Thinking Like the Damned - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Thinking Like the Damned

Despite all the troubles of this life, despite all the dangers of this world, despite hunger, disease and death, the depths of dark valleys and the heights of sharp cliffs: there is still no landscape so perilous as the inside of an unsettled head.

Such is the first lesson to be learned by any man in a crisis. Such is the only way out of that crisis. The anxious mind, if it finds any relief at all, will find it in a moment of dawning realization: that today was once tomorrow. Yesterday’s mysteries are today’s moments, and they are never so bad as they once seemed. Dante bends his neck in the direction of this wisdom in the midst of his Inferno. Sadly, Mr. Dreher missed it in his recent essay on the subject of that work. I here attempt to take up the slack.

While Francesca and Paolo provide a prescient warning concerning the dangers of lust, it is the heretics Farinata and Cavalcante who ought to command our attention. Lust, unless one is cut down in the midst of the act (as was the case of the lovers), is something from which one can recover. But the mental disposition of the damned is no respecter of Hell’s borders. It is held in common between all souls without hope. “We see,” begins Farinata,

like those with faulty vision
things at a distance. That much
for us, the mighty Ruler’s light still shines.

When things draw near or happen now,
our minds are useless, Without the words of others
we can know nothing of your human state.

Thus it follows that all our knowledge
will perish at the very moment
the portals of the future close.

The damned, like too many young men and women, can think only about the future. Awareness of the present eludes them. In Hell, this faulty vision explains why Farinata can predict Dante’s coming exile from Florence, but Cavalcante does not know if his son is living or dead. On earth, this faulty vision often masks itself as responsibility, the constant asking of questions that can only be answered with time—What if my application gets lost in the mail? When will they schedule an interview? What if they don’t? What will my girlfriend and I talk about on our date this weekend? What if we run out of things to say?!—and the ignoring of questions that are now finding answers.

It must be noticed that this constant questioning is often justified as responsible concern for the future, but it is obviously no such thing. The mind mustn’t move hither and yon so easily. A dead leaf can be blown all over the world and back again in the changing and uncertain winds. It takes a living tree to keep things settled. It takes a living tree to stand still.

One who thinks like the damned will wake up and look to those things that are coming but not yet here. As he brushes his teeth, his commute will come to mind: What if there is bad traffic? As he drives to school, his first class looms: What if I didn’t earn the grade I wanted? During his first class, his lunch plans come into question: What if they forget to meet me? Perhaps into this anxious stream will come the thought of a warm evening spent with friends around a fire and a bottle of wine, but even this will serve only as a reminder that food must be purchased and the house must be cleaned.

The man who thinks like the damned wanders from anticipation to anticipation. He chases a future that never arrives, because he never stops to savor the seconds that are currently passing. For Christians, like Mr. Alighieri, this is a mind-set worthy of Hell because it denies the providence of God in the present. God does not meet us in the hypothetical abstractions concerning our future careers or possible love lives. How often does an imagined future include anything resembling an unexpected blessing or unmerited grace? In the Lord’s Prayer, we petition: “Give us this day our daily bread.” We must wait until tomorrow to pray for tomorrow’s bread. God meets us in the present. The question is whether we will meet Him.

Grace

Late in the poem, Dante is confronted by Vanni in the Malebolge (the ten circular ditches in the eighth level of Hell), who warns of the coming collapse of Dante’s political party in Florence. He wishes for Dante to share the squirrelly, desperate intellect of those who are thrashed by God’s justice: including those who fret that their political party will flounder and fail. Dante, the poet, does not comply. Like all the sins displayed in the Inferno, this one is a warning for those who have yet to die. Can a more timely warning than this be found for American conservatives? For American Christians?

No.

IR-Fall14-Cover_IRO-234x300I chuckled to see the cover art of the latest Intercollegiate Review, depicting a coffee cup with safety sleeve being grasped by the hand of a demon. Coffee sleeves are terribly important, though I doubt whether the sweltering skin of satan would have much use for one. Oprah ought to be corrected for putting such rubbish words on coffee sleeves, because the sleeves serve a noble purpose. Indeed, its telos (for you philosophical types) has much in common with Mr. Dreher’s essay and even the Divine Comedy itself. Mr. Dreher writes advice for those who still might heed it. Dante showcases Hell for those who might work to avoid such a place. The excuse for this essay is that I wish to do the same.

There are a great many ways to go wrong, yet they may all be avoided. I dearly desire for all damnable thinking to cease. The mind uprooted cannot grow any more than the tree uprooted can. This is the simple foundation for all manner of virtue. Like Dante, Dreher, and the coffee sleeve, my purpose here is to prevent the reader from being burned.

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