Gambling with Gambling – The Catholic Thing

Ever since I started teaching the Divine Comedy years ago, I’ve been on the lookout for lacunae. Just when I think I’ve found one, it turns out Dante has covered it with incomparable sagesse.

Take gamblers. Why don’t we find them in Hell? Well, it depends on where we look. 

There’s no specific infernal circle set aside for gamblers. That’s because they’re scattered throughout. And that, in turn, is because their true sin doesn’t lie in the wager, but in what prompts it, what feeds it, and what stems from it.

Descending into the fourth circle, Dante and Virgil catch sight of the greedy and the prodigal pushing huge boulders in opposite directions around a circle of icy sleet. Each time they run into each other, the greedy shout to the prodigal, “Perché tieni? (Why do you hoard?),” and the prodigal to the greedy, Perché burli? (“Why do you squander?)” (Canto 7) Gamblers are found in both groups, for they can’t imagine anyone not betting big when there’s so much in the jackpot, just as they can’t imagine anyone placing money anywhere but on the table. They hoard money from their families and squander it on slot machines.

More importantly, gamblers inhabit the various bolge (“folds”) of the eighth circle reserved for fraudulence. Of particular interest is the fourth bolgia containing sorcerers, diviners, and anyone who attempted to predict the future. With an ingenious use of the contrapasso (the “counter-step”), the Florentine poet depicts the soothsayers with their heads twisted 180 degrees and walking backwards perché ‘l veder dinanzi era lor tolto (“because seeing ahead was taken from them”). (Canto 20) 

The scene is so pitiful that Dante the poet pauses to address the reader directly, saying, “May God so let you, reader, gather fruit (prender frutto) from what you read.” (Canto 20)

The abundant fruit to be plucked from Dante’s lines has never been more valuable, in every sense of the word. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been busy lately, making it easier for gamblers to bet on everything under the sun, such as which party will take control of Congress next year and who will win the war in Ukraine. 

The dollar figures across prediction market platforms are bound to exceed more than $240 billion this year, a staggering increase from $64 billion last year. At that pace, the industry could easily reach one trillion by the end of the decade.

Like Dante and Virgil, until recently I have been happy to pass the soothsayers by in silence until I understood why Dante the poet interrupts his narrative to remind us how egregious the sins of the fourth bolgia are. He knows that no sphere of human activity is immune from soothsaying madness when so much money is involved, including my 9-year-old’s travel-ball team. Apparently, even Little League Baseball is fair game for big bets.

All of this made me revisit the official Catholic position that gambling, in itself, is not “contrary to justice.” (CCC 2413) Upon reflection, such teaching makes perfect sense insofar as it highlights the gravity of other things that cause, accompany, and result from it. 

The Catechism emphasizes that games of chance become sinful “when they deprive someone of what is necessary to provide for his needs and those of others,” or when one becomes enslaved to gambling, or when one cheats and deceives to win at gambling. (cf. 2413) Studies show that the latter two make the former all the more probable. 

Who can resist upping the ante when an anonymous trader walks away with more than $400,000 after placing a $34,000 bet that dictator Nicolás Maduro will be removed from Venezuela? 

More disturbingly, why was no one willing to track down the identity of that trader once it came light that the bet was placed just hours before U.S. forces actually captured Maduro? Similarly, two Israelis – both with insider information – bagged copious sums after waging that Israel would strike Iran just hours before it actually did. 

The threat prediction markets now present to national security plunges us into the deepest circle of Dante’s Hell in which treason and treachery are punished.

We are lightyears away from grandmothers getting together on Thursday to play bingo in the church basement to support the parish school. We are in an entirely different universe from the friendly office pool during March Madness to purchase a new coffee machine. We live in an age when someone I’ve never met will use AI to place a big bet on my 9-year-old son’s regional baseball championship.

As shocking as this is, it only takes a cursory reading of the Inferno to realize that man, left to his own devices, is just as likely to regress as to progress. Whether you are day trading, dabbling in DraftKings, or deploying your retirement savings in the prediction markets, you are running the risk of having your head twisted around 180 degrees in the afterlife. 

Pointing to Amphiaraus, one of the Seven Against Thebes who used the gift of prophecy to foresee that an attack on the fabled citadel would end disastrously for everyone involved (which it did), Virgil notes how “he’s made a chest out of his shoulders; and since he wanted in this way to see ahead, he looks behind and walks a backward path.” (Canto 20) 

Banning prediction markets last week, Minnesota became the first state to acknowledge that betting on anything and everything under the sun amounts to turning your head 180 degrees and walking backwards. As the anonymous better on Nicolás Maduro’s abduction shows, it also opens up a shortcut to the lowest circle of Hell insofar as it can reveal State secrets and effectively amount to treason.

Dante has every base covered in the Comedy. No one rivals him in warning how a seemingly neutral act – an act the Catechism rightly characterizes as not in itself “contrary to justice” – can easily capitalize on our concupiscence and land us in the lowest circles of Hell.