Jesus — Our Virgil

This is Part Two of my exploration into Dante’s Divine Comedy and the true nature of God. The first part, A God of Love or a God of Wrath should be read first.

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Jesus is the proof that God is love. We may blame God for the suffering in the world, but God’s answer was, rather than denying such pain, to come down from the heaven that is perfect beauty and to share not just human existence, but the worst, most degrading, excrutiatingly painful moments of human existence. By becoming a weak baby, experiencing the joys and sorrows of life from the perspective of humanity, and by willingly taking on the lowest aspects of the human experience, Divine Love not only shows itself, but proves itself, in the person of Jesus.

Jesus came to show us that God was not a distant ruler of humanity, but the Lover of humanity, with us every moment of every day. In Jesus, God became a helpless baby. God worked for a poor family, learning a trade. God studied the history, religion and culture of the time. God journeyed by foot from town to town in an occupied nation. God had friends.

A popular song a few years ago asked the question, “What if God was one of us?” I remember hearing it play on the radio, describing God commuting home from work, experiencing all the menial existence of human day-to-day life. I thought, not only is God one of us, God has been trying to show us that for two thousand years! God became one of us in the person of Jesus. The composer of that song still struggled with the Danteen view of an aloof God, and thus the question seemed to be a marvel. That we can ask a question like “What if God was one of us?” as if it was a new idea shows how much we have gotten it wrong from the very beginning!

Jesus example, his love and his death, shows us what kind of Creator we have. We say that Jesus died for us without further thought. But we must give this further thought. It is quite a difficult statement which centuries of saying has made easier. Jesus chose a painful and humiliating death to show his solidarity with the suffering of the world. What a profound love! Jesus is difficult to believe in because what he did is so far removed from common human nature—to put others first, even unto death. In Christianity, we place our faith in a man who endured humiliation and suffering beyond anything most of us will ever face.

The cross is the symbol of Christianity. We are so used to seeing it that we have forgotten what it is. The cross is the invention of a sick ancient mind, a tool of torture beyond most of our imaginations (though not too far off from some of the tortures described in Dante’s Inferno). At the time of Jesus the cross was a symbol of terror. On the cross pain and despair overwhelmed the mind. Death was a relief so far distant the hours seemed like days.

Crucifixion was also considered the most degrading of executions. The convicted is stripped and their naked body stretched out for the entire community to see. In Jewish culture, this made one “unclean” in just about every sense of the Mosaic law. Images of Jesus on the cross typically give him a courteous cloth around his groin, but the reality of the time was that men were crucified naked to maximize the humiliation of the punishment.

As Jesus, God not only experienced the day-to-day life of humanity, but its lowest moments. God was betrayed by a friend and denied by another. God was ridiculed and spit upon. God suffered. God was executed. God died a painful death, utterly alone. “What if God was one of us?” God was!

Imagine for a moment the experience undergone by Jesus. Imagine looking upon the cross on which you would die—the firm and awful darkness of its wood. Death more certain than if you were staring into the barrel of a firing gun, and a thousand times more painful. Imagine the crippling fear just to see this instrument of your death before you.

Your body is already exhausted from scourging and carrying the cross up the hill as they lay you upon the prostrate wood. As the nail pierces your first hand the shock of pain lashes through your entire body. Your arm is pulled across the beam, yanking your hand sharply against the nail as a second nail is drilled through your other hand. Yet the pain in your hands does not even begin to compare with the horror of the spike which pierces your feet. For a moment you try to relax, but soon your cross is lifted upright, jerking against the ropes that lift it as pain pulsates through your body, pulling against every nail. The pain is far worse than you ever imagined. For the next three hours each breath you take pulls against those awful nails, scrapes your back, already raw from lashes, against the rough wood behind you. If you try to relax your arms it pulls excruciatingly against the spike in your foot. If you try to relax your feet you feel like the skin of your armpits will tear from the weight and strain. There is some comfort in seeing your mother below, but her tears are so painful to witness that you can hardly look at her. Beside her are a few other women who loved you. You look for your friends, the ones who said they would willingly die with you. What a relief it would be to see your companions one last time and feel their support. But of your twelve closest friends, only one stands beside your mother below. The pain of rejection almost surpasses the pain of the nails.

Jesus chose this fate. When he was praying at Gethsemane the night before and the soldiers came to arrest him, he could have escaped. The back-side of the Mount of Olives leads away from Jerusalem, into the desert. Jesus was familiar with the desert and knew how to survive in it. A mob coming up the hill with lanterns and torches, as John’s gospel describes them, would have been seen while they were still rising the hill. Jesus and his three friends would have had plenty of time to retreat on the other side of the hill and escape. Later, when Pilate questioned him, he could have defended himself, but he remained silent. Pilate wanted to acquit him. He could have fled Jerusalem and continued to preach his message. But he chose not only death, but the most painful and degrading death possible, to give his message life, by sharing humanity’s lowest moments. Throughout his ministry, Jesus told his disciples that to die was his redemptive purpose. “Verily I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)

Jesus’ death was not to satisfy a blood justice for our sins, as is often portrayed, but that by dying we might trust the love and compassion he preached: the same love and compassion which God has been giving us ever since our creation. The world suffers because of humanity’s selfishness, humanity’s tireless quest for satisfaction and pleasure, and its unwillingness to share what has been gained. God cannot change the human nature that spawns this folly. To change it would be to take away our free will, and with it, our ability to love. What God can do is to prove how much he loves us by sharing in our suffering, even the suffering of death. This is what it means to say that Jesus died for us.

If we view God as did the poets Dante and Milton, the wrathful God demanding punishment to atone for sin, then Jesus becomes a mediator, standing between us and God’s anger. This theology places Jesus’ death in the context of ancient Jewish sacrificial rites, and against the unity of Trinity. Jesus is a sacrificial lamb. Sin must be atoned for by death. If Jesus did not die, then we all must die. As Dante described, “Ne’er was a penalty so just as that inflicted by the Cross…. that a just vengeance was, by righteous court, justly revenged.” (Par. VII) The problem with this view, still widespread in Christianity today, is that it is entirely inconsistent with the picture of God given by Jesus. If God is pure and perfect love, why would he need blood to satisfy wrath and justice? What God of love would send his own son to slaughter in order to satisfy laws he had created?

Such a doctrine turns God’s love into a kind of currency which can be bartered for through sacrifice, rather than his very nature. Many Christians still think that this is what the doctrine of the cross means, but this is not the case. The Pope himself works tirelessly to dispel this gruesome view of God. “One turns away in horror,” he says, “from a righteousness whose sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible.” Rather, he identifies the cross as “the love that gives itself completely, of the process in which one is what one does and does what one is; it is the expression of a life that is completely being for others.” (Ratzinger: Introduction to Christianity, II, II, 3) This is indeed the description of a God who is by his very nature Love, who’s gift of himself is so complete that the cross was the result. We have here a God who out of unbounded compassion for creation, chose to become one with humanity, showing love by example, and as Jesus subjecting himself to our own worst hours—betrayal, ridicule, torture, and death. (Ibid, II, II, 2)

If Jesus was merely the greatest man who ever lived, or a lesser form of God, then the cross again begins to appear as a sacrificial rite, where God’s justice must be appeased with blood. Jesus, then, as the best man, offers a sacrifice for all humanity. But Jesus was in fact God incarnate. Thus, again in the Pope’s words, “it is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in order to give to him… God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled; he goes to meet them and reconciles them… The cross is not an offer from mankind to the wrathful God, but the expression of that foolish love of God’s that gives itself away to the point of humiliation in order thus to save man; it is his approach to us, not the other way around.” (Ibid. II, II, 3) Jesus died for our sins, not as a blood sacrifice, but because only by passing through death, even through the gates of hell, can he bear us up with him. This is how he cleanses us with his blood.

How remarkable! Jesus really loved us that much! Jesus is our Virgil, guiding through every terror of our lives, but then he even goes so far as to die with us in order that we, who have earned none of the love we seek, might achieve perfect love. Jesus not only leads the path out of hell, he shares in the suffering of hell, of his own accord, that he might destroy it. Only our selfishness, our egotistical greed, has allowed a place without love—hell—to continue to exist.

It seems ridiculous to believe that God could be so close. We set God in a cloud, not believing he could touch us, and thus we do not need to touch God. Jesus shatters that possibility. Jesus says, yes, it is ridiculous. But love is ridiculous. Love knows no bounds and will defy logic for its be-loved. Jesus says I am love. You are my beloved. This is what I am willing to endure for you!

Dwell on this for a moment. Think about this love that Jesus gave. Contemplate the terror of the cross—the utter hell he endured! Could you willingly endure such horror, even for the sake of your beloved? Yea, not only to endure it for the beloved, but to endure it at the hands of the beloved! What terrible pain of body, and what worse pain of heart Jesus suffered! Next time you feel tempted to blame God for your suffering, realize that God has faced suffering much worse than your own!

In Jesus, God, the Omnipotent Creator stands in solidarity with creation. When Jesus faces the terror of the cross he gives us the courage to stand firm in our darkest hours. This is the love God has for us, that he became one of us. Jesus truly took the sins of the world on his shoulders that day at Golgotha. How he must have suffered, not just in the pain, but to bear the creation he had so lovingly made spitting on him and scourging him. In Jesus, God shows himself to so love the world and pity its suffering to come into it and share its suffering, that by example, the world could have hope.

Let us reflect again on Michelangelo’s two Jesuses. God willingly became the limp, weak frame of the “Pieta.” If we have love, need we fear the wrathful Jesus of “The Last Judgement?” When we die will we face the upraised arm that casts the sinners down to their doom, or will we meet our friend, our own Virgil, the Jesus who walked with us through life’s misery? We all have failed. We all deserve to be punished for our selfishness and rejection of love. We should all be fearful of judgement. But take heart, for the Jesus who judges is none other than he who shared our sufferings and temptations. We fall at the judge’s feet, begging mercy, but he stoops down to lift our chin, saying, “Fear not, it is I.” (Revelation 1:17, Mark 6:50)

A God of Love or a God of Wrath

This is the first in a two part exploration into Dante, and the true character of God.

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God is love. All of creation stands as evidence of God’s love. Yet it is surprisingly difficult for us to believe in a Creator who is none other than love itself. Rather, we have been fed an image of a vengeful God, more eager to remind us of our failures than our goodness. But love does not behave that way. Love always encourages, forgives, and energizes the beloved.

How did we come to believe in this God of wrath? More importantly, what is God really like?

I recently journeyed to Rome and was struck by an astounding contrast between two images of Jesus, rendered by the same artist, Michelangelo. These pieces illustrate the dichotomy between the God of wrath and the God who is Love.

Across the front interior wall of the Sistine Chapel is spread the vibrantly colored, action packed painting of “The Last Judgement.” Here a muscular Jesus, flanked by his mother Mary, stands with arm upraised, separating the dead souls, half of them being carried up to heaven, and the rest cast down to hell. To the right, men (and they are all men; besides Mary there are only a handful of female figures in the painting) line up for their turn before the judge, all desirous, all fearful, and they seem not to have any idea what their impending verdict will be. Jesus and Mary wear emotionless faces as some people are spared and the rest eternally damned. The imagery in the lower half of the painting is cruel and grotesque, complete with angels punching the unwilling souls into the waiting arms of demons, and Phlegyas in his boat, bearing the lost souls across the dark river Styx.

Minutes later I entered the Basilica San Pietro and beheld the sculpture called the “Pieta,” Michelangelo’s sublimest work. Here a contemplative Mary holds the lifeless frame of Jesus, limp, weak, his body thinned by the cruel death he underwent. This Madonna, by contrast, has a face full of emotion—sorrow, complacency, love, and the pity for which the work is named. Jesus, in contrast with the painting, is a thin man, his legs and arms showing none of the girth seen in the prior Jesus. His stomach is indrawn from hunger and dehydration, his ribs exposed. This is not the body of a fallen warrior, but of one who was taken and killed by stronger men than he.

I cannot help but see sacred art as theology, and there is a huge theological contrast between the Jesus of the “Pieta” and the Jesus of “The Last Judgement.” The dead frame shows the Jesus who took on the despair of the world, loving the least of creation with his own acceptance of a lowly death. Yet the muscle-bound Justice of “The Last Judgement” is a figure of wrath, casting the lowest of creation into eternal perdition.

The theology of one artist may be interesting to analyze, but Michelangelo’s theology has had much more far reaching effects. It amazes me how much the theology depicted in the wall, and the ceiling of the Sistine chapel continues to influence our view of our Creator, and our perspective on the afterlife.

The theology is not Michelangelo’s. This image, and indeed most sacred Renaissance art reflects the theology of his fellow Florentine of two centuries before—Dante Alighieri. Seven hundred years have passed since The Divine Comedy was published, yet it still colors our concept of the Christian religion today.

In this graphic tale, Dante, using himself as narrator, journeys through all the circles of hell and purgatory with Virgil as his guide. All manor of torment is described, particularly for those who were the author’s political rivals. The pilgrims are immersed in a dark realm, accosted by demons and lost souls on every side. Dante is constantly in fear, but the steadfast Virgil comforts him with his confidence and by addressing the demons with authority. The suffering of the shades is horrendous and grotesque, the punishment not of a merciful judge, but of a masochistic ruler who employs a twisted knowledge of suffering to enact his revenge.

Is it the masochism of Satan that assigns this terror? Not in the picture drawn by Dante. Satan is simply God’s pawn. It is God’s anger that drives the sinners into Satan’s net. God’s justice is satisfied to be rid of the damned and this God feels no regret. Where is love in this scenario? Who is this lover who forsakes the beloved? “I opened to my beloved but my beloved had turned and was gone. I sought him, but did not find him; I called him but he gave no answer.”(Song of Solomon 5:6)

The Divine Comedy is one of the most celebrated books within the Catholic tradition, and much of its theology, especially from the last half, gives a beautiful image of a soul striving for the divine. But the imagery of inferno and early purgatory is gruesome and vengeful. It is this imagery that has abided over the centuries. It was obviously written as an allegory, never intended to be viewed as a literal description of hell. Yet the details are unimportant. The spirit of this work has significantly and negatively colored the Christian view of our Creator.

There are some particularly disturbing encounters made by the two travelers as they sojourn the underworld. There are the souls of good Christians who died in battle without being administered last rights. (Prg. V) For no other wrong they are condemned to eons in purgatory before being admitted to paradise. In hell they pass through “limbo” where dwell worthy souls who were not baptized, either because of infant death or because they lived before the age of Christianity. “These of sin were blameless: and if aught they merited, it profits not, since baptism was not theirs: the portal to thy faith…” (Inf. IV) Further on in hell Dante converses with Francesca, who with her lover is condemned to eternal hell because their love for one another distracted them from their love for God. (Inf. V) Even in heaven, the narrator meets the soul of a nun who was raped. She is consigned to the lowest level of heaven because her vow of chastity was broken, even though by no fault of her own. (Par. IV)

To believe that humans would be thus punished because their deaths were sudden with no opportunity for last rights or baptism depicts a God reduced to the size and restrictions of his own rules. Where is mercy in this scenario? What reason is there for such a damnation? How terrible it would be for a Creator to turn its back on its creation for a failure in a rule when there was no chance to obey. What baby chooses to die before baptism? What soldier chooses to be slain? What person chooses to succumb to a catastrophe when no priest happens to be near? Does the soul deserve to suffer for such circumstances? What woman, whether or not she has taken a vow of chastity, deserves a reduced blessing for being raped?

Virgil, the ancient Roman poet who serves as the allegorical guide, confesses that he is amongst the souls in limbo. Despite his good soul he is condemned to this place in hell. He is trusted to shepherd the character of Dante through the abyss, but he disappears as soon as they reach the gate of heaven, for he is allowed no further, and never will be.

Francesca and her lover, in their love for one another, supposedly deprioritize love for God. What is love for God but love for one another? When can love be wrong? This is a twisted view of God, and a twisted view of love.

Interestingly, Dante identifies love as the guiding theme both in the grace of heaven, and in the punishment of hell. In Virgil’s soliloquy at the central point of the work, he makes the case that it is through loving things of the world, or themselves too much, that the souls in hell are forced to suffer. Their punishments are ordered based on this corrupted love. There is a confusion here between love and lust. True love is gift. What is identified as love for self and love for sin, is actually lust.

The souls in hell are described as penitent, longing for the love God can give to spare them from their self lust. If God is love, then the Divine Comedy is a story of a God who lost the celestial war. The beloved is cast into a pit of suffering. The fallen angels, Lucifer in particular, are masters of their realm, drunk on the suffering they inflict. What type of punishment is this for the demons who turned all humanity away from God? They are tasting eternal success? Why would God allow Lucifer such satisfaction in his power? Why must Francesca suffer more pain than Lucifer? The whole picture does not make sense. Lucifer has won! This is a God who has lost the power to do good in all places. This God lacks either the power or the will to reach out a hand to rescue the beloved.

The God of Dante is a God whose need for justice outweighs love and mercy. This God no longer cares about the souls in hell. They were placed there because of specific rules and transgressed laws, and there is no looking back. For this God, rules are more important than morality and love. If one broke the rules for whatever reason, or lacks a proper conversion experience and baptism, damnation is certain. And once the soul is damned, God leaves the equation. Once Lucifer and the fallen demons are out of God’s sight, they are out of mind, free to inflict any suffering on others they may wish, even if those souls are guilty of lesser evils.

You may be thinking this is an archaic view of God and saying “I don’t view God that way.” But have any of us really left it behind? Don’t you still picture hell as some sort of fiery pit, where sinners work like slaves before the whips of grotesque demons? Logically, you don’t, but doesn’t your brain still conjure up this image?

We were made because of love, and it is our free will to reciprocate our Creator’s love that makes us the beloved of God. What would be the point of this life if the rules change in the next? No, God’s reward is our willingly reciprocated love, out of free will. Heaven is the culmination of our lifelong pursuit of beauty and love. There will be no obligation in our praise—how could we refuse it, being finally in the presence of perfect beauty and perfect love? By contrast, hell is the chosen rejection of love.

But we have been taught a God of rules and wrath instead of a God of love. Christians are far quicker to judge error than to laud goodness. Just like Dante, we pass judgement on those we consider sinners, never with any doubt that God is doing the same. Dare we consider that mercy may be greater than judgement?

We should embrace a love-theology rather than a fear-theology. The songs in heaven will be sung out of the joy of the beloved to be in the presence of the Lover. Beholding the beauty of life’s gifts, our desire to please God will come from pure gratitude, not because of fear or obligation. Fear begets obedience only until the moment of rebellion.

Grown out of the disturbing view of God, where wrath trumps love, comes a faulty notion of Jesus’ role which propagated in the middle-ages and was key in fear-theology. Jesus is seen as a mediator between us and a vengeful God. It is as if Jesus convinces God to tip his emotional balance from anger to love. John Milton described Jesus begging God to forgive humanity after the first sin. “Bend thine ear to supplication; hear his sighs… let him live before thee reconciled… and for these my death shall pay..” (Paradise Lost, XI) God gives in to Jesus’ intercession. God is not love, Jesus is love.

To a God of love, if the afterlife really were the way Dante and Milton describe it, God would not be in heaven accepting the love of an obedient creation. God would be weeping in eternal pity for the beloved’s suffering. How God would grieve to know that his repentant beloved (as the souls in hell are described in Dante’s Inferno) suffered! In Dante’s hell, the souls long for forgiveness and grieve because of their separation from God. Could the Lover listen unmoved to the beloved’s cry of regret? God would be wandering the seven circles of Dante’s hell, desperately trying to free the victims and take them to a better place. Love would have no blind eye toward suffering.

Hell, rather, is a chosen rejection of love, not a place designed for punishment. If a soul chooses selfishness over love, hell will be their fate. If a soul wishes to be with God’s love, and demonstrates it by exercising love, Divine Love will not reject that wish. Yes, hell is a place of suffering, but it is a chosen suffering, because to be embraced by love, self must be sacrificed.

God cannot reach into hell to save the damned because hell is the absence of love, and there, God cannot go. Nor can a soul in hell ever be repentant, for hell’s darkness is eternal selfishness. When in such a state, there is no desire for change. Purgatory is the journey away from self, toward love. In the end, if we are to experience purgatory or hell, we will discover that it was our own choice that put us there. I do not only mean metaphorically, but that we will be actively choosing to be there by rejecting love.

Will the Last Judgement be the Dies Irae (day of wrath), or a day of Pieta (pity)? If God is love, then ours will be a judgement where God wants to pardon us, wants us in heaven. But we must embrace the gift, at the expense of our own ego. If we are unwilling to do that, then we choose hell, the despair of lost love, and God weeps for us. The suffering of hell is that of the mind and heart which has rejected love, and we get there by closing off love. Fear this hell! Fear it with every ounce of dread Dante stirs, for such suf-fering, such coldness of a complete void of love is far worse than burning and gnashing of teeth!

Heaven is the living experience of perfected beauty and perfected love. It is the fulfillment of our insatiable longing for beauty. There, our desires will be satisfied. The lesson Jesus teaches is that we must give up our selfishness in order to gain this reward. It is not such a strange command, since we all know that true love requires sacrificing our own desires to the desires of the beloved.

The most comforting thing is that God wants us with him in heaven and will do everything we allow to make it happen. God does not want us to suffer the pains of hell, and God is willing to do something about it! God is not aloof and distant, but challenges us to accept love every moment of every day. We make the mistake of viewing God as so big and powerful that he is beyond our sight and comprehension. But God is so big and powerful that he is present in the smallest of things, not only able but willing to walk with us at every moment.

Virgil, who guides the narrator through the darkest shadows, is the closest depiction of God in all of the Divine Comedy. But God is our Virgil, the hero with us on our journey.

In Christianity we have created a series of intercessors. Jesus is the first. We picture him, as in the Miltonian conversation, swaying God’s heart toward us. God is too distant for our imag-ination. Jesus is more accessible to our hearts. Viewing God as our personal hero is an utterly foreign idea to us. We rely on figures like Virgil to be our heroes. Yet even Jesus has become too distant, so we rely on more intercessors, such as Mary, and the Saints. We ask them to intercede for us. We even invoke personalities such as guardian angels to be our protectors, taking the personal role we cannot concede to God. It is too difficult for us to imagine God, to care enough to worry about our lowly lives. Why don’t we take away the barriers? God is close enough. God is our guide. The Saints can be beseeched to pray for us, just as we would ask our brothers and sisters to pray for us. But God is also here with us every minute. We are God’s beloved. God does not send others to mediate on our journey.

God appears to us every day, sometimes in the most unexpected ways. God does not leave the job of companionship to others. If we could only open our minds and hearts to God’s true nature we would see him with us every step of the way.

How does God prove this love? By not only walking with us, but by becoming one of us. In the beginning of Dante’s inferno, the heroic Virgil seeks out the narrator to lead him through the pits of hell. God did the same thing. As God incarnate, Jesus seeks us in our lowest moments, sharing in our suffering for the chance to lead us through. Jesus is our Virgil, come to us in our need to provide the guiding hand up from inferno.

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Part Two: Jesus — Our Virgil