A brief and clear testimony of the Christian faith, the Credo teaches us from its first article what the foundation of a correct worldview is: Almighty and eternal God created the hierarchical world—composed of the ‘seen’ (the physical, material cosmos, accessible to the senses) and the ‘unseen’ (the metaphysical, spiritual cosmos, accessible to the intellect). Before the incarnation of the Savior Jesus Christ, ancient cultures, whether monotheistic or polytheistic, recognized the existence of the unseen world. The Jewish people speak in the sacred texts of the Old Testament about both God, the Lord of all that is, and the creatures and world populated by them. Although pagan religions had lost the essential reference to the one Creator, they still acknowledged the influence that the unseen world and higher spiritual beings, the gods, had over the ‘lower’ world of humans. If we reread Homer’s epics, Pindar’s poems, or the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, we see that everything in human society unfolded like a game on a giant chessboard, where the pieces were animated by the intervention of various deities from the Greek pantheon.
Christian culture brought about a tremendous transformation of this worldview by refocusing it on the almighty Creator—God, the Holy Trinity.
All creations of Christian culture demonstrate the power of the vision generated by faith in the existence of God, who intervenes directly, though discreetly, in the lives of His creatures. The cosmic event of the Incarnation of the second person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, and all the teachings derived from this unique historical event represent the decisive argument for a society that conceived the visible world as the field of a terrible confrontation between beings who serve God and those opposing Him. Angels and demons are the creatures that influence our lives and free decisions. The creative virtues of such a vision have manifested in numerous creations of Christian culture: architecture, visual arts, music, and literature bear deep marks of faith in God and the unseen world. At the heart of the canon of universal literature stands, without equal, the poem that, from beginning to end, is a literary testimony of the author’s faith.
Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia synthesizes all the convictions, sometimes very concrete and almost physical, of medieval Christians regarding the unseen world.
Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia synthesizes all the convictions, sometimes very concrete and almost physical, of medieval Christians regarding the unseen world. Describing Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise with maximum visual accuracy, Dante’s poem takes us on a fabulous journey through the afterlife, which becomes for readers almost as real as our earthly world. Resulting from the exceptional talent of the poet, the visual impact of the description of the unseen world led to strange debates regarding the geography and geometry of Dante’s Hell.
The protagonists of this enormous Renaissance controversy were the Florentine Antonio Manetti (1423–1497) and the Lucchese Alessandro Vellutello (1473–?). Underlying this was the historic rivalry between two Italian cities, Florence and Lucca, to which the two opponents belonged. The discussion was one of the strangest that today’s world, dominated by atheism and agnosticism, could imagine: the geometry of Hell, its dimensions, and the beings that populate it. Of course, any contemporary scholar would readily accept such a discussion when it comes to continents, countries, and landforms of our visible world. However, a large-scale discussion, which resulted in treatises and precise drawings regarding the dimensions of Hell, is practically inconceivable today. And yet, the members of the famous Florentine Academy organized such conferences with great public resonance, most likely unintentionally proving what effects the universally accepted Christian faith had on the mentality of that era.
Without delving into the details of a controversy with many ramifications, I will suffice in the following to describe its essence based on an extremely erudite study by one of today’s brightest Romanian thinkers, Horia-Roman Patapievici. In the preface he dedicated to Galileo Galilei’s lectures on Dante’s Hell,[i] Patapievici shows that the main subject of the dispute was the shape of Hell in the Divine Comedy. For Manetti, it looked like an inverted cone, whose tip pierced the center of the earth. More sophisticated, the image proposed by Vellutello was that of a complex figure, composed of a succession of truncated cones followed by two cylinders that stopped at the earth’s center. Vellutello’s main criticism of Manetti’s figure concerned the impossibility of proving how the earth’s crust could support itself above the vast void created by the base of the inverted cone. Among Italian intellectuals in Florence and Lucca, as well as in other intellectual centers of the time, such discussions were as usual as a five o’clock tea for a British Lord. It was in this context that a little-known young man with remarkable gifts in mathematics was invited to give his verdict: Galileo Galilei.Galileo Galilei (1564–1642).
Towards the end of 1587, when he was only 23 years old, Galileo delivered two lectures on Dante’s Inferno at the Florentine Academy—founded by the Duke Cosimo I de Medici. Adhering to the academic rigor of the time, he demonstrated his mathematical prowess by proving that Manetti’s vision of the inverted cone was the correct interpretation of the descriptions in The Divine Comedy. His presentations, which can still be read today, are simultaneously hallucinatory and brilliant. Mathematical details abound. He even went so far as to calculate the size of Lucifer (1,935 braccia=aproximatively 1.12 kilometers) and the physical boundaries of Hell. As H.-R. Patapievici pointed out, Dante’s text was pushed to justify such technical analyses. However, being a poem, the Florentine masterpiece does not offer such details.
What is significant is the fact itself: for both Dante and his contemporaries, scholars or not, Hell was a reality whose dimensions could be discussed as easily as the proportions of the city of Ravenna (where Dante’s earthly remains lie) or the distance from Verona to Venice. But this was grounded in a shared belief in the unseen world, a belief held by all members of Christ’s social kingdom in those bygone times. Can we imagine such a discussion today?
A first answer belongs to the realm of Christian apologetics. True theologians and missionaries are obliged to seek all the arguments they can offer, delicately but clearly, to those who doubt or do not believe. Entire sections in apologetic manuals from past centuries discuss not only the arguments for the existence of God but also for the existence of the unseen world. From this perspective, we can seek as many proofs as we want to support the reality of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. On the other hand, however, we must admit that we can hardly imagine a discussion about the dimensions of Hell like the one held by Galileo and his contemporaries. Yet a sensational news story circulated in recent decades could suggest otherwise.
Launched in 1989 in Sergei Gorbachev’s Russia, this piece of news claimed that from a well drilled somewhere in Siberia, the cries of pain and terror of souls trapped in eternal imprisonment could be heard. Yes, you read that right. A newspaper (or many) claimed that the location of eternal damnation had been geographically identified. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was located in the physical underground of Russia. Meticulously and apparently credibly, the journalists emphasized the technical details of the drilling as well as the fact that the cries had been recorded on magnetic tape. So, there was no longer a need for the roars of a death metal band to hear the damned. The vision of Fatima experienced by the three shepherd children had finally been ‘democratized.’ Not only could everyone now learn the truth, but they were forced to accept it based on empirical evidence. Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940), the Russian writer who had insinuated in his novels The Master and Margarita and Diaboliad that the motherland had been overrun by demons, could smile in satisfaction. The thesis of his highly controversial novels was proven beyond a doubt. Except, as expected, the news was a hoax.
Dante, Galileo, and others like them, who discussed Hell, did so based and inspired by the already-existing supernatural faith in their souls. In contrast, those who believed that the news about Hell discovered in Russia through a deep drill could convert unbelievers assumed, wrongly, that faith could be gained through such a ‘revelation’ received in front of the television or radio.
No cries were heard from the well, which had been drilled to a depth of approximately twelve kilometers (and not fourteen kilometers as some journalists claimed). And the well was not located in Siberia but somewhere on a peninsula near Finland. But for journalists, such details didn’t matter. Because once the great ‘discovery’ had been recorded, neo-Protestant media channels spread it, eager to convert the entire planet to their (pseudo)Gospel. So, according to them, the existence of Hell had been scientifically, empirically, irrefutably proven. What is significant is that there have been, and still are, many Christians who consider such truly fake news good apologetic material for converting those who do not believe. The Siberian well was often cited as an ‘argument’ in debates between religious believers and their agnostic or atheist opponents. At first glance, these apologists seem somewhat similar to the Italian intellectuals who attended Galileo Galilei’s lectures on Dante’s Hell. Both invoke empirical, physical, scientific details. Both speak about these aspects of the unseen world as if Hell were, indeed, under the earth’s crust on which we walk. Much like those interpreters of the Holy Bible—including saints like Isidore of Seville and Thomas Aquinas—who believed that Paradise, protected by a great wall of fire, was somewhere at the Equator, they speak of articles of Christian faith as if they were notions from textbooks on physics, geometry, and geography. Unfortunately, they are fundamentally wrong.
Firstly, no article of the Credo refers to tangible realities—such as those of our material, empirical, transient world. Neither God, nor angels (good or evil), nor the saints in heaven, nor the Immaculate Virgin Mary are directly accessible to us, fallen humans. If that were the case, we wouldn’t need the supernatural grace of faith. Moreover, the Savior Christ wouldn’t have left us the episode in the Holy Scripture about Thomas, called ‘the doubter.’ For he wanted to base his faith in God on direct knowledge of the Creator. Do you remember his words?
“Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).
And yet, although the Lord Jesus Christ granted him this rare privilege, He rebuked him. Then He added a brief word meant for all who would read or hear His Gospel until the end of the world. And this word underscores the irreplaceable value of faith:
“Blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed” (John 20:29).
Faith, therefore, implies not seeing. It is the fruit of a supernatural grace that, discreetly and profoundly, works on our hearts without needing ‘proofs’ like the one from the (fake) news about the Hell discovered beneath Russia. This seems to have been ignored by all those who desire such evidence to convert nonbelievers. Moreover, in another passage from the Holy Scripture, in the parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus, the patriarch Abraham makes the same point: if they do not believe what is transmitted to them through the sacred texts of Moses and the prophets, no one will believe even if someone rises from the dead (Luke 16:31). How many believed—and believe—in the resurrection of the Savior Christ from the dead? And those who do believe did not gain their faith because someone filmed and presented to them the most mysterious event in history. No. They believe because the supernatural grace of God guided them, enlightened them.
Dante, Galileo, and others like them, who discussed Hell, did so based and inspired by the already-existing supernatural faith in their souls. In contrast, those who believed that the news about Hell discovered in Russia through a deep drill could convert unbelievers assumed, wrongly, that faith could be gained through such a ‘revelation’ received in front of the television or radio. To these, we remind them that if faith were based on scientific—i.e., empirical, verifiable, tangible—data, it would no longer be possible. There would simply be no need for faith. Why believe in something you can see? In Paradise, we will no longer need faith. And here, on earth, we don’t believe in the existence of the sun or Greenland: we know they exist.
Supernatural religious faith is necessary precisely because it gives us spiritual access to realities beyond our physical world. This is why we must always remember what the Queen of the Universe, the Holy Virgin Mary, asked of us at Fatima: to pray for those who are at risk of ending up—because of their unrepented sins—in Dante’s and Galileo’s Hell. Of course, we can tell as many agnostics or atheists as possible about what the children of Fatima saw. That can be truly a good and meritorious deed. But we must never forget that, first and foremost, we must pray for them. Prayer—and especially the Holy Rosary—is the ultimate means for converting unbelievers, not sensational news stories. For only prayer can implore from God the supernatural graces necessary to convert hardened hearts.
Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us, who have recourse to you!
Latest from RTV — So, I saw the Mel Gibson/Joe Rogan interview… and I have some thoughts!
[i] Galileo Galilei, Două lecții despre infernul lui Dante (Two Lessons about Dante’s Inferno), Edition, translation, and notes by Smaranda Bratu-Elian, Forward by Horia-Roman Patapievici, Geometrical reconstructions by Tudor Elian, Bucharest, Humanitas Publishing House, 2021.
