Are Most of Us Going to Hell? Is Don Giovanni Already There?

J. D. Vance has said that Kamala Harris "can go to Hell" for her failure to investigate the killing of 13 U.S. military service people during the evacuation from Afghanistan in August of 2021.  When he was asked whether he should apologize for using such language, he said that he would not apologize for using "a colloquial phrase" to express his moral disgust with Harris.  Of course, he is right that most of us today use the words "go to Hell" as a "colloquial" expression of our emotional disgust with someone.  

This suggests that we have forgotten that for most of Christian history, orthodox Christians spoke of "going to Hell" as a literally true Christian doctrine--that most human beings after they die will go to Hell where they will be eternally tormented by God as punishment for their wickedness.  As I have indicated in my recent posts on Vance and his association with Catholic Integralism, Vance professes to be a traditionalist Catholic who believes in the truth of Christian orthodoxy, who also believes that the identity of America as a Christian nation depends on enforcing belief in that Christian orthodoxy.  

For the Catholic Integralists, the highest end of man is to avoid eternal torment in Hell and enjoy eternal beatitude in Heaven.  And achieving that end requires a Catholic theocracy: the temporal power of the state must serve the spiritual power of the Catholic Church, the only true Church that can lead human beings to eternal salvation and away from eternal punishment.  But as I have argued previously, the Catholic Integralists don't really believe this, because they are still liberals who accept the liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration.

Moreover, people like Vance and the Catholic Integralists--and most Christians generally today--believe that the truth of Christian orthodoxy has been divinely revealed by the Holy Spirit through scripture and tradition.  But that belief is denied by the fact of religious pluralism--by the fact that devout Christians cannot reach agreement on fundamental Christian doctrines such as the doctrine of Hell as eternal torment for most human beings.  This confirms Locke's claim that "everyone is orthodox to himself," and for that reason we need to secure the religious liberty and toleration that will allow a free debate over religious doctrines without any coercive enforcement of one church's orthodoxy over another's.

Last year, the Gallup polling organization reported that the proportion of Americans professing to believe in God, Heaven, and Hell has declined over the past 24 years.  In 2001, 90% believed in God, 83% believed in Heaven, and 71% believed in Hell.  In 2023, that had gone down to 74% (God), 67% (Heaven), and 59% (Hell).  In some other countries, the percentages are lower.  In Great Britain, for example, it's 49% for God, 41% for Heaven, and 26% for Hell.  Hell is always less popular than Heaven.  Nevertheless, the international surveys report that in a few countries--like Egypt and Morocco--almost 100% of people report believing in Hell.

Over the years, I have written many posts on the evolutionary history of Heaven and Hell.  And in the last four hundred years of that evolutionary history, particularly in Europe and North America, there has been a notable decline in belief in the Christian orthodox doctrine of Hell as the place for the eternal torment of most human beings.

DID DON GIOVANNI GO TO HELL?

Recently, I had to think more about this when my wife and I attended performances of Verdi's La Traviata and Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Santa Fe Opera.  Don Giovanni was a legendary libertine who was reputed to have seduced (or raped) over 2,000 women.  The Italian libretto for Mozart's opera, written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, is based on this old story.

At the beginning of the opera, in seventeenth-century Seville, we see the Don struggling with Donna Anna, who is resisting his sexual assault.  Donna Anna's father, the Commendatore, comes out of his palace, and he challenges Don Giovanni with a sword.  At first, the Don is reluctant to fight with an old man, but finally he draws his sword and easily kills him.  Leporello, the Don's servant, is horrified by what he has seen.  The Don and Leporello leave together.  

Meanwhile, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, her betrothed, come out of the palace and are shocked by the dead body of the Commendatore.  Together, they sing about their "oath to the gods . . . to avenge that blood."  That sets the recurrent theme in the opera of "vengeance" as indicated by the many appearances of the Italian word vendetta in the libretto.  Every woman who is assaulted or betrayed by Don Giovanni seeks vengeance against him.  And as they warn other women about his predatory ways, the Don fails in all his attempts at new conquests because he cannot escape his bad reputation.

Near the end of the opera, the Don and Leporello are walking through a graveyard with monuments and statues, including one of the Commendatore.  The Commendatore's marble statue speaks: "You will cease laughing before dawn!"  Mozart uses three trombones here for the first time in the opera.  In the eighteenth century, trombones were used mainly for religious music and for supernatural scenes in operas.  This sudden entrance of trombones in what is a comic opera must have awed Mozart's audiences.

Don Giovanni is surprised, and he asks Leporello to read the inscription on the statue: "Here I await vengeance [vendetta] on the wicked man who brought me to my death."  Leporello is frightened.  But the Don is amused.  He invites the statue to come to dinner.  The statue agrees.

Later, Don Giovanni is having a grand party in the banquet-hall of his palace.  The statue arrives and enters the room.  He invites the Don to have dinner with him.  The Don agrees.  He gives his hand to the statue as his pledge.  The statue's hand is freezing cold.  He orders the Don:  "Repent, change your life, it is your last moment!"  Giovanni refuses to repent.

Roaring flames begin to surround Giovanni, and demon voices are heard from below: "All is as nothing compared to your crimes! Come!  Worse is in store for your!"

Giovanni cries: "Who tears my spirit?  Who shakes my innards?  What twisting, alas, what frenzy!  What hell.  What terror."

With the demon voices screaming, Giovanni cries "Ah!" as he is enveloped by flames and sinks to hell.

A few minutes later, all of the main characters appear in the room.  Leporello explains what happened: "right over there the devil swallowed him up."  Don Ottavio says: "we all have been avenged by heaven."  The opera ends with all singing the "very ancient song"--"And the death of wicked men is always just like their life."

Don Giovanni has always been one of the most popular of all operas.  And some opera critics have said that it is the greatest of all operas.  And yet many people have found the end of the opera with the Don's descent into Hell unsatisfying.  This ending just does not feel right.

                     Don Giovanni, the Commendatore Scene, from the Movie Amadeus

Or perhaps it does not feel right only for modern secular audiences and opera directors who have no understanding of Mozart's Catholic Christian conception of Hell as the place where evil men like Don Giovanni will be eternally tormented for their sins.  

But that's not a good answer, because the religious language in Don Giovanni sounds more like a vaguely pagan polytheistic view of the Underworld rather than a Christian view of Hell.  The characters invoke "the gods" without any reference to the God of the Bible or to Jesus.  In explaining what has happened to the Don, they say that he has gone to be with "Proserpina and Pluto"--the ancient Roman gods of the Underworld.  This is very strange for people supposedly living in the Catholic Spanish world of 17th century Seville!

Furthermore, whenever the characters appeal to a "just heaven" to punish Giovanni, they seem to be projecting their own personal vendetta onto "heaven."  For example, Donna Elvira tells Giovanni: "A just heaven willed that I would find you, in order to accomplish its own vendetta and mine."

What I see here is confirmation of Judge Morris Hoffman's claim that evolution has built our brains to punish cheaters.  Our brains incline us to three kinds of punishment.  As first-party punishment, most human beings punish themselves for cheating through conscience and guilt.  As second-party punishment, wrongdoers are punished by retaliation and revenge (delayed retaliation) from their victims.  As third-party punishment, we punish wrongdoers for harming others with retribution.

It's clear to me that Don Giovanni has no moral conscience or sense of guilt, and so he doesn't punish himself for his wrongdoing.  He's a psychopath or what I have called a "moral stranger"--someone who does not feel the moral sentiments that most of us feel.

Nevertheless, Giovanni is punished by the second-party retaliation and revenge coming from his victims and by the third-party retribution coming from those who observed his wrongdoing.  If he really was sent to Hell by the gods of a "just heaven," that would be a supernatural form of third-party punishment.

Stephen Barlow--the Director of the Santa Fe Opera's production of Don Giovanni--disagrees with my claim that Giovanni has no conscience, and he even designed his production of the opera to show that Giovanni's guilty conscience drove him to kill himself at the end, and this self-inflicted punishment takes the place of his being thrown into Hell.

Barlow's idea was to alter the staging of Don Giovanni to make the story similar to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Dorian Gray is a young man in Victorian England whose beauty is admired by both men and women.  When an artist paints a portrait of Dorian, he realizes that while he will always be beautiful in the painting, he will lose his beauty as he ages.  So, he wishes that the face in the portrait would age, while he remains young and beautiful.  His wish is fulfilled.  He devotes his life to beauty and sensuous pleasures, and he experiments with every vice, even murder.  Reflecting the increasing degradation of his soul over the years, his portrait becomes ever more hideously ugly, while he still looks beautiful.

Struggling with his guilt, he decides that he must destroy the only evidence of his vicious conduct--the portrait.  He takes a knife and stabs the picture.  Doing that, he actually stabs himself in the heart and dies.  The next day, when people find his body, they see a withered and ugly corpse, while the portrait beside him is young and beautiful again.

To mimic this story, Barlow staged his Don Giovanni in Santa Fe as set in Victorian England.  At the opening of the opera, the audience sees a young and beautiful Giovanni having his portrait painted.  Then, at the end of the opera, the statue of the Commendatore is replaced by a portrait of the Commendatore, who looks like an aged and ugly Giovanni.  The Commendatore steps out of the portrait to challenge Giovanni.  Refusing to repent, Giovanni rushes toward the painting and stabs it with a knife.  But then Giovanni falls back and collapses.  He has actually stabbed himself and dies.  His guilty conscience has driven him to kill himself.

I do not see any evidence in the music or the libretto of Don Giovanni to justify Barlow's claim that Giovanni is punished and finally killed by his own guilty conscience.  The Don as depicted in this opera acts like a psychopathic libertine who has no conscience, whose punishment comes not from himself but from those provoked by his wrongdoing into a vendetta of retaliation and retribution.

I suspect, however, that many people in the Santa Fe audience found Barlow's clever alteration of the opera's ending more satisfying than Mozart's staging of the Don's descent into the eternal torment of Hell.  This is because in recent centuries, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, belief in the Christian doctrine of Hell as a place of eternal torment has been in decline, particularly in Europe and North America.

In my next post, I will say more about this cultural evolutionary history of the symbolic reality of Hell, so that increasingly many people today, even devout Christians, can no longer believe in that traditional doctrine of Hell.