Dante, Fortune, and the Universal Destination of Goods

In Canto 7 of Dante's Inferno, the narrator and his guide, Virgil, descend deeper into Hell, encountering the avaricious and profligate. Here Virgil tells Dante, "Bad giving and bad keeping has deprived them of the lovely world and set them to this scuffling.... Now you can see, my son, the brief mockery of the goods that are committed to Fortune, for which the human race so squabbles" (7:58-59, 61-62, Durling trans.). These sinners have erred by keeping too much, or too little, as if they were somehow able to avoid the allocations of Fortune.

Dante, seeking to better understand asks, "This Fortune that you touch on here, what is it, that has the good of the world so in its clutches?" (7:67-69) Virgil replies:

He whose wisdom transcends all things fashioned the heavens, and he gave them governors who see that every part shines to every other part, distributing the light equally. Similarly, for worldly splendors he ordained a general minister and leader who would transfer from time to time the empty good from one people to another, from one family to another, beyond any human wisdom's power to prevent.... This is she who is so crucified even by those who should give her praise, wrongly blaming and speaking ill of her; but she is blessed in herself and does not listen: with the other first creatures, she gladly turns her sphere and rejoices in her blessedness. (7:73-81, 91-96)

Just as the celestial bodies have "governors" - imagine here some kind of angels that enforce the laws of physics and keep the stars and planets on their courses - so too earthly goods have a governor, Fortune. Like the angels who oversee the heavenly bodies, she is "blessed" and does not care what praise or blame is given by men.

But why would God create Fortune at all? Why must the sphere of worldly goods turn in the way that the celestial bodies turn? There are probably many potential answers, though one that strikes me involves what we have come to know as the "universal destination of goods." As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains,

In the beginning God entrusted the earth and its resources to the common stewardship of mankind to take care of them, master them by labor, and enjoy their fruits. The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race. However, the earth is divided up among men to assure the security of their lives, endangered by poverty and threatened by violence. The appropriation of property is legitimate for guaranteeing the freedom and dignity of persons and for helping each of them to meet his basic needs and the needs of those in his charge. It should allow for a natural solidarity to develop between men.

The right to private property, acquired or received in a just way, does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind. The universal destination of goods remains primordial, even if the promotion of the common good requires respect for the right to private property and its exercise. (CCC 2402-3)

In other worlds, while particular individuals hold particular goods (i.e., private property) in order to care for themselves, all goods ultimately belong to everyone. Although private property is the day to day norm, the "primordial" reality of the universal destination of goods remains. But what if someone should acquire too many goods, to his neighbor's detriment? Here Fortune turns her wheel: the wealthy are impoverished while the poor are enriched. Or, as Mary puts it, God (acting through Fortune)

has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
And has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
And the rich He has sent away empty. (Luke 1:52-53)

There is certainly a coherence to Dante's notion of Fortune: she reflects the justice of God, her creator. The sins of avarice and profligacy are rebellion against her God-given authority and, for such rebellion, those who commit such sins are punished. And I think there is merit in the idea of Fortune as the guarantor of the universal destination of goods.

But for anyone who has observed the actions of Fortune, she often seems capricious, even vicious. It is one thing for the man of comfortable means, upon having lost some bit of wealth he did not really need, to curse Fortune as fickle. He is in the wrong, as Virgil contends. But what of children who starve because of natural disaster? Can we look upon them and glibly say, "Fortune gives and Fortune takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord"?

Aquinas argues that there is no discontinuity between chance and the divine order (Summa theologiae, 1a, q. 22, articles 2-3; Summa contra gentiles, 3.94) while Boethius likewise argues that seemingly random events in fact have a divine cause (Consolation of Philosophy, 4.6). I am not well-versed in the works of either Boethius or Aquinas, and I happily admit my intellectual poverty in their company.  (I only have the citations because Robert Durling provided them in his notes on Dante.)  But I can hardly think that the problem of destructive and capricious Fortune is so easily resolved.

Here we must recall that Adam and Eve's fall has ripples that are wide and enduring, not only for human beings but for the entire world around us. Where once rains simply watered the earth and made it bring forth food, now they also produce flooding and devastation. Although the natural world was created good, it too is fallen and can now bring forth evil as well as good. Fortune, like storms or fire, has been damaged by our sins. How exactly this came to be I do not know - perhaps no one does - but it accords with both Dante's understanding of her as akin to the forces of nature and with everyday experience of Fortune's power and vicissitudes.

Today's image is from the medieval Burana Codex.

Of Men, Angels, and the Incarnation

Several years ago, while studying in Rome, I had the opportunity to attend several events with Bl. Pope John Paul II.  On one occasion several large choirs were in attendance, and filled the first quarter or so of the audience hall.  Each of these choirs was just a tad smaller than the block allotted to it.  Somehow the organization Regnum Christi ended up with the tickets to these few extra seats, and one of my classmates, a Regnum Christi member, acquired half a dozen shortly before the audience began.  They were spread out all over the hall, one here, a couple there.  And so I ended up seated, along with another classmate, in the midst of an Italian men's choir singing for the pope.  I am sure that, as a blond American, I stuck out, but at least my black coat more or less blended with the choir's uniforms; my female classmate, with Irish-American red hair, no doubt seemed even more out of place.  Our neighbors, who did not speak more than a word or two of English, were good-natured about our presence and shared their music.  We had a grand time.


I was reminded of that experience when reading the sermon of St. Bernard which I posted a couple weeks ago.  In it he contends:

The angels, we know, sinned through malice, not through ignorance and frailty; wherefore, as they were unwilling to repent, they must of necessity perish, for the love of the Father and the honour of the King demand judgment. For this cause He created men from the beginning, that they might fill those lost places, and repair the ruins of the heavenly Jerusalem.

I find this an arresting notion. If Bernard is correct, we will stand alongside the heavenly hosts as we share the beatific vision.  In the justice of God, we will merit this, of course; He will make sure that we are worthy of our new places, by His grace.  But I cannot help but chuckle, and then tremble, at the idea that I might be placed alongside archangels and cherubim, dropped there as randomly as I arrived in the midst of my Italian choir.  If this is the future that awaits us, by virtue of Christ' incarnation, we indeed have cause to celebrate Christmas!

But is Bernard correct?  This idea of mankind replacing the fallen angels is not one we often hear, in Scripture or in preaching.  I am no theologian, but I know a few, and they confirm that Bernard's suggestion, if not doctrine of the Church, is at least well-attested.

In Book 22 of The City of God, Augustine argues that God willed that

...from this mortal race, deservedly and justly condemned, He would by His grace collect, as now He does, a people so numerous, that He thus fills up and repairs the blank made by the fallen angels, and that thus that beloved and heavenly city is not defrauded of the full number of its citizens.

Is mankind merely a place-holder?  This sounds rather unlike our loving and personal God. Augustine further notes, however, that the heavenly Jerusalem "perhaps may even rejoice in a still more overflowing population."  Thus, humanity both fills the places left by fallen angels, as well as adding to the numbers of the heavenly choirs.

Writing nearly 700 years later, Anselm follows Augustine's thinking.  In Cur Deus Homo, he  contends,

Intelligent nature... was foreseen by [God] in a certain reasonable and complete number....  It was proper that God should design to make up for the number of angels that fell, from human nature which He created without sin.

Like Augustine, Anselm suggests that redeemed humanity may exceed the numbers of the fallen angels, according to the perfect design of God:

If that [perfect] number [of heavenly beings] were not found in all the angels together, then both the loss and the original deficiency must be made up from men, and more men will be chosen than there were fallen angels. And so we shall say that men were made not only to restore the diminished number, but also to complete the imperfect number.

He goes on to explain:

Human nature was either made to consummate this perfection [of the original creation], or... it was superfluous, which we should not dare affirm of the nature of the smallest reptile. Wherefore, then, it was made for itself, and not merely to restore the number of beings possessing another nature. From which it is plain that, even had no angel fallen, men would yet have had their place in the celestial kingdom.

In other words, the choir of heavenly angels, like the Italian choir I encountered so many years ago, is not quite as big as its allotted space, leaving open seats whether the full choir is present or not.

More than a century after Bernard, this idea was again raised by Thomas Aquinas, although he demurs of any concrete knowledge:

Concerning the number of all the predestined, some say that so many men will be saved as angels fell; some, so many as there were angels left; others, as many as the number of angels created by God. It is, however, better to say that, "to God alone is known the number for whom is reserved eternal happiness."

 In any event, the Church clearly teaches that, whatever our precise relationship with them, we shall spend eternity in the company of the angels and saints around the throne of God.  Thus does God become a little Child, that we might share in the everlasting life of God.


Today's image by Gustave Doré of Dante, Beatrice and the Heavenly Host of Angels, from Canto 31 of Paradiso, is brought to you via Artsy Craftsy.

Josef Pieper, Agnosticism & "The Sense for Mystery"

At the end of his post on the movie Pi, Aaron briefly mentions agnosticism, and suggests that most self-declared agnostics have simply never made any effort to ask the big questions about the meaning of the cosmos. Even if we will not reach conclusive answers, we need to ask the questions, and not take the easy way out by calling ourselves agnostics. This brought to mind a book I read recently, which made precisely this point: Josef Pieper's For the Love of Wisdom: Essays on the Nature of Philosophy.

Pieper was a 20th-century German Thomist whose work has been discussed on this site before, and who always deserves more attention. What made Pieper stand out from many of his fellow Thomists was that while he always maintained a realist outlook, he placed great emphasis on the limits of knowledge. For instance, in The Silence of St. Thomas, Pieper demonstrated how Aquinas incorporated the via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius into the core of his own work. Pieper always placed in the foreground of his writing the paradox that things are intelligible in themselves because they have been created by God, but are not comprehensible by our intellect because God's intellect surpasses ours by so much. Here is a quotation from part VI of "A Plea for Philosophy" that explains this paradox:

The sentence "omne ens est verum" [everything that is is true]. . .has two aspects. The one enables us to recognize an ever deepening access to all existing things; the other, the impossibility of ever reaching rock bottom. Both aspects. . .are empirically verifiable facts. That, however, both may be traced back to the same origin; that they are even in a certain sense identical; that, more specifically, the things are, taken for themselves, knowable in their ultimate constitution because they originate in the infinite brightness of the divine logos and that they are at the same time unfathomable to us precisely because they originate in the infinite brightness of the divine logos--this is not empirically verifiable.

This paradox leads Pieper to the conclusion that, in the face of our inability to comprehend the meaning of the cosmos, agnosticism is not enough. This paradox should instead lead us to wonder, awe, and a "sense for mystery":

Now, what is meant here by mystery is not something exclusively negative and more than simply what is obscure. In fact, when understood more precisely, mystery does not imply obscurity at all. It connotes light, but a light of such plenitude that it remains "unquenchable" for a knowing faculty or a linguistic capacity that is merely human. The notion of mystery should not suggest that the effort involved in thinking runs up against a wall but rather that this effort exhausts itself in the unforeseeable, in the space--the unlimited breadth and depth--of creation.

We never will find all the right answers to the big questions. Nevertheless, that should not prevent us from setting out on the journey.

Critical Thinking & Diversity

Apropos of our recent discussions regarding diversity, dialogue, and academia, I recommend to you an interesting article by R.R. Reno at First Things about the search for truth in academia. Reno contrasts two views of the objective of "critical thinking." The first view can be found in Plato's dialogues and St. Thomas' Summa Theologiae. Critical thinking exists in order to lead to the truth--after a struggle. The idea is that

[students] must delay the impulse to rush to a direct and unopposed affirmation of truth—and they do so in order to sharpen and heighten their perception of what makes the correct view the true view.

The second, more modern view of "critical thinking," on the other hand, degenerates into unending suspicion about ulterior motives because it only aims at unmasking any truth claim as serving one's will to power.

[I]t does not clear the way forward to deeper convictions. Instead, the moment of seeing falsehood has become the goal and summit of the intellectual life. One does not so much aspire to critical thinking as critical theory.

I recommend this article because it points quite clearly to the differences between the good and bad types of diversity. The good type of diversity is concerned with learning to think critically and come to the truth, after considering the arguments on every side. Diversity among students, in this case, makes us hesitate before accepting something as true, and makes us less dogmatic, though no less concerned with finding truth. The bad type of diversity simply leads us to relativism, whether by way of accepting everything as valid, or rejecting everything as a mask for some suspect motive. Diversity, here, makes us not discerning, but merely apathetic about the truth.

Diversity, then, is not a value in itself, but only insofar as it forces us to confront other views of truth and grapple with them. It is this grappling which makes acceptance of the truth fruitful. Finally, we must guard against the temptation to equate simply dismissing all truth and grappling with the truth.

Picture credit: Rembrandt's 1659 painting, "Jacob's Struggle with the Angel" (Gn. 32:23-33).