstadt, were individuals who were Christians of Jewish descent. It is tempting today to call them “Messianic Jews”, but this would not correspond with their self-perception. Like most other Jews in Germany they saw themselves as Germans; unlike most other German Jews they were Jews who had embraced the Christian faith, some by conviction, others for pragmatic reasons. But in Theresienstadt they shared the fate of “Mosaic” Jews. In the eyes of the Nazis, their Christian faith did not obliterate their Jewishness.

Theresienstadt is a window into what happened to Christians of Jewish descent during the Holocaust. It is estimated that as many as ten percent of the half million Jews in Nazi Germany were Christians. They suffered and died along with their fellow Jews. For Nazis, blood not belief defines a person, or a non-person.

The path Germany followed from civilized nation to Nazi domination went from prosperity, to defeat in war, to racism and slaughter.

In 1913, Germany was by many measures the most powerful and civilized nation on earth, the world leader in education and manufacturing. It was the country where Jews were most integrated into the life of the nation, many of whom considered themselves German citizens who were Jewish.

By 1923, Germany was defeated in war and crushed by the terms of peace.  Anti-Semitism was on the rise and Germany turned inward.  In 1933, Hitler was in power and German Jews would suffer increasing attacks.  By 1943 nearly all German Jews were dead or enslaved and soon would die.  Thirty years and an immoral leader completely changed the fate of Jews in Germany and every nation the German Army conquered.  

The Evangelical Church in Germany backed Hitler early and strongly, blessing his war machines and abandoning Jews in their own congregations and their Jewish neighbors to be tormented, deported and murdered.  The Church sold out for power.

Beginning in 2015, the Evangelical Church in America has backed the vilest human being ever to be elected President and backs him more enthusiastically than any other group of his followers.  I know many Evangelicals who say that naming conservative judges to the court and defunding Planned Parenthood prove he is a Pro-Life champion.  I could understand their position before Charlottesville, but after Trump called Nazis “fine people” there is no way to label him Pro-Life. Nazis, White Supremacists and all who support them are Pro-Death, Pro-Genocide but not Pro-Life, unless they mean Pro White Life.

Jerry Falwell Sr. was the first prominent sellout for political power. He created the Moral Majority to create voting bloc for all those who wanted the restoration of White Power. The Moral Majority was clearly the White Majority in America. Brown people, Liberals, Gay people and others who were not white conservatives were not true Americans.

When the Moral Majority dissolved in 1989, it spawned a dozen other organizations with Christian labels grasping for secular power. By 2016, Evangelical leaders flushed doctrine, covenants and commandments down a cosmic toilet and showered blessing on an entitled racist who despises everyone mentioned in the Beatitudes.

But this is not new territory for Evangelicals. Before the Civil War, Evangelical Churches in the America South blessed the especially vile form of slavery practiced in slave states. When the South was defeated, the same Churches supported Jim Crow laws creating American apartheid. Churches were just as segregated as voting booths, schools and drinking fountains.

Since World War II, American Evangelical leaders have blamed the reclusive biologist Charles Darwin for inspiring Nazi leaders with the theory of evolution. They assume Darwin is responsible for Social Darwinism, which is akin to believing Albert Einstein developed the philosophy of moral relativism.

Do I think Trump will turn on the 5 million American Jews? Maybe. But it’s more likely that a national crisis will let a worse racist than him grab power. Trump, unlike Hitler, is a coward and a bully who dodged the draft and attacks men who actually have courage.  He is more sleazy than Nazi.

But I am quite sure the Evangelical Church will corrode further and faster as it receives power and privilege from its new god in the Oval Office. Its millionaire preachers will abandon all traditional faith for its orange-ish golden calf.

Live Forever? Yes! In This Body? No.

Unicorn Farting a Rainbow:

Long life and lack of reality

Today and many other days, a nice person less than half my age said something to the effect of, "You're going to live to be 100! How can I get in shape like you?"

Usually I say thanks and change the subject.  Sometimes, I answer truthfully. Answer 1:  No, I don't want to live to 100, at least not in this body.
Answer 2: You won't like the answer.

Even before I broke my neck in a 50 mph bicycle crash 11 years ago, I was thinking about how life would be when I was older than 75, and how long I wanted to live. The modern medicine I love so much for keeping me alive will betray me as the end of my life gets closer.  I just started a wonderful book titled Being Mortal by doctor and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande. He makes clear what I already knew that the bias in medicine is strongly toward heroic measures to prolong the lives of even clearly terminal patients.

Most people simply want to live longer without much thought about how they live.  I really don't.  I love being alive, but I see old age as a minefield I have to traverse.  And crossing a minefield requires skill, sensitivity, information and luck.

The odds are, according to insurance estimates, I will have a long life.  Of course, 65 is already way longer than I ever thought I would live. I once wrote a series of blog posts about how I would already be dead if I had been born 50 or more years ago.  And that does not include waiting for World War III to start on the border in Cold War West Germany.

A few of the "How I Would Have Died" posts:
Missile Explosion
Motorcycle
Vaccination
Bicycle Race Crash I
Bicycle Race Crash II

As it turns out, I do many things the advice books say to have a good life in later years. Better still, the things I need to do are what I want to do.

I get lots of exercise because I love to ride.

I read out of love, not just for information. Two days after Christmas, I found out Mark Helprin had written a new novel about my favorite city--Paris in the Present Tense--it was like a double Christmas.

I do crossword puzzles,

I travel,

I do new things I have never done before.

I have many wonderful friends and my new life as a protester has given me new friends. All those things are supposed to give me a great life in my 70s and beyond.

But then there's medical reality.  I have had four major concussions. Four times I have seen a bright blue flash behind my eyes and lost consciousness.  My brain works now, but brain injuries will catch up with me just as surely as other injuries already have.

My wrists, especially the right wrist I broke three times, hurt nearly every day. My knees click and pop loudly in yoga class every week. The many injuries I accumulated over the last 60 years all put a kink or a twist in the life I live now. These problems are in addition to the other problems we all share with aging.

Speaking of brain health, I started learning Hebrew a few months ago.  Again, not for health, but because I want to.  This week I learned about the seven forms of the Hebrew verb. I was delighted. I have been practicing the gendered, numbered forms of the present participle.  But the most difficult thing is the vocabulary. But when I learn ten new words and forget five I learned the day before. Learning a language is natural at age 5, crazy at 65.

Spiritual life can be even more of a minefield. In The Screwtape Letters  by C.S. Lewis, the mid-level bureaucrat in Hell sending advice to a field agent tells him to prolong the life of the people he wants to lure into Hell.  It's not only that beliefs harden with age, the ability to exam beliefs and react to new information is even more difficult. Just when spiritual life means the most, the tendency is to push away new experience. Screwtape wants his patients to have a long life in which to tempt them.

No one knows what life after death is like. I have favorite guesses, but no facts. I believe that we live eternally after death, but that also is a matter of faith. I have no evidence except from people who are still alive or those who spoke about their beliefs while they were alive.

I love being alive, which makes me sure I do not want to prolong my life simply to have more years. If the end is near, I want to be ready to embrace what comes next, not struggling to remain alive at any cost.  I hope I can look at that reality squarely not be grasping for unicorns and rainbows.

Gas Explosion vs. Guns in Texas

In March 1937, 295 students and teachers died 

in a natural gas explosion in a Texas school 

When students in school die, the community, the state and the country search for and find ways to keep their kids safe--except when the kids are killed with guns.

In 1937 a Texas school exploded, killing 295 teachers and students.  Odorless natural gas was blamed for the tragedy. No one in the school could smell the leaking gas before the entire school disappeared in a huge explosion.  

Almost immediately, grieving parents clamored for an answer to keep kids safe in the future. Politicians went to gas producers and demanded they make natural gas leaks detectable. The answer was gas odorants: compounds make gas smell so bad that the slightest leak would be detectable by anyone. These sulfur and nitrogen-based compounds smell so bad that most people can detect them at concentrations of less than one part per million.  Sensitive folks can detect odorants at the parts per billion level. 

Problem solved in less than a year, not only for Texas, but for the entire nation. 

Today, 80 years later, Texas kids are killed and wounded in schools and churches and politicians from the same state that solved a huge crisis in the 1930s will do nothing in 2018.  

Politics, working together through government, can only solve a problem that we as a people want to solve. In the 1930s, the government and the people wanted to solve the problem that led to kids being killed in a natural gas explosion.  

In the case of guns, millions of people think their right to own dozens of guns, including guns designed for war, trumps the right of kids in school to live until graduation. Their guns are more important than the right of teachers to simply teach, not die as a human shield for their students. 

Texas during Jim Crow would not grant basic human rights to its non-white citizens, but could fight to protect kids in school.  But today the Lt. Governor of Texas is saying doors, not guns, caused the death and wounding of twenty kids and teachers.

America will never be great, it won't even be good, until gun rights are sane again. 
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MEDEVAC Training in June 2012, Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa.

Some photos from Annual Training 2012 with Charlie Company (MEDEVAC), 2-104th GSAB, at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa.  

Talking About Heaven, Hell and Eternity in NYC and Iraq

On Friday, May 11, I was the speaker at the monthly meeting of the New York C.S. Lewis Society.  I talked about the Divine Comedy and Lewis' delightful homage to Dante, The Great Divorce.
Part of the talk was reading Dante in Iraq with young soldiers.  I also read The Great Divorce and several other CSL books with a few of the Camp Adder chaplains.
The audio of my talk is too big to post on line.  Let me know if you want it and I will share it. ngussman@yahoo.com
Here is the text of my talk, which is mostly an outline. If you listen to the talk you will see I leave the script about 10 minutes in:

Today I will be speaking about two books that give their readers visions of the character and geography of the universe. I do this in a month in which I just stepped over a major milestone on my own path to the eternal world.  I turned 65 last week. C.S. Lewis died a week before his 65^th birthday; I am already one week past. We are all here because Lewis made such wonderful use of the talent and time The Lord gave to him.

In the same way I fell in love from the first reading of Lewis, the Divine Comedy became a literary obsession with me. And I did not know at the time Lewis had written a lovely homage to the Divine Comedy that is the other half of my talk tonight. 

Before we start on our parallel journeys through eternity with Dante and Lewis, I want to mention Machiavelli.  Both Dante and Machiavelli were famous failed Florentine politicians from either end of the glory days of the city-state of Florence.  Dante in the late 1200s, Machiavelli in the early 1500s.  I first read the Prince in 1980; I have re-read this slim book every four years since.  Both Dante and Machiavelli admired the great men of Florence and Rome. Dante’s Heaven is a roll call of the greats of history.  Machiavelli, looking at greatness in a practical way, admires the men who wielded great power, but at the same time, shows that earthly power is no path to virtue. So if the writer of the Prince was assigning people to the afterlife, I think he would put most of those he admired in Hell. In fact, I think the Prince is most concise manual on how to go to Hell ever written. I read The Prince for ninth time in January of 2016—as a warning, not as a guidebook.

I have loved and admired Dante’s poetry from my first delighted reading and in its entirety: from the entrance of Hell to Celestial Rose at the Center of Heaven, but his view of eternity seems to me much more Roman than Christian. I could not articulate my aversion to Dante’s Heaven immediately, but after I read The Great Divorce, I knew what was wrong.  More later on the difference between Dante and Lewis on Heaven.

So let’s start our journey.  Lewis was a great walker and a man who could read a map.  He would use a map for his walking tours with friends, and would certainly want a map for a journey to and through Hell and up to and into Heaven. 

Although the universe we see in The Great Divorce and The Divine Comedy seem completely different, Lewis and Dante agree on matters of scale. 

With Dante and Virgil his guide, we circle down through Hell, roughly 4,000 miles to Satan’s mid-section, then climb 4,000 miles back up to the base of Mount Purgatory. According to the Antipodes Map, that is, of course, antipodesmap.com, Mount Purgatory is roughly 2,000 miles east of New Zealand in the Pacific Ocean, exactly where all the dirt would pile up when Satan’s fall punched a hole from Jerusalem to the icy center of the Earth and pushed all that dirt through to the other side of the world.

As an aside, I just want to say how different writing is in this century than in the 20^th century.  I mean all kinds of writing from blog posts to books. From the mid-80s to my recent retirement I wrote about chemistry and electronics.  In the previous century, I was the owner of a quirky collection of dictionaries, encyclopedias and books of tables that were my companions as I wrote about integrated circuit sockets and the virtues of methane sulfonic acid—which are many, by the way.  Now, every arcane fact that I want to know is somewhere on the Internet.  I was writing this talk and decided I want to know where Mount Purgatory would be.  I searched “point opposite on globe.” The first link was to antipodesmap.com.  I know the Internet can be a sewer, but just like the sewers of Paris in Les Miserables, the sewer can stink and also be a lifesaving place for a writer on deadline being chased by a screeching horde of doubts. 

While we are on the subject of research, let me mention Lewis’, The Discarded Image.

If you have read the Divine Comedy, before you read it again, read The Discarded Image.  It helped me to understand things that even the best notes in Divine Comedy translations cannot explain.  I will have more to say about notes and translations at the end of my presentation.

Now to the maps. In the universe Dante shows us, Hell is a 4,000-mile deep ditch.  In this universe sin are heavy. Lewis wrote elsewhere about The Weight of Glory, but in Dante, sin has weight Glory is lighter and lighter. So it follows that Satan, as the most proud creature in the universe, would be the heaviest.  In Dante’s universe, the earth is at the center in the way a drain is at the center of a sink.  It is the place where everything falls.  So Satan, heavy with sin, falls from the unfathomably great height of the Presence of God toward the earth, which is the lowest point from every direction. Also, earth is the planet on which sin is quarantined.  Satan, in this view, was directly above Jerusalem in the greatest celestial sphere when he fell from Heaven.  The greatest sinner—the longest, deepest fall.

Full of sin, Satan hits so hard he punches a hole all the way to the center of the earth.  The dirt he shoves out of the way pushes out the other side east of New Zealand and forms Mount Purgatory.  From the top of Mount Purgatory, repentant sinners step off into Heaven, which extends to an immeasurable distance in every direction.

The repentant sinners can make that final step from this world to the next because unburdened souls lose the weight of sin.  The lightened souls rise toward the light of Heaven.

Let’s now turn to The Great Divorce. Lewis shows us a world that seems at first reading very different.  To those inside Hell, the place is infinite in every direction.  Hell is flat, gray, rainy and limitless.  

Napoleon is a million miles from the center of Hell striding back and forth blaming everyone else for his defeat. 

Older sinners are unimaginably far beyond the Emperor of France. When the tour bus leaves Hell it flies ever upward along a vast cliff toward the edge of Heaven.

It would seem the Hell of Lewis is far larger and far deeper than the 4,000-mile deep ditch of Inferno.  But near the end of Lewis’ book, we find out at the end of Lewis’ tale that Hell is the reverse of what we first believed. The place of separation from God rather than being infinitely large is infinitesimally small, fitting in a tiny crack in the ground between blades of Heavenly grass. 

When we find the true size of Hell, it is more like Dante’s vision in scale. Although Hell under the earth is the radius of our planet, on the scale of all of creation, Hell is vanishingly small. So in the end, we find the maps of Dante and Lewis are relatively the same, Hell is of insignificant size relative to the vastness of creation and Heaven. 

Of course, none of us know what we will see in life after death. I am sure that just in this room there are many competing beliefs about the details of eternal life, and if we asked the next dozen passers by outside these doors, we would get a dozen more. 

I would not claim a coherent view of eternity, but the view I have of eternity comes from C.S. Lewis much more than Dante Alighieri. Most chillingly, I first understood from Lewis that the doors of Hell are locked from the inside:

“I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the gates of hell are locked on the inside.” (The Problem of Pain, 127)

And in The Great Divorce the character of George MacDonald observes:

“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.’”

More vividly, every sinner but one who boards the bus and travels to Heaven opts to return to their smoky, rainy eternal home. The choice comes down to admitting sin, asking forgiveness or damnation.  Pride and Envy lead the ruined souls to reject life in Heaven if the price is admission of sin. 

When I first believed, one of the changes I noticed was that words seemed stronger, more significant than before.  When I lived in the vague universe of a Jewish agnostic, words seemed less concrete, less important.  After coming to believe in a universe full of the Glory of God, when I heard someone say, “I’ll never forgive him, ever” I wanted to run up and say “NO! Don’t say that!”  I actually tried that with a family member.  The results were not encouraging. 

Lewis shows us vividly and painfully that we can cling to our superiority, our sense of injury, our vanity, and our hatred. 

Until recently, even the most proud among us was reluctant to say in public, “I have no need for forgiveness.” Although that was jarring in a public figure, Lewis makes clear that the man who says, “I’m as good as everyone else” is really saying the same thing.  As Lewis said elsewhere the first mark of a bad man is to say, “I am good.” 

If the scale of the universe in the books of Dante and Lewis, their treatment of sin is very different.  

In Dante, some sinners defy Heaven and, I believe, would grab at a chance of forgiveness if offered. Those sinners are in the upper circles of Hell where the sins of the flesh are punished. The sins of the flesh are those in which our bodies are instruments.

Lower in Hell, spiritual sins such as Pride, Envy and the various flavors of fraud, are punished. These are the since we share with fallen angels. Many of these sinners defy Heaven.

Lewis and Dante diverge sharply here. In Lewis free will pervades the universe.  Every denizen of Hell could potentially repent, even though the actual number of those repenting in The Great Divorce is just one. 

In Dante, those sent to Hell stay in Hell.  This is nowhere more sadly vivid than in the case of Virgil.  Dante’s guide, the man appointed by Beatrice to lead Dante all the way through Hell and up Mount Purgatory, is condemned to Hell forever.  Virgil is with good company in the Limbo, which is the Upper West Side of Hell, but he endures separation from God forever nonetheless.

For 25 years from my first reading of The Divine Comedy I took the justice of Virgil’s place in Hell for granted. Dante’s universe reflects both the theology and science of his time.  But not everyone is willing to accept Dante’s judgment of Virgil’s place in eternity.  In 2009, I deployed to Camp Adder, Iraq, an Army airbase near the Kuwait border.  For the first few months, I was a mechanic and did not leave the base, so I started a book club, a Dead Poets Society. It was July. The temperature topped out at 133, 16 days of the month, so what better book than Inferno.  I had a group of a dozen young soldiers who wanted to read a classic book.  We got through Inferno by September. I previewed Purgatorio and mentioned Virgil gets sent back to Limbo. As a group they were outraged. It was not fair.  The result was we read Aeneid next and then read Purgatorio.  They wanted more of Virgil and thought Dante was not much of a Battle Buddy. 

In this matter of eternal punishment, we also see how differently Lewis viewed the universe that the great poet of Florence.  If I were going to write a 21^st Century Inferno, I would stuff Hitler and Stalin into maw of Satan with Judas. 

Televangelists would fill the 8^th Circle so full with fraud that they would overflow into other Malebolge.  

The architects of the Iraq War who said we would be greeted as conquerors would be condemned to kick open a door and get a different limb blown off every day for eternity.  In other words, I want my enemies in Dante’s Hell.

For myself and those I love, I want Lewis’ eternity.  Condemned by our own choices certainly, but able to reconsider.

And now let’s look at some of the details of Dante’s world.

Returning to the The Discarded Image Lewis said, “There was nothing which medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.”

Dante sorts sins minutely into nine circles, but that’s after passing through the vestibule of Hell where the indifferent are punished.   Although we are not yet in Hell, the punishment is terrible. The sinners, angels and humans, who took neither side chase banners and are chased by insects forever.

The first six circles each punish a single sin, the seventh circle is subdivided three rings, and the eighth circle into ten ditches, and then the region of giants separates the eighth and ninth circles. 

One’s place in Hell is assigned by Charon. Canto III

Here are the circles:

1.    Limbo—no punishment or the greatest punishment 

2.    Lust—Mute Paolo, wistful Francesca

3.    Gluttony

4.    Avaricious and Prodigal—the cheap and the spendthrifts clash forever.

5.    Wrathful

6.    Heretics

a.   Dante and Virgil meet Farinata degli Uberti in the Sixth Circle of Hell, a place reserved for heretics. The bleak landscape is filled with cemeteries, and the dead are buried there again in tombs and sarcophagi to indicate that they are dead even to the afterlife. Dante carries on a relatively long conversation with Farinata in a scene that likely had more drama for contemporary readers than modern ones.

b.   Outside of Dante’s narrative, the real Farinata led one of two opposing factions struggling for power. When Farinata’s Ghibellines were in power, he stopped the potential destruction of Florence. The tide turned with the Battle of Montaperti in 1260, which saw Florence burned to the ground and the Uberti family exiled. Their property was completely destroyed, and Farinata—along with his wife—was put on trial for heresy. Found guilty, he was exhumed and his remains were scattered on unconsecrated ground.

7.    Violent against

a.    Neighbor

b.    Self

c.     God

8.    Fraud

a.    Panderers and Seducers

b.    Flatterers—Machiavelli says they flock around every leader, certainly my experience in and out of the Army

c.     Simonists—buying of Church offices from Simon who tried to buy Holy power from Peter

d.    Soothsayers

e.    Grafters—abuse of political office

f.      Hypocrites

g.    Thieves

h.    False Counselors

i.      Sowers of Discord—Talk Radio

j.      Counterfeiters/Falsifiers

9.    Traitors

Dante carefully parses the sins and condemns each sinner for what used to be called his or her besetting sin. 

In The Great Divorce, on the other hand, everyone at the bus stop and everyone on the bus is guilty of a different sin, but the sinners are all guilty of Pride, the sin of Satan, the sin that locks the doors of Hell from the inside. We come to know this as they refuse mercy in the encounters at the edge of Heaven.  As Lewis said in Mere Christianity:

“The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”

Lewis, to me, has it right. A few years ago I tried to write my own inferno full of millionaire preachers.  The problem was trying to put them in one circle.  And over my life, my own sins are suited to occasion and circumstance, but always backed up with Pride and Vanity. Even a 400-pound televangelist could not be properly confined to greed or gluttony.

So the bus in the Great Divorce condenses all of Hell into one shining vehicle and transports the sinners to both Heaven and possibly Purgatory. 

Since we are mentioning the bus, it is time to mention the Driver and his parallel in the Divine Comedy, the Angel in Canto 9.

Last month, one of my former co-workers who is an avid reader of Lewis was talking about Lewis’ self description in De Descriptionem Temporem that he, Lewis, is one of the last medieval men, a dinosaur they can study.  And yet, when Lewis rewrites Dante’s universe, the result is very modern.  The universe is guided by the Universalism of George McDonald, not Hellfire.  In the Discarded Image Lewis tells us with admiration that the universe of medieval theology, which Dante brought to life, is ordered and vertical. We look up into a night sky full of warmth and music and love.  The modern universe is horizontal, flat, cold and forbidding. Lewis’ Hell is flat, rainy, gray and infinite with occasional spots of light like in Napoleon’s mansion—not unlike the cold, empty universe of modern cosmology, vast spaces at 3 degrees above absolute zero dotted with stars, but stars without spirit, music or life, fusion furnaces amid the emptiness. Lewis’ Heaven also goes against all traditional Churches, which manage to find a way to honor great achievement in earthly pursuits.  Sarah Smith is wonderful, but the visible Church in this world creates Cardinals and Bishops and venerates leaders. Sarah simply lived love.

She is the most venerated being in CSL’s Heaven.

Of course, one could say Lewis wrote for modern people in a modern idiom to express eternal principles, which is also true.  But the brilliant mind that created the flat Hell and the scales of time and space from infinite to infinitesimal, was a mind thoroughly steeped in the modern world. 

Translations

Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot and many other great lovers of Dante learned medieval Italian to better know the Divine Comedy.  At one point, I thought of learning the language of Dante and Machiavelli, but I well know from 30+ years of struggle with Ancient Greek that reading a language and not speaking it is quite beyond my limited abilities.  I read French partly because I traveled to France many times and had the chance to struggle with the language of the Ancien Regime.

So for the rest of us, translation is the only possibility.

Every translation is a compromise and the richer the poetry the more compromises must be made. Yet in Dante, Lewis says Dante is the most translatable of poets.

So I have read eight translations and found them all with significant merits.  Such ranking as I have is much more personal taste than real merit.  By contrast, I have read widely in 19^th Century Russian literature. With Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I have a strong preference for the translations of Pevear and Volokhonsky. With most literature in translation, the translator can make an enormous difference.

In general, following Lewis’ admonitions in Studies in Words about the way words change, I prefer recent translation to an older one. A 200-year-old translation is full of syntax, idiom and meaning of its own time.  

The first translation I read, and my favorite for the entire commedia is Mark Musa’s translation published between 1967 and 2002. 

The Inferno I love best is Pinsky.

For Purgatorio, my favorite is W.S. Merwin. 

My favorite Paradiso is Tony Esolen’s translation, partially by virtue of the notes. He is particularly good in Paradiso.  Esolen was my choice for the soldiers in Iraq who never read the Divine Comedy.

The most fun notes of all I have read are in Dorothy Sayers’s translation. But I don’t like the translation itself. As with Ciardi, I sadly cannot read hard rhymes in English for page after page with pleasure. 

The new Clive James translation uses soft rhymes as with Pinsky. I enjoyed that very much. His translation is looser than the rest, going for meaning in preference to adherence to strict line length. He adds lines in places for clarity.

Last year I read Stanley Lombardo’s translation and finally read the Italian aloud, just for the sound.  I listened to Roberto Benigni read on YouTube, then read the Italian myself. 

Lewis on Commedia

“Much of the strength of [Dante’s] Comedy comes from the fact that it is performing a complex function that has since been split up and distributed among several different kinds of book. It is, first, a book of travel into regions which the audience could not reach but in whose existence they had a literal belief, and is thus strictly comparable to Jules Verne’s or H.G. Wells’s voyages to the Moon. It is, secondly, a poetic expression of the current philosophy of the age…thirdly, a religious allegory like Bunyan[‘s Pilgrim’s Progress], and fourthly a history of the poet like [Wordsworth’s] The Prelude – not to mention its political and historical aspects which would set it side by side with the memoirs of a retired statesman. In this complexity of function it dos not, of course, stand alone. All old works of art show the same contrast to modern works, and the history of all arts tells the same miserable story of progressive specialization and impoverishment. Thus Tasso is, in some sense, the Milton and Wordsworth of his age – the great serious poet; but he is mediating all his serious poetry through pastoral and chivalrous stories of the kind then generally enjoyed and so writing epic poetry and popular fiction at the same time…In the same way, the great Italian painters are not only the Cézannes and Picassos of their day; they are also the popular illustrators whose work would now appear in Christmas magazines, the people who show you what some famous story really looked like; and, thirdly, they are the great decorators who can make a rich man’s dining room look as he wants it to look. So, once more, an opera by Mozart is the ancestor both of the modern serious opera and of the revue. The separation of the low-brow from the high-brow in its present sharpness is a comparatively recent thing: and with the loss of the old unified function all curb on the eccentricity of real artists and the vulgarity of mere entertainers has vanished.”

–from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge UP, 1966): 67-68.

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