Evil and the loss of intellect

Abstract

In the third canto of The Inferno, as they stand before the gates of hell, Virgil says to Dante that he is about to come across people ‘for whom there is only grief’ and, then he adds: ‘Those who have lost the benefit of the intellect.’ One might wish to retort that politically and socially created hell is invariably built by a group who exercise their intellect to manifest their own idea of heaven. This was as true of the inquisitorial wing of the church, as of the Jacobins, as of the Stalinists and National Socialists, as of the present day Islamists. In fact, as any reader of The Comedy will know, Dante’s understanding of the intellect is shaped by an ontology in which love is the source of all. Hence, Dante’s statement is not simply a reiteration of the Socratic/ Platonic formulation that evil is ignorance. Just as he empowers and perfects the classical virtues of wisdom, justice, temperance and courage by conjoining them with the Christian powers of faith, hope and love, Dante enhances our understanding of the purpose of the intellect by judging its presence or absence not merely by cognitive operations — those in hell have not arrived there through an inability to provide ‘reasons’ for their judgments and deeds. Instead he grasps that doing evil is bound up with the intellect not being guided by love’s light. Hence the damned are unable to see the world they are making until it is too late. There is a fundamental hiatus between the illusions they have about what they are doing and what they actually do. They have lost the one God-given power to discriminate between the two. In this paper I will take Dante’s insight and discuss how systematized evil is generated by widespread substitution of the false intellect for the real intellect— a job performed time and time again historically by people entrusted to be the brains of their respective collective. Hell becomes inevitable when a group becomes sufficiently steeped in its illusions that it does not see the awaiting terror. Concomitantly, when a group reaches this stage they cannot be touched by true words: the group, then, literally belongs to (the d)evil.