Faith vs. Reason: Reformed Inferno
Dante’s Inferno, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment demonstrate the changing relationship between religious faith and human reason in the west between the 13th and 18th centuries. The dramatic differences between the text’s and the later historical events’ dealings with faith and reason demonstrate a stark change from utter reliance on canonized religious ideals to a focus on reason, even reason of the lay class.
The Inferno exalts faith and condemns reason wherever it breaks with faith/tradition. It espouses the ethic of a pre-Reformation world in which the clerical moral ideal was the only licit moral ideal. Lust was merely impotence, but violence was tantamount to tyranny. Traitors were the worst of all sinners. This moral vision seems likely to forgive or underplay the lustful crimes of many popes and clerics while condemning breaks with the mother church as the worst of all actions: a fact that effects to keep the clergy the religious power-wielders and the laity the religious yes-men. Dante’s audience was not to question this vision but to accept it and move on. In fact, those who try to reason their way out of the church’s teachings or to practice another faith are relegated to the circle of heretics. Reason, then, is the responsibility of the clergy, and the laity ought to leave it alone.
The Reformation marked a major breakthrough for reason in the field of religion. When Martin Luther nailed up his 95 Theses in 1517, a wave on intellectual freedom within Christianity swelled. Luther questioned the Church’s teachings on indulgences, pluralism, and clerical authority over scripture. He made his own German translation of the Bible, which could be circulated by the tens of thousands thanks to Gutenberg’s printing press. Thus, laity could read scripture on their own for the first time. Zwingli challenged the doctrine of transubstantiation, arguing that the Eucharist is merely a symbol of the blood and body of Jesus. New, Protestant sects arise to challenge Church teachings. The Anabaptists, for instance, challenged infant baptism and questioned monogamy’s being the only licit type of marriage. The laity were finally free to express their own religious opinions. Reason overrode tradition.
Faith lost even more authority to reason in the public sphere during the Enlightenment. Denis Diderot summed up the Enlightenment by saying that all beliefs had to be questioned without regard to the feelings of anyone. This ideology marks a stark contrast from the unquestioning faith of Dante. Now, even religious views could be questioned openly and without regard to who would be offended. Philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant openly—albeit very carefully—questioned faith. Hume’s posthumous Discourse on Natural Religion led his readers to say that he had some strong atheistic tendencies: a fact very new to public writing. Thanks to Francis Bacon and René Descartes, respectively, inductive and deductive reasoning became key aspects of proving theories, religious or otherwise. Only what could be proved from reason made for a legitimate theory according to these thinkers.
Thus, juxtaposing The Inferno, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment demonstrates a clear change in the relationship between religious faith and human reason in the west between the 13th and 18th centuries. Reason challenged faith: Christian practitioners sought rational, internal reform, and religious dissenters could finally express their opinions publically.