We Live in Dante's Hell
Aleksandr Filonenko / Photo from personal archive
SHORT PROFILE
Name: Oleksandr Semenovych Filonenko
Date of birth: 18 October 1968
Profession: Ukrainian Orthodox theologian, public intellectual, Doctor of Philosophy
«Dante speaks to us today in a completely different way than he did to people of previous eras», believes theologian Alexander Filonenko. Were the creator of The Divine Comedy alive in our time, he would think he had found himself in hell. Because, from his point of view, we betray our desires and destroy the beautiful garden of human relationships, which no longer bears fruit. How can Christianity revive and purify the source of our desires? You will learn about this in the interview — one of an entire series of philosophical conversations with Alexander Filonenko published by the Huxley almanac.
WHY DECEIVERS FILLED HALF OF «HELL»
O
ur society differs significantly from Dante’s. For example, we assess the gravity of murder and betrayal differently. For us, murder is worse. For Dante, it is the opposite — betrayal is a far more grievous crime. In his work, violators and murderers inhabit the seventh circle of hell, while the eighth and ninth are the circles of deceit and betrayal. One encounters even such forms of deception that today might seem entirely harmless to us. Take flattery, for instance. From our point of view, there is nothing terrible about paying someone a compliment. It is of little importance to us whether it corresponds to reality. Moreover, we often resort to this technique in order to create positive motivation in another person.
Yet for Dante, exactly half of «Hell» — 17 out of 34 cantos — is devoted to deceit. For him, even the smallest and most harmless lie clouds the truth within oneself. Gradually, a person becomes so entangled in a web of falsehood that they lose the ability to distinguish reality from illusion. One of my favorite characters is Thais from the eighth circle of flatterers. She is a hetaera who, when asked by her admirer, «Are you satisfied with me?», replied, «No, you are simply wonderful!» And that was it — she ended up in the eighth circle of hell. Her punishment is more severe than that of murderers. But why? Is it really only because the poor woman exaggerated a little in order to morally support a confused client?
HOW EXPERIENCE KILLS REAL RELATIONSHIPS
Today, as if demonstrating good manners and respect, we all shower one another with compliments. But what actually happens in this process? Beneath a mountain of compliments, we have buried real relationships — relationships we can no longer reach. We have lost an understanding of who we are… Murder horrifies Dante, but for him there are things even more terrifying. Modern people, however, have already grown accustomed to many of them. We define quality of life through the concept of experience. A good life is lived by the one who can say: I have gained rich experience! For Dante, everything is different. For the first time in European literature, the word «expert» appears in his work. In the 26th canto of Hell, Ulysses calls himself esperto del mondo — an expert of the world. It is not enough for an expert to know or to believe — they want to verify everything through personal experience. Beginning with the modern era, the accumulation of experience has come to be considered the most important thing in life. To be experienced — that is the highest value! With such an approach, our relationships with other people become instrumental.
TODAY WE ALL LIVE IN DANTE’S HELL!
We say, «I am very grateful to you for the meeting!», because thanks to it we gain a unique experience. From this purely instrumental point of view, murder is a grave crime because you kill a bearer of experience. In Dante’s culture, everything is the opposite. If Dante were to find himself in our time and read one of the millions of our complimentary text messages or greeting cards, he would be horrified, believing he had ended up in hell! According to Dante, a good life is not lived by the one who accumulates experience, but by the one who cultivates good relationships with other people. God sends people to us, and we, like caring gardeners, must cultivate the gardens of our relationships with them so that they bear beautiful fruit. Relationship is the heart of life. Every relationship with another is intrinsically valuable. Friendship is intrinsically valuable. Love is intrinsically valuable. Experience is useless here. But if relationships are the most precious and valuable thing, then there can be nothing more frightening than deceit and betrayal — an act that calls these relationships into question. A murderer takes the life of the body; a traitor kills the soul, destroying trust in relationships.
WHERE TO FIND A NEW SOURCE OF TRUST
The problem of trust is extraordinarily relevant for the modern world. In 1995, Francis Fukuyama wrote a major book — Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. He argued convincingly that economic well-being depends on structures of trust. We usually underestimate the fact that the economy develops not only according to economic laws, but also within structures of trust. Fukuyama was the first to sound the alarm, proposing a revision of European civilization from an unusual perspective — to find a new source of trust that is being lost. Trust means «before faith». It is what precedes faith. These are very subtle settings that we ignore and break, using all these deceptive emojis and likes. And from here it is not far to betrayal, which in Dante begins with the betrayal of oneself. It lies behind all the catastrophes of this world. It is no coincidence that the degenerated angel Lucifer, who betrayed his light-bearing nature, is located at the very center of hell. All sins are born of betrayal of oneself — and even more so, of betrayal of one’s desire.
BETRAYAL OF ONE’S OWN DESIRE
At the beginning of my acquaintance with Dante’s texts, I could not believe that a medieval person could reason in this way! A book by my mentor Franco Nembrini is titled Dante. The Poet of Desire. While working on its translation from Italian in Kyiv, we argued a great deal: how accurately does our word «desire» convey Dante’s meaning? It turned out that, no matter how you look at it, this is the most precise equivalent. It sounded to me like a bolt from the blue: the only source and root of evil in this world is a person’s betrayal of their own desire! From this unfold all other forms of betrayal. Dante identifies four of them: betrayal of friends, betrayal of one’s homeland, betrayal of one’s relatives, and betrayal of one’s benefactors. The last is the most terrible form of betrayal: people believed in the happy outcome of your fate, and you betrayed them. The problem of desire is one of the key issues in the dialogue of cultures. For example, the great discussion between Christianity and Buddhism is built around it.
THE CHRISTIAN RESPONSE TO BUDDHISM
I had a great teacher — Alexander Moiseevich Pyatigorsky. He was a leading specialist in Buddhism and Freemasonry. I taught Christian theology and, frankly speaking, was not a very good student. Alexander Moiseevich and I agreed never to discuss three topics: Buddhism, Christianity, and Freemasonry. Because all conversations about these three traditions shifted into a professional plane. The Four Noble Truths of the Buddha constitute a kind of path to salvation in which the word «desire», understood as the source of suffering, plays a key role. To get rid of suffering, one must get rid of desires. But then what are we to do with Dante, for whom the main betrayal is the betrayal of one’s own desire? How can this understanding be reconciled with Buddhism? I think the Christian answer to Buddhism is this: if the Christian God does not exist and a person has no definite relationship with Him, then indeed suffering and desire are one and the same.
«REJOICE ALWAYS!»
Christianity brings to the world the message that God is present in it through human desires. There is a saying: Christians are Stoics, only joyful. Rephrasing it, one could say that Christians are Buddhists, only joyful. When Christianity links desire with constant joy, it moves it into a completely different dimension: the center of gravity shifts not to the quantity, but to the quality of desires. And for a Buddhist, this joy — which seems to come from nowhere — is simply another name for the source of desires. The Apostle Paul gives Christians astonishing advice: «Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all things». It sounds nice, doesn’t it? Almost like a toast! Until you begin to reflect: what does it mean — «rejoice always»?
CHRISTIANITY IS A PROVOCATION!
Notice that the Apostle Paul calls on us to rejoice not «sometimes», not under certain circumstances, but always. For example, is it possible to rejoice in the face of people’s deaths? And what does «give thanks in all things» mean? Truly for everything, or are there things that do not deserve our gratitude? Christianity is a grand provocation. «Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all things!» — on the one hand, it sounds appealing, and on the other, it is completely unclear what it means. That is why all of this needs to be carefully examined. It seems to me that in this recommendation of the Apostle Paul there is an «additional element» that Buddhism lacks. Everything that the human mind is capable of foreseeing on its own, Buddhists have foreseen. But Christianity introduced just one element — Christ. That is, the difference between Christianity and Buddhism, by and large, is not doctrinal. Christianity added only one event — the Theophany.