There will not be a test at the end. I'm tempted, but no test. This is, I have four and a half hours over three weeks to more or less explain the universe, because that's what Dante does. He's encyclopedic in his knowledge, and he's an expert poet and storyteller, and you put all that together, and you can't do it just this important half.
Hours of four and a half years or four and a half lifetimes, probably, but we'll do what we can. I'm going to give you some background on Dante, some biography, some background on how one would, needs to go about interpreting Dante's literature, background on the divine comedy itself, and then we'll start the inferno, which is the first part of the three part work of the divine comedy. We might not finish the inferno. Maybe I'll purposely not finish it, so you'll come back next week.
But I hope to get through most of it. Maybe we'll finish. The next week, the bulk should be dedicated to the purgatory o, and then the third week to the paradiso. And then when I go home tonight, I'll kick myself for all that I left out.
And I'll do that three weeks in a row, but that's how it is at school as well. OK, Dante lived from 1265 to 1321. I tell my students these are actually important dates. The 1265 date ends up being important, and because of the date that the poem is set.
And I'll explain that in a minute. But this is one date I make them memorize the 1265. The 1321 not so important. The 1265 is.
There he is. Fairly I want to picture his Dante with the divine comedy. Florence here to his lap. This is hell, purgatory o, and the paradiso would be surrounding him.
So his life work and his beloved hometown there. Let's see if I can work this, correctly. Whoops, let's get to two. He was born in Florence, died in Ravenna.
Ravenna has his bones. Florence would like to have him back. It's the greatest son who was exiled, who they exiled, in 1302, much of their future shame. So there's a tomb for him in Florence, and they're waiting, I guess.
Just very briefly, what we know about Dante comes from Dante's own writings in the divine comedy tells us much about himself because he's the main character. But since it's a narrative poem, you can't be sure whether or not he's always telling the truth. Then he wrote another poem called Vita Nova, which has biographical information. Again, scholars can't be sure whether or not it's just a story in part that he's telling.
And then he had some early biographers. And of course, there are documents, legal documents. He met Beatrice Portinari, Beatrice, when he was nine, and fell in love with her. So he was quite precocious.
This was the great love of his life. And we don't know really how many times he even met. He tells us, I think, of two times that they met after this. She was destined to marry someone else, and she was destined to marry someone else.
And it wasn't going to happen. It wasn't that important, either, because she represents for Dante as for other medievals, the ideal woman, a woman that can be loved from afar and purely, very chivalric. He married in Stegemato, Nati, 483, Beatrice, had her own husband. She died young, which greatly affected Dante.
And shortly after his death, her death, he wrote the Vitanova and felt quite guilty for being unfaithful to her in his heart. So even though he might have only spoken with her twice or thrice in his life. Hi, I'm with the Autobike Grapple, Vitanova. I elected prior of Florence in 1300.
This was the highest political position Florence held up for two months. There were six priors. It shows his political involvement. There's a lot of politics in the Divine Comedy.
And I'm not going to address that. It's very difficult to follow. And it's less universal than other issues, such as philosophical and theological issues. Since Rome, in 1301 to meet with the Pope, this was for political reasons exiled while he was gone in early 1302 on corruption charges.
And what he was exiled on becomes important, because in his inferno, there's a circle dedicated to the crime that he was charged with. And so his reaction to those criminals or sinners is, turns out, being important. I live in various cities and cities until his death in Ravenna in 1321. He lived with rich people.
Do you have a question? Well, he's from a moderately well-to-do middle-class family, married into a banking family, which is interesting, because bankers don't fare too well in the Divine Comedy. But he was well enough known that in Italy, he didn't. He was exiled, and there was great spiritual and psychological pain.
He never went back to Florence. He was part of the plot at one point to go back and take back the city. But he didn't go through with it. But he was well-known enough to live comfortably in his exile.
He might have gone to Paris. He might have left. Italy scholars aren't completely sure his whereabouts. There was no NSA event would be tracking him.
Dante's universe, this ends up being very important as well. It is largely the medieval universe, the geocentric universe. I'm going to point out a few things. Here's the Earth.
This is hell was actually here. It's upside down, conical shape, cavern, in effect. Directly opposite it. And it's in the southern hemisphere.
It's called the hemisphere of water. I'm sorry, in the northern hemisphere of the hemisphere of land. The southern hemisphere has the purgatory, which is a mountain, directly opposite. And it is capped with the earthly paradise or Eden.
It is directly opposite Jerusalem, Christ's crucifixion here. Followed or surrounded by sphere of air, then sphere of fire. So we get the earth, air, water, and fire, all the four elements here. Then we have the various spheres of the moon and the planets and the sun, which were considered to be literal spheres that were solid.
So when Dante gets to paradise, when he starts flying through the heavens at the speed of light, he wonders why he's bumping into things. Then we get to the very top, we get the Imperium, which is the place of God. So God here in the heavens, the furthest heavens, is as far away from earth as you can get. In fact, the furthest point from God in the universe then is the very center of the earth and the person that belongs there, the angelic person that belongs there, Satan.
And that's where we will find him. He's at the very furthest point from God as possible. So that's a quick tour of the medieval universe. Dante inherited from the Greeks, of course.
And I think his innovation is the placement of purgatory, which is important allegorically. Did Dante really believe purgatory was there? Well, he had never been there, didn't see it. It's just a product of his imagination.
The great chain of being, I'm going to go through this very quickly, this Dante inherits you from medieval thought. God's at the top, you're being the angels of pure spirits. The order of the angels here from the highest to the lowest, poor just angel angels at the bottom, is the order that you encounter the angels in Dante's paradise. So each one has an assignment in the spheres.
So Dante's world and the divine comedy is highly structured and highly ordered. And the disorder you find will be in the Inferno. The Inferno is chaos ordered. There's chaos in the midst of order.
So it's a brilliant way of looking at hell. Corporal beings, beings with material bodies, man, animals, plants, and minerals. So animal, vegetable, mineral, what is it? So this is the hierarchy.
And if you're at the top, man, he has everything that the others have below him. So the animals have what the others have below. So man has a spirit in the world. But he also has appetite and intelligence.
He has life, growth, and reproduction, and material existence. Animals have everything but the spirit and the will. So Dante, when he's building his universe, this is all part of his way of looking at the world. Not just his way.
A lot of background. OK. Man, soul, this is important because this is how Dante orders the Inferno, according to this principle. The intellect seeks the truth.
It can't help but seek the truth. The will follows the good. It can't help but follow the good. So even when people commit heinous crimes, their will is following the good.
It's a misidentified good or disordered good, but it's following the good. It can't help it. Emotions, the emotion seeks pleasure and avoids pain. And here, the senses receive material images.
So that's how one knows and then can choose. Inferno will be ordered in the opposite direction. So those at the top of hell, who are the least guilty, but in hell nevertheless, follow the put their motions at the top. They were guided by their emotions.
The second realm, more or less, are those who have corrupted wills. And the third have either corrupted intellects or they sought to corrupt the intellect. And these are the most grievous sins. So that fraud, which is at the bottom, is worse than murder, which is higher up in hell for Dante.
So when we get to that, I'll address that further, I think. So it doesn't really seem to be right, but according to Dante's scheme, it makes perfect sense. What happens? The divine comedy itself, when I transferred from PowerPoint to what's this called?
keynote, I lost all my italics. So La Comadea should be italicized. Propose that these are guests days, we don't know for sure. I didn't write it past that.
He's not see us loose. He kept writing years and years after he died. There's a new book I see us loose. It comes out every year.
But La Comadea, while in exile. So if you hadn't been exiled, we might not have this. So we called it the comedy. That was the name of it.
It became known as divine comedy later, but it's the comedy. There's not that much funny stuff in it. So you don't want to be deceived there. There's a little bit of humor in the inferno.
So there's irony in the inferno. You don't find irony in. Well, there's actually some irony in parody, so irony of surprise, but the people aren't ironic. They don't have ironic attitudes.
There's irony in the inferno. So there's a little bit of humor, but comedian means it's got a happy ending. And it's written in the vernacular, the language of that ordinary person could understand. That was Italian.
So if you could write in Latin, you wrote other things in Latin, but this he chose to write in the vernacular. That coupled with the happy ending, because it goes to heaven, makes it a comedy. It has three canticles. We might call books.
Inferno Purgatoric adiso, 100 cantos. The first one has 34. And the other two, 33. Now, the three is the most important number in Dante.
There are a lot of threes. Things are built on threes. The first canto, if you take it as a prologue to the entire work, then you get 33 cantos with the inferno, 33 purgatory, and 33, 34. So there's a 33, 33, 33.
But Dante also likes to turn the three into a 10. So each of the sections inferno purgatory, so each one has nine major sections plus one extra one that doesn't quite fit, so it's both nine and 10. So the iconity is both 99, 33 threes. Parts or cantos plus that one extra prologue.
So it's also a multiple of 10. So he likes to do these. He likes to square the circle, or circle the square, whichever it is. Square the circle.
It has 14,000, 33, hene decosyllabic lines. Anyone know what hene decosyllabic means? That's alive and syllable lines. He does some cheating in counting of syllables, as all poets do, but he's very orderly that way.
Terrence le Rima, that's the rhyme scheme in the show. You got a minute, but he has a special rhyme scheme. The work is in tersets. So all the stands are three lines, and then each canto into the single extra line, which turns out, I think, to be important.
11 times 3 hene decosyllabic lines times three lines per tersets gives us that number 33 again, which is the number of cantos. Now people say, was that just the plan that? Well, we don't know, but it's too much of it to think that it's not planned. Yes.
In terms of syllables, are you talking about the entire? Yes. So now the rhyme scheme and the metrical scheme, you can call it that. Generally speaking, cant translate into another language.
Dorothy Sayers did the rhyme scheme, which is, I'll show it here, I'll show it here, I'll show it in an ABA, DC, DC, et cetera, et cetera, that means the first and third lines always rhyme, and in the middle line rhymes with the first line of the next stanza. And he does that throughout the canto than he has the extra line. Dorothy Sayers does that in her translation in English. And I believe she attempts, I think, pentameter, which is an English metrical scheme.
The problem is that she has to make too many changes. So her translation has a lot of weaknesses to it, but she has great notes. So I would take her book and read the notes and read them on this translation. But she has excellent notes in the written vernacular.
Dorothy Sayers, she wrote the Lord Peter Wimsi series. So she was part of that, the English mystery writers that skilled Chester Simmons in it. And now it was the ones dedicated just to the mysteries. Just to the mysteries.
Oh well, black with red. Can't quite see this. But in the original, as Turstits, you can see it. Finally, iPad.
The lines are ending, Vita, Osura, Samarita. That's the first Turstit. Dendora, Forte, Paura, Morte. So we have Vita and Iita arriving in Courra.
Courra rhymes with Dora and Paura. And then Forte is running with Morte and Sorite. So the Vi can tell that Vi is going to be the next line. So that's the Turstit.
But if you just picked it up and read the first four lines, you get Vita, Osura, Samarita, Dora. You think he's writing in quatrains. And in fact, the last line of each canto since it would make the last Turstit a quatrain. So he takes the quatrain and merges it with the quatrain.
And he does that for 100 cantos. Now, I tell my students don't try this at home. This is for professional poets. You might harm yourself.
You know, when you're exiled, what else are you going to do? Dante is a poet. It's easy to get stuck on the theology. There's theology.
There's philosophy. There's astronomy. There's meteorology. There's geography.
There's domestic geometry. That's all of medieval knowledge. You find bits and pieces of it in the Dora and comedy. So it's easy to get stuck on that and forget that it's a narrative poem.
It has poetic elements. I've shown you the rhyme. And one of the remarkable things that Dante is the sheer number of similes that he uses. There are hundreds of similes.
It's hard to turn the page without bumping into a simile. And you can't really read that very well either, because of the red. But I'll mention a couple of them. At the beginning, this one's the first one.
This might be an end of canton when it might be. I don't know if it's one in between. But he has come out of the dark woods. The dark wood of sin is the allegory.
And he doesn't know. He got there anyway. He looks back at the dark woods. He really should be doing that.
And he says, just as a swimmer, still with panting breath, now safe upon the shore, out of the deep, might turn for one last look at the dangerous waters. So a swimmer who almost drowned, barely makes it the shore, then looks back. Why are you doing that? So I, although my mind was turned to flee the dark woods, turned around to gaze once more upon the past that never let a living soul escape.
That was the dark woods. We don't know exactly what he means by the never let a living soul escape. But he's comparing himself, leaving the woods, as someone who almost drowns. OK?
So it raises a lot of questions. Like, why would you just keep going and get away as far from it as possible? Well, it turns out we find out right after this, when he tries to escape, since we find out that he's not detached from all of his sins, since they'll impede him. So looking back at the ocean, if someone looking back, probably in fear of the thing that almost killed him.
And for Dante, he's looking back at the dark woods of his sin, looking back at the thing that almost killed him. But he's not ready to let it go completely. He still wants to look at it a little bit. The other, no, this is Canto II.
The flower image, which I like, he, Virgil, his guy through hell meets him. And says, I'm going to take you on a trip through hell. Dante says, what the hell? No, he says, I'm going to take you to hell.
Actually, what I call my students, there's a high school student, is the good thing about studying inferno is you can use the word hell in class a lot. And you probably won't get in trouble for it. So I'm going to take you to hell in a purgatory where those are burning but joyfully and into the heavens. And Dante says, sounds like a great idea.
And he starts thinking about it, gets cold feet. And then Virgil tells a story about the blessed virgin, going to the Santo Lucia, who went to Beatrice, Beatrice, who came to Virgil, who came to get down the aisle of trouble. And so Dante bucks up and he gets encouraged. And he compares himself to a flower.
As little flowers from the frosting night are closed and limp, and when the sun shines down on them, they rise to open on their stem. My wilted strength began to bloom within me. And such warm courage flowed into my heart that I spoke like a man set free of fear. OK, it's an odd kind of an odd image.
It's become encouraged and compares himself to a flower. So I ask my students, we can see the literal comparison. And we can understand that he's standing tall now. Well, he's probably not so tall as Italian.
But he was standing as tall as he could. And like the flower coming up, so we can see that. But then I ask them, what do you think of a flower? He doesn't say which flowers.
It doesn't matter. Flowers. What are some of the qualities of flowers? And I get a little prompting.
I'll get a couple of responses. They're beautiful. So there's a beauty to Dante because he's a human person. His soul is beautiful.
Creating things like a god. But that can shrivel up through sin. Then they'll say it's delicate of fragile, which is exactly the state that Dante finds himself in. The state of fragility.
So the point here is when Dante or really in a good book gives you the simile or metaphor to not just leave it and tell you how flower it is and he has that, but then to go to the image that he uses and what is it about a flower. And you start thinking about it and you learn more about Dante that he's told you upfront, even at the surface reading of the simile. OK. And I give them a project.
Of course, they have to pick some out and do this themselves. I'm like I tell them everything. I don't know everything. In fact, they tell me stuff.
It's the typical I don't say I learn more from my students than they learn from me because why are they paying me? If that were true. But I do learn things from the students. Sometimes they'll raise their hand.
And at the bottom of the inverter, in fact, I got one of the most brilliant comments from the student. Maybe the most brilliant about Satan at the pit of hell. So I'll tell you when we get there. So I do learn some things, but not as much as they learn from me.
OK. The inverter know we get the consequence of sin. And it's in darkness, purgatory, the detachment from sin, which is alternating darkness and light because they're on the mount, purgatory, so the sun rises and sets. And they can't make progress in the dark night.
They have to stop what we're progress are making. So it's darkness and light. And then, paradiso is eternal light and Christ. It is light.
That's probably the most common image that's used in the paradiso, a lot of light. The inferno is about justice. That's the title of this lecture, what I was once. What I was once, a lot.
I still am dead. Whoops. Didn't do that right. Then the more one climbs, the easier it becomes.
That's the impenence. That's the purgatory and in his will is our piece. You see that's the theme of the paradiso. He stole that from San Augustine.
That was back when you could steal stuff. And it wasn't plagiarism. As long as you put it in your own words. How when interprets the micom, Dante says in a famous letter to a friend of his.
That doesn't look too well. I should have known this one. Maybe turn lights on. This is the Latin form, Mr.
Mackeken, judge the translation here. But there were four levels of interpretation applied to the Bible. And Dante said, you can apply those four levels to my writing, which was maybe a little impious for him to say that. He does things like this.
Maybe it seems a bit arrogant. You can use the principles of biblical interpretation to Dante. Well, you can try. It works quite a bit.
There's a literal level, which just says what happens. There's allegorical or the symbolic level. There's the moral level, which teaches you what you should do. How you should act.
And then there's the anagogical level, which teaches you where to set your aim. It always has to do with the final judgment, the new Jerusalem, the end times. That's what you're aiming towards. And sometimes they overlap.
The example of Solomon's Temple, which used a couple of times, then it will be wrote about that I think Dante did as well. The Solomon's Temple is literally the Solomon's Temple. Allegorically, it's the Body of Christ. I would tell them the Temple of Reville in 3 days.
They're the lightest. But that is the Body of Christ. Morally speaking, because the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit, then that causes us to act in a certain way. And then the anagogical imagery is of the new Jerusalem and the Temple therein.
So you can take various parts of Dante. You should be able to take any major imagery or think that happens in the plot and apply these levels and see what you get. So that's a lot of fun. And you can't be wrong to a certain degree.
You can't be wrong, but there's a lot of different answers that are possible. The story of every brief. I don't know why I just didn't do this. OK, because he's got an over with in one slide.
Dante realized that he has lost as a special grace. He has given three guides to take into hell. Special grace, purgatory in heaven, so that he may learn what sin is, how to overcome it, in order to be in the eternal presence of God. So who wouldn't want to do that?
It's the first person, medieval spiritual travel log. The universe, in which Dante draws upon all fields of human knowledge to his experience. And it is quite impressive. His journey begins late, Thursday, and early week, 1300, and ends exactly one week later.
He actually, depending on how you read the timeline in Dante, he tells you what time it is by where the sun is in the stars and planets. So there's some ambiguity. But it looks like, holy Thursday night, he goes down into hell on Good Friday and comes out of hell on Easter Sunday. And he has a few more days to get the purgatory in heaven.
His purpose, purposes, to reform the church and to reestablish the empire, which was weak at this point, he wanted to reestablish the empire ruled by a holy emperor who would rule, in effect, alongside the pope. So he was, he could say in favor of something like separation of church and state, but there was one state in one church. And they worked together. They had different spheres they were responsible for.
But there was no competition. But there was one church, one state. So it's not exactly what we mean, but something like that. So to reform the church, reestablish the empire while saving his own soul, and then really the soul of others who go along with this project.
So there's a huge project here. We don't know if he was successful in any of it, really. The inferno, OK, here's a little picture. This is the structure.
Am I going to pass? I'm throwing a lot at you, but I'm trying to cram the universe into four and a half hours. There are a lot of pictures you Google, the inferno, you can't really see this one really well. But I like this one.
It has all the levels and all the sub-levels. It's got the characters, the punishments. A little picture of the heaven, the earth, the three ladies. And important to Dante.
And there's an upper hill. And there's a lower hill. There is an outer vestibule before real hell proper. There are punished there, but he has special people reserved for the vestibule.
There's limbo, which is actually very important. Section of Dante, I pulled some of the keys to understanding what Dante's doing. I spent a lot of time on limbo in class because students have a lot of questions in limbo. And he does mean largely what is meant in the Middle Ages by limbo, both the limbo of the fathers and limbo of infants that he adds to this.
And he does some unusual things with it. Then there are the sentiment confidence, which really lack of self-control, the emotions, lost gluttony, adverse and prodigality, wrath and sloth. And it looks like, lost gluttony, adverse, wrath and sloth. Can you tell what it looks like he's doing it at first?
What does that look like? Those are lost gluttony, adverse, wrath and sloth are five of, that have been seven to be since. And it looks like that's what he's doing. The next one should be in the end and then pride.
And he's done. But he breaks the pattern. Now some scholars think he broke the pattern because he stopped writing. He came back to his mind.
That may be true, but it also shows part of the disordered that's in the structure of hell. So there's a structure because hell is a part of creation. But there's also a disorder because it's full of sin. And so what you think you're getting into isn't what you get into.
He breaks the pattern. Lower hell has a kind of heresy. He means something very special about heresy. It's usually called archer, heresy.
And then sins of malice, which are divided into violence and fraud. And the violence against neighbor self and god. And those are subdivided. And then fraud, simple fraud, which are natural bonds between society.
For instance, if someone defrauds you, when you get gasoline, it's like a gallon. It's 0.98 or whatever. That would be simple fraud. And the complex fraud, violating personal bonds that we have within family and church, for example, so more personal.
So it's highly structured. I'm not going to go through every sin. I'm going to go through many of them. And then I'm going to use sins as exemplars.
The characters don't have a name in here, but by personal I mean, but I'm going to use it as a historical. By historical, there are a lot of historical characters, famous characters. I'm not so famous. But many of the names we would recognize from history, he puts them in hell, per the brain having all over.
Personal acquaintances, friends of his, people he admired, family friends, they can end up in any place. Some people, one of the persons he admired most in his life is in hell. So Don I think doesn't reserve hell simply for his enemies and put all his friends elsewhere. Biblical characters from old and new, mythical characters are going to be found in hell.
Some of them are guardians of different circles, like Chamboreus, the three of the dog is the guardian of the glottins. Makes sense of a lot of those and part of the band as well. They might be a guardian and they're using a monster figure of their guardian, but they could just be a mythical character, someone from mythology or epic poetry, they're buying themselves down there in the band. Contrapasso.
What do we mean actually? We'll get there soon. Contrapasso is his method of inflicting punishments. I'm going to call it that on the sinners, although really the sinners inflict their own punishments through their choice.
Contrapasso is suffering the opposite. The punishment can resemble the sin, or it can be a contrast to the sin. So the cowards, I call them the cowards, they're not named by Dante. They never took sides, now follow a banner, because in life they didn't take a side.
And if you take a side like a military battle, you follow the standard banner. You have to follow that. They didn't do that. Now they follow a banner, that's the contrast.
But that banner is aimless, and that's the resemblance to their sins because they didn't choose a side. So there were some aimless in their lives. Okay, does that? The wrath will continue to strike out at others.
They're constantly hitting other people, hitting them. But that's the resemblance that also being struck. So to be struck is the contrast, you might say, to striking. If he does this throughout, you can look at the punishments.
We're going to call that and ponder those. What is he getting at? The punishments always have both. Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's both, sometimes it's the other.
You kind of just read and figure out what you think he's doing. And you might see something that someone else doesn't see in the punishment. I say punishment that's a little too harsh because the punishment is really a self-inflicted because it's an eternal choice. Like I'm going to skip this because that's what I'm actually doing.
Okay, the dark wood is where we start. Finally, in the inferno. It begins midway along the journey of our life. This is a famous first line in literature midway along the journey of our life.
I work to find myself in the dark wood where I'd wandered off from the straight path. So Dante does something grammatically, perhaps unusual, in this first sentence. This long first sentence takes three lines. Midway along the journey of our life I work to find myself in dark wood where I want to.
Do you see something odd about that? Conceptually, if not grammatically. I'm sorry? The hour?
Yes, the hour, yeah, the hour life because it's in the first person singular. So what Dante's doing here from the very first line is signaling that this is indeed an allegory. And what he means this to be is the story of each person's life if he wants to confront sin and see what sin is, not the illusion of sin, but sin itself that's why it's so ugly and hell, detach himself from his sin, purge himself from his sin, and make it into the divine light. So this is our story if we want to follow Dante.
We don't follow him. Well, we're in trouble. I woke to find myself in a dark wood. The idea that he's giving here, which is hard for us to understand, the idea he's giving here, I think it's hard to understand culturally speaking, is that this actually happened.
Because what he's saying, by the fact that he woke up, he was sleepy, there's another one that said, yeah, I'd become so sleepy, is that it's not a dream. It's not a vision. If he wanted us to think it was a vision, he would say, I fell asleep and I had a vision. And that's how you get a lot of that in medieval poetry, visions.
And then you can say, literally I'm not lying, I had this vision. See, I said it was a vision that didn't really happen. But Dante's taking a chance here, really in the middle ages of being accused of being a liar, if this isn't true. He wrote it.
He said it happened. It needs to be true. So that seems odd to us. But I remember as a child, I was reading a book on it was the Remunit triangle or aliens building the pyramids, something like that.
And I was telling Bobby Barnad about this, kid up at the down the street. He's still, you're older than I was. And he says to me, you don't believe everything you read do you? And I thought, well, it says nonfiction on it.
I believed it. So that is the innocence of the way that writing could be approached in the middle ages. And you think about the fact that it didn't have printing press and there was a lot of things written down. So what writing was with a different view of this than Dante.
But he's signaling he's taking a chance here by saying this. It's quite bold of him. I have to say this is not a vision. How he entered there, I cannot really say, I had become so sleepy at the moment my first straight, leaving the path of truth.
This straight path is the path of truth. That's the straight narrow. That's pretty obvious. He doesn't know how he entered in the dark woods.
So this is, he's sleepy to his state of the soul. It could be the mortal sin. It could be many, many, many, many venial sins that have numbed his soul to his quest. It doesn't quite say.
He doesn't have my own theories as to what Dante sin is. But he doesn't know. So we can be that too. And it would help if we would wake up.
He doesn't know how he woke up. So he's lucky. There's some divine intervention. At the moment of grace, he can't wake himself up out of the sin.
Something has to nudge him. That's what happens. The mouth of joy. So he comes out of the woods, then a valley's in a valley of the shadow of death.
And he sees a mount and there's a sun rising. And so he wants to climb it. But when I climb myself the foot of the hill, at the edge of the woods, beginning down in the valley, first felt my heart plunge deep in fear. I raise my head.
It's all the hilltop shawl. The morning rings a light. Sit from the planet. This means star that leads me straight ahead on every road.
So it's the sun, which literally the light of the sun defines your path. But it's also the truth of God. The light of your path. And so he starts to climb the mount.
Let's see what I have next. I have that next. So he starts to climb them out. And he is impeded by three beasts, the leopard aligning the she-wolf.
He gets around the first two. The third the she-wolf pushes them down. And he runs back down the mountain. So it's clear that the animals represent his sin.
Which sin is scholars debate which sin. But he thought he could make it up the mount and go to the truth while still in sin, while still attached to sin. That's his error. So virgile has to come to him and say, no, you can't get up to the top of the house as long as you're attached to some sin, whatever that sin is.
OK. So that's who comes to Virgil, the poet Virgil, who appears as a ghost. The characters in, especially in Verno, they're really ghost-like. He doesn't use the word ghost.
He's the word shade or shadow. But he can see them. He can recognize them. So they look like we would think of the ghost.
Not Casper, but the other kind of ghost. He lived before Christ, author of the Aeneid, which is, in the middle ages, the epic. They didn't know Homer hadn't been recovered fully at least. So he knew the Aeneid.
That's the book. That's the pagan book. Virgil's considered kind of a pagan prophet, even, becoming a Christ. He's his teacher and his guide through the inferno and in through most of Purgatorio.
But in a sense, in his life as well, he's a Dottie literary inspiration. He's a Dinnison or Citizen of limbo, which is very important. Dottie puts two or three characters, pagans in Purgatori and Perdiso. I would say three, unvattised pagans.
Two of them living, two of them before Christ, someone had to Christ, remember correctly. And maybe they're all I to, a couple of check, the dates. But he could have put Virgil there. He could have saved Virgil, but he didn't.
So Dottie does show, didn't say how, but it does show that it's possible for a pagan to be saved. You don't get it if you only read the inferno. I have to tell the students that in the class, in which we only read the inferno. He witnessed the harrowing of hell.
So when Christ descends into hell and releases the righteous from the Old Testament. And Dante names all the names Adam and Moses and Noah and Abram and David. These are all covenant makers, he names them all, plus some others. So there, he witnessed that when he was, hadn't been in hell very long.
If heres a lot of the shadow, he leads Dante to hell. OK. So he is a fitting guide, but because Virgil's a pagan, they're things that he can't show Dante. He can't show them heaven, he can't show them heaven.
But he also might make mistakes along the way. So you have to pay careful attention to Virgil. He seems to know what he's talking about, but he might make some errors. Because even though symbolically he's thought to represent reason, or he might say more broadly virtue, reason unaided by grace will run into a brick wall.
Reason unaided by grace only gets you so far. He gets you very far, but it doesn't get you all the way. You need to go. So Virgil is a good guide, but there are things he doesn't know.
Things that Dante knows that Virgil doesn't. To get the hell. There's a famous line on this, to get to hell. But when they go into the gate, it says over it, this is not the entire inscription, hardly inscription.
Just as it was that my great creator divine, omnipotent, straight of me, and highest wisdom join the primal love. So hell is made, justice moves God. But also omnipotence. So actually what we have here is the Trinity.
We have the creator. That's the one. And then we have the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The divine omnipotence is the power, omnipotence is an attribute that we give to the Father, wisdom to the Son, and love to the Holy Spirit.
So we've got a doctrine. You can say the Trinity, Son, the Spirit, on part of the gate to hell. Now there's this love part. OK, we can see justice and power and wisdom.
But love is what's going to throw people off. I was reading a blog recently by a writer called Rod Dreier. He wrote crunchy con about conservatives who also like granola, I think. And he's rereading the divine comedy.
And if you want to Google and find his commentary as he's reading, it's just his thoughts about it. They're excellent. They're very, very, very good. But people's comments about what he's writing are somewhat, I'm taken aback by some of them.
They don't or can't get it. They're limited by their philosophy, the worldview, their lack of faith. There's something that limits them. They can't even see very well the allegory that he's speaking of.
It is quite striking. You seem like an otherwise intelligent person, but your comments. And some of the people commenting didn't have even read the book. They're just commenting on what he's writing.
But they don't like, now a lot of people, they don't like hell. They don't like hell. And they're talking to letting God have the hell. They get on about the answer to that question.
That's the love part. So hell is an act of love. In fact, we can say that hell is an act of mercy on the part of God and justice. God and God, nothing's divided.
It's justice is mercy. So the reason it's an act of mercy is that the souls in hell, as miserable as they are, are happier in hell than they would be in heaven. And therefore, the punishment, I'll explain that in a second. So the punishment in hell, if we call it that, the eternal life in hell, they're actually better off in that respect.
So if God were mean, he would make them be in heaven with him. Anyone want to explain what I just said? Is it self-evident? Since their mind and their hearts have turned away from God, and they don't want to be in his presence, to force them into his presence would be more painful to them than to follow the path that they chose.
And objectively, of course, if they chose God, they would be happier in heaven. Subjectively, they're happier in hell. And of course, the souls in heaven are the happiest. They chose God.
They're happy that's what they wanted. Part of the divine economy of salvation here, for Dante, is you get what you want. Be careful what you ask for because you might just get it. Those who ask for God, even on their dying breath, get God.
Well, they say God or Mary. They get two ways. So you get characters in purgatory who were murderers who, on the literally dying breast of Mary or Jesus, and they get to be in purgatory for a while. But obviously, it wasn't just the word.
It was the heart. There was a repentance at the end. The only difference between the souls in purgatory and the souls in hell because they're both suffering is the souls in purgatory repented, even at the last moment. Souls in hell did not, would not, will not.
So does that make more sense? You have to think about it and see. You do not agree with it, but that seems to be what's happening. OK, there's something else I can say about that.
Anyway, that's me. So when you're reading Dante, you think about these things. You don't have to get just from Dante. You could get it from other sources.
These are the kind of things that the poetry element, the similes especially, and we're probably dealing in translation. We don't have all the loveliness of the original. But the idea is that you can draw from Dante in the beauty of the language and the story and the sympathy you can have with Dante as a character make the divine comedy of not only a book that can change your life. And I'll talk about the more when we get to Beatrice, especially.
I mean, he can count the story up in the top of the story. And I tell my students after they read it, assuming they do, I said, if someone asks you if you read the Inferno, you have to say to them, no, I've only read it once. That doesn't count. OK, and there are people that read it every year.
T.S. Eliot was a famous poet who I think he read the divine comedy every year. And a father Dwight re-read it every other people that re-read it. Yes.
How old are your children? OK, that's a purgatory, probably. Theologically, he's orthodox. He follows St.
Thomas, usually, although not always. His treatment of limbo, he adds some ideas to limbo, which aren't contradictory to the faith. But he explores limbo. He kind of opens up limbo, he might say, to other people that might not otherwise have forgotten it.
And so we'll get there. I can't think of anything. He does some controversial things. He's got some people in heaven.
He has a famous heretic in heaven. But that heretic might have converted it into his life. He actually was an opponent of Thomas' points. But curiously, he's on Thomas' left.
The next door neighbor doesn't have that. He's on Thomas' left, which means that's the guy that was wrong. Because he's on his left, the sinister side. So he reads very carefully.
There's this new union in heaven between two former opponents. But he also signals that Thomas was the right one. Because he's on the right. But there's no problem with a heretic converting or renouncing his hair as he being in heaven.
So I thought that maybe none of something we don't know. Or otherwise, I can't think of anything that is clearly unorthodox or wrong. He does things that you could dispute and disagree with. But nothing dogmatically that I can think of.
Keep your eye out. You might find something that I've overlooked. Before me, hell, nothing. But eternal things were made.
And I show last eternally, abandon every hope all you enter here. That's the famous line you can't see. Abandon all hope, you enter here. Of course, the souls in hell have no hope.
The souls in perfect every hope. They're both suffering, one willingly, and joyfully, and the other not so much. OK. Now before me, nothing but eternal things were made.
This could be the angels. Eternal things could also be man, have eternal souls. But let's say the angels were made. And on God's checklist to do list, OK, I make the angels.
Next thing I do is make hell. So in Dante's conception, he doesn't go on the Genesis account. He's got the angels. And then hell.
He's got to make hell after makes the angels. It's logical. Because why does hell have to be the next thing after the angels are made? They have to have some place to fall.
OK. So they have some place to choose. OK. So in the angels, having these pure intellects don't need to learn anything, and who know the consequences perfectly of their actions get one choice.
Since we have to learn again, learn again, learn again, learn again, learn again, learn over and over again. But the angels can't do that. They know they have perfect vision. They choose.
But they have to have something to choose. That's the two things to choose. So it's God and not God. Now also, emphasize my students that Satan and hell, and Satan, Satan is not 100% evil.
Satan is still good. In that, he's a being created by God. He has an intellect and a will. All those things are good.
They're abused. They're misused. They're disordered. So the souls in hell, angelic and human souls, there's still something good about them.
If they were 100% evil, they would not exist. OK? That's a better way of putting it, actually. Yes.