There exist a number of widespread criticisms of, or points of discomfort with, real or perceived Catholic doctrine on what we might call humanitarian grounds. The Catholic vision of the cosmos comes across to many non-Catholics and even to some Catholics as a harsh, punitive world, in which God, while perhaps less arbitrary than He is painted in some other forms of Christianity, plays favorites with individuals and with whole demographic groups, and consigns those He does not favor to everlasting torments that no misdeed by a finite being could justify. This obviously is not my perspective, otherwise I wouldn’t be here, but it is one that I think Catholics should take more seriously. There are serious critiques here, and ones that are longer-standing than many think. This is not just modern sentimentalism. Some of this discomfort demonstrably goes back to the High or Late Middle Ages, or even earlier.
Simone Weil says in The Need for Roots that, while some people think principled opposition to slavery was non-existent in Antiquity, in fact Aristotle, discussing (and excusing) slavery, mentions that opponents of the practice did exist. She brings this up in a discussion of freedom of speech (she sees making this false claim about history as socially damaging enough that it’s reasonable to ban people from making it), but I mention it here because we see something similar by looking at the style and tone with which some medievals feel the need to justify the Catholic worldview of their day. Looking at this, a certain squeamishness becomes evident, which focuses on many of the same points of critique we see today.
Take, for example, this intriguing passage in St. Catherine of Genoa’s Treatise on Purgatory (Charlotte Balfour and Helen Douglas Irvine’s translation; London: Sheed & Ward, 1946, p. 22):
The pain of the damned is not infinite in quantity because the dear goodness of God sheds the ray of His mercy even in Hell. For man dead in sin merits infinite pain for an infinite time, but God’s mercy has allotted infinity to him only in time and has determined the quantity of his pain; in justice God could have given him more pain.
So much for the idea that it is a modern declivity for an infinite or eternal hell to strike people as a troubling concept that presents issues for God’s omnipotence and benevolence. Blessed Julian of Norwich strikes a similar tone regarding a series of attitudes that fortunately turned out to be much less embedded in the overall structure of Catholic thought than is teaching on hell. In the Long Text of the Revelations of Divine Love she writes (Grace Warrack’s translation; London: Methuen & Company, 1901, p. 68):
For though the Revelation was made of goodness in which was made little mention of evil, yet I was not drawn thereby from any point of the Faith that Holy Church teacheth me to believe. For I had sight of the Passion of Christ in diverse Shewings,—the First, the Second, the Fifth, and the Eighth,—wherein I had in part a feeling of the sorrow of our Lady, and of His true friends that saw Him in pain; but I saw not so properly specified the Jews that did Him to death. Notwithstanding I knew in my Faith that they were accursed and condemned without end, saving those that converted, by grace.
In his notes on the Penguin Classics edition of Julian (in which this passage is on p. 87), Anthony Colin Spearing comes right out and says that this seems to indicate a private lack of fire in the belly for Late Medieval England’s level of religious antisemitism (London: Penguin, 1999, pp. 184-5). Otherwise why would Julian specify that she did not actually see “the Jews” presented negatively, and had to take other Catholics of her own time’s word for it? This is a woman who lives in the fourteenth century, probably the most trying and demoralizing in recorded history before the twentieth; she has ample examples besides her visions of the Passion to draw from here. A similar and much better-known demurral from personally endorsing what’s being taught about a certain type of person occurs in the third example that I will be presenting.
In the Divine Comedy, Canto XV of the Inferno introduces us to Brunetto Latini, a former guardian and teacher of Dante’s whom he greatly loved and clearly continues to respect, even admire. Latini is spending eternity on a plain of burning sand as one of those who have done violence to “God, art, and nature.” The usual interpretation is that he is there as “a sodomite” (i.e., in this context, a man who has sex with other men, although the term could also mean other things at the time), and indeed, recent scholarship has discovered at least one love poem that Latini wrote to another man, Bondie Dietaiuti. Joseph Pequigney connects Dante’s respectful, sorrowful description of Brunetto in Inferno XV with his return to the topic of homosexuality in Purgatorio XXVI, in which both heterosexual and homosexual souls are purified of their sins of lust in a relatively mild way (“Sodomy in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio,” Representations No. 36 (Autumn 1991), pp. 22-42). What’s of particular interest here is that Dante, after introducing Latini’s predicament, seems actually to change his theology of male-male sex in real time; it is violence against God and nature when he’s in hell, but a sin of lust just like proscribed forms of straight sex when he’s in purgatory forty-five cantos later. Dante, much like modern proponents of more generous pastoral treatment of gay Catholics, still thinks and talks about homosexuality in terms that most secular gay rights proponents would find unacceptable and insulting; but there is a noticeable and substantive evolution in his treatment of the topic, for reasons that we can still recognize and with which we can still sympathize today.
To cut a long story short, medieval Catholics were perfectly capable of charitable, humane, and (if one is inclined to be more critical of these mindsets) conflict-shy attitudes about the world. These attitudes often are the ones that produce theological and moral preferences decried as sloppy sentimentalism by many more traditional theologians today. Far from doe-eyed, mawkish special pleading, these concerns are considered, compassionate, and in venerable standing in Church life.
Image: Dante, Virgil, and Brunetto Latini, from Gustave Doré‘s illustrations of the Divine Comedy. Public domain.
Nathan Turowsky is a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution. He works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.
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