Several friends have recently asked for prayers as mothers, friends, even distant acquaintances are seriously ill or lie on their deathbeds. News comes, too, for those of us with memories of storied moments in sports that the great Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz (undefeated in 1980 and a national championship) has entered hospice care. We talk a great deal these days about the loss of the “Christian anthropology,” which is to say the deeper meaning of being human in this world. But one reason for that loss, surely, is that we’ve also lost the main part of the story, the truth that there’s an afterlife, in the next world. And that, therefore, what we do has meaning here and eternal consequences.
The recent prayer requests happened to coincide, for me, with seeing, by chance, on an overladen shelf, Seamus Heaney’s lively translation of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. And pulling it down for yet another re-reading. It’s where Aeneas enters the underworld and learns things about souls in the afterlife and the future of Rome.
I’ve loved Virgil since I first read him at fifteen, and when I discovered Dante a few years later, it was easy to appreciate their deep natural affinity. Dante is probably the only poet whose portrayal of the afterlife surpasses Virgil’s. But that’s because the “Christian anthropology” tells a larger story about life after death than even the best of pagan speculations (e.g., Plato and Cicero).
St. Augustine, too, loved the Aeneid and felt guilty, as a Christian, about an attachment to a pagan poem. But he was, maybe, over-scrupulous. The phrase anima naturaliter christiana (“a naturally Christian soul”) was early applied to Virgil. That was just one of many reasons why Dante (in the Divine Comedy) could take Virgil as his guide through Hell and Purgatory (though, out of respect for Virgil’s paganism, Dante has him depart before Paradise).
In fact, before Dante and Virgil enter the underworld, Dante wants to beg off. He tells Virgil that it’s understandable why St. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, went to Heaven and came back. As St. Paul himself had said:
I know someone in Christ who, fourteen years ago (whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows), was caught up to the third heaven. And I know that this. . . .heard ineffable things, which no one may utter. (2 Corinthians 12:2-4)
And Aeneas, says Dante, was worthy to go there, too, since his travels (at least in Virgil’s telling) led to the founding of Rome, which was to become the capital of an Empire and seat of the Catholic Church.
Yet Dante, understandably, sputters:
But I? To travel there? Who grants that?
I’m not Aeneas, nor am I Paul.
For that, neither I nor any other thinks me worthy. (Baxter trans.)
Virgil explains: this is willed in Heaven, and a whole series of saints – including the woman Dante knew as Beatrice on earth – has set it all in motion.
And as other indications suggest in that greatest of Christian poems by the greatest of Christian poets, this is a journey that we all must make. Worthiness or unworthiness is not the main point. How we live here in the brief time allotted us has a deep historical significance and an eternal destiny – for some, as even Virgil’s pagan vision of the underworld made clear, eternal punishments, for others perpetual joy.
Indeed, the phrase anima naturaliter christiana, which was said especially of Virgil because of his leanings, even as a pagan, towards Christian truths, was used even more broadly in the early Church.
I only discovered this recently, but it was the early Christian theologian Tertullian who coined the phrase – and applied it universally, in the sense that all souls are, in a way, naturally Christian. Because they are created by God and, therefore, are created for Him, whether they recognize it or not. Tertullian is also the author of the peevish, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” His scorning of pagan learning as having little to do with faith. But he saw through his own irritation to a deeper truth about the soul.
It’s not easy to imagine what the afterlife will be. St. John says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (2 Corinthians 3-2) But what little we surmise goes well beyond the vague notions we’ve come to have about being “with God,” as you hear these days at almost every funeral.
Because that’s not what we hear from the mouth of Jesus Himself, and elsewhere in Scripture. He speaks of sheep and goats, everlasting fire, various other things that cannot be ignored. Msgr. Charles Pope of the Washington Archdiocese recently wrote a good book, The Hell There Is, which lays out Jesus’ words on the subject. He wasn’t being a scaremonger, merely a truth-teller. Naturally, after a lecture he gave on the book, a woman catechized in the church of the warm-and-fuzzy Jesus rebuked him: “That is not the Jesus I know.”
Which is precisely the problem, and widespread.
George Orwell, a non-believer, mocked the Christian vision of Heaven as a “choir practice in a jeweler’s shop.” There’s Scriptural precedent for some of that. And maybe the joke, in the end, was at Orwell’s expense for thinking that gold and silver and jewels and music – divine creations all – are beneath the dignity of a modern skeptic.
In any event, there’s much available to us in Scripture, Tradition, Catholic culture, even the great pre-modern pagans to reflect on as we see people around us on the threshold of eternal life and prepare ourselves for that singular day when we pass from this world to the next.
Mors certa, hora incerta (“Death is certain, the hour uncertain”). So there’s no time like the present.
