We would expect that Dante's Inferno would speak of dramatic sins but the reality is that dramatic sins are salacious but not always profound. Adultery is a dramatic sin as is murder but it is ordinary in the way that both have been going on since the Fall and seem to be favorites of mankind. The more profound sins are those of the lukewarm whom God will chew up and spit out, those neither hot nor cold who seem perfectly comfortable in and outside the Church. They live in lives of moral ambiguity certain that there is no black and white but shades of grey that call the wise to be silent more than to cry out. They tend to recede into the background of wherever they find themselves and offend no one -- not even God.
These are those who are sheep no longer desiring the Shepherd, hearing His voice but not following, and living on the edges of the flock. The Kingdom of God lives not simply in the dramatic moments but in the sphere of every small choice in which the Christian either manifests that he belongs to God or not. There is, of course, the presumption that a sort of neutrality in which the soul yearns for and seeks another way without the messiness of witness might exist and this is what blinds the soul to the consequence of being comfortable neither of God nor against Him. It is a quiet withdrawal which chokes off faith but does not quite make the sinner a dramatic force of evil.
Dante understood this and it is manifest throughout his work. There, at the threshold of Hell, before he encounters the usual suspects of tyrants, murderers, traitors, and violent sinners who everyone knows and expects to populate the deeper realms of hell, he sees sees the souls of those who never truly chose God nor reject Him. They simply live in ambiguity. Their lives are, according to Dante, sanza ’nfamia e sanza lodo—“without infamy and without praise” (Inferno III, 36). They are not alone on earth for Dante also connects them with the angels who were “neither rebellious nor faithful to God” (Inferno III, 38–39). Perhaps they had conscience and moral strength enough to refuse great evils and yet they could not bring themselves to stand forth for good. They live in silence rather than conviction, choosing safety and security here over truth, comfort and ease over martyrdom, personal pleasure over sacrifice, and self-preservation over faithfulness.
Why this scene is chilling in Dante is because he does not begin his sojourn through Hell with monsters and notorious evil whom everyone expects to be there but with those who insist upon belief but lack conviction, who insist upon good but live in the realm of the morally evasive. Their sin is not dramatic and would merit no mention in the tabloids that chronicle our evils but they are even more profound. They have refused the dignity and danger of choice, teaching us that neutrality is not innocence. It is as if they say, “I belong to Christ, but I will not stand with Him publicly.” It is the realm of fear.
The Church and Christians have lived with this fear for too long and it has become usual and familiar. The Church has become daring only insofar as this is the same edge on which lives public opinion and the direction of society. The Church has become reluctant to call a sin a sin and lives too easily within the realm of silence for the things that the Word of God condemns. It is not all nor everyone but it is the many who claim to be authentic and who insist that they love Jesus. They love the idea of Jesus more than His reality and the false image of the Savior over the One who insists upon dying for sins because they cannot be forgiven any other way. It is the quiet Christianity in which the witness is more to a conceptual love than the love revealed in suffering on the cross. It is the silent Christianity which speaks of this idea of love while refusing to upset things by addressing the sins for which Love was born. But Dante's witness is clear as is Revelation. The lukewarm who live in vagaries and uncertainties and fear find the gnashing of teeth and not comfort at the day of judgment. They have refused the cover of Christ's love in life and so it abandons them in death to reveal that their sins, not dramatic but profound, lack the cleansing of the blood because they refused to see them as sin.
This is the affliction of modernism that brings rot to the institution of the Church. Some are confused by righteousness to presume moral authority to judge in the place of Christ but this is no answer. The refuge of the soul lies always in the Love that suffered and died, in the sin admitted and confessed, in the body laid in the tomb for the dead. When this is no longer our message and we live in the convenient realm of simple do gooders who seek to improve today rather than proclaim God's tomorrow, we betray our calling as Christians and our identity as the Church. At some point, the emptiness of what passes for Christianity will no longer be able to live in the shadows and must either stand close enough to Christ to be splattered with His blood or live in the clean clothing of the world that offers nothing of real hope. Perhaps that day is coming soon.
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