Months ago, I listened to a priest take a unique and fascinating approach to the Good Samaritan story in Luke’s Gospel. While most homilies, I imagine, focus on the charitable actions of the Samaritan toward the assaulted stranger on the roadside and emphasize corporal works of mercy and compassion for one’s neighbor (which are, of course, legitimate and important themes), this one concentrated not on the Samaritan or the battered man but the priest and the Levite who first passed him over.
The homilist speculated that the priest and the Levite might have rationalized passing by the battered stranger by appealing to Mosaic law and its stipulations pertaining to ritual purity. Because Jews would be made ritually impure by coming into contact with a dead body, the priest and the Levite had a convenient excuse to avoid aiding a man in need.
Of course, Christ, explaining the parable, condemns them and lauds instead the Samaritan who was “moved with compassion at the sight” of the stranger, cares for him, and provides him shelter in an inn at his own expense. Christ orders us to “go and do likewise.”
The two priestly characters justify passing by the man, whereas the Good Samaritan helps him out of compassion and neighborly love.
This analysis of the priest and the Levite’s motivations immediately reminded me of a story in Dante’s Inferno.
While following Virgil through the many “ditches” of the eighth circle of hell—i.e., Malebolge, home of the fraudulent—Dante encounters the soul of Guido da Montefeltro, a former Italian military commander whose deeds “were not those of a lion, but a fox.” After Guido left the life of conquest and had become a Franciscan friar, Pope Boniface VIII approached Guido for military advice, seeking to seize a family of nobles who had opposed his election to the papacy and took refuge in a fortress in Palestrina.
According to Dante, when Guido hesitated to offer what he knew would be fraudulent counsel, Boniface promised to absolve him of the sin in advance. Guido conceded and advised the pontiff to promise the nobles amnesty but then revoke his word as soon as they relieved themselves of their fortifications.
Sane people are logical, but purely logical people are insane.
Guido recalls his own soul arriving at the gates of hell upon his death. There, King Minos sentences the damned to their respective punishments by wrapping his tail around them a number of times equal to the layer of the inferno that will be their prison for eternity. When St. Francis of Assisi comes down from heaven to retrieve Guido, he is halted by a demon who says
He must come down among my servitors,
Because he gave the fraudulent advice
From which time forth I have been at his hair;For who repents not cannot be absolved,
Nor can one both repent and will at one,
Because of the contradiction which consents not.
Austrian artist Joseph Anton Koch provides us with a vivid depiction of the scene: The winged and tailed demon grasps the friar’s cincture with one hand and waves his other finger at the saint. The demon looks at Guido and taunts him. In a sinister quib, he says, “Thou didst not think that I was a logician!” Minos then wraps his tail around Guido eight times and sends him down to Malebolge to be tortured among his fellow fraudulent sinners forever.
Thus, Guido, using reason to justify sin, makes the same mistake as did the priest and Levite in the Good Samaritan parable. He attempts to rationalize evil deeds by twisting the rules established by Christ and his Church. In his case, these were rules about penance and forgiveness. Only when he arrives in hell does he discover a terrifying truth—that the devil is, in fact, a logician, and one far more cunning than he is. In his rationalizing, Guido made a crucial mistake. He assumed one could be absolved of a sin prior to committing that sin. He forgot what seems in hindsight obvious: to be absolved requires contrition. To be contrite and to consciously intend to act against God’s love is a contradiction. Guido thought he could outsmart God. He ended up outsmarted by the devil.
Guido as well as the priest and the Levite of the parable are all, in a sense, madmen. The madman, of course, per G.K. Chesterton, “is not the man who has lost his reason” but “the man who has lost everything but his reason.” In other words, sane people are logical, but purely logical people are insane. Insanity is “reason used without root, reason in the void.”
“The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad,” Chesterton continues. “He begins to think at the wrong end.”
Reason and logic are not at all bad things. In fact, by creating us as “rational animals,” God gave us reason as part of our nature. The proper use of reason, therefore, is part of our natural end. Reason, thus, is not only part of who we are but who we are supposed to be. God gave us reason, and he expects us to use it. But he does not expect us to use it alone. He expects us to use it in conjunction with other things: those “proper first principles” mentioned by Chesterton.
Aristotle, in his Posterior Analytics, described first principles as non-demonstrable fundamental truths. This means they cannot be proven by a deductive argument but instead serve as starting points for deduction. They can be rationalized from but not rationalized to. Some set of first principles must be assumed prior to the act of reasoning or else reason is groundless.
And the madman, as Chesterton describes him, is devoid of any first principles. He is busy building a house on a cloud. He has no solid foundation, and everything he uses his reason to construct quickly comes crashing down. He has “an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense.”
Tradition, doctrine, divine revelation, and even common sense can all be said to be first principles, grounding reason in something other than itself. And not only must reason be properly grounded. It must be properly aimed. It must be directed toward the truth, the objective truth, which exists outside of ourselves. It must be directed toward God, who is Truth.
“When reason fails, the devil helps!”
The groundless and aimless logician—the madman or the maniac—really sets himself as the beginning and end—the alpha and the omega—of his reason. His reason builds off of his own assumptions and is directed toward his own gratification. In effect, he replaces God with himself, and that’s exactly what the devil wants.
Perhaps there is no better depiction of the logician-maniac in literature than in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The novel’s main character, Raskolnikov, is a poor law student in the slums of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg who murders an old pawnbroker with an axe. Afterward (which is really the vast majority of the story), he wonders why he did it and how his act of violence could possibly be justified.
Before I started reading Crime and Punishment during Lent last year, a friend of mine compared the novel to a “schizophrenic fever dream.” I now believe that to be an appropriate description. The grimy, impoverished, and shadowy world Dostoevsky describes is merely the background to a story that essentially takes place inside the character’s mind—a mind that desires to be so coldly rational, it slips into insanity.
As he plots his crime, Raskolnikov feels it is his choice, justified because the pawnbroker is a miser, takes advantage of impoverished students like himself, and beats her young niece. Yet, as he starts to carry out his plan, he is overcome by a sense that he is being dragged into committing the crime by some external force like the “cogs of a machine.” When his plan doesn’t work exactly as intended and he is forced to improvise, he thinks to himself, “When reason fails, the devil helps!” One can only rationalize so far. Sooner or later, nonrational forces kick in. In Raskolnikov’s case, these forces are not courage or sacrificial love but envy and pride.
Raskolnikov does not just murder the pawnbroker but her poor and innocent niece as well. He steals some valuables, but he never uses them to elevate himself or his family out of poverty. Instead, he buries his loot under a stone in a courtyard in the city. And, as he is being pursued by an investigator, he finds himself caught in a battle between self-hatred and self-justification. He contemplates suicide but decides against it. He compares himself to Napoleon and Alexander the Great, monumental movers of history whom he believes must have had to cast aside moral constraints in order to actualize such high potential. He keeps trying to rationalize his crime yet, in turn, he becomes more irrational. Finally, he turns himself in and is shipped off to a prison camp in Siberia. Only when he is there does he once and for all admit to himself what he did was wrong. Only then, in prison, does he become truly free.
Near the novel’s end, Raskolnikov has a dream. In it, Europe is overtaken by a disease that drives all men mad. Dostoevsky writes,
But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. . . . All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite.
This was a warning against ideology and reason detached from love. Eerily, we know it is a warning Dostoevsky’s own people failed to heed in 1917 when the communists took Russia and the bloody reign of the Soviet Union began. Millions were slaughtered as sacrifices to utopian abstractions of “pure reason.” Logic failed. The devil helped. Evil ruled.
But man is not necessarily determined to fall into this trap. With the help of grace, we can use our reason for better things. We do not have to be like the priest or the Levite who passed by the battered man on the roadside. Nor do we have to be like Guido da Montefeltro or Raskolnikov before he finally gave way to repentance. We can instead approach life like the Samaritan: “moved with compassion,” driven by love.
Yes, the devil is a logician, and a cunning one at that. We may not be able to outsmart him, but we can—and we must—outlove him.