Part 2: Fruit of the Poisonous Tree
I have some pretty strong opinions about how people have used Scripture in their writing. Whether it is thinly veiled allegory (did you know many interpretations of Superman essentially make him Jesus?), more complicated and nuanced (The Lord of the Rings), or written for children, but still thinly veiled allegory (The Chronicles of Narnia), people do use Jesus in their writing. And although I think there are good ways of doing this and bad ways of doing this (check out these three articles here where I’ve discussed movies and film that use Jesus) I find that I must return to the topic of using Jesus outside of Scripture to tell stories because of one author. Okay, maybe more because a meme or two about this author has recently made the rounds and I found myself curious about it.
Having personally included people’s names in a certain Scripture with really good intentions and purpose (John 3:16: For God so loved [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE]), I feel a bit of guilt writing this next sentence. You should not, as a general rule, insert yourself into Scripture. This does not mean that you should not look for yourself in Scripture (and often the disciples serve as a perfect foil for self-insert), but you do not get to add yourself to Scripture and change the story being told. You do not get to write a whole three part work and make up some new stuff about how heaven and hell work. That’s right. This whole post is going to be calling out a twelfth century writer, Dante. Because even if you think the catholic church is corrupt and full of bad people does not mean you get to write a story where they are all in hell… including some of the living ones!
The confession: I have never read Dante’s Inferno nor I do not plan to do so. I’ve read none of The Divine Comedy and if I did, I would not start with the third part. This knowledge came from a Wikipedia deep dive.
If you’ve ever heard of the different levels of hell, guess what? You’ve been influenced by the writings of Dante. That whole idea is credited to the man. He wrote a whole story about all the people he did not like in the church, only some of whom were dead, and put them all in hell at different levels based on how badly he thought they had sinned. And he creates a hierarchy for what the worst sins are! This creates a false impression that some sins are only a little bit bad and others are truly terrible. This is a false impression about how sin causes us trouble. Any sin is a sin. There is no hierarchy for God. There is no limit to God’s grace so no sin is so bad as to be unforgiveable. We as people do like to do just like Dante and pretend like some sins aren’t so bad. God’s grace is bigger than any sin and we really don’t need to sin on purpose for there to be grace for our sins, but we really shouldn’t be putting them into a hierarchy and pretending like some sins are okay. This is just one theological point on which Dante wrote that can be easily misunderstood.
Dante, for better or worse, created an understanding of what hell looks like, how you get there, and who populates the place. Very little of this is based in Scripture, but it holds enough of what was the catholic catechism of the time that people began to recognize it as truth about what hell looked like. Considering how poetry worked in that era, its not some big stretch that people who could not read and lacked the background in other writings might hear this or hear of it and understand it as truth rather than fiction. It is the source of a few misunderstandings, including the hierarchy of sin. Yes, people bring their own interpretations to Scripture. It can be a very good thing to understand Scripture with your personal viewpoint interwoven with who Scripture calls you to be. When you start adding to the Scripture to an extreme, you create the roots of the poisonous tree.
The poisonous tree does not have some biblical connection, and this is something I’ve picked up from watching crime shows. It’s a legal doctrine that says that if things like evidence are obtained under sketchy circumstances, you cannot use the evidence you find after that. I want to apply that same idea to writing. Some people take writings like The Divine Comedy and treat them like Scripture. They read them, internalize them, and then preach them. Or live them. Their interpretation becomes the only acceptable interpretation in their faith traditions or spheres of influence. How you interpret Scripture does matter, but what you use to understand Scripture better matters too. Some very popular Christian writers create Bible studies, devotionals, or materials that have some very problematic interpretations of Scripture. Basically, some writers are as bad as Dante in my eyes because of they ways in which they weaponize Scripture.
That’s the bad news, right? That you have to be wise about what you choose to consume theologically because it might influence you more than you suspect. That’s true of just about everything though, so this little rant about Dante does not mean much in the grand scheme of the entire history of humanity. Except, let me ask you this. What was the fruit that Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge? An apple… right? It has to be an apple. That’s how it’s depicted in art, movies, and in every single child’s illustrated Bible. People can’t just make things up to suit them, right?
Wrong. It was not always an apple. You can read a bit more about that here from an actual expert. That one was not Dante’s fault, it was Milton, a different poet. It still leaves us in the same situation: Scripture can so easily be warped and manipulated into something other than that which it is. A question, therefore, for next time, if some interpretations are okay and some are not, how do we tell the difference between the two? Leave your comments and thoughts below, but be sure to tune in next week for the conclusion of this somewhat convoluted thought exercise.
