The Devil Is a Logician (Word on Fire)
A preview of my recent article on Word on Fire's Evangelization & Culture Online about the dangers of logic unhinged from love as demonstrated by Luke, Dante, Dostoevsky, and more.
This is a preview of an essay I wrote for Word on Fire’s Evangelization & Culture Online. It concerns the human tendency to rationalize sin and the danger of logic detached from love. To drive home my point, I draw from Luke’s Gospel, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and even Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. You may read the full essay by clicking the button below.
Months ago, I listened to a priest take a unique and fascinating approach to the Good Samaritan story in Luke’s Gospel. While most homilies, I imagine, focus on the charitable actions of the Samaritan toward the assaulted stranger on the roadside and emphasize corporal works of mercy and compassion for one’s neighbor (which are, of course, legitimate and important themes), this one concentrated not on the Samaritan or the battered man but the priest and the Levite who first passed him over.
The homilist speculated that the priest and the Levite might have rationalized passing by the battered stranger by appealing to Mosaic law and its stipulations pertaining to ritual purity. Because Jews would be made ritually impure by coming into contact with a dead body, the priest and the Levite had a convenient excuse to avoid aiding a man in need.
Of course, Christ, explaining the parable, condemns them and lauds instead the Samaritan who was “moved with compassion at the sight” of the stranger, cares for him, and provides him shelter in an inn at his own expense. Christ orders us to “go and do likewise.”
The two priestly characters justify passing by the man, whereas the Good Samaritan helps him out of compassion and neighborly love.
This analysis of the priest and the Levite’s motivations immediately reminded me of a story in Dante’s Inferno.
While following Virgil through the many “ditches” of the eighth circle of hell—i.e., Malebolge, home of the fraudulent—Dante encounters the soul of Guido da Montefeltro, a former Italian military commander whose deeds “were not those of a lion, but a fox.” After Guido left the life of conquest and had become a Franciscan friar, Pope Boniface VIII approached Guido for military advice, seeking to seize a family of nobles who had opposed his election to the papacy and took refuge in a fortress in Palestrina.
According to Dante, when Guido hesitated to offer what he knew would be fraudulent counsel, Boniface promised to absolve him of the sin in advance. Guido conceded and advised the pontiff to promise the nobles amnesty but then revoke his word as soon as they relieved themselves of their fortifications.
Guido recalls his own soul arriving at the gates of hell upon his death. There, King Minos sentences the damned to their respective punishments by wrapping his tail around them a number of times equal to the layer of the inferno that will be their prison for eternity. When St. Francis of Assisi comes down from heaven to retrieve Guido, he is halted by a demon who says
He must come down among my servitors,
Because he gave the fraudulent advice
From which time forth I have been at his hair;For who repents not cannot be absolved,
Nor can one both repent and will at one,
Because of the contradiction which consents not.
Austrian artist Joseph Anton Koch provides us with a vivid depiction of the scene: The winged and tailed demon grasps the friar’s cincture with one hand and waves his other finger at the saint. The demon looks at Guido and taunts him. In a sinister quib, he says, “Thou didst not think that I was a logician!” Minos then wraps his tail around Guido eight times and sends him down to Malebolge to be tortured among his fellow fraudulent sinners forever.
L.W. Blakely is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Wayfarer, a newsletter where he publishes literary fiction, criticism, and musings. Learn more about L.W. and The Wayfarer on the About page, or (if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read) consider subscribing and sharing his work.