Dante's Inferno

Welcome to Catholic Stuff You Should Know, a J-10 Initiative.

Hey, welcome to the podcast, Father John.

Father John.

New location, not far, though, St. Louis, Catholic Church.

Thanks for coming down, Father Shawnee.

You're welcome.

Normally, we record at Lourdes, just a mile south, though.

There's three priests here in our little household that run two parishes, St. Louis and

Englewood and our Lady of Lourdes, Catholic Church, in Denver, they're one mile apart, and

we are in my rectory right now, because confessions have been blowing up, baby, it's holy week,

it is holy week, and we have been in and out of the confessional.

But today's the last day, right?

Yep.

No confessions on Holy Thursday, good Friday?

Yep.

Okay.

Probably should have them on good Friday, but I'm not the pastor, so...

It's fitting.

We don't know.

We have confessions today, today's spy one is that we have them from three pm.

You have to be in line by four pm, if you're in line by four pm, your confession will

be heard.

I like that style.

So it's kind of a gamble.

We could be there till four-fifteen, we could be there till five-fifteen.

Yep.

That's true.

Yeah, it's a beautiful time.

I mean, but lots of hours, I thought I was awesome because I heard about ten hours

of confession between Thursday and Saturday, and then I realized I was like, that's

like St. John Viani's like morning, like he's taken his afternoon espresso after ten

hours.

Yeah.

That's a day in his life.

I was thinking about that.

I've been complaining about the load, and then I'm just like, St. John Viani, patron saint,

a parish priest, how can I not be more virtuous there, but one potato a day and one espresso

a day?

That's right.

I was reading Gifton Mystery, which is John Paul II's meditation on his own priestly

life, and he talks about the voluntary imprisonment you have to make to the confessional.

It's cool, because it is kind of like you're kind of a prisoner to the confessional.

Yeah.

It's one of the modes of self-surrender.

Coming back into parish life, it's like getting the zones up, like we're always talking

about cycling zones.

But I felt like I needed some zone to training for a long time before I could hit the confessional

for hours and hours and hours, and it's nice.

I feel like I'm more in shape as a confessor, if that makes sense.

Oh, totally.

No, I think when the line is long, though, it's just like, I don't give much advice.

It's just like for your penance, here you go.

Absolution, you know, get on with the day.

I find that most people are well-prepared, and yeah, we're not there to chitchat, we're

not there to talk about how much your husband sucks or your wife is annoying you.

We just do it, and it's beautiful.

It's a beautiful gift.

We love it.

Thank you for coming to confession.

Keep coming.

But we also do it all year, so you don't have to do it all on the Wednesday of Holy Week.

So anyways, the joy of my last two weeks, though, has been teaching this Dante course.

That's right.

And we're going to dive into it today because we got a lot to talk about.

And I'm really grateful to Father Sean and Father CJ.

And Father CJ is going to be a guest to appearance, so he's a companion friend of ours.

He's going to jump on with this, but we're going to do a three-week, little mini series

here that rolls through the divine comedy.

I'm teaching it over six weeks at our Lady of Lords.

At the end of the podcast, I'll explain how you can watch that.

They're all live streamed and on YouTube, so this is going to be just an introduction

to each of them.

Today we're going to the inferno next week we're going to the purgatorio and the following

we're going to the parody, so which plays with the timeline of the divine comedy, which

I'll explain in a second.

But I am teaching six, 90-minute lectures, so it's a lot of content.

So I had a 90-minute one last night, and so I got into the first week and I was like,

oh, I have like nine hours, it's like half of a course in an academic, you know, a two

credit course like 20 hours, so I was like, oh, I've got to have my game here.

So I have lots of notes that I'm not going to refer to because I'm going to try and keep

this thing moving.

Great.

Steadily for you.

But the difference is this course you're teaching is just in the parish, right?

People aren't reading necessarily, I mean, they might be, but it's not like a seminar

style course where they've been engaged with the text, and then they're bouncing questions

or ideas.

Exactly, because I taught, I don't think I taught your class, but I started teaching

Dante, taught on elective, and then I started using an eschatology, and it was, it was

that.

It was more of a seminar style where we're all kind of just working the text together.

Now when you go to a lecture, it's like you got to be on your game.

Like you got to have, you got to be able to comprehensively present.

This night, it was like, and you got to know who all these kind of characters are and

all the history and make sure you're not saying dumb things, which I was at certain points

talking about.

Caesar Augustus, instead of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon in the year 49 BC, he didn't

do that.

It was Julius.

This guy came up to me and he was like, I was a little confused.

And then you have like interesting things like this Jewish guy shows up at class last night.

He's got the Yamakan, super nice guy, speaks Italian, we were talking, speaking a little

Italian together.

But then we get to like Conto, 26, where Kayifist, the high Jewish priest who condemns Christ,

is crucified to the floor of hell and you're just like, oh, anyways, next Conto, oh, there's

Muhammad, he's in hell also.

And so there is some kind of, you would stop and kind of explain things, you know.

Why, how did he learn about the class?

Somebody invited him.

Yeah, really interesting guy.

Yeah.

Is he thinking about converting?

I don't think so.

I don't even, yeah.

I don't think so.

So he's somewhat of a historian that if he's reading Dante and standing in his stuff.

That's wild.

Yeah.

But my favorite person who comes to class is Pia.

She's a...

That's your niece?

No, that's Evan and Katie Miller.

She drew me, this is her artwork in my notes here, spider cutting practice.

If you want to, you know, take a look at that.

That's so fun.

She was working on sweet Pia.

We're going to meet Pia in the purgatorio.

She is one of the characters that we meet.

There's these little profiles that happen throughout the Divine Comedy and Pia is one

of them.

I tried to get Evan and Katie to name their second daughter, Beatrice, but they decided

on Esme, which is a beautiful name, even though it's from what's that dumb vampire show,

Twilight.

I guess it's the main character, so give her a hard time next year, so Esme.

Okay.

So we're in it.

We're two weeks in.

And I have this master Excel doc that I created, very German of you, very German, and it's

got all these essentials.

And what I'm going to try and do is I have about 20 pages of notes that I really shouldn't

even look at because we won't get through this thing if we do it.

So...

Climbing excited dive in, I said this the other day, but I've been in, like, school for

how many years, almost 30 years, 18 years plus nine years of seminary, so 27 years,

and never have I read the greatest poet in history.

I've never read Dante's comedy.

Well, that's a damn shame, Sean.

I'm just joking.

It's not an easy book to read, and I don't think you can really sit down and just kind

of read it by yourself.

It's poetry.

It's also translated from a medieval Italian, it's Tuscan, it's the language, which then

became Italian.

Of course, my mom would say Italian, Italian, you know, salad dressing, things like this,

but it wasn't.

Italy was a bunch of different countries until 1872 when it unified, and then they chose

the language of Dante to be the Italian language, and they put that on everybody.

Why did Dante write an Italian or not in Latin?

He's the first to do it, really.

It's that's that he kind of just breaks the mold.

Part of the reason he calls it a comedy, so there's two different kind of classical forms

in the ancient world in terms of drama and poetry.

You have tragedy and comedy, tragedies end, or excuse me, they start good and they end

bad, comedies start bad and they end good.

Now in the ancient world, tragedy was a higher form of dramatic expression.

So you think of Escalus and these, you know, the Orstaya and these different edipists,

yeah, terrible, terrible endings, but that was the highest, most noble form.

And I think what the Greeks were expressing was that human life really is tragic, and

there's a deeper expression of it.

The comedies were written more for kind of the plebeian people, they were kind of, you

know, more kind of like fun kind of folksy.

Were those the ones that were made into plays as well?

They were, but they were just never at the level of the tragedies.

Okay.

The Tragedy and Sophocles and Escalus and Erypides.

These are the giants of 5th, 4th century BC in ancient Greece, in the whole Hellenistic

world, these to have these competitions where they would come and perform tragedies.

And so like Escalus, like famously one, one of these, and we know about this from some

of the historical stuff that we're aware of at that time, so it's like a big deal.

And I think the comedies are kind of smaller.

So fast forward though, Palsar has an interesting insight.

He says there is no tragedy after the cross.

The cross kind of takes everything tragic about human life, and it's consolidated in a way

in Christ to become sin for us, 2 Corinthians chapter 5, and dies as an atoning sacrifice.

So the resurrection is kind of the triumph of, and it's the reversal.

It's the comedic transformation of humanity and of history.

So Dante writes his great poem, and he just names it La Camodilla.

It's just the comedy.

It's going to be, I think it's Boccaccio, who two centuries later will put divine in

front of it.

So it's just the comedy.

So this is always a trilogy.

Yes.

Okay.

Yep.

It has three parts, three different canticles, big songs, and then there's little contos

in between.

There's 100 little contos, 33 per each one, and then there's kind of an intro one with

the inferno.

So the inferno is technically 34, and then 33 and 33.

So 100 contos, 14,000 lines, all of which have this rhyming in the Italian.

So the first and third line, it's called the Tertzerima, they rhyme together.

So as you read the Italian, it just flows and the complexity and the harmony and just

the brilliant kind of architecture of the work, it's absolutely, there's nothing like it.

I feel like you just can't, you can't get enough, you just go deeper and deeper and deeper

into the significance and meaning and purpose of things, and so it's been a joy to teach

over the years, and we've had a lot of fun, 200 people showed up.

So McCadden Hall was packed last two nights.

The first night it was too hot, it was like, something was broken and it was sweltering

hot, and I was like, perfect, we're in the inferno.

But the second part of the inferno gets very, very cold at the level of treachery, so I

was like, we're going to turn the heat down for the second class, which we did.

So good.

All right, so tell me briefly, your experience, introduction, awareness of Dante.

Dante pretty much nothing, I can talk a little bit about the divine comedy if you want

me to.

Yeah, I want you to say a few words about that.

So what I understand, as you already pointed out, it's a trilogy, so it goes through

the inferno purgatory, which is a mountain, you climb up the mountain, and then you cross

over into paradise, paradise, paradise, heaven.

And so he kind of walks through, and the only character I know is Beatrice, who kind of

leads Dante through, you meet different characters who are in hell to your point earlier, as you

climb the mountain purgatory and then cross over into heaven.

One thing that is important, of course, to understand is just medieval cosmology, if

you will, that the earth is the center of the universe, not because of pride, but that's

just the way they understood it, right?

But the earth is low in the sense that it's not that they thought the earth was the center

of the universe because of pride, but just that as a sphere, everything that goes up gets

more and more perfect.

And so heaven, paradise, is outside this earth, right?

You have the four elements, the fifth element being ether, which is outside heaven and purgatory

is this mountain, which if I remember correctly, it's on the exact opposite side of Jerusalem

in a spherical world, I think it's Odysseus who tries to go look for it and he never finds

it, right?

But all that to say, hell is the center of the earth, so you have the world, the center

of the earth is hell, it's cold, it's frozen, and then it's a funnel going downwards,

but then purgatory is the opposite where you climb up this mountain, and then you get

to the ether, which is heaven.

Cosmology is important to understand that.

That's what kind of Dante is playing off of from what I understand.

Yeah, that's well said.

And I think Dante's cosmology is theocentric.

So this idea that in the ancient world they were all wrong because they thought the earth

was the center of the universe, and then the Copernican revolution where it's actually

rotated around the sun, all these things.

The whole cosmology is actually about getting to God.

God is the center of reality in the center, so it's a journey to that, but you described

it well.

We're going to descend today into the center of the earth, and that's where the inferno

drops, and it's under Jerusalem, it's this huge cavern that's going to collapse in.

But before we go there, maybe a couple of biographical words on Dante.

Great.

This is going to be a lot of content, and I don't want to just lecture at you.

This is meant to be a conversation, so cut me off whenever you want.

Dante was born in Florence, year 1265.

He is of a noble lineage, his mother dies when he is five.

His father remarries, and then his father dies when he's 12th.

So he's raised by his stepmother.

The most decisive moment in the childhood of Dante is when he's nine years old, and

his father takes him to a, in May, they had this kind of celebration for Mary in Florence

at the time.

So he goes to the family house of the Portieres.

So this is another kind of noble family in Florence, and there he sees the daughter of the

head of the house, the Portierie family, and her name is Beatrice.

Beatrice Portierie.

Nine years old, Beatrice is a year younger than Dante.

She's eight, and he absolutely, completely, unlike probably anything ever in history, falls

completely in love with Beatrice.

At nine years old, he basically dedicates his whole life to her.

Yeah.

Doesn't talk to her.

Several times throughout the next few years, he's going to see her here and there.

But Beatrice is like the Paragon of Earthly Beauty.

She is the full expression of just purity and freedom, and it's not just like an obsession.

It's like very reverent.

There's a deep kind of, I don't know, this is not lustful and kind of obsessive.

It's just this kind of, I don't know, how to describe it.

It's a poetic kind of troubadour heart that says, just as this is a woman you honor with

your life.

You give your whole life to her.

I don't think we can really translate into a modern mentality.

He then sees Beatrice again at age 18, and he runs into her on the streets of Florence,

and she says to him, bonjourno.

She says, good day.

Good morning, and he just almost dies from just ecstasy, if you're hearing her voice.

He describes this in a small poetic work that he writes called the Vitanova, and he says

in Chippit Vitanova, he says now begins, he turns a new life, so it says poetic, musing

towards Beatrice.

Dante from a young age is betrothed to a different woman, named Gemma Donati, and at some point

they marry.

At some point Beatrice also marries.

Beatrice dies at the age of 24, so Dante is 25, they've both been married for a few years,

and he and from what he describes it as the entire city of Florence was devastated by her

death because she was just this remarkably beautiful, pure and very holy young bride.

Dante's wife, Gemma, we don't hear a lot about it, so I don't know.

Are these arranged marriages?

Was he forced to marry Gemma?

Yeah, but one in to marry Beatrice.

That's interesting.

He never says that.

He never says he wanted to marry Beatrice.

I don't know.

Again, it's like one of those things, we can't read into it.

As moderns, it's like, oh, the oppressive structure of arranged marriages.

It was just kind of like, he doesn't talk about it like this, but Gemma, I don't know,

we just don't, we don't hear a lot about it, they have several kids, and one who becomes

a religious sister takes the name Swar, Beatrice, sister Beatrice later in life, obviously.

So Beatrice dies at the age of 24, and Dante shifts from his life as a young poet.

He goes and studies philosophy and theology, and then he steps into the world of politics,

and he succeeds.

And through the 1290s, he kind of arrives at his kind of highest prestige.

He's elected to this kind of council, the conciliity of Florence, basically, run the city.

And he's part of a party called the Guelphs.

The Guelphs and the Ghibelines have been fighting for about 60 years.

In the year 1260, in the Battle of Monteperte, the Ghibelines are run out of Florence, and

the Guelphs take charge.

But then the Guelphs get in trouble because there's two kind of leaders and their wives

hate each other.

And one of them was named Bianca.

And Bianca, so they call them the White Guelphs if they followed that side, and then the

Neody, they name the other ones, the Black Guelphs.

Dante was a White Guelph, so the Ghibelines are gone, but now the Guelphs are fighting.

All of this to say, Dante is kind of betrayed by his own party in this kind of political maneuvering

that happens in the year 1301.

In January 1302, he is charged with basically treason against the city and is exiled.

To be exiled means, if you step back in the city of Florence, you're going to be burned

alive.

Everything is taken from you, you lose your state, you lose all of your patrimony, you

lose all of your wealth, you have nothing, you're just cast out.

And again, to be exiled from your city is not just like, I have to leave Englewood, Colorado,

or Littleton, Colorado.

Your whole life, your whole world for centuries has been, your whole identification, your name,

your name, your purpose, your language, everything, you have nothing.

And Gemma stays in Florence.

The kids eventually come to visit him.

He kind of works his way through Tuscany, different places.

He's just living off benefactors for the rest of his life, but he eventually makes his way

to Ravenna, which is where he's going to come onto the care of a guy named Cangrande de

La Scala, and he'll write a beautiful letter to dedicate the parody, so the last part of

it to him.

Cangrande will die in the year, 12, excuse me, I do need to look at my notes on this one.

I don't have it all 13 sometimes.

In my memory, he dies in, oh, she dies in 12, 90, or 24.

He dies in 13, 21 at the age of 56.

So from the year 1302 until 13, 26, he is in, excuse me, 13, 21, he is in exile.

So Dante starts to write the divine comedy in the year we believe in the year 1308, six

years into his exile.

And here's what's interesting.

Dante locates the divine comedy in the year 1300.

We find ourselves in a Selva, a scuba, in a dark wood on the evening of Holy Thursday

in the year 1300.

And Dante is lost in this wood, and for the next 24 hours, he describes trying to find

his way, and he runs into a leopard, he runs into a she wolf, he runs into these different

kind of creatures that express and algorithmically symbolize the world, the flesh and the devil.

And so he's trapped in the world.

But what's striking about that is in the year 1300, Dante was at his peak.

He was wealthy, he was influential.

He had everything, he had the world.

And when he's reflecting out poetically, he's not saying I was in the dark wood in exile,

he's saying I was lost in the world when I was at the high point.

Someone told me that when you read the comedy, it's actually meant to be read similar to

the Bible in the sense that you read the Bible through the four senses of scripture,

the literal, and then you have the topological senses, the three spiritual senses.

Have you heard that?

Are you familiar with that?

So when you read the comedy, there's a literal sense, but then there's also an anagogical

sense, a moral sense, and a spiritual sense.

Yeah, so Dante describes that he gives the interpretive key to the comedy in his letter

to Con Grande de la Scala, where he says there's a literal meaning in an allegorical meaning.

Now I think you can break down the allegorical into different aspects, but the point of it

is to say, this is not some guy's kind of wild acid trip through hell.

There is a literal sense to everything, every person we meet, everything that we meet,

but then there's also an allegorical significance, which is to say this is actually about the

journey of the soul to God.

And that's the significance that it brings to bear on our life.

So one of the challenges of teaching is you don't want to just tell the story and say,

then we met this guy, and then we were at this circle of hell, and then we did this,

but also to say, and this is what it means, this is what he's expressing.

And one of the most powerful ways that he does that is through what he calls a contraposso.

So the contraposso, passo meaning to suffer and contras the opposite.

So in hell, souls are afflicted with certain sufferings that are the opposite, so to speak,

they work against the contraposso of the sin that they're condemned for.

And in purgatory, it's going to be the opposite.

It's going to be that contraposso is the healing remedy by which they are ascend to the

parody so and kind of work their way into the vision of God, the unmediated vision of

God, which is in the imperialion, which is at the top of the parody so.

So we're paying attention to those things as we're kind of moving through, but yeah,

the allegorical sense is that it means something that is more than the literal that there's

a spiritual sense as we would say scripture.

So to answer your questions, yes, yeah, it definitely has to be read both ways.

And just to back up real quick, born into a noble family, most of society is illiterate

during this time, is that right?

And so having money would have allowed him to be educated and so kind of the upper class

is educated.

So because he's educated, he gets exiled, and then is that why he's able to have benefactors?

The benefactors want to see him continue to use his intellect to continue to further society

or to continue to write in this case.

Yeah, it was oftentimes that poets and artists would live off of benefaction.

So nobles, you know, different kind of patrons, that's what you'd work for.

In Dante's case, he really had nothing.

So yeah, so the comedy begins, the divine comedy begins, it begins bad, and it ends good,

which makes it a comedy.

So he's kind of inverting the whole kind of literary form, so to speak, of the ancient

world, in light of Christ.

All the while he's doing everything, he's like reinterpreting, I was thinking about this

last night, I was like, he's reinterpreting the whole patrimony of Western civilization,

in light of Christ.

So it's amazing about him.

So every monster that we meet in hell, Gary on, and you know, charon, and they sound like

Pokemon, right?

I know you're a Pokemon guy, right?

Totally.

Yeah, that's just me.

No, we had the fish fry the other night, this little kid, Lee Royes, his name actually,

he had a book of Pokemon that, I don't know if it's like, it looked brand new, he must

have just gotten it, and he was just like, what's your favorite Pokemon?

I'm like, golly, I haven't thought of Pokemon in like two decades, you know, I just like

pulled one up, I'm just like, ball the sword, I'm like, what does he look like?

I'm like, I don't know, yeah, but he goes through, it's like this index, and he found

him.

Nice.

Yeah, so I mean, all of these monsters and creatures, I think what he's doing by having

Medusa in hell, so to speak, or the furies, or we're gonna come across like, you know,

giants, Nimrod, and these different types down in the lower part of hell, I think what

he's doing is he is crystallologically interpreting the significance of mythical figures.

So he's thinking about what did myth have to say about the human condition?

So all these characters from Homer, or from Ovid, or from whatever, are being played

out in the comedy to help us understand, articulate what, why was it so tragic, and it's supposed

to feel tragic, especially at the beginning, and it gets worse and worse as we go through

the inferno.

All right, so moving into it.

Great, are we?

Yeah, so that's the background of his life, and then diving into the inferno.

All right, what have we got here for time, and I'm watching the time, buddy, I promise

so.

So it's holy Thursday in the evening, we're in the Selva Escura.

We encounter a leopard, a lion, a she-wolf, and then all of a sudden we meet Virgil who

proposes this journey for Dante, basically to say, you can't find your way out of this

dark wood.

You have to descend into hell in order to find your way.

That's the first con to the second con to Virgil explains how Beatrice, who's in heaven,

was the one who interceded for him, and Dante's going to see her footprints actually in limbo

in the first circle of hell where Virgil was, and he's going to realize that it was

by her care and her intercession that this happens, and really the divine comedy is not just

about Dante.

It's about Beatrice.

It's about the intercession, and it's about how beauty stirs him and the desire for conversion

to God, and when we get to the parodies, I'll explain how I think the whole thing shifts

on him realizing as he looks into the eyes of Beatrice in paradise that he's looking

at God.

I think the whole thing shifts on that.

So Beatrice is, again, the paragon of earthly beauty, she's the kind of perfection of form.

She also is one that he betrayed, became worldly after she died, and she's going to have some

words for him at the top of the amount of purgatory.

So stay tuned on that.

It's a very dramatic moment.

But for now, she goes down in her intercession with our lady, Prang and St. Lucie Prang,

they're kind of the other two, but Beatrice goes down, finds Virgil to bring him to Dante,

and they begin this journey together.

So they approach the gate of hell at sunset of Good Friday, and they see the famous line,

La Shiatte, Oni Sparanza, a band and all hope, Yehu enter here.

That's what I used to put when I had on my syllabus, have the grades, ABCD, La Shiatte

Oni Sparanza, so that famous line of a band and hope, all Yehu enter here, they descend

into hell, and the first thing they do is they cross the first of four rivers, which

is called the Arcaryon, and they meet a guy named Charan, who is just whipping and kind

of slashing people as these souls are getting on boats and moving into hell.

So then we approach and we get into hell proper into the inferno, and we hit the first

circle.

And there's nine circles of hell.

So there's an architecture to the whole thing.

There's nine levels, so to speak, in each of the three canticles, nine circles of hell,

nine terraces of purgatory, and then there's nine kind of levels of the parody, so within

those there's usually kind of one intro, seven key ones, and then one kind of exit.

So like, for example, on the mount of purgatory, you're going to have seven, the seven deadly

sins are going to be played out, starting with pride, ending with lust.

In the inferno, it's interesting, we're going to start with lust, and we're going to end

in pride.

Now the structure I was explaining this last night in more detail, the structure of the

inferno, it kind of collapses, it becomes chaotic, it's not this perfectly clear cut thing.

Please get more ordered as we move up the mount of purgatory.

You get stronger as you climb, it's a really cool thing.

It's steepest on the bottom, you start with pride, and with lust.

The takeaway here is a lot of times the sins of the flesh, especially the sins of lust

and gluttony are the ones we obsess the most about.

For Dante, that's the least level of hell, and it's the last thing to be purified.

So you want to get up the mount of purgatory, you want to encounter God, you got to begin

of pride, and we think it's like, no, I got to get all the lustful, gluttonous, adverse

desires fixed, and those are all sins, and they're condemnable, but they're not the depth

of hell.

It's interesting to really kind of reframe how we think about things morally.

So the first place we're going to come across is the first circle of hell, before we get

to lust, is limbo.

Now limbo is, this is not where babies are, and that's a whole other kind of conversation.

I don't know if we've treated that on the podcast, but limbo just means the rim or the

place at the edge.

The limbo's potroom is a classical understanding of a differentiated hell that Christ descends

to.

All right, so there's two different perspectives on this, this whole other topic, but basically

where does Christ go to when he descends into hell?

It's a debate, Balthazar takes a different approach to it, which is totally fine.

You can believe that.

That's true.

The limbo's potroom, the place where the holy souls are before Christ, Abraham, these

types, Christ descends there, and then brings them as he opens heaven, that he does not

descend to the hell of the damned.

Now Dante's doing something different here.

He's looking for a place where he can put noble souls that were unbaptized.

And so Homer's there, Aristotle's there, there's where Virgil is.

He's viewed as a castle, and they're living there, and their punishment is eternal longing

without hope, but there's kind of peacefulness to it.

So he starts there, so there's not much, I mean, the suffering would be that there's

no hope, but it's not like a torment in the same way that hell is.

Exactly, yeah.

Yeah, they're not tormented except by that longing because they were unbaptized and they

had no faith.

All right.

So these are the virtuous pagans who are present there.

And he descends to the level of lust.

This is going to be the first kind of hell proper.

And we're going to meet the first kind of profile, which is Paolo and Francesca.

Okay.

Sesca Giorlamo, I don't know her married name.

She was at my talk last night, and I was like, ah, echo Francesca, and she was like,

I don't want to be affiliated with her.

This Francesca is a piece of work.

So this is a real couple that maybe during the lifetime of Dante, maybe a little before,

they were, Francesca was married to Paolo's brother, Giakamo.

And she falls in love with the brother and has an affair with him.

The brother finds out, murders them both.

So Paolo and Francesca are the first kind of profile that we meet.

It's kind of like we're experiencing all these kind of wild contrappostles, all these

kind of sufferings and all this kind of chaos in the description.

And then Dante zooms in on different people.

And those are the most kind of personalistic touches.

They're also the most powerful expressions, because we're going to speak with Francesca

and Paolo when she's going to tell this story and it's heartbreaking.

It wrenches you, but it's also seductive and complicated and kind of eludes us.

So we're going to be attentive to those little profiles as we go.

It seems fitting though, because if someone's reading this, they're like, I know people

who fit these categories.

I know people who, you know, their whole life, they lived for last and like where are they

in eternity now?

Not to say that we condemn people to hell, but if you don't overcome certain sins, it's

like, yeah, the lot is there for us, you know?

So I can imagine someone in, you know, 1330 reading this and saying like, oh, yeah, I know

people who fit these categories perfectly.

Yeah.

Yeah, they do.

And he's using real historical people, locating them to say, this is where it is.

So it's part of the power.

It's also the literary sense, the allegorical sense is we're trying to understand more deeply.

So the contraposso of the level of lust is there's winds, there's these violent winds that

they're in and they can't grasp each other.

They're always trying to kind of pull each other in and they just can't.

And that's a great image of how concupacence works when you grasp at the flesh.

Literally, it's, it's, it's, it's on, it's never enough.

It's always ungraspable.

Sorry, I was just going to go back and say to you that this is not like, the church isn't

saying like, you have to believe this, like, this is what hell actually looks like.

This is what purgatory and paradise looks like.

This is like a poet wrestling with giving an image in an allegory for what hell in heaven

probably do look like, but it's not like a dog rub the church of this is what it looks

like.

Oh, no, no, yeah.

It's poetic expressions and, and again, it's tough to see some of these people and some

of the things that he does, but he's, he's forcing us to kind of grapple with the reality

of it.

And I think that the lesson of Dante in some ways is until you really understand the hellish

reality of sin, you, you really can't repent and climb the mount of purgatory.

There's a reason he descends into hell.

Virgil's not just like, hey, that place down there, it's really bad.

We shouldn't go there.

So let's go up purgatory.

It doesn't, it doesn't instill in him enough desire.

He doesn't hate sin enough.

And so you have to kind of look at that.

That's part of self-knowledge is like that line from the gospel of John, the Holy Spirit

is sent to convict us of sin in a, in not in a self-condemning way, not in Ja, but just,

we have to be aware of this because sin is a privation, right?

We talked about that with the aesthetics of sin, I mean, it's not, it's not something

positive.

So this is, we're looking at the deprived world that's collapsing, the order of God and

the harmony of it is collapsing.

We're never going to hear the name of Jesus in the inferno.

We're never going to be spoken.

And so we have to kind of work our way down to see what is that, that kind of truly

anti-crystallological world look like in terms of these good desires that are being twisted.

So lust, then we go to gluttony and then we go to greed.

Now these are sins of what we would call perverted loves, they're disordered loves.

That's the upper hell.

Then we're going to go into what's called the city of dis.

So it's this kind of castle, medieval castle.

And then we enter into lower hell.

And lower hell is a blend of the other seven deadly sins.

So wrath, jealous envy and pride kind of blended together under what he's going to

call violence, fraud and treachery or betrayal.

Betrayal is the bottom of hell.

And those three kind of blend together.

Now part of what he's doing is it's going to subdivide and subdivide and what's going

to get kind of complicated.

He's not trying to have a perfectly clear cut structure of here's the seven deadly sins,

here's the seven circles of hell.

It's more complicated because the whole thing is degenerating.

It's just chaos the further we go down.

I wonder how much St. Ignatius was familiar with this.

I imagine he was, but just thinking about just the rule of just like when the soul is

in mortal sin, it's going to be inclined for more mortal sin.

Like the soul that is struggling with, you know, greed or whatever is going to also

struggle with lust, like the sins, the seven deadly sins, they all play together.

And when you struggle with one, you're going to naturally struggle with all of them.

Yeah.

What he sees, he has mercy on the souls and the top layers of hell because these are

sins of weakness in many ways, but then there's a real commitment to the will like and all

of these are starting to kind of play together as you described.

Okay, so in the interest of time, let's just kind of describe some of the highlights here.

So the level of gluttony, the souls are lying in filth and there's freezing rain that's

kind of coming down upon them.

The level of greed, they're forced to roll these huge boulders.

They're just rolling them everywhere.

So these images are helpful, the lust, the winds, just like the lustful desires for

concypes and it's being drawn into these things, gluttony, just that continual need to consume

and consume and consume.

And what happens is that we're so caught in the world that now they're faced down and

filth and they're just getting hammered by rain, greed that we think the amassing of wealth

will actually stabilize us and instead it becomes this massive burden that we have to

kind of carry the rolling of these boulders.

Then we cross the second river, which is called the Sticks and we arrive at the shores

of the city of Dis.

Now if I can describe to you the city of Dis, it's basically the profile, they're looking

at a huge fortress.

So think of like Lord of the Rings style here.

And there's thousands of demons.

The furies are there, right?

Medusa, who if you look at her in the face, you turn into stone.

Dante faints, he's just collapses, Virgil's holding him up as they arrive over the river

Sticks.

But it's all a facade.

All of a sudden an angel of God comes down and boom, shatters the whole thing and the

doors open to the city of Dis and everything scatters.

And what it reveals is the kind of way that the enemy and the way that evil manifests

itself is something great and powerful as a force that can take over your house and

take over your children or whatever.

And it's not for Dante.

The city of Dis is an inverted demonic version of the city of Jerusalem.

The heavenly Jerusalem is described as a city and so the city of Dis is this kind of collapsed,

strange, ultimately a facade.

There's nothing to it.

And as they pass through the gates, they realize there's nothing there.

Now Dante does conveniently put the spires of minarets on the city of Dis.

Minarets meaning Islam?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he's got a very clear understanding of kind of what he's doing and how he's thinking

about this, though it's not PC in our sense.

Right.

Okay.

So we move into the city of Dis.

We now move into lower hell and I'm going to move through this very quickly because I've

way too much here.

But I'm just going to hit a couple of the highlights.

The first thing we find is the souls who committed heresy and they are in burning tombs.

So the first one who rises up is again in Fari Nata.

Fari Nata is a great kind of leader.

He was a gibaline and he was an Epicurian.

That was his heresy.

So Epicurianism is a kind of ancient form of atomism.

So it's a materialist base, but it's known mostly for its excess of hedonism and Fari

Nata.

They have this conversation.

Then we move down to the level of violence.

The violent are held in boiling blood.

So those who committed murder are there.

The sentars are running around shooting arrows at the murderers in this river, Flegion.

We come across the suicides.

They're located in hell and they're in these thorny trees and we have a conversation with

them.

And I took time in the class to explain as priests, we work with families who have experienced

suicide in their family, also people who have suicidal ideations.

We're not saying that people who commit suicide are in hell at all.

What Dante is saying and the way he describes these examples are, is to say, these are people

who are so complicit and so completely in their will rejecting God that we're not talking

about psychological depression, anxiety, things like this that mitigate that.

This is pure violence against God and against nature and against the self.

We are going to see a suicide, Kato.

The elder is going to be in, at the beginning of purgatory, he's not even baptized, so stay

tuned.

All right.

Blasphemers, sodomites, users, all of these are the level of the violent.

The rain, the biggest theme is that the rain of fire is coming down.

At the level of satami, Dante is shocked to find a guy named Brunetto Latini.

Brunetto Latini was a poet who became a politician and he was Dante's mentor.

So they have this really interesting conversation, everybody's talking about Florence, they're

talking about Dante's life as they go through these things, but he's really upset to find

that.

All right.

So we come down through the levels of violence and then there's this huge cliff and

they can't get down it.

So they get on top of this monster called the Garyon and they fly down to the level

of fraud.

And I don't have time to go through this, but when they hit the level of fraud, now we're

deeper in.

In the level of fraud, we're going further and further down this kind of cone-shaped circle,

but there's a bunch of these pockets and they're called Mollabogs, right?

Mollabogs and there's ten of them and this is where all the different kinds of fraud

are.

All right.

And then there's a lot of things, you feel like you're losing your mind at this point

as you're reading the inferno and I think that's part of it.

Like you actually feel like this is, I have no idea what's going on.

We're just going through these pockets where souls are kept.

The first we see is the seducers and the flatters, they're whipped by demons and plunged

into excrement.

This is the first two ditches.

And then we come to those who committed simony and this is not fun, this is where the clerics

are.

I was about to ask that because I don't know if this is Dante who says this or if it's

just, you know, kind of low tea, lowercase tea tradition, but like the way to hell is

paid with the skulls of bishops and priests.

It's like, where do I fit in here?

Yeah, that's a shocking word.

I think that, I mean, Dante, the main place we see is Pope's Nicholas, Bonifus and

Clement are plunged headfirst in holes and their feet are set on fire.

And the reason for that, the contraposso is the simony is actually, it's an inversion

of the sacramental order.

The physical expresses the spiritual, right?

We have physical signs that express and communicate the supernatural.

What simony does is it takes the supernatural in order to materially profit.

So it flips.

So it's this really sick inversion.

Now we got to know a little bit about what's going on in the world at this time in the

around the year of 1300.

The French monarchy basically has stacked the deck of the cardinal, the College of Cardinals.

And we have a lot of French popes coming up.

You also have had kind of Rome deteriorating economically, politically, the Burgundians

come down and they're sacking it and they're just kind of, Rome's basically run by like

the mafia at this point.

And so in 1308, Pope Clement, the fifth is going to go and say, you know what?

Let's get out of here.

Let's go to Avignon.

And if you ever been to Avignon, you know, you're like, I get it, make sense.

It's an amazing place.

But what they're doing is they're putting the papacy basically in captivity to the French

government.

So they're selling, it's a huge act, political act of simony to be like, we will go to

Avignon and we will be taken care of.

But it's actually selling of the church for the sake of putting it under the temporal

power.

And they're going to be there until I think 13, 1389, when St. Catharine is going to

come up and be like, boys, back to Rome and they go back to Rome.

Right.

No, there is a huge controversy on how much power the Pope should have.

And who should write in 800, Charlemagne is crowned as king by the Roman pontiff.

And this idea of like, where do you get your power from on earth, who has the authority

to name and invest bishops?

And so during this time, the medieval area, it's like the local governor, the local emperor

was the one to name the bishops of the area, which has many problems because then it became

all about the simony of just like, well, if I just pay the emperor, I'll become bishops.

Right.

And Dante's going to do a lot with the interaction between the church and politics.

We think of this like, the separation of church and state is like better.

But classically, it's not necessarily better.

It's just the world is so intimately bound up.

The political, economic, and social dimensions of Christendom were permeated by the values

of the gospel.

So you had a Catholic world, you had Catholic monarchs.

And so that was a huge part of that conversation.

Dante hates Boniface the eighth a lot because Boniface probably betrayed him because the

gulfs and the gibotines, it was all about who's pro emperor and who's pro papacy.

And Dante was a gulf, so he was pro papacy, but less than the black wealth.

So he basically appeals to Boniface who basically betrays him.

So he's like, you're definitely going into hell.

But what's crazy is that Pope, climate is the Pope at the time that he's writing this

and he puts him in hell.

So he's like, really, he's not holding back on these guys.

All right.

So then we continue down the levels of fraud, those who, the diviners, the bariturs, hypocrites,

thieves, evil counselors, this is worth pausing it very briefly.

Evil counselors are swathed in flames and this is where we hear and meet Ulysses, also known

as Odysseus from Homer's Odyssey, Allah, Matt Damon.

That movie come out yet?

No.

Okay.

I mean, it might have, I don't watch movies very much.

Maybe sweet.

But Ulysses recounts his voyage, which is a creative development of where Homer ends

the story.

So do you remember anything about Ulysses?

No.

The story of the Odyssey.

He's a warrior.

I, I, no, I don't remember much about that.

That's okay.

The story of the Odyssey begins with the collapse of Troy, the sacking of Troy.

It's, it's the story of how one Trojan warrior, or excuse me, Greek warrior tries to

return to his home of Ithaca.

And it's a very, very long journey bag shipwrecks and all kinds of crazy things.

The story ends with his return to Ithaca, reunited with his bride, excuse me, Penelope

and his son who helps him to reestablish and he lives happily ever after.

Yeah.

Not in Dante's mind.

Interesting.

Dante picks up from the story there and says, well, what happened is Ulysses or Odysseus

same.

He gets bored.

He gets bored at home and he says, back out, I got to get back out for adventure.

And so he gets the, gets the boys together, he sails west through the straits of Gibraltar

in search of the Isle of purgatory and uncharted waters that are forbidden, no one is to ever

see this isle.

So he makes his way into the southern hemisphere and right as he sees and beholds the

amount of purgatory the shipwreck and he dies.

Wow.

So this presumption and evil council is where Ulysses is and it's one of the most powerful

and kind of creative moments in the inferno to hear this story told again from this man

who lived with this presumptuous audacity and unceasing desire for adventure.

Yeah.

And I think that's very compelling for us as guys who love adventure.

For sure.

The reality is like known as like, it's like the story of the old ancient world isn't

it?

It's like Homer was like the classic author, the Iliad and the Odyssey together.

I mean, everyone read those.

Yeah.

So those two and then Virgil's a need, which is the third part and Virgil is our guide,

right?

We're with Virgil this whole time.

Yeah.

It's a very interesting kind of creative spin on it.

Okay.

Then we continue down at the level of the schismatics is Muhammad and other people.

There's devil slashing them open, which makes sense because schism is literally the separation

of the flesh.

Then there's falsifiers and impostors and then we had last arrive at the ninth and final

level of hell, which is the level of betrayal.

So Dante sees the experience of betrayal as the deepest sin possible.

And betrayal happens to kin, family, part of your nation, betrayal of guests and then

ultimately betrayal of benefactors, which we're not talking about people will give money

but people who do good to us.

And this is where the world is frozen.

He's going to come across.

He stumbles on a head that we're walking across the last of the four rivers and everything

is completely frozen.

And these heads are frozen in ice.

So no longer is it the hot, there's no flames, there's the kind of stuff.

It's just ice cold.

The level of betrayal is just frozen.

And we hear the devastating story of Kant, Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, which we don't

have time to go into, unfortunately, because I do want to kind of wrap this up, where basically

Kant, Ugolino, was running pizza with his nephew.

He wanted to run his nephew out of town, Nino Visconti, he wants to run him out of town.

So what does he do?

He aligns with the Archbishop of Pisa, Ruggieri.

And then he does that and then Ruggieri turns on him and he imprisons him in the tower

in Pisa with his sons and grandsons and he starves him to death, throws the keys in

the river.

And then Ugolino is telling the story of how they, and he's just absolutely consumed with

hatred and vengeance and over the treachery he experienced, but also the treachery he committed

against his nephew.

And so it's like power at its absolute worst playing out.

And the Ugolino is chewing on the head of Archbishop Ruggieri in this lower level of

hell as they're frozen in the ice.

It's really, really sad, terrible.

And you feel it as you read this.

And then at last we get to the bottom of hell, which is completely encased in ice.

And here we behold Satan with three mouths chewing on the three betrayers, Judas Iscariot,

and Cassius.

Judas Iscariot we know, the treachery of Christ, we read that in the Gospel today.

But Judas and Cassius we might not be as familiar with.

So that requires us to brief kind of explanation.

Rome is a republic prior to Julius Caesar.

Julius Caesar is a military officer.

He's in the north.

He's north of the Rubicon River, which he crosses in the year 49 BC, which is a statement

of war.

Basically, he's taken the Roman army and he's attacking the city.

So it's this unblue moment.

Two of his generals get out of there and they align with the leader of the Roman republic,

the Roman democratic side, which is again, I'm told of me.

And those two generals were Brutus and Cassius.

And they align with him to fight Caesar, Julius Caesar.

They lose the battle.

They are taken captive by Julius Caesar.

He pardons them both, forgives them, sets them up into different political positions.

And then on the Iads of March in the year 42, I think it's 42 BC, they align to assassinate

Julius Caesar.

Yeah.

And if you ever are in the Largo Argentina on the Iads of March in the city of Rome,

you can see this replay out because that's the place where it happened.

And so there's Italians who will be reenacting, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

It was the year 44 BC.

And the Iads of March that he was killed in what is the present day at Largo Argentina,

where there's a ton of cats, it's kind of disgusting, but it's a cool spot in the middle

of it.

So that phrase, the line, et to Bruté, that sometimes people call it, is that from, do you

know what that's from?

Not from Dante.

Yeah.

I think it's from Shakespeare.

Okay.

Thank you, Brutus.

And you, Brutus.

Yeah.

And so a Brutus and Cassius are there.

And this is really the depths of hell.

Now what's going to happen is they kind of Dante's kind of coming in and out of consciousness

at this point because he's so overwhelmed by what he's seeing and they're frozen, but

they've reached the bottom of the world.

They're in the center of the earth now.

And so they're going to climb over the top and they're going to come down the back

height of Satan and they're going to slip in the other side and they're going to start

coming up the other side of the world.

All right.

So at this point, it's 7.30 p.m. on Holy Saturday.

For the next 12 hours, they're going to climb out the other side of the world.

And at 7.30 a.m. on Easter Sunday morning, they're going to climb out.

They're going to look across to see the water, the mount of purgatory, and they're going

to look up to behold the stars.

You can't to go ends with the stars.

And this is the first moment where they're immensely relieved to have completed their

journey through the inferno and now ready to climb the mount of purgatory.

Awesome.

There you go.

Thank you.

This is great.

I think where I often hear the inferno quoted is at the kind of first layers of hell.

There's like this fire.

There's this, I don't know.

You're just subsisting in agony because of this flame that's come to kind of eat away.

But then at the very, very core of hell, there is no love.

It's frozen.

There's no movement.

There's nothing going on.

There's just frozen in time, frozen in place, frozen in self-hatred and hatred of and

betrayal to your point of the three heads there.

The absence of God is horrible.

There is no love because God is love and God's love will melt away all of that.

If we've been in the absence of God's love, the love actually feels like harmful, which

is really tragic and really sad.

And come back full circle to the discussion earlier about the confessional being as a

from a pre-spective, people are so ashamed of sexual sin in particular and the passionate

disordered loves.

Those are sins.

But the real sin is the death of love, the ice cold, the trail in the heart of God, where

you're incapable of love.

That's the depth of it.

And so that's what needs to be rooted out of our hearts more deeply and everything else

will kind of flow naturally from that.

All right, so that was part one.

And I would just say, let me look up this YouTube link real quick.

I have a lot more content on this.

This is kind of the first cut of it, but if you'd like more information, you can go to

Lord's Denver YouTube and you can find my lectures there.

And there's three hours on what we just talked about.

There'll be three hours on each of the four parts.

It's probably easiest just to go to Lord'sDenver.org and then look for the YouTube link.

Yep, Lord'sDenver.org.

Look for the YouTube link and then I'll take you to the YouTube landing page for Lord's

Denver.

And then, I don't know, it's probably under live videos, it would be my guess.

Yeah, they are live stream.

And if you are listening to this the next four Tuesdays, they will be live.

So yeah, you can go to Lord's Denver, which you say was Lord'sDenver.org, and that's

L-O-U-R-D-E-S.

Yeah.

And again, lots of Dante and they'll be live on Tuesday nights at 7 p.m. for the next

four weeks.

But we're going to have two subsequent ones coming out.

I'm timing this because it's holy week, it's holy Thursday.

Dante starts the inferno.

We're going to the purgatorio and the parodies, so in Easter time because that's when they

take place in Dante's mind.

Beautiful.

All right.

Well done John.

Do you have any shout outs?

I'd like to shout out Tony, Visaraga and his wife, Dianne.

Dianne works for the church, but Tony listens to the podcast and they both might actually.

Shout out to them.

They're a great family.

Thanks for listening.

I have two shout outs.

You know, we usually don't do friend shout outs, but Kevin and Mary Berry were like, you

got to give these two shout outs.

So Jill, Janusek from Orland, Park, Illinois, and Francis Parsons in Raleigh, North Carolina,

great people and faithful listeners, friends of the Berry's.

Thank you for listening.

Jill, I apologize for butchering your last name, Janusek, I think I got it, so thanks

again, you guys.

All right, Sean.

It's funny for today, wishing you a blessed tritum, happy holy Thursday to you.

Thank you for your priesthood, grateful to be your brother in it, and we will be back

in Easter time.

So Catholic stuff podcast at gmail.com, be sure to keep in touch and we will see you in

Easter.