Master Adamo lies a bloated mass of “watery rot.” His amorphous frame bears his diseased paunch and distended limbs, as his lips curl and crack under his parching fever—despite being a waterlogged waste. He lies before Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil and explains how King Minos poured him into the last ditch of the eighth circle of hell. He was a counterfeiter of Florentine florins. He blurred the lines of reality in life and now he lays blurred—a poor counterfeit of his former self.
In Dante’s Inferno, the eighth circle of hell is composed of ten ditches populated by flatterers, fortune tellers, deceivers, alchemists, and other fraudulent souls. It is not surprising such souls suffer eternal torment, but it is surprising that Dante the Poet has them suffer with greater severity than murderers or the lustful. Why, for example, would a flatterer suffer a worse fate in hell than Attila the Hun? Why would an alchemist merit greater suffering than Cleopatra or Achilles? The structure of hell, as presented by Dante the Poet, moves from the lesser sins of incontinence—lust, greed, prodigality, etc.—to the greater sins of malice: violence and fraud. For Dante, fraud is more perverse than violence, because it represents an abuse of that which is highest in man: the intellect.
The suffering of Master Adamo invites us to three considerations: first, how acting contrary to reason creates a counterfeit anthropology; second, how the intellect suffers when it satiates on untruth; and third, how lying is an act of sterility that leads to a superficial embrace of reality.
It will remain, however, to question who is to blame for these unrealities becoming culturally normative, and the steps we must take to purge our imaginations of these counterfeits of Creation.
I. Our Counterfeit Anthropology
Jesus Christ is the Word, the Logos, the ordering principle of all reality. He made all things, and He continues to hold all things in being (John 1:3; Col 1:15-17). St. John’s use of the Greek word Logos for the Second Person of the Trinity is, according to Pope Benedict XVI, the apogee of the harmony between Greek and Hebrew thought.[1] The ancient Greeks too sought the logos. They sought the reason or rational order of things. They inquired about the logos of justice, for example, or the logos of the polity. Man too has a logos—an observable order that illuminates his purpose and place within the cosmos. A distinctive character of the logos of man is that he can act with logos. Man is a rational animal, as Aristotle observes.[2] Amongst all the visible creatures of God, only man has an intellect. As Scripture reminds us, man is made in the image of God, but it is Christ, the Logos, who is the “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). St. Thomas teaches that we bear the image of God like a coin bears the image of a king, but Christ bears the image like a son that of his father.[3] We, who have logos, look to the Logos for the reality of our own being. We who may act with reason turn to Reason-itself to know ourselves. We bear the image of the Logos.
To act contrary to reason is to act contrary to our humanity. Those who abuse their logos will abuse the very image of who they are as human. Irrationality and inhumanity are tethered. Those who abuse their intellect become, like Master Adamo, a counterfeit of their own anthropology. Like all counterfeits, there is some remnant of the original that cannot be removed, as Master Adamo, though a putrid puddle, still presents as human. Acting contrary to reason is contrary to the very image of God in us. As Pope Benedict XVI notes, “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”[4] Irrationality is contrary to both the nature of man and the Divine. Acting contrary to logos will always deform our perception of what it means to be human. We must labor to be like God and to be rational—to understand and act in accordance with our intellects to avoid a counterfeit anthropology.
II. Our Shared Unrealities
The intellect seeks truth, and truth is the conformity of the intellect to reality. As St. Paul notes in the beginning of his letter to the Romans, the world is intelligible, and man is held culpable to the truth he may observe therein (Rom 1:19). The intellect strives to align with the contours of Creation. Man may use his logos to discern the logos of particular things. As noted, the Greeks sought the logos of the polity—they discerned its ordered reality, which allowed the mind to conform to what is real and true about communal life. Here, we see why Christ refers to Himself as “the Truth.” If He is the Divine Logos, the rational order of reality-itself, then to know Him is to conform the mind to the ordering principle of all Creation. In Him, we know the Truth. What a wonderment it was to the Hellenistic mind that the Logos was a person and not just a principle—that Truth was someone to be known and loved. In the person of Jesus Christ, the cosmos unfurls before us as an intelligible narrative in which nature, revelation, history, et al., teach us about man and his place in reality.
As the beauty of man blossoms by understanding his relation to the Logos, so too does the depth of his depravity when man acts contrary to it. Such depravity invites deformity in both who man is and his relation to the cosmos. The intellect, which is an appetite for truth, suffers when it attempts to satiate on untruth. Man ceases to know who he is amongst the ordered whole of Creation. Yet, the satiation of the intellect upon unrealities is not simply a depreciation of truth—it suffers the effect of untruth. To decouple our logos from reality is to accept the fiction that we, each of us, is a god. Each person is “the Truth,” a “Logos” unto his own. The intellect, deprived of the satisfaction of our observable reality, falls into an unreality malleable to man. The various strands of our ordered cosmos—nature, history, revelation, reason, and even our own bodies—are perverted pursuant to the whims of each person. The contours of Creation are compliant to human desire. Like Master Adamo, we praise our counterfeit realties—while in actuality we suffer the disease and rot of our own making. Both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have said we live in the “age of sin against God the Creator.”[5] We fancy ourselves gods. We live in the age of the anti-logos: to each person a reality to shape as his own with the promise of a heaven and the certainty of a hell. If truth is the conformity of the mind to reality, then we must reject these counterfeit realities for our good and that of our neighbor.
III. Our Sterility of Speech
The purpose of speech is to convey truth. Our minds conform to reality, and we can share that reality with others. We gather together and discuss the observations of our existence and, as iron sharpens iron, we use speech to pursue truth alongside our neighbors. Speech bears a natural fecundity that allows the intellect to root deeper into the thickness of reality. Like contraception to its act, lying distorts the act of speech by impeding its very purpose. A lie divorces speech from truth and the receptive mind from reality. The sterility of lying leads to a superficial embrace of what is real. Our age has become well-versed in this contraceptive speech. Many words, such as man, woman, love, life, marriage, family, freedom, and science, now convey counterfeit realities. As the intellect falls into unreality by a lie, so too do entire societies fall into unreality when contraceptive speech becomes culturally normative. Here again, the Logos is instructive. Aristotle speaks of the logos as an appeal to the intellect—a reasonable argument, a communication of reality to another. So too the translation of Logos into Word is particularly illuminative of this communicative aspect. It is through the Word spoken by the Father that reality was made and is held in being. The Divine Speech communicated reality into existence, and our speech communicates the truth of this intelligible reality to others.
Lying is directly contrary to the Logos. It is an act of anti-logos. Dante the Poet places flatterers, soothsayers, alchemists, and others, like Master Adamo, lower within the pit of hell than murderers, because to lie, to be fraudulent, is an act of malice directly contrary to both human nature and the reality of God. Contraceptive speech leads to contracepted intellects. The mind satiates in untruth and not the Truth. The unreality separating the soul from God is at the sordid heart of why Satan is the “father of lies.” To lie is to mimic the Great Deceiver, whereas to tell the truth is to mimic the Word, the Logos, Truth-itself. The maliciousness of a lie will deform who we are and how we see ourselves in reality, whereas the charity of proclaiming the truth will set people free from unrealities that bind them.
IV. Our Contracepted Intellects
Whom shall we blame for the unrealities of our age? Are we to accuse left-liberals—the progressives, the “woke”—for this contraceptive speech? Left-liberals are the most apparent practitioners of this impotent language. Being driven deeper into unrealities, we must now not only tolerate contraceptive speech but must agree and praise the counterfeit anthropologies it signifies. We are asked to lie, to look at Master Adamo and say, “All is well.” The question, however, is whether contraceptive speech is limited to left-liberalism. Though the speech of progressives is often criticized by right-liberals or classical liberals, it is arguably the conservative side of liberalism that habituated us to this error. For before left-liberals had contracepted the term woman, the right-liberals had done the same to terms like man, marriage, freedom, nature, rights, law, and the common good. Freedom, for example, went from the ancient notion of “self-discipline in order to choose the good” to the liberal notion of a “lack of restraint in order to satiate desire.” Classical liberalism did not create its own jargon to express its ideas; rather, it created counterfeits of ancient terms that lacked the same potent engagement with reality. The distinction in contraceptive speech between left and right liberalism is one of degree and not kind.
Nor is a contracepted anthropology unique to left-liberalism. Liberalism has, since Locke, had a reductionist view of the human person. It has always reduced or removed humanity’s natural predilections toward the good, marriage, and self-preservation. It has called into question whether man is naturally political or even rational. It has, since it was contrived, denied fundamental aspects of our human nature in favor of an artificial social contract brokered by mutual consent, i.e., the human will. It laid a counterfeit veneer over the nature of man and his engagement with the cosmos. It presented an unreality in which there is no final end, no common good of man, but rather each person may pursue his own end, his own reality, with “freedom” as the highest shared value. The achievement of consent is praised higher than that of truth. In all these things, liberalism has habituated the mind to relativism. No longer is it that we are tabling the final end of man, because we cannot agree on it, now there is no final end of man save the particular ends that each man may create. Our minds are contracepted from their natural end, and our anthropology suffers under this liberal, contraceptive speech. Disorder begets disorder. Right-liberalism leads to left-liberalism. It has taken four hundred years, but the subtle anti-logos of classical liberalism has led to the depraved sterility of our modern age.
In the West, liberalism is not something which man can stand apart from and critique. We are immersed in it. It is our cave wall. Its contraceptive speech forms and shapes our moral and political imaginations. It is, in many ways, our anthropological and cosmological default. Liberalism may attribute much of its success to its habit of securing for man societal approval of his disordered appetites through contraceptive speech. Error thrives in ambiguity. The “emancipation” of man from that which governs him—i.e., God, true religion, nature, history, reason, the body, etc.—has largely come not through explicit rebellion but through equivocation and obscurity. This “freedom,” in the spirit of non serviam, has been sated over the centuries by toppling ancient boundaries and proclaiming it “good.” The interplay between the satiation of disordered desire and contraceptive speech is a downward spiral like Dante’s Inferno, that leads society into error and desolation. For if liberalism habituates us to relativism, relativism habituates us to despair. Contracepted intellects, unable to flourish in the truth, fall into hopelessness—whether they are cognizant of the cause or not. All that is left is the human will and antagonistic dynamics of power fueled by passions. We must, for our good and that of our neighbor, purge our imaginations of liberalism and its contraceptive speech. We must think outside left and right. We must allow our imaginations to be formed by the unadulterated reality of the Logos.
V. Our Hope
Leaving Master Adamo behind, Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil discover that the final pit of hell is ringed with giants who rebelled against the divine. They meet the giant Nimrod who famously attempted the tower of Babel. Fittingly, Nimrod can only babble. He can neither understand others nor be understood. Dante the Poet’s catechesis on the correlation between speech and sin is made complete when Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil stand before the giant-demon of Satan at the center of hell. Given that the Divine Comedy is a work saturated in dialogue, the reader anticipates Lucifer engaging in some clever conversation with Dante the Pilgrim. We think of the Great Accuser in Job or the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Dante’s Satan, however, is silent. The speech that spun the unrealities that separated man from God is now soundless. It is a subtle statement of hope that no matter how sordid the untruth of our age, no matter how much our contraceptive speech impedes the flourishing of the mind of man, Truth will shine forth in the end. All the lies will follow the father of lies into silence.
Dcn. Harrison Garlick is a deacon, husband, and father who serves as the chancellor and legal counsel for the Diocese of Tulsa & Eastern Oklahoma. He also serves as a tutor for the Alcuin Institute for Catholic Culture teaching in its Great Books program.
[1] Pope Benedict XVI, “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections,” September 12, 2006.
[2] Politics, 1253a1.
[3] ST I, q. 93, a. 1, ad 2 and a. 6, ad 1.
[4] Pope Benedict XVI, “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections,” September 12, 2006.
[5] Pope Francis, “Meeting with the Polish Bishops,” July 27, 2016.