Tuesday, May 15, 2018

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 65th 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 20th 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 21st Century Inferno, I would stuff Hitler and Stalin into maw of Satan with Judas. 
Televangelists would fill the 8th 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 19th 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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