Is He Alive or Dead?

I’m not going to die.

I don't know where I was when I realized. I started at the idea, but it was mine. I had a fictional idea of death despite all the nonfictional evidence. I had to stare at this illusion until I saw through it. An ugly corollary to this belief, I realized, was a very bad idea of Christ. If we don't have faith that we will die, I don’t know what we make of Christ.

My theological chalkboard was looking pretty blank. I needed the right idea of death, a carnal, ugly, biological one, which I would need to train over the long haul, before I could dream of putting my theology back together. I had to fall and shatter like that famous egg, in the hopes that God would put me back together.

Death requires faith.

Why would something so basic to our nature require so much work to believe? Faith pertains to more than dogmas. Our births we believe. They happened. But our deaths? Ask anyone. Everyone knows they’re going to die.

The saints tried. They kept it in mind. They slept in rooms with skulls concentrating on the fact. Because it’s forgettable. Something obvious, something everywhere, is for that reason forgettable. We fail to attend to what is so forgettable until it brings us down.

Enter Hell.

Two tensile ideas walk side by side in the Inferno. One is that to read the text well one can never forget that every image, sound, and person, save Dante, is dead. We are alive and can comfortably cast a fictional confection around the text, but we’re asked not to. His world is on the other side. Everyone has lost gravity there. The dead in hell yearn to know what’s happening here.

Dante, the character, is never sure whether he’s living or dead. Neither am I. Some have located the most important line in the whole of Hell to the question posed in Canto 10 by Cavalcanti. He asks about his son: “Is he living or dead?” And Cavalcanti, like ourselves, never hears the answer. He never knows. Dante the character is not sure if he’s living or dead. No living person has ever made this trip. And Dante is frightened of being left and not making his way back. According to Dante, none of us should be sure whether we’re living or dead. The question should nag. 

Like Dante, we shouldn’t be so sure what land we occupy, the living or the dead. Our status is unclear. We’re on borrowed time, and we’re in a time that converges with what comes after, in ways we can’t divine. That questionable status of our whereabouts is key for perceiving some of the real glory of hell. Dante is taught, as he proceeds in hell, to rejoice over these punishments, which is not such a bad idea, and not far from our wishes. There’s really no one under the sun who doesn’t want justice, as there wasn’t in 13th C. Italy. It’s the basic line of being human: the demand that people meet a certain line of justice, of living right. We can’t have the streets filled with folk wild about fatality. Just those sorts of people are running around hell. Bringing it closer to home: we also can’t have liars running around. We wouldn’t accept that in our own home.

Hell isn’t far. Most are susceptible to correction. Some kind of penance and amendment. The damned are not. There’s not a tear in hell. The rule of the Inferno is straightforward: As they were living, so they are dead. The tears they didn’t shed while living they can’t now. Many are still raging. Others are still deceiving. No one would have a problem putting these people in hell. There would be rejoicing. God didn’t create things like prudence and honesty for them to be systematically ignored. In that respect, hell is all reversal. 

Still, how can the scrupulous bear the idea, as some theologians cannot, of souls burning an eternity in hell? One way is that time exists nowhere in the afterlife. There’s no time anywhere in hell. Most fears of hell are about spending “eternity” there. These fears did not exist for Dante or his audience. Neither convicts nor children at that time in history were punished with the removal of time. Neither punishment nor reward turned on duration. Every world turned on the quality of friendship, be it ill or salubrious.

The focus on relationship for the medieval was theological: the afterlife was defined by friendships because they prepared one for Christ. Hell was the absence of Christ, not the fullness of time. Purgatory, only, begins to have some sense of time, because purgatory most resembles the earth, where we are prepared for Christ. I’ve never met anyone scared of hell, including myself, who wasn’t scared of time, in some respect, instead of fearing the absence of friends.

I know there’s no fast way out of fearing something used to breed fear in children. Logic won’t do. But Ratzinger comes close when he describes hell not as a “place” to be threatened but as a challenge to be assumed. He rightly identifies the purgative function of hell, as it was for many saints. Dante is going through hell. He’s not stopping. Virgil, his guide, chastises him when he slows. Hells now prepare us for purgation then. The turn from a threat to a challenge when we take up the idea of hell is categorical: our relationship to Lent is a relationship to a Person, for whom we cultivate our suffering.

This is part 3 of our Lenten series on the Four Last Things. Catch up on part 1 (death) here and part 2 (judgement) here.