Many readers wonder why Dante reports that Brutus is one of the three people in the very deepest part of The Inferno. Why was Brutus, a comparative nobody in history, sent to share that most awful of eternal agonies with Judas and Mohammed, two of the most well-known enemies of The Church?
Brutus led the group of assassins who killed Caesar in the Senate. But, several treasonous people killed various Roman emperors. How did Brutus earn the greatest of all eternal punishments?
God programs and downloads each one of us. He programmed Caesar, and downloaded him into Rome. Caesar was like a super-farmer, sending huge plows into pagan soil to make it ready for cultivation. He ploughed up Gaul, enslaving and killing several million people. In the process, he utterly eviscerated the local religions and their often murderous practices.
Rome, and most notably Caesar, had made Spain, France, and Northern Italy ready to receive the word of Christ. Catholic Fundamentalists today see Caesar as God’s unwitting seedbed preparer. His land-clearing projects let the seed of Christian faith take root and grow for millennia to come.
After a short stint in Rome, Caesar planned his next conquest. He intended to attack Rome’s enemies to the East of Turkey and Syria, and brutally pacify the peoples there as he had the Gauls. When that job was done, Caesar planned to march his triumphant army (what other kind of army would Caesar have had?) back home over the top of the Black Sea, and plow through Germany before returning to Italy.
The region from the Indus to the Baltic would have been made as ready to receive Christianity as had been North Africa, Palestine, Spain, and Gaul.
The army was already marching East for the great operation. Caesar had some unfinished business in the city. He planned to leave Rome on March 20, 44 B.C. and catch up to the troops moving East.
Brutus arranged for Caesar’s murder on the Ides, March 15 of that same year. The treachery of Brutus was the horrible crime that kept Caesar from preparing the mid-east for God and His Church. Brutus kept millions of souls for generations to come from being saved.
From what Dante tells us about Brutus’s eternal fate, he’s getting what he deserves. He will continue to do so.
