Reading Dante's Inferno on September 11, 2001

Good morning. Let me set the scene scarcely more than 24 hours ago. The day at Elon began around the Fonville fountain. Sun shining. Blue skies. Football team and coaches gathered. A marching band coming across the quad. Americana in pure form. We would soon learn the gruesome, surrealistic news. Out of the serene skies -- two-hijacked aircraft would annihilate the World Trade Towers. Another plane would crash into the Pentagon. Smoke spewing forth. Fire, blood, and suffering. Everywhere the darkness of debris, adding blindness to pain. This generation's Pearl Harbor. I went to meet my 10:30 class called "Dante's Journey." My students were already watching the news, already in the room were tears and grief, worry and disbelief. Ironically, this was the day we were to begin Dante's great poem -- the Divine Comedy. This was the day we were to enter Hell with Dante. Here is how the first cantica begins: "At the midpoint of the journey of our life, I awoke to find myself in a dark wood from which there was no direct way out." And so Dante's journey begins -- his journey through hell -- to learn the many ways we violate one another, to experience the many faces of evil. I said to my students: Today, we are in the dark wood. Today, we are at the gateway to Hell. There it is on the screen. The Manhattan skyline, its twin towers collapsed; clouds of smoke muffling screams of horror. The sky blackened with the pain, not of hurricane or flood, but the pain that humans consciously cause to other humans. As Dante begins his journey, he must face three beasts. First, the leopard of disordered appetites. Second, the lion of bestial behavior where we trample the good of intellect underfoot. Third, the lean and hungry wolf representing the worst form of evil -- when the highest capacities of humans are put to the worst of uses. Cold, calculating intelligence in service of cruelty and the diminution of life. Slavery. Holocaust. Racism. Genocide. And, in smaller but no less deathly scope, terrorist attack. Yesterday, on September the 11th, 2001, we glimpsed this face of evil. Cold, calculating, cruel. Corporate evil. Systematic evil. Evil inhabited by twisted ideologies. A saint in our time has said that if you give a person a gun, that person may killed dozens. But if you give a person an ideology, that person will willingly kill millions. Yes, and go to sleep in the unshakable belief that he or she has kept the faith, stood up for the good and glorified God in the action. The sins of the leopard come from disordered appetites -- as when drinking to excess causes tragedy. The sins of the lion arise when we trample the good of intellect underfoot. Perhaps when we face acts of mindless vandalism. The sins of the wolf arise when we utilize intellect and loving devotion -- the highest human capacities -- in service of death, darkness and cold. Anti-life, anti-light, anti-warmth. Are the seeds of such evil in us? Yes, and we are most often blind to it. We descend to this circle of hell as we become dogmatic about our country, our religion, our way of life. We become infected by this evil as we reduce complex matters to slogans and then exult in "being right." We become infected by this evil when we close our eyes to systematic injustice at home or in our foreign policy. We become infected by this evil when we cry out for revenge and coldly say: whatever it takes! In a famous Zen story, a samurai warrior comes up to a little monk and says: Teach me about heaven and hell. "Teach you?" the little monk replies, "why you are a dirty, smelly, poor excuse for a samurai. Even your sword is rusty!" Insulted, the samurai, flush with anger, draws his sword and is about to cleave this insolent monk in two. A split second before he strikes, the monk says: "That's hell." The samurai has a moment of insight. He realizes that this monk has gone to the very door of death to teach him. He fills with gratitude, his body relaxes and he sheaths his sword. At that precise moment, the monk says: "That's heaven." There is a lesson here. Day by day, moment by moment, I can create hell or heaven. And I have a choice, if I am awake and alert -- in what I say and do this day, will I choose to create hell or choose to create heaven? And the larger lesson is this -- one truth we humans should have learned by now. The simple truth is this: hate is never overcome by hate. Strange as it seems to so-called realists of any age: hate is only overcome by love. Only overcome by love. Why do some of our brothers and sisters so hate us that they will give their lives to obliterate two symbols of our power? How can they fail to heed the cries of our people? we say. How can we fail to heed the cries of their people? they say. We have mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. They have mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. And this is how we act? Immense, immeasurable sadness. "We have one moon, clear and unclouded," says the poet Ikkyu, "And we are lost in the darkness of the world." Having entered the gates of hell what will we do? Create more hell? Or be a presence for peace and the hard work of self-reflection, repentance, wisdom and compassion? Dante passes through hell and will soon enter the spiral path back to the earthly paradise. Here are the final lines of Dante's passage through hell. "He first," Dante says of his guide, Virgil, "and I following; till my straining sense glimpsed the heavens through a round hole, by this glimpse of the heavens we climbed, by this glimpse of a better way, we here in this place climb. We are companioned too. And together we will, as the last line of the Inferno puts it, "come forth, to look once more upon the stars." Yes, we are companioned too. And together we will, "come forth, to look once more upon the stars." May our journey lead us -- as Dante's did -- from dark wood to White Rose, from our potential for violence and ignorance and cruelty to our potential for living a larger life and following a higher way. In all this, may we, who companion one another, be moved by love, by the great love that overcomes hate, by, in Dante's words, "the love that moves the sun and other stars." And let us say: Amen. John G. Sullivan Elon University September 12, 2001