They say that the Divine Comedy is I think, as you pointed out at
the beginning, I just want to restate it's really really important to our universal
history project because it integrates essentially everything that came before it. It brings in
the Greco Roman world, that brings in medieval cosmology and theology and science,
and the Old Jewish and Early Christian apocalyptic traditions and all of the Apocryphate brings
all of that stuff in. There are giants, there are I mean,
it's all there in the comedy. And what's more is that it doesn't invent
But it's probably the best example for modern readers of the idea that man is
a microcosm, that every human being is actually a cosmos. Dante's descent through
the Earth, that is, descent through the spheres, is a deeply personal
journey, and it's one that bridges perfectly, I think, the medieval and
modern worlds because it shows us how this vision of a cosmos, this medieval
model, is not merely just an external vision of things that will fall apart
as soon as you put it under a microscope or into it telescope or whatever.
It doesn't just adequately describe our experience of reality on a day to day
basis, but it is also a map to ourselves. This is Jonathan Pejel,
Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone, I am back here with
Richard Rowland for one more Universal History episode, and this week we are going
to talk about Dante's Comedy. And the reason why is because, as many
of you know, we are getting ready to embark on a long journey through
hell, up purgatory and into heaven. Richard and I love the comedy so
much, and so we've decided to do it as three classes for the Symbolic
World really going into it, and the classes will be longer than the ones
we've done before because we really want to take the time, both of us
to make our commentary on this wonderful text, how it is of this powerful
map of symbolism, and how much inside Dante seemed to have into reality.
And so so Richard is going to be our guide in this. He's going
to be maybe my Virgil. I don't know, I'll take it. I
mean you do have to have a guide, that's for sure, and even
Dante needed a guide. But the comedy is about as confusing as the afterlife
itself in certain places. There's just a lot of illusions that are that are
difficult. Sometimes it's a little difficult to cast your mind back into the frame
of why are things important to Dante that are not important to us anymore?
By the way, this is the right question to ask, almost no matter
what you're reading. I've been reading some other stuff in preparation for some other
Universal History videos that we're going to be doing in the future, and I
will just say, by the way, guys, Jonathan said, we're back
for one more Universal History, but it kind of sounded like you was saying,
this is the last one. No, no, not the last one
the stomach. Yeah, that's right, that's right. But I've been I've
been reading through a bunch of Celtic stuff. I promise we're still getting to
that symbolism of Ireland, but currently I'm stuck in Wales, so it's a
whole thing. But I've been reading through a lot of Celtic stuff lately,
and rereading stuff and kind of refreshing my memory a little bit and looking for
certain patterns as they occur and reoccur throughout Celtic literature. And one of the
one of the great questions to ask yourself whenever you're reading something, especially something
that feels so in a way like deeply foreign, like some of that really
old stuff, is why do they care about something? You know? The
things that they care about aren't the things that we care about in our world
today, at least that's how it seems on the surface. You get the
same kind of feeling reading something like the Iliad, Like, actually, the
whole premise of the Iliad, which is this, you know, Achilles decides
to go and sulk like, seems like to us it all just sort of
seems like he's being a big baby, Like why is he doing this?
And why is this like a reasonable thing for him to do? Is something
that you have to grapple with if you're going to take the poem seriously.
So anyway, all this to say, Dante has concerns and he has interests
and that are very different from ours today. If we were going to write
the comedy today, god forbid that, you know, it'd be very different
in these ways. So yeah, I'm really excited at getting into all of
this looking at it together. I thought what we could do for today would
be to kind of give an introduction to the comedy. And this is going
to be based a little bit on the introduction that I give when I teach.
When I teach the comedy, and then we can just kind of talk
about it, and obviously they'd be a little bit of repeat But the class,
as you mentioned, is going to be pretty long. We basically are
going to have five three to four hour classes, right, so if you
want to just sit and discuss the comedy with me and Jonathan for four hours,
I mean this is going to like bring some coffee and then maybe something
else, because it's going to be there's going to be some sessions and I'm
really really really excited about it. It might be it might be more than
anybody can handle, but I'm just really really excited about it. Of course,
if you get the course, then you have the videos so you can
always rewatch certain sections and yeah, but I'm really really excited about it.
So let me say a few words about Dante, who he is when he
lives. I'm not going to spend too much on this, too much time
on this kind of stuff. What I try to give my students when I
tease the comedy is just enough information that will come to all of the political
stuff in the comedy, and there is a lot of political stuff in the
comedy. People at least have some idea of like who the major players are
and what does this actually have to do about Dante's spiritual journey, which is
really what the comedy is about. Yeah, and it's important for people to
understand that the comedy itself, the way it's structured, it in some ways,
needs to have his personal story as part of it, because what Dante
is doing is linking his personal story with you know, the national story and
then ultimately the cosmic story. And that's actually how symbolism functions. He's showing
analogies between the different levels of reality. But for us sometimes the particular aspect
can be difficult because you're like, why is who are this? Who this
count of so and so? Like Elvis and the Ghibbelins, and what's all
this about? Yes, so you skip to the end a little bit of
what I wanted to say. But that's that's okay, that's great. Yeah,
that the way that all of this becomes personal, you know, this
is this is what's really important about the comedy. So, Dante Aligiuri,
He's born in twelve sixty five, so he lives at the end of the
thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. He's a Florentine poet. We
it's important to say he's Florentine because at this time the nation of Italy does
not exist. Actually, the nation of Italy is younger than the United States,
which is pretty pretty dangn young as nations go up till that time,
I don't know, something happened. Somebody unified Italy. All the trains ran
on time, I don't remember, but anyway, I'm sorry, yeah,
yeah, I'm not saying Massolini unified Italy, but anyway, it was a
whole thing Italian Italian politics and history. Actually, the last two hundred years
really interesting and very yeah, very spicy. But so he's a Florentine poet.
He lives in the second half of the thirteenth beginning of the fourteenth century,
and as a poet, he's primarily famous for his work called the Divine
Comedy. And the Divine Comedy is essentially what's a lot of things, but
really at his heart it is an apocalyptic vision. It has three parts.
The first one is called Inferno or hell. The second is called Purgatorial or
Purgatory, and the third one is Perrydic or Paradise. Now, Dante is
part of a movement, which we'll talk more about in the class. You
could even say he's the leading light of this movement that wrote poetry in the
vernacular at a time when everything important in Western Europe was still being written in
Latin. And this Dante very consciously in this ties himself to Virgil, the
Roman poet, who wrote his great Epic in Latin at a time when everything
which was the vernacular for Virgil, at a time when everything important in Europe
was being written in Greek. Right, So there's a there's kind of like
a anology between him and I think that for us, I think probably for
you as well. But I know for me, Dante is one of the
reasons why I wanted, you know that Matti and I wrote God's Dog as
a comic book or as a movie, Like we had this vision that in
some ways, these great moments in transition, there are these great moments in
kind of symbolic capture, recapturing. They happen in a way that tries to
inscribe it, you know, in the lowest possible form, you know,
as it's alluding to all these higher forms as well well. And what's really
interesting about this is that Dante's sort of invents Italian as he's doing this,
Like the dialect of Italian that he's using. I mean there's not there's not
a single Italian language at this point, right there are all these local dialects
that are more or less I mean, like Italian is is you know,
it's like bad Latin. Yeah, I just had some tubble read there those
friends, you know, yea French French is worse Latin. And then not
kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, actually, guys, Just so you
know, like one of the most fun things about hanging out with Jonathan is
that somebody will call him on the phone and it'll start speaking French and it's
just like, what is this? This is so yeah, it's it's it's
really it's it's it's really cool. I really as somebody who loves language but
mostly spend spends most of his time studying dead languages. Whenever I meet somebody
who like legitimately bilingual, and I know lots of people who are, but
people who can just like switch back and forth, you know, it's just
amazing. It's amazing. So anyway, it's very very fun to watch.
Okay, So Dante sort of invests the Italian language, is what I was
trying to say, And what I mean by this is that the dialect of
Italian that he uses is kind of a it's a it's a literary dialect.
He's pulling in pieces from Latin, he's pulling in pieces from his own Florentine
dialect. He's actually also pulling in other pieces from other parts of Italy,
and this goes a long way to sort of establishing the Italian language. And
there's nothing unusual about this, by the way. Obviously in English we have
Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Basically, the idea is that, you
know, if sometimes a defining literary work in your language, you know,
especially anything that was written right at that time when things were moving from the
medieval to the modern, right that little handover right there, that is when
that's when your your that's when you're great literary epics tended to have been written.
And then that in turn kind of defines your language in certain ways.
All Right, So Dante lives in the midst of an incredibly tumultuous political time.
There are basically, let's say, two primary political factions in the Italian
peninsula. There are the Guelfs and they support the papacy, and then there
are the Gibolians and I'm not even going to try to say those in Italian
and they support the Holy Roman Emperor. And what happens in Dante's lifetime is
that the Guelf party, which is pro papacy and which Dante is a member
of because his family is a member of it, after they drive the Gibolans
out of Florence, they split into two. For the parties, there are
the White Gelfs and the Black Guelfs, and essentially the White Gelves, which
is the party that Dante is going to end up belonging to. They want
more freedom from Rome, and the Black Gelves take a really hard line on
papal control. Now all of this, the reason this is happening is it's
all tied up with something called the investiture controversy, which basically has to do
with kind of the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope of Rome being basically rivals
in terms of who can appoint bishops, who can do you know, which
is what the controversy's name refers to. But who could do other things in
the Holy Roman Empire. And so one of the things that happens in the
Italian Peninsula is the Italian Peninsula. You know, all of these city states,
you know, Milan, Florence and so on, are part of the
Holy Roman Empire. But they're going to start pulling away from the Holy Roman
Empire over the course of you know, the next couple of centuries. And
that's all part of what's going on in Dante's time politically. And let us
just say that when I say that there was this was an incredibly tumultuous political
time, what I really mean is it's an incredibly stabby political time. You
can really see how, you know, these people's descendants eventually become like the
mafia, like it's it's it's it's an incredibly violent period, incredibly violent period.
Violent in a personal way. You say, human history has always been
violent, but nowadays we're violent from a distance, right, and so we
have the ability to kill large numbers of people from a distance without really getting
our hands dirty. This is more the kind of like invite somebody over to
dinner and then stab them in the back kind of violence, right, you
know. And so all this to say, we won't get too much into
this except to sort of explain who the major players are. So I think
for people don't need to understand the investiture controversy. I don't know if I've
talked about it a lot in my videos. It's very important in terms of
let's do it, yeah, in terms of understanding kind of the structure of
the world and how things lay themselves out and how is what's the difference between
authority and power and how these things function. Because one of the issues was
that, you know, the pope in theory is the one who crowns the
emperor, and this is something that you know, started with Charlemagne but also
started you know, is I think is also real at least ritually in the
Byzantine Empire. That is that the patriarch is the person who ritually will crown
the emperor. Now, in the West, this became a serious problem because
it seems like in the West there's a confusion between authority and power. And
this has to do with the fact that the pope is in many ways left
on his own and has to have an army and has to act almost in
some ways as often as a civil authority. And so because of that,
there's this weird confusion of what who has the power to do what? And
so the the Bishop of Rome, what he would do is use the fact
that he could crown the emperor to obviously try to get the emperor to do
what he wants. And then the emperor would use the fact that he has
a lot of people with weapons to be able to get the pope to do
what he wants. And so you have this tension that is not only in
the Holy Roman Emperor but Empire, but also ends up happening in France with
the King of France and these different characters where you all you have this tension
between what we could call spiritual authority and temporal power that it's not clear what
one is supposed to be and how it relates to the other person. This
is the this is the defining conflict of the Late Middle Ages. And when
I say it's actually not even correct to say the investiture controversy as though there
was only one, because it really happened in waves, right, So there
is a the investiture controversy that happens in like the twelfth century, but then
that continues to have these ripple effects all through especially German and Italian political life,
which is part of the reason that neither one of those areas even forms
a cohesive nation state until the nineteenth century. The Reformation goes back to this,
right, what do you think those German princes, you know who backed
all the reformers. Yeah, well, I mean you didn't even have to
be cynical about it, like you could just say that there's like, there's
already this precedent set right, there was always already this push pull like and
so what they sort of saw themselves doing is sort of continuing this let's continue
to neuter the power of the church, let's continue to elevate the state as
the right. But that's already the controversy. That controversy has already been going
on for hundreds of years before the Reformation. And so when you can look
at it, like if you take the Bible as an example to kind of
understand the relationship between the two in scripture, the way that God sets up
the covenant with Israel is that those that are the spiritual authority in the sense
that they hold the ritual power, and they are the ones who manage the
sacrifices and all that. They do not have land, they do not rule
over over over a land in Israel. And therefore their their function is to
be a spiritual authority. And that means that they have certain ways that they
can influence the world, but they're not meant to influence them directly towards mechanical
with mechanical causes. That they're not supposed to beat up people. You're not
supposed to fight, You're not supposed to do that. And in that way,
when that happens, then ultimately what you want is you want then the
temporal power to submit to that spiritual authority and then be in some ways the
arm of the guiding principles that are held by the priestly caste. And so
they they're the ones who enact the laws, They do the things. They
you know, they have to put people in prison, they do that.
And in the in the West, there there is that structure like it's there
implicitly right. So for example, when you hear about witch burnings, like
the church has never burned anybody in its entire life. What it always did
if it had a problem with someone it was it would judge them for their
spiritual reason and then would hand him over to the state for the state to
do the action. That's the usual relationship. But what happens in the West
is that you start having this problem where there's a confusion at first, I
think with the pope trying to act like a king. And when that happens,
like when there's this, when there's a confusion of levels. This is
the whole by the way, sons of God, daughters of women, thing
like that, when the authority, when the people stop try to take what's
from what's below in an in a legitimate way, then he creates a destabilizing
force and it leads to revolution ultimately. Yeah, anyway, that's the way
to think about it. Well, actually, I mean I think that this
is all really important obviously for Dante. It's the main thing. It's the
whole enchilada, and and Dante comes down eventually, he comes down on the
side of the Holy Roman Emperor in all of this. So he keeps,
oh, yeah, he's he's really looking for the Holy Roman Emperor to bust
into Italy and clean house. This is what he really wants, and this
is what he tries to profess side, and it sort of never happens.
And Andy, we'll get into all of this, but this is what Dante
really wants eventually, because what he sees, uh uh and and actually just
just just for fun, since this is universal history, Dante blames Constantine,
you know, but you know, which is kind of a meme these days.
But the reason that he blames Constantine is because there was a fraudulent document
that was forged by the papacy or by somebody in the West, called the
Donation of Constantine, and and it was used to support the papal claims of
of the pope as sort of that the ruler of the West over the the
Emperor Constantinople and the and the Orthodox Church and anyway, it's just a whole
thing. And but but I and I'm not trying to be polemic about this.
Everybody knows it was forged. The West figured out that it was forged
in the fourteenth century, so like everybody knew this document was forged, but
in Dante's time, they thought it was genuine. And in the Donation of
Constantine, you know, what the document basically said is that the West Empire,
the Western Empire, was left to the Pope upon Constantine's death, and
so the popes were using this document to support the claim not just against the
East but also against the Holy Roman emperors to say, actually, we're the
ones who should sort of be running the show. So on Constantine's death,
upon constantine fraud, well yeah, I mean it took him a little while
to figure it out. Again, to be fair like they it was it
was still like pre modern times when they figured out it was a forgery.
So but but at Dante's time, they still think it's genuine. And Dante
uses the donation of Constantine. It's something he talks about more than once in
the comedies We're going to see. He uses it to directly blame Constantine for
you gave all of this temporal power to the church, which has corrupted the
church. And so this is Dante's One of Dante's major themes is that when
the church holds large amounts of temporal power, that it that it corrupts what
the church is supposed to be, which is the bride of Christ. Right,
So Dante, Dante is, let me just be very clear, he's
a very faithful Roman Catholic. He's a faithful son of his church. But
he also as a faithful son of his church sees the way that it has
been corrupted by everything that's going on in Italy and in Germany and in that
area that's really that they used to call the Holy Roman Empire. So we'll
talk more about all of this stuff, but I do want to kind of
point out one of the reasons that it is important is because Dante is living
at a time when the world is falling apart. You cou'd say, the
medieval consensus is about to start breaking up in certain ways, and all of
this is kind of endemic in the political strike that's going on in Italy at
this time. And what Dante shows us is a way that you can take
this cosmology right, that you can take this model, what sees what was
called the medieval model, and integrate it into your life as a way of
sort of making sense of things when you see the world falling apart. And
I'll say some more about that in just a moment. Basically, after the
Black Gulps sees power in Italy, Dante is specifically in Florence. Dante is
exiled, and he's exiled and he's actually condemned to death in absentia by his
own city. And this is a death sentence that the city of Florence,
by the way, officially revoked in two thousand and eight, so relatively recently
they actually revoked the death, the death sentence on Dante, who was certainly
their most the most famous florent Team who's ever lived. Probably, but yeah,
finally, finally, finally, yes, yeah, right, exactly,
yeah, yeah, some kind of a stereotype there, sure. So while
he's in exile, Dante, who up to this point has been a successful
poet of love poetry and also a relatively unsuccessful politician, goes through a crisis.
And it's in this crisis, in this what he calls the midpoint of
his life, that he writes the Divine Comedy. So the Divine Comedy,
I should start out by saying, is a comedy, not because it's ha
ha funny, although there are some haha funny moments, and it especially in
Inferno, where obviously you would put all your jokes in Hell's there are no
really, there are no jokes in Paradise. So actually they do put all
the jokes in Hell. And I will just say the jokes. I mean,
this is like quality stuff people like if you were if you were hoping
to read the greatest work of Western literature, which I do believe the comedy
is in which demons fart out of their butts like trumpets. I mean,
sign up for this class we're going to have. They're gonna be butt trumpets,
like like people in the Middle Ages, like these are their only two
registers. Right, It's like, let's contemplate the mysteries of the divine trinity
or butt trumpets, and there's nothing, nothing in the middle. There's nothing
in the middle. So so yeah, there there are. There are some
jokes in here. It's mostly kind of body humor. But but a comedy
or comedia, right, means that it's a story that starts low and ends
high. So it starts out bad, but it ends happy. Right,
that's the and then there's the divine is the modifier to that, right,
that this is not just a comedy about some kind of earthly life, but
this is the divine comedy. So it's the comedy of this, the whole
story of redemption, the whole story of salvation as experienced by one man,
right, as experienced by one man. So the comedy has its roots in
kind of three sources. The first is the romantic poetry of the troubadours and
the courtly loved tradition, and this is where Beatrice comes in. Dante is
actually part of a whole new movement called up called the Sweet New Style,
which makes me feel like they're all wearing berets and smoking French cigarettes. But
anyway, you know, or there, or they're like hip hop artists or
something. I don't know, but u this is where Beatrice comes in.
So Beatrice is a very important figure for the comedy. I'll say a lot
more about her actually in the purgatorial class. We'll do a small introduction to
her in Inferno, but she really becomes important in Purgatorio and Paradisea. So
Beatrice is this girl that Dante meets when he's he's nine years old and she's
eight. And Dante claims that they only ever met twice. They might have
met more than twice, but they did. The point is they didn't meet
often. But Dante writes about the two times that they met, once when
he was nine and the other when he was eighteen, so nine years apart.
So they only ever meet twice. And actually one of the times that
they met in person like his conduct had been so bad with like other young
women in the city that she wouldn't even speak to him, and she wouldn't
even speak to him in the street. So when we say that it was
love at first sight, obviously we're not talking about boy meets girl, you
know, kind of a it's something a little different here. The way to
think about it is that Beatrice is sort of his great muse. She's the
impetus for the events that kick off the divine comedy. But their love was
never it was never mutual. There's nothing to indicate, for instance, that
Beatrice ever knew, reciprocated, or even knew about Dante's affection for her.
They both marry different people. She dies when she's twenty five. And as
we're going to talk about the more in the class, there's this element of
being unattainable is actually a key feature of the courtly loved tradition. So it's
actually it's actually like part of why it works. And what Dante is going
to do is take this courtly loved tradition, which is which is a weird
and almost non Christian part of the medieval tradition. It's like very well,
it's very problematic. I think it was actually declared heretical at some point.
Oh yeah, especially especially when it was when you get into the more like
the religion of love kind of thing, the stuff where basically you're worshiping Eros
as a god and whatnot. But Dante's going to take that tradition and integrate
it into the Great Christian Epic. He also does this with the Greco Roman
epic tradition, particularly Virgil's a Eneid. We already mentioned that the Eneid is
It's one of Dante's main touchstones. You could almost say it's one of his
main justifications for why he can tell a story in this way, because Virgil
already did it. And of course the Eneid, like the Odyssey, has
a descent into the underworld, and Dante will use elements of that descent,
Aeneas's descent into the underworld. He'll use elements of that in the comedy to
kind of tie all those things together, and then he'll just make other references
to Greco Roman mythology if you want to, if you want to get a
sense of how people in the Middle Ages freely made use of and references to
Greco Roman mythology in a way that freaks out, you know, like I
don't know homeschool parents, now you can. Yeah. The Comedy is is
really the best example that we have going. It's also such a counter example
to the way that people imagine what Christianity has always been. That's right,
this idea that Christianity was this this this this closed minded thing that they got
ridden of all the old stories that you know, they were just you know,
they they really Dante is the best example of universal history that you can
find in the sense that he really tells the story he had, the story
of his own people, and you know, going all the way back to
the to the Greeks, in a manner that he is completely conjoined with his
Christian Christian faith. So it's it's pretty stust and to the point that he
will I'll just scandalize people a little bit ahead of time, like he'll he'll
especially especially in the Comedy or in the Inferno, especially in the Inferno,
which is where most of these reference. You'll find most of these references because
in Hell you meet people from Greek and Roman like mythology and myth like you
meet people from the Illity, the Odyssey and Seven against Thieves, like you
meet those people in hell, right, So they're in hell why because they
blasphemed God. But if you go back and look at the story of this
guy who blasphemed God, it's he cursed Joe, he cursed Jupiter, right,
and so so it's it's it's yeah, it's it's just really it's really
interesting. So we'll talk a lot more about that and look at how and
why he integrates these things and why what he's doing is okay. But the
the other touchstone, So if you if you studied the comedy in college,
you were probably told about the Romantic poetry and the Greco Roman epics, but
you probably weren't told that there's a third touchstone, a third launching point for
the comedy, and that is the Judaeo Christian apocalyptic tradition. So in the
ancient world, in ancient Judaism, especially second double Judaism, and then and
then starting with the Book of Eenoch and then into Christianity, the most important
Christian apocalypse is of course the Apocalypse of Saint John. Like the Book of
Revelation, there is a tradition of a story, and the story always starts
in the middle of something really bad. Right, always starts in the middle
of something really bad. So your people are being persecuted, or you're in
exile or what. Right, Saint John is on the island of patmost the
Church of God is being persecuted, but he was in the spirit on the
Lord's Day, right, and then he has this vision and so then what
happens is you're given a vision of let's say, like the eschatological reality of
the cosmos. So that is to say, sometimes it's the afterlife, but
it's more than the afterlife, because I mean, for instance, the apocalypse
of Saint John doesn't really show you the afterlife per se. It kind of
shows you the way that everything wraps up and comes together. So it's the
eschatological vision of things, but it's I mean, the word apocalypse means the
pulling back of the curtain, right. Actually, if you've ever gone to
an Orthodox liturgy, all Orthodox liturgies are apocalyptic because of the moment when we
pull back the curtain and Christ is revealed. So one of the defining features
of the apocalypse to tradition, let's say, there are two defining features that
that almost every apocalypse has in common. There are variations on this, but
they're pretty it's pretty standard across the board. One of the things that is
done is that the person who is being shown the afterlife or being shown the
eschatological reality, has a guide. The guide is usually an archangel and some
later Christian apocalypse is The guide is also sometimes Saint Peter or the Virgin Mary.
Dante takes this tradition and turns it on its head a little bit because
he has his guide be a pagan poet, not just his pagan poet,
a pagan pre Christian poet. Yeah, but it's makes so much sense.
It makes so much sense because obviously this this guide is the one who him
through that which is not in the let's say, it's not contained in the
identity of Christianity. Right, Everything that is outside or below or ambiguous is
being brought about by Virgil. And then as soon as he gets the purgatory,
the purgatory is really the beginning of paradise. By the way, It's
hard for people to think that it's like because whoever then purgatory is gonna is
good at some point, gonna make it up the mountain. Yeah, well,
Virgil leaves at the end of Purgatory, but right before he gets into
the earthly paradise, which is which is pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah,
I mean that's the crazy thing, like Virgil leading you through hell. Okay,
that kind of makes sense to me. But then you get this idea
that Virgil is not not only is Virgil leading you through purgatory, but the
entrance to purgatory is guarded by Cato, who is a Roman philosopher who committed
suicide. So there's all kinds of crazy stuff here, guys, and I'm
really excited to talk about it. Yeah. And also like the fact that
even that even Virgil can hear the voice, you know, because there's this
succession of intermediaries that yes, that kind of invoke Virgil to come to Dante.
You know, it starts with the Virgin, and then there are different
saints and Beatrice, and then there's this really the beautiful image of kind of
divine procession, you know, kind of grays coming from above through the different
levels that can handle it up to the up to this encounter with with Virgil.
It's very very beautiful image of reality and very powerful. So that comes
down because basically Virgil is sent by Beatrice, and Beatrice has moved to send
Virgil by the Virgin Mary in Saint Lucy. Yeah, and this is thin
a little bit of a head ahead of ourselves. But let's say Saint Lucie
is very important. She's one of the She's one of Dante's heavenly patrons.
Sat Saint Lucy is who's actually one of my family saints. She's the saint,
she's the patron saint of blindness and blind people, but also the patron
saint of poets, or one of the patron saints of poets. So Dante
is a poet, but he is also struggling with a certain kind of blindness,
and there's a theme of blindness and the recovery of site. The strengthening
of sight is one of the main themes of the comedy. And so there's
this procession down from the Virgin Mary, Saint Lucy, Beatrice, who's also
a saint in the comedy, down to Virgil, who's then sent for Dante.
But then Dante. He proceeds down through Hell, up the mountain of
Purgatory. He gets up to the top of Purgatory, Virgil hands him off
to Beatrice. Beatrice that will later actually hand him off to Saint Bernard right
and right, because because there's like somewhere that even actually Beatrice can't take him
right. So now he's got to go. Now he's got it to rise
beyond even the idea of love as Dante understands love, and into the realm
of pure contemplations. So anyway, this is this is really cool stuff.
Actually, Paradisio's probably my favorite book of the comedy to go through because almost
nobody has read it. That's not the only reason, but almost nobody has
read it. People read Inferno usually in high school, and then they never
get farther than that. A few people might have read Purgatorio, but not
a lot of people have read Perediicio. I think because holiness is less interesting
to most people than wickedness is. Right, Like, there's a certain like
math in the Inferno that kind of makes sense to us. But then when
you when get to Parigiicio, people suddenly start getting very offended by the idea
that there are also levels in heaven, like there are also tears in heaven,
and that some people get more of God than other people. And by
the way, this is one of the key ideas of the comedy, is
that everybody gets as much God as they want. Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
this is one of the key ideas. Yeah, and this is I
mean, this is something you see, you know, taking up all the
way in di cs Lewis or even into a lot of Orthodox visions of the
River of Fire and all these ideas, which is, in some ways,
you are where you want to be. You're always where you want to be.
You're not you know, if you're in hell, it's because you actually
want to be there, and that's definitely the case for Dante's. Actually,
what Lewis says about Dante's version of hell is that it's locked from the inside,
right. Everybody, everybody that's in there is in there because they want
to be there, because they've denied God and really what it is. So
let's talk a little bit about each of the three books. So each of
the three books has thirty three cantos, and then and then there's and then
Inferno also has a prologue, so to make it a total of thirty four.
So that means there's one hundred canto's total. So canto is an Italian
word means like a song, but basically think of it like chapter divisions or
something. If that's helpful. And in Inferno, Dante begins a descent into
the Abyss on Good Friday, and this is after basically coming up a face
with his sin and also the kind of the sins of the Florentine and Italian
people that are allegorized is these three beasts. He can't get past them,
and he's lost in the dark wood, as he says, definitely know that
feeling, and so Virgil assent to guide him. But in order to save
him, in order to recover him, he's got to actually go through Hell
first. And this is a very deep Christian understanding that you always have to
go down to go up, and to you to you always have to descend
to us send. And so he goes down, it descends into ves on
Good Friday, following the path of the herowin of Hades, the heroin of
Hell, to finally emerge on Easter Morning out the other side of the world
literally. And the Inferno is really about confronting sin, right sin. Ultimately,
it's about confronting Dante's own sins. Right sin in the City of Man,
the way that the way that human sin, and there's a very particular
ordering of sin in the Inferno that we're going to talk about. But one
of the main ideas about sin in the Inferno is that sin erodes our personhood,
so that Dante's hell is full of people who have ceased to be people.
They are people who have chosen to identify so strongly with their sins that
they've essentially ceased to be human persons. And this is what we mean when
we say that it's locked from the inside, right, These people have effectively
become their sin. And this is the whole idea of You know, there
are all these gory, horrifying punishments in the Inferno, but none none of
the punishments are arbitrary. Every single one of the punishments in some way sort
of shows what the person with the person became all along and so and this
is a this is a feature of the of the This is a feature of
the the Christian apocalyptic tradition, this idea. But it's more than just let
the punishment fit the crime, right, It's more than that. What it
really is is the punishment is really just the sinner living with themselves, right,
and so so you can you can very clearly see what they became,
right or sometimes living with other people. If Hell is other people, I
mean some of the people in Hell, that's definitely being stuck with those people
until the day of judgment is a bad time. I want to ask you
just one question though, Like this is because you know, we we mentioned
that this is part of the Christian apocalypse tradition, the Jewish and Christian apocalypt
tradition, you know, so we have all these images, you know,
whether it's the book in it Enoch three, I guess is that the one
where he goes up first, it's in First Enox. Yeah, and First
Enoch you have this ascent. He goes up, he sees the processes of
the of the heavens. You see that in many texts. But you know,
where is there precedent for the descent into haities? I think you mentioned
thirdsdras well. He does see it, and he does see it. You
do see where the wicked are punished in Actually you see in First Enoch going
all the way back, you do see where the rebellious stars are and and
and uh. And actually the word that's also used in uh in Jude,
in Jude's epistle, that's also that's used in Enoch for the stars who abandoned
their right, the angels who abandoned their proper place to the stars they've been
the word is planet, by the way, a wandering star. Right,
that's a anyway, which is which is fun to think about because then you
think about the fact that the ancient like uh Romans and Greeks identified the planets
with the various gods, right who who are sort of like in the Eenolkian
tradition, are actually fallen angels. Anyway, It's that's all very fun and
interesting. We'll talk about that one of these days. So he sees,
so he sees the place where he sees the place where they're being punished,
and he also sees the place where the wicked are being punished. And by
the way, it's freaking like it's it's weird, like it's like he's describing
like gravity well or something like it's a really it's a really evocative description in
first Knox. So but yes, and in our last video I said third
As Dress that I was wrong. It's actually fourth Asdress or second Esdress because
those are the same book for various reasons. So you can see how one
bite confused these things. So in fourth Esdras or second aka seconds dress.
In some numberings, you have a very clear descent as Ezra is taken down
into the underworld. He's taken down into Shaol, and he's shown very clearly
the famous sinners and the ways that they are punished. Right, And I've
sort of I sort of situate the beginning of that particular tradition with that book.
And then there's something that gets riffed on, especially in the there's some
later Christian apocalypses that were very popular in desert areas, let's say, because
people who live in the desert seem to like extreme stuff. I don't know
what's going on with that, but it's one of those one of those things
is like, yeah, the most extreme forms of Christianity always came from people
who are living, you know, just like you know, in constant danger
of starvation and being killed by wild beasts and whatnot. But so there's the
apocalypse of some what's sometimes called the Apocalypse of Saint Paul or the Visiopouli.
But it's also really that Texas is part of like a whole cluster of similar
texts that are related to each other that were very popular starting in about the
second century. Ap so anyway, all of that to say, we actually
talked about one of those we talked about the the Zeopoli in the Baille class.
But it's also related to Dante. See it is all connected, all
connected, yeah, there. So what's important is to understand that this this
image of descent is there's a precedent for it. There's also the obviously your
president for it in in the in the apocrypha, the Gospel of Nicodemus,
like the apocrypha that shows Christ going down into the sending in the hades,
sending in the hades and kind of freeing the the people there. So I
have a big question for you because actually I don't know the answer to this,
like go for it. No, We often in orthodox thinking will say
there's a difference between shale and Gehena. Right, so it's like a difference
between the idea of the realm of the dead that does have some seem to
have some aspect of suffering of you know, of a lack of personhood like
the way we describe it. Then they're the image of the fire that comes
from the throne of Christ at the end of time. So one of the
impressions that I have when I read when I read Dante, was that that
all gets that all gets kind of joined together, like it's just all the
same. I don't know if you have that so sort of if Dante makes
it very clear throughout the comedy that everybody in his afterlife is still awaiting the
General Resurrection and the Last Judgment. So these people are still awaiting the General
Resurrection and the Last Judgment. And this actually comes up in particular because there's
some sense that may the suicides won't get their bodies back at the General Resurrection
because they've already rejected their body and so this kind of comes up because Dante
is like asking about, well, what happens to suicides at the resurrection if
they've already Yeah. So so everybody in Dante's version of Hell is awaiting the
General Resurrection and some other fate. So he still he still has that I
like especially important slash troubling when you're when you start talking about Limbo. Right,
so the people in Limbo are the righteous Pagans also unbaptized children and the
righteous Muslims, not just ancient right yeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah not that,
which which is a big deal that Dante is at all soft on Muhammad
by the way, Oh no, no, yeah, we're gonna see what
happens to him, and yeah, yeah, I think it. Salad is
salad in solid yeah, which who everybody really just like had a huge crush
on in the Middle Ages. He was a better he was like a better
knight than the Christian knights. He was more virtual, right, yeah,
very very honorable man by you know, at least, you know, according
to the standards of this time and the way that people in Western Europe thought
about him. That's a very interesting Actually, that's a hugely interesting study.
Somebody wants to do like a master's thesis or something, look at the ways
that the crusader's route about Semidin. But anyway, okay, so so you've
got these sort of like righteous pagans and these other categories of people, basically
people who were not baptized, people who didn't have an opportunity to be baptized,
et cetera. They're in limbo, which is the first circle of hell.
But it's pretty nice, like there's no torment. Yeah, their only
torment is that they don't have hope. And when we say hope, the
Christian virtue of hope is in It is not. I just we're going to
talk about the virtues in the class because there are certain things that you need
to understand to read people literature. I have a little list, it's almost
like a little catechism that we're going to go through. And one of the
things is, these are the seven medieval virtues, right, and here's the
deadly sins, and here's the stuff like this. You got to know these
things at some point. This was part of everybody's education, like religious,
academic, whatever, and then at some point people stop stop learning about this.
But the Christian virtue of hope is not a vague I hope things will
get better. It is a hope in the resurrection in particular. Actually,
Christians, we don't expect things to get better in this life, not really,
right, But the thing that we're looking forward to is in particular I
look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.
That is the Christian virtue of hope. So these people live in relative
ease. It's basically it's basically the same place where the righteous, or let's
say, where the virtuous are in virgils in Neiad, like when Inius goes
to the other world and he meets his ancestors and they're there and they they
get sort of like they've forgotten their earthly sufferings and things like that. Right,
So that's where they are, That's what Limbo is. But they don't
have any hope. That is, they have no hope for the resurrection.
So what does that mean? What are the long term implications for those people?
That's one of the things that we're going to talk about in the class.
And and I'll just say, like, obviously Dante is a particular person,
writing at a particular time and a member of a particular church. Not
all of Dante's theology is my theology. Obviously, I'm an orthodox Christian.
We're going to disagree on some things. We agree on more things, obviously.
But what I want to when I want to focus on, is what
is what does Dante think? What is Dante saying about the world. I
also think that there are some really interesting images that he uses. So he
says certain things and then he also alludes to other things by some of the
images, Like in Limbo, there's this is image of them going up a
little, like they go up a little, and then there's like they have
some light that comes from above, and I'm thinking, yeah, that's a
very interesting image that he's using right there in the at the Portal of Hell,
you know, as he there are also so many weird exceptions to even
Dante's own rules, you know, uh where where Dante is like and what
it really is is Dante's wrestling with things in the tradition that seem to be
incongruous and he's trying to put it all together. Yeah, so I'll just
like a little spoiler. You're gonna meet Trajan, who's a pre Christian Roman,
or it's not pre Christian, he persecuted Christians, right. In fact,
the emperor Trajan's daughter is a saint and he killed her because she was
a Christian. Right, so you're gonna meet him in Paradise. Yeah,
well because of that story, yes, don't tell people spoilt them. Yeah,
no, there's uh so anyway, there's there's a there's all. We'll
leave that one as a teaser. Obviously, people can just go look that
up, but you can't actually spoil something that's more than you know, a
thousand exactly. But the my point is that Dante is wrestling with incongruous things
in the tradition, and so sometimes and the important thing is for people to
understand is that Dante is not writing a manual that says the afterlife is exactly
like this. He was so successful and this often happens with It happened in
the English language with Milton as well, where where something is so artistically successful
that it just takes over the imaginations of everybody, right, and this causes
all kinds of weird things downstream, especially when it comes to purgatory, which
we'll talk about when we get there. Everything, almost everything that modern people
and here I'll say Orthodox Catholics everybody thinks about purgatory would have been completely unrecogni
to people in the Middle Ages. Yeah, and even Dante's version of purgatory
is like very innovative in certain respects. And it's because he's got a particular
purpose. He's not saying purgatory is actually like this. He's got a particular
purpose to what he's doing because he I mean he is he's actually making a
map of reality and of the process of transformation. But then also the way
that things lay themselves out in terms of a hierarchy of virtues. You know
and then ultimately as vice is, as their kind of as their flip side.
But that's so it's more about the ontological structure than it is about the
idea of that he's just accurately describing the afterlife, although he's obviously talking about
the afterlife. The way that he places beings at different levels, yeah,
more to help you understand this ontological hierarchy of being and the way that kind
of God manifests himself at different levels in reality. Mostly, what I mean,
by the way, when I say this, is that Dante's version of
Purgatory is the nicest one anybody ever came up with in the Middle Ages.
Previous versions of and I will read some excerpts are pretty r rated. They're
pretty horrifying and just really terrifying stuff. Actually, Dante's version of Purgatory is
very nice. It's very very kind of fluffy compared to not that, not
that it seems great either, by the way, like some of the some
of the things that people are dealing with, but also it is great because
everybody, so here's the thing, everybody in Hell wants to be there.
Also, everybody in Purgatory wants to be there, and so they're all happy
to be going through what they're going so that they can be purified from their
sins. But anyway, we'll talk about all of this, but I think
one of the things that I want to point out that we'll talk a lot
more about is the is the the different ways of thinking about sin that you
get between Inferno and Purgatorial. So, as you mentioned, there's Dante's giving
us a vision of the way the world lays itself out or the way that
reality is structured. But sin is sin is kind of like an anti reality,
and so it has its own hierarchy. There's there's this sort of a
hierarchy to sins in the way that they that they destroy or dement ontological hierarchies,
and so in Inferno, sins are that you can say that the defining
metaphor for sin throughout the entire comedy is that sin is weight. The worstest
sin is, the heavier a sin it is, the more it pulls you
down. Right, You don't want to go down, do you want to
go up? Right? So the heavier sin is, the worstest sin is
the more it pulls you down. Well, in Inferno, the heaviest sin
is treachery to your lord, right, And so at the very bottom of
hell you have the devil, and the devil is chewing on the heads of
three famous traders, right. The least worse sin for Dante is actually like
adultery. Now, I always like to ask people, like, so,
if you were like structuring hell, where would you put adultery? Obviously right
down at the very bottom, because hyper focused on these sources of sins in
our society, right, And it's actually because of the dominance of the courtly
loved tradition, by the way, So the idea that you would yeah,
anyway, So so Dante and the Dante arranges all of these other sins like
somewhere in the middle there. And basically there are two categories in Inferno.
The first category is is sins like animals. If you sin in this way,
you become more like an animal, right. And the second category is
sins like a demon. If you sin in these ways, because you're using
your rational self, you become more like a demon all the way down to
satan. Well, in Purgatorio, Dante does a totally different scheme. Sin
is the wait, but now he's just following the seven deadly sins. But
if you take a look at so there are only seven seven tiers to the
mountain of purgatory, whereas there are nine layers to hell. Right, But
as you wus send the mountain of purgatory, what you start to realize is
that the heavier sins are still like the more demonic one. So pridees at
the very bottom. It's the first tier of purgatory is because it's the first
thing you have to be purified from, and it's also the worst sin is
the sin that makes you the most like Lucifer. It's the sin that makes
you most like the devil. Right so so so he actually keeps the same
scheme in book places. But but you know you're you're you're encountering it in
two different orders, in two different ways. It's it's one of my favorite
things. And the big the big focus in Inferno is Dante has to confront
since So at first in Inferno, Dante the character feels really bad for all
the people and how and it keeps like fate swooning, like fainting because he
feels really bad for how they're suffering, and he's and eventually Virgil rebukes him.
We're gonna see this. Virgil rebukes him, and he makes a great
pun in Italian on the words pity and piety, which are the same word
in Latin. Right. In Virgil's Great Epic, the enead Aneus's dominant heroic
trait is his piatas, which is which you could say, is in it
in the Latin mind, is something like his right attitude towards and understanding of
his responsibilities towards the gods, towards his family, towards his people. So
he's frequently in English translations you'll easily see him referred to as pious Eneas pious
Aeneus, right. But that word pious can mean that, but it can
also mean but it also comes to have a connotation that we think of when
we think of pity or or or I mean, depictions of Christ, you
know, in the arms of his mother being taken down of a cross are
called a piata, right, And so it's it's it's all. It has
all those images contained within it. It's a really robust word. And Virgil
will say, if you had real pity, you would actually be glad that
these people are in hell. And the reason he says this right is he's
making, he's punning on this where he's saying, actually, if you had
the right, a rightly ordered relationship with the cosmos. So there's something wrong
in Dante's soul, and that's why he's here in this, in this dark
wood to begin with. There's something disordered in a soul where he can't at
where like he hasn't been able to turn away from sin, he hasn't able
to become a holy person. Right, And so so what Dante, what
Virgil is saying is that basically, if you really knew what sin was,
if you really knew what sin was, you'd be happy to see it punished.
This is a hard killed, a swallow from modern people. Right,
we'll talk about it when we get there. But then, so Infronto is
about rejecting, is about is, let's say, confronting our sin and seeing
it for what it really is and ultimately seeing ourselves for who we really are.
Purgatorio is about rejecting that sin and becoming purified. And there's this beautiful,
beautiful sense in as as Dante is as Dante's the sending amount of the
Purgatory. He has seven peas inscribed on his forehead. Like burned into his
forehead by an age and they're for Picatu, for sin, the word for
sin in Latin. And as he's ascending the mountain of Purgatory, they start
to fall away, and one of them falls away just like is like brushed
by an angel's wing, and it's just like it's just oh, it's so
beautiful. It's heartbreaking, you beautiful. And then Paradiso is about something which
is almost impossible for any of us to even get. I think it's even
a struggle for Dante. Like the final cantos of Paradisio are going to become
like increasingly difficult for us to understand because Dante is trying to wrestle with with
I think, a very real vision of of cosmic realities and of holiness.
And basically it's about Dante's sight being strengthened so that he can be prepared for
this ascent, so that he can finally achieve the vision of God. And
that's what parodisso is. But we got to go through hell to get there.
So just kind of wrap all this up, maybe say the divine comedy
is I think, as you pointed out at the beginning, I just want
to Restate is really really important to our universal history project because it integrates essentially
everything that came before it. It brings in the Greco Roman world, that
brings in medieval cosmology and theology and science, and the Old Jewish and early
Christian apocalyptic traditions, and all of the Apocryphate brings all of that stuff in.
There are giants, there are I mean, it's all there in the
comedy. And what's more is that it doesn't invent. But it's probably the
best example for modern readers of the idea that man is a microcosm, that
every human being is actually a cosmos. Dante's descent through the Earth, that
is, descent through the spheres, is a deeply personal journey, and it's
one that bridges perfectly, i think, the medieval and modern worlds because it
shows us how this vision of the cosmos, this medieval model, is not
merely just an external vision of things that will fall upon as soon as you
put it under a microscope or into a telescope or whatever, but that it's
actually something which it doesn't just adequately describe our experience of reality on a day
to day basis, but it is also a map to ourselves and to our
movement through reality, right, our struggle to become holy people. So I'm
very excited to be able to go through this with you and with the whole
symbolic world community. Yeah, this is going to be This is gonna be
great. I mean, I can't wait. And we're really going to be
uh can I say this. We're not gonna, we're not gonna hold back.
We're gonna we're gonna We're gonna take our time and really enjoy that.
You know, I've been now I'm diving back into it. I've been ready
in a few years and I just can't believe it. Like the first conto
is just I'm thinking we just take the whole class on the first like three
contos, Well, we have to get through eight in the first class.
So I mean the analogy that he's able to bring together, like these powerful
analogies of all that which is low in scripture, right, so like the
wilderness, the waters, the the animal aspect of it, like all these
images that you'll find for examples like Gregor Nissa or in in you know,
in the spiritual descriptions of what it what it means to be low as analogies
but also just as a like, as a story, as a story trope
of someone who's going through this through this is I mean, I can believe
it, Like all the lines that I was like underlining every word, Like
you can't underline every work because then what's the point of underlining. So I
can't wait to get into this. It's going to be wonderful. Yeah,
all right, So people site up to join the class. I think that
for people who wanted it, this is something people ask for the last time
in the bay Wolf class. There are like payment plans and things like that,
So we've done our best, you know, to make it accessible.
Unfortunately, to do something like this at the level that we're going to do
with that, we do have to, like you have to charge money because
they can take them so much time, so much time. But I promise
it'll be worth it. And like I said, we've done the best that
we can to make it accessible to everyone. Even if you can't join for
the life classes, if you buy the course, you'll have access to the
videos and the discussion boards in perpetuity. So there's there's absolutely no rush to
to like feel like you have to be there present for every single class.
But but sign up as soon as you can join us, and I'll see
you all in Hell, all right, everyone, And uh and then for
us, I think we'll see everybody after Pascas, so it'll be a weird
paradox. We'll see you now and we'll see you in the I. The
ideal way, Jonathan would be to start Inferno during Holy Week itself and then
finish by the by post whole thing. But but that's essentially impossible to do
for people whon't know. Orthodox Holy Week is like forty something hours of services.
Yeah, and it's just it would be impossible for us to to to
to be able to do it. But yeah, so it's gonna be a
little weird. But also I'll be I'll at least be in the mood to
be like, oh yeah, we totally we totally harrowed this place. Yeah
exactly. So don't worry, folks, We're out of We're out of there.
We're just this is just backstone. That's right, that's right, that's
right. All right, everyone, So we'll see you there. Looking forward
to it. Oh bye,