Wednesday
This past Monday, when my Dante Discussion Group was comparing The Divine Comedy to Paradise Lost, I recalled a passage that applies to Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. Watching Satan make his way toward Eden, omniscient God tells his angels what will happen once Adam eats the forbidden fruit. “Die he or justice must,” he says sternly.
In other words, as hard as this is for some Republicans to grasp, justice requires accountability. Trump must face consequences for his behavior or justice dies.
Trump struck at the very foundations of our democracy when he sought to overturn the election and assume dictatorial powers. Adam, meanwhile, violates the foundational contract with God, attempting to take on god-like powers himself. Here’s what God has to say on the matter:
Man disobeying,
Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins
Against the high Supremacy of Heaven,
Affecting God-head…
What must he do to “expiate his treason”? God says there is only one answer:
To expiate his Treason hath naught left,
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He with his whole posterity must die,
Die he or Justice must…
Fortunately for humankind, there is a way out. God’s son will take on the sin himself, thereby giving humans a second chance. To achieve this second chance, however, humans must be genuinely repentant, as Adam and Eve prove to be. By contrast, it’s a point of pride with Trump never to say he’s sorry.
Following our Dante discussion, John Gatta, an Americanist, mentioned that he had been thinking about mobs in Hawthorne after reading my blog post on mob action in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” He mentioned the people who gather around Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale at the end of The Scarlet Letter.
Although Dimmesdale climbs the scaffold and confesses his sin, revealing a scarlet “A” that has somehow appeared on his chest, there are those in the audience that refuse to see it. John noted that we are seeing such denial amongst Trump’s defenders:
It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant’s. Neither, by their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any, the slightest connection, on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter.
Instead, these “highly respectable” witnesses (sarcasm alert) weave intricate theories that allow Dimmesdale to escape accountability. They say he must have just been speaking metaphorically, lumping himself in with all sinners. Surely he couldn’t have been actually admitting to adultery:
According to these highly respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying,—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels,—had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man’s own righteousness. After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind’s spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike.
This leads Hawthorne, as it should lead us, to reflect upon cultic loyalty:
Without disputing a truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale’s story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man’s friends—and especially a clergyman’s—will sometimes uphold his character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust.
Trump, who never confesses to any failing whatsoever, is of course no Dimmesdale. He is as far from being a holy soul as it’s possible to be, despite his holding up a Bible in front of a church. Nevertheless, as with Dimmesdale, his crimes are as clear as the mid-day sunshine. We have witnessed him pressuring election officials and state legislators to overturn electoral votes, and we saw him on television inciting a mob to attack the Capitol and pressure a Republican Congress and vice-president not to certify Biden’s victory.
If we were to compare him to a Scarlet Letter character, I nominate Chillingworth. Trump is as vindictive as Hester’s husband and Dimmesdale’s tormentor, although Trump’s grudges are more visceral and less guided by a malign intelligence.
Incidentally, there’s another use for Chillingworth in the impeachment proceedings. I see that Trump’s legal team is accusing Democrats of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a phrase first used against Democrats opposing George W. Bush and then against Republicans opposing first Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton. I think some of the accusations are more legitimate than others, but for a literary description of the phenomenon, check out Hester’s cuckolded husband.
Chillingworth is so obsessed with his grievance against Dimmesdale that he makes it his lifelong missing to torture him. Now that’s derangement! This also means, however, that his fate becomes linked with the preacher’s, so that Dimmesdale denies Chillingworth his reason for being when he publicly confesses:
Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place, almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale’s death, in the appearance and demeanor of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy—all his vital and intellectual force—seemed at once to desert him; insomuch that he positively withered up, shriveled away, and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge; and when, by its completest triumph and consummation, that evil principle was left with no further material to support it, when, in short, there was no more Devil’s work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the unhumanized mortal to betake himself whither his Master would find him tasks enough, and pay him his wages duly.
To keep from being a Chillingworth, focus on policy differences and justice, not on humiliation and destruction. Regardless of one’s beliefs, one is not deranged as long as one keeps the eyes on the higher principles at stake.
In other words, strive for the stance God assumes with Adam and don’t let ego gratification drive your opposition.