All Done With Augustine

For the rest of my life, I need to make a point of celebrating October 15. It’s the day I finished reading Augustine’s Confessions.

This must be how people feel the day after they get out of prison.

When you commit to a task, you make a slave of yourself. Your freedom is gone until the day you finish. While I was reading Confessions, I couldn’t spend much time reading things I might actually have enjoyed. It made me feel as though I hated reading itself, which is not true. Now I’m free, so the only thing that remains is to convince my heart the chains are gone. My ordeal with that miserable book started to produce a habit of feeling like a captive.

I started reading Dante’s Inferno, and it’s a much better experience. I suppose Dante had less influence on the course of the world, so maybe Confessions is more important than The Inferno, but right now all I can think about is how much less Dante makes me suffer.

I’m not far into the book, but I think I can make a couple of observations without fear of being proven wrong.

Dante is not as boring as his predecessors. He doesn’t act like he’s being paid by the word. He can write a sentence that’s less than ten lines long. He doesn’t have to come up with ten cryptic names for every person or place he mentions.

Dante maintains a faster pace than Homer and Virgil. Something significant happens on every page. He probably will not spend three days of my time writing about a dull boat race in which the captains cry and whine like six-year-old girls.

If you can stand Dickens and Twain, you can probably stand Dante. That’s my guess.

Why do we call him “Dante” and not “Alighieri”? How did we end up on a first-name basis with so many old writers? Seems silly to me. But I will not fight it.

According to Wikipedia, Dante lived about 800 years after Augustine, so in moving from Confessions to The Inferno, Columbia’s Lit. Hum. syllabus makes a very gratifying leap. It’s like that feeling you get when a vehicle that’s stuck in the mud breaks free and starts moving. I wonder if it was smart for the Marxist eggheads to skip eight whole centuries. Surely someone must have written something good during that time.

I guess I’ll check.

Apparently, Beowulf and The Song of Roland aren’t important. Neither is Chaucer.

Looks like that’s most of it. No wonder they called the Dark Ages “dark.”

The Renaissance is right around the corner. Won’t that be fun?

Considering Dante’s year of birth, I have to wonder: did the Black Plague influence him? I believe it entered Europe pretty close to 1300 A.D., on a ship that docked in Genoa. No, it looks like I’m wrong. It arrived after he died, in 1347.

I’m already annoyed with Dante. He has a level of hell which is reserved for people who deserve salvation but don’t have it. The reason they’re not in heaven? They were not baptized. Nice bit of legalism there. Forget the thief on the cross who entered heaven after accepting Christ, with no opportunity to hit the mikvah. He didn’t deserve salvation, and he wasn’t baptized, but somehow he squeaked by. He must be heaven’s first illegal immigrant.

Guess who he puts in the area for deserving heathens? Homer, Virgil, Socrates, and Plato, among others. Socrates was a flaming homosexual, and Plato probably had the same bent, if you will pardon the pun. Homer endorsed murder, conquest, pillage, and rape. So did Virgil. Dante apparently thinks talent or intelligence equals righteousness, but he’s not overly concerned with things like purity or compassion. Crazy.

He put Ovid in the nice area of hell. I still don’t get Ovid. Stalking letters from needy women? How are those a great contribution to the arts? Something must have been lost in translation.

If he was going to put someone really nice in the pleasant part of hell, why not Cassandra? Why not Briseis? They didn’t bother anyone. How about what’s-her-name? You know…the daughter of Agamemnon. Was it Iphigenia? Yes. I checked. I don’t understand why Dante chose a bunch of murderous, genocidal imperialists, some of whom had sexual inclinations very much contrary to those espoused by the church.

The church was royally screwed up by the time Dante was born, so none of this should surprise me. The Holy Spirit was long exiled. Popes were greedy, warlike kings. The Catholic Church was the greatest terrorist organization that had ever existed. You could be burned alive for writing a pamphlet. They burned people left and right and thought their agony made God happy.

People were absolutely terrified of the church. It was not an institution Jesus would have approved; it was the spiritual continuation of the Jewish priesthood that had him killed. Had he shown up in 1300, they would have killed him a second time.

I’m very glad Christians don’t have the power to burn people any more, because if they did, the local Catholics would eventually round me up and make me the main attraction at a barbecue. I know several Protestant preachers who wouldn’t mind watching me roast. I feel safe for the moment, because–temporarily–we have great freedom compared to people like Galileo and Joan of Arc. The Gaystapo will probably get us eventually, though.

Wedding planners will become inquisition planners. Everything will be done tastefully, and there will be glamour gift boxes for the ladies and near-ladies.

It’s hard to be green when you burn people alive. Maybe carbon credits will have to be obtained. Plant two trees in Madagascar, and you get to incinerate three NRA members.

Dante’s theology is highly bizarre, but I can overlook that because he isn’t turning my brain into sedimentary rock. I hope to be done in a few days, so I guess it’s time to hit Amazon and order new stuff.