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[Editor’s
note: A point in the text of Guy Raffa’s contribution has elicited some debate
among the members of the board. The discussion ensued is perhaps best
encapsulated in the following comments penned by Christian Moevs.]
There
is passage in in Guy Raffa’s essay that reads as follows: "Homosexual
relations, like heterosexual ones, are not sinful in and of themselves for
Dante."
I
don't believe that his argument, or the terrace, will sustain that
conclusion. All that can be argued from
the terrace of Purgatory is that "homosexual attraction, like heterosexual
attraction, is not sinful in and of itself for Dante." Which is already a
lot, especially for his time (but also for ours). Given that Dante divides the
penitents in two groups with explicitly different attractions, one could
perhaps even argue, using terms from our time, that "the homosexual
orientation .... is not sinful in and of itself for Dante." That is
technically true of course also for the Catholic Church. Being attracted does
not itself constitute sin; what you do with it can.
We know nothing of actual actions committed
and repented by the penitents on this ledge, and any actions repented cease to
be obstacles to salvation. It may well
be -- in fact it is likely -- that if
these penitents had committed acts of sodomy, or of sex outside marriage,
without repenting of them, that they would be in Dante's Hell. What is at stake on the ledge, as Guy argues
up to that point, is lust --excessive, obsessive desire or attraction, the
underlying disposition to sexual sin of any kind. Dante makes no value
distinction here about the orientation of that excessive desire. Clearly same-sex attraction is not inherently
sinful for Dante, but it is not a sin for the Church either.
All
this is particularly relevant now, because essentially Dante's position (if one
considers the ledge of Purgatory together with the treatment of sodomites in
Hell) seems to be that he makes a distinction between same-sex desire and the
actions that can follow from it: the orientation and desire is blameless in
itself (and might even be innate), but to act on it damns you.
That
was the position of the Catholic Church until a few years ago, when Cardinal
Ratzinger, reflecting on the oddity of saying that homosexual desire is
perfectly blameless, but to act on that desire damns you eternally, changed the
Catechism to say -- as it now does -- that homosexual desire is itself an
objective disorder intrinsically oriented toward evil. Then it makes sense that to act on such a
desire would be sinful. And while even that position could be reconciled with
Dante's terrace of Lust, it certainly does not seem to be Dante's view.
It needs to be
mentioned that in the Inferno Dante categorizes homosexual acts (what Raffa calls
"homosexual relations") as worse than murder, as a form of malicious
violence against God. That was the canonical medieval view. Dante may have changed his view on things in Purgatory, but he need not
have, because of the sharp distinction in Catholic thought between acts and
inclinations. One should be clear that Purgatory corrects vices, not sins.
See Mark
Jordan's The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (U of Chicago P,
1998). |
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