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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Dante's Inferno Ep. 1: Intro and Canto 1 with Dr. Jeremy Holmes
02:01:16
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- [00:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we begin our journey into Dante's Inferno. Dante the pilgrim must journey through the pit of hell for his own good, alongside his guide, the Roman poet Virgil. We read Dante the Poet because he is a teacher, a teacher of souls. He is a master of the human condition. For Dante, it is love that moves all things, and it is even love that gives structure to hell. Dante the Poet invites us to take our soul seriously and approach the Inferno not as a sterile academic task, but as a spiritual exercise. I am joined today by Dr. Jeremy Holmes of Wyoming Catholic College, and we take up several introductory questions to Dante, like what is the Divine Comedy and how should we read it? And then move through the first canto of the text. If you have not Already, check out thegreatbookspodcast.com for a written guide to the Inferno and join us as we start this beautiful and challenging journey together. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I am a husband, father of five, and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We are recording on a beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. If you are new to Ascend, we are a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. If you want to read Homer's Iliad or his Odyssey, for example, we have everything you need to guide you through those texts. Check us out on Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters. You can also Visit us at thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have written guides to help you read the great books. Today we are kicking off our discussion on Dante's Inferno, the story of Dante the pilgrim traveling through the pit of hell. We'll be reading this wonderful narrative over the next seven weeks, starting with today and ending in Holy Week today to help guide us through the Inferno. We are delighted to welcome Dr. Jeremy Holmes, who holds a BA from Thomas Aquinas College and an STM from the International Theological Institute in Austria and a PhD in Biblical Studies from Marquette. He now serves as the Associate professor of Theology at Wyoming Catholic College. Welcome, Professor.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Thank you for having me.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So do I understand correctly that when you were at the ITI in Austria, you lived in a Carthusian monastery for two years?
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
That's correct. In fact, the second year I was there with, when my wife and I had our first child, we lived in the priorin house, that is in the apartment that the prior would have had reserved for him. So I was sometimes up at 2 in the morning with my summa theologiae, imagining what was happening 1000 years before me in this apartment, you know, who was pacing these very floors.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's beautiful. How many kids do you have now?
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Nine.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Nine. Congratulations. God bless. We're a small family of five out here in rural Oklahoma.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah, I come from a family of five. I am one of five siblings myself, and my oldest is 25 now and has her own child, so I'm also a grandpa.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, congratulations.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And my youngest is actually younger than my grandchild, as sometimes happens with bigger families.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's great. There's a woman down the hall for me at the chancery, and her oldest is married and had a child and their grandson. When he was born, their youngest was three, so he became an uncle at three. And it's really kind of. It's a beautiful family dynamic with large families.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. Unfortunately, my grandchild is far away from where I live, and so we only get to see her in person once in a while.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that tends to be how that works. And then also then after living in the Carthusian monastery, obviously, you got your PhD and then eventually you went down to the subtropics down at Ave Maria in Florida, right?
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah, yeah. I was down at Ave Maria for a couple of years, teaching graduate and undergraduate theology. Made some great friends and got to learn from some great people down there. And then while I was there, Wyoming Catholic College was starting up, and I had some very close friends involved in that startup. And it's both true to say they recruited me rather heavily, and that Wyoming Catholic College really lined up with a lot of what had been my intuitions about what I wanted to do.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I have a really soft spot in my heart for Ave Maria University. I went down there for my master's work and came into the church at their little oratory that they have, as unique as it is, but it's really just a really beautiful, very unique place to come into the church. Because I remember, like, we come in, the Easter vigil is, like, you know, three hours long. The pub across the street, that's back when they still had that little, like, Irish pub across the street. Stays open to welcome everyone from the Easter vigil. Right around midnight. They're, like, welcoming everyone who's, like, every little old lady's, like, having a beer and welcoming you into the church and giving you rosaries. I mean, really, like the whole town, right, is like, alive with a celebration that you've been, like, you know, reborn in Christ at Easter. And then our sponsor held a party after that. And so literally we were going. I think the party that we went to last was at like 2am is when it started. And they had made like a little lamb cake and everything. And like, kids are just passed out all over the house and people are still like, celebrating. It was just, it was a beautiful place that really took seriously, like, oh, yeah, you have become a new creature in Christ. And there's like all these physical ways, you know, as kind of century animals to celebrate that. It was a really beautiful experience.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah, they've really evolved into a kind of a taste of a Catholic town, which is really a neat thing. Well, when I was there, I was there for their, their, their last year in Naples and their first year at the. The new campus in Ave. And so when I, when I was there, there were campus buildings and a few houses and big, you know, dirt fields where they planned to have a grocery store and things like that. Um, so it was, it's been neat to, to go back and visit and see, oh, wow, that that dirt field is now something real and serving the community. And I've got some very close friends down there that I stay in touch with. And it's, it's. It sounds like a really neat place to be.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
It is. It's a beautiful place. I still have friends down there as well. And some days when it's really cold up here, I do actually miss. I do actually miss the heat down there. I don't miss the bug season, whatever that was. We're like, you know, they don't have real seasons down there. They just have like Florida seasons. And one of them is just bugs. There's like a million bugs. Like, I don't miss that. I do enjoy Oklahoma. Let's kind of get into Dante. So we are reading Dante's Inferno for the next seven weeks over Lent. I think this is a fantastic text to read over Lent, but just in general, even if it's not Lent. So when you have students that maybe ask you, like, why, why would we read Dante's Inferno? Or maybe someone who really hasn't even read it yet, they're just kind of checking out this first podcast of just like, well, maybe I'll read this. Maybe I don't, I don't. I know kind of about it. I've seen some art online, but I don't really know the text. Well, if they just asked you, like, why should I read this text? Like, how do you answer that?
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Well, you know, there are a lot of different kinds of answers to that. Right. So for People as perhaps maybe your. Your usual listeners, the people who keep coming back to your podcast who are very similar to my students, that is people who already have a hunger for great books. You know, one, one relevant kind of answer is just to say Dante is one of those names that gets tossed around as maybe the best poet ever anywhere. I think T.S. eliot said, basically there's Dante and Shakespeare, and between them they cover everything and there's nobody else. So in terms of great books, there's no disputing. He's great, maybe the greatest poet. That's one kind of answer. I think another kind of answer regarding the Inferno in particular would be to say our Lord in the Gospels frequently warns us about a coming judgment and the possibility of that human life can end well in a, in sort of in a, in a comedic way. Human life can also end badly. There, There is a tragic possibility for us. And he warn, he warns us to think about that. And the Inferno is a sort of extended meditation on that possibility. And in Dante's hands, what happens in the Inferno is all those little lies we tell ourselves all fall away, right? And so the, the, the, the, the various sins that we commit in our, in this, our lives are there in the Inferno with all the glamour and the attractiveness gone, all the rhetoric gone, you know, and it's, it's bracing as, as you say, oh, wow. Not only is that where I could be if life ended tragically, but it's telling me something about where I am now.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I really appreciate that. Yeah, a few thoughts, just like, building upon that one, I think that Dante, in a lot of ways, you kind of look, if you kind of set him within the Great Books tradition, right? These great authors that are in dialogue with one another, in a lot of ways, I think he is like a zenith of a certain culture. This kind of like the ancients moving into the medievals. He tends to be, you know, a certain zenith, a certain just like high point, almost like, you know, on one side you have St. Thomas Aquinas, right, with a Summa theologica. And there's like, that's like a certain zenith of like scholastic thought, right? Like this is the highest, this is the peak. In certain ways. I feel like Dante is that, but in poetry, right? So he takes like the whole tradition, right? So he's going to, we're going to see. He pulls from like Greek, like Greco Roman mythology. He pulls from scripture. He's pulling from early church fathers, he's pulling from St. Thomas Aquinas. He's playing from the saints, like these, it really is of a summa in and of itself. Right. He kind of draws this whole tradition together and then kind of presents it in an incredibly, I think, captivating narrative.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And not, let's not forget, he's also. I mean, we tend to gloss over, but he's also pulling in what was the science of his day. Right. I mean, that is to say, there's no area of knowledge available in his century that's not coming in and somehow being fused into one huge experience for his reader. And I bring that up just because while the science of his day has passed on and we have a new science, I think we tend to be despairing about the possibility of unification of our knowledge. And Dante really challenges us with the idea that truth really is one truth, and it. And that has not passed. Right. That. That. It. It. It.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
He.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
He sort of challenges us today. Can you do what I can do in my. My day? Are you able to. To bring, you know, science and theology and philosophy and poetry and history, one truth, one experience, one vision? I've thought, you know, one way, I think, about what Wyoming Catholic College is trying to do is we're trying to lay the seed bed so that one day our age will have our Dante. And to read the Dante of his age is a way to see where we're trying to go.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like that a lot because I think, too, as moderns, it's hard to see unless we read the ancients and read the medievals. We're very atomized in our thought process. I mean, we're atomized from each other, too. We don't really understand friendship anymore. Community. You look at people suffering from despair, but a reflection of that is that we're actually very atomized in our thought process. Right? So, like, over here is my religion. You know, I'm a Catholic. Over here, like, is science. Over here is a certain technology. Over here is my professional life. Like, these things don't mix for us. So I appreciate what you say, because I think one thing that we have to explore as we're introducing the text is that Dante creates for us a beautiful architecture of the entire Divine Comedy is not simply a philosophical and theological text or pulling from, like, the Bible or Greek mythology, but, like, astronomy plays a heavy role, mathematics plays a heavy role, Right? Numbers. Like, he's playing with numbers throughout this. I mean, this is a brilliant, brilliant man. And so, like, one of the things that I would say to people when they're like, hey, why should I read this? I think in a lot of Ways it's an invitation for us to take the soul seriously, which is not something we do well as moderns, right? But he places it. It's like you take your soul seriously and then you place it to what you were saying inside this, like, ordered cosmos, right? The things are structured. Reality is something that's intelligible. We can come to know it. And so kind of. And it's funny because that's why we read the comedy over overall. But even in the Inferno, I think kind of buried in this, in the architecture of reality, is love. That love is this, like, cosmic force that love provides a certain architecture, even to hell, even to the damned. And so I think in a lot of ways, you know, these things sound alien and foreign to us, that Dante invites us to be a student of the soul and to love, you know, via kind of the horror of sin. So as we kind of, you know, because the comedy overall, and we'll kind of get into this, right, is this movement from. From hell to purgatory to heaven. But the first thing he has to encounter, right, is this kind of the reality of evil, the reality of sin. But even behind that veneer, he's trying to teach us something, I think, about the beauty of love.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah, absolutely. From top to bottom, the Divine Comedy is structured around either the love lost, the love had imperfectly, or the love finally possessed.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no. Very good. Okay, so that's like the pitch, like, why do we read this? Why is it worth the time? So let's take a step back and kind of just maybe ask some, like, brass tax questions. So, like, maybe who is Dante? Right? You know, so my, like, you know, preliminary understanding, you know, Dante Alighieri is born in 1265, right. He's born in Florence. This time is like the Republic of Florence. So, like, Italy is kind of fractured into these kind of very antagonistic, warring. They're not exactly city states, but they're like little kingdoms, right. Little republics, etc. You know, he's the son of, like, a modest, aristocratic family. I think his father was some type of merchant. If I remember right, he makes a claim somewhere in the Comedy that he's like, the descendant of the ancient Romans, but, you know, he reminded me of Aeschylus, because on the podcast, we just finished studying the Oresteia. And a lot of times when we think of poets, I don't know, in the modern parlance, I don't know, I mean, maybe it's my own limited imagination, but that's like, if you're a poet, it's like something limp wristed, it's like milquetoast, it's a weakness. But when we read Aeschylus and his Oresteia, like, you know, this is a guy that fought in the battle of Marathon, like defending a nascent west against the Persian invaders. And I, I don't know if I really appreciated until recently that that Dante also, he's a poet.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Fought in battles.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, he's also a soldier and within.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
The Divine Comedy he'll bring forth comparisons to battles and you kind of have to check the commentary to realize, oh, he was at this battle, he was involved, he, he was fighting, he was, he was in the politics of his day. Not only in an office, some he did hold political office, but also in the battlefield. And his, of course he was heavily involved in a kind of Florentine ring of romantic poets that were, were busy starting what they called the new style, the new sweet style. But of course his, all his efforts to command words are very relevant to his involvement in politics in his late life. The, you know, the, the, the, his reputation was such that people were afraid to let him be involved in things because he was considered to be so persuasive that he could just get people to do anything. You know, his, his command of language had become so great by the time he was. Well, we'll get to that time. But by the time he left Florence for good.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I mean that's really reminiscent of like someone like Cicero. Right? Like just don't let them, don't let them speak. Right? Whatever you do, don't let them speak because of this like rhetorical power. So I think this like taking a step back, particularly for like first time readers. I mean Dante is just like this fascinating character. He's a poet, he's a soldier, he's a statesman. He seems to have a real mastery of maybe what we would call the liberal arts. Right. He's very well educated. He pulls from, I mean it's amazing to me sometimes I think about all the text he pulls from or stories. When you then kind of get down into a very granular level and realize like, oh, he never, he probably never even had a copy of say like the Iliad or the Odyssey. He probably never was able to read Homer directly. Yet he still like commands somehow this like marvelous understanding of these characters and then weaves this together, right? This is that architecture of love that we'll be looking at. He weaves this all together into a story that I think then invites you to really take your soul seriously with inside this reality that we find ourselves. What else do we know? Just kind of setting off here on the beginning. Anything else about who he is and his person that you think would find or we'd find beneficial?
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah, well, I, I think it's, it's crucial to know maybe a little bit about his relationship with Beatrice which is, is so foreign to us. But, but really behind the Divine Comedy that, that he, he writes a number of works before the Divine Comedy. One of them is Ilvita Nuova in which he recounts his very. A nine year old encounter for the first time with a little girl, Beatrice, who lived not far, far away. And he was just overcome with love for this person. And he, he doesn't have daily interactions with her from there forward, but, but every, every encounter with her is this epoch in his life. And, and then, and then he writes a lot of poetry both in her honor and in honor and recounting the love that she has inspired. And then she dies and he may. And at the end of the Vita Nuova he makes a promise that one day he is going to write of Beatrice that which has never been written of any woman. And as we'll not today, but, but next on the next podcast we'll, we'll get into how she's ultimately behind the entire journey that we're going to read about in the Inferno and, and past the Inferno. And that the, the whole thing driving it is his originally his very human love for Beatrice and how that's transformed by stages into as he goes through the Inferno of the parody. So it eventually up to the very heights of love that. But it starts with something we can all relate to, romantic love. Yeah, I think that's again, just, just driving home that he's. There's a very autobiographical thing about love that explicitly inspires the Divine Comedy. And so back to your point about this thing is about the architecture of love.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I really appreciate you kind of parsing that out. Yeah. Because I think there's a few things there that are very odd to us. Like one, so I'm from Oklahoma, so I'm going to call her Beatrice. So like first off, Beatrice is not his wife. Right. Beatrice, like you said, this is a girl that he originally saw when he was 9. I guess the best way I've come to describe her is like her beauty captivates him even though he doesn't see her very often. But she becomes like a muse. Like you think about the muses at the beginning of the Iliad and the Odyssey. She becomes like a muse to him that Somehow, like, ignites his imagination in this certain love. But I think that's something that's really interesting. You talk about his poetry. That really helped me understand, like, what is the role that Beatrice is going to play in this story? You know, what is this woman that seems to be, like, leading him, guiding him, like, what is she doing? Like, what's the role? You know, we'll kind of get into that in the canto too, a bit. But when he writes the poetry, I remember reading, you know, very clearly in there, that he talks about her beauty. In this one poem, he says, you know, talking about her beauty, et cetera. And in this kind of, like, love, courtly poetry, right? What you would expect is you talk about the beauty of the woman, and then you would pivot and say, you know, and this. What draws me deeper into my love for you. But he pivots differently and he says that she has this beauty. And that is why I love him. Right? This like capital H, right, Referring to God. I think this is, again, one of these concepts that's very alien to us and here at the beginning of a text about hell, that the beauty of a woman can somehow be an icon of God's beauty. It could somehow be this, like, icon of the cosmos, of, say, okay, there's a beauty that's drawing the soul upward. Right. And so, yeah, we're going to have to. As we kind of move through the texts, we're going to have to wrestle a little bit about, like, what is this kind of muse role that Beatrice plays and how does she inform our understanding of, like, human love and how our natural love, right, our amor, our eros, can kind of actually lead us or invite us to love God.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah, and that's, you know, this is. This is so relevant today because we live in a time where we either divorce loves entirely, where we can't imagine our love for our spouse really having much to do with our love for God. They're sort of two tracks, or we just conflate loves utterly, you know, and we, we, we. You know, there. There are these signs that people put in their yards, you know, in this house, we believe. And the. One of the first lines of theirs, love is love. Which I think what that means is I refuse to make any distinctions between kinds of love. And so we've got this other force in our culture that just wants to conflate all loves. And Dante has a virtuous mean between those where there are truly distinct loves that are nonetheless inherently related one to the other, so that they form A kind of ladder that one can climb up, starting perhaps with the vision of a beautiful woman and then moving on step stage by stage, up finally to the, at the end of the Paradiso, to the vision of God and the, the beautiful line at the very end of the Divine Comedy where Rodante says that. That he finally had reached the point where his own heart was simply moved by that love that drives the sun and all the stars in their motions.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Again, I think that he is a teacher, Dante's a teacher, and I think one of the lessons here is what is love? And I think that's a much thicker and more complicated subject than we tend to take it today. Right. He's going to really kind of force us to understand what is actually this force of love. Right. How is it that love moves both the soul but also the cosmos and what's it moving us to? And, you know, sometimes it's a proper love, sometimes it's, it's improper, sometimes it's, you know, falling short, sometimes it's exaggerated. He's going to show us that there's all these different ways. But at the end of the day, I think that even in a text about a journey through hell, the lesson is really about love. So, no, I think that's.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. I would just say for our listeners a great question to ask at each kanto in the Inferno as you, as we go down through the depths is what is being loved here? It's just, it's, it can, can help to open up when you have it. You like? Yeah, sometimes we'll, we'll, we'll encounter, as we get to get down there, some fairly repulsive scenes where you. Love is a word that is not coming to mind. But at the back of the scene, the central characters are loving something and it may be it's a bad idea or they're, they're loving it the wrong way or there's something twisted about it.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, very good. So let's kind of take a step and look at the. What is the Divine Comedy? So, particularly for those that are, like, you know, unfamiliar. So as we've already mentioned, you know, the, the Divine Comedy has, you know, three parts, just to use kind of a common parlance. So there's like three parts. Right. So the first art is the Inferno. This could be Dante the pilgrim. Right. Because we have to make distinctions. There's Dante the poet who writes this thing. Then there's Dante the pilgrim, who's the main character.
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
So there's Dante, he makes himself the main character. Of his own book, which kind can kind of lead to confusion and conversation. When we say Dante, do we mean the guy writing or we mean the, the, the himself that he put into his narrative? Yeah, so Dante the pilgrim. Nice, conventional way to refer to the Dante in the narrative, right?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, the stern is Dante. It's kind of like going on the journey. I think it's fascinating to always step back and see how he's presenting himself. And like, what does he represent? Which I think is a good question. But the first part, right, they're gonna go down to the hell. The second part, they go through purgatory, which is presented as a mountain. And then the third part, they ascend right towards the beatific vision in heaven. So this is the Divine Comedy. Why is it called a comedy? Like that's not. Is it funny? Like why, why do they call it a comedy?
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah, and that's a great point. So in, in Dante's time, the, the word comedy or commedia didn't have that sense of funny or joke or haha. It simply meant a story that begins with trouble and ends happily. Which is you could have a tragedy which. In which begins with things going pretty well and ends very badly. So those two are the reverse of each other, right?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I remember when I first kind of learned that then as you read poetry and plays, etc, you pick up really quickly. If the play starts off with everything being really great or being really difficult, it gives you this like, insight right at the beginning of like, okay, where's this work of art going to take us? Is this like. So when he talks about the Divine Comedy and it's like, okay, journeys through hell and purgatory and heaven, etc. Like, what is this? Like, is this like a vision that he had? Is this like St. John on the island and like the Lord showing him something? Is this like a mystic thing where he's trying to actually give us the topography of hell? Like what, what is, what kind of text? What kind of genre is this?
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Well, that's, that's very interesting because Dante maintains the relentless fiction that this, this really happened to him. There's no point in the Divine Comedy where he even hints that this was not real, that this is just a poem. And, and so he, he sets it up so you can really just get into the, the, the, the sense of the reality of this, of this journey. And you know, it must be the case that Dante, the great genius poet, has created a fictional experience for us that did not really happen to him. And yet at the same time There's a great deal of evidence that the whole thing came to him sort of all together at once that he, he knows. For when he, as he's writing Canto 1, he knows things about where he's going to be in the middle of Purgatorio that are astounding. I mean, the unity of the work is amazing and it's not absolutely perfect. There are, there are a few chinks here and there. Right. But the unity of the work, the great genius that went into conceiving the thing so synthetically from the beginning, I think is what makes him able to carry off so convincing an illusion that it's tempting to think of it as some kind of mystical vision or experience. But I think it is. What it is is, is it's great poetry and great poets and mystics resemble each other in some startling ways. But, but we don't need to invoke any kind of in fact supernatural event that happened to Dante. We just have to say his, his poetry was so great that he, he, he creates the closest thing to that that you could get without the supernatural actually happening.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. And what do you take to be. I mean, maybe this is too much of a loaded question, so feel free to kind of put a bridal on it. But you know, what's the purpose? Right? So he writes this poem. I don't think the purpose is to actually give us the geography of hell. Right. Like, he's not really vying for trying to get the church to adopt that there's actually like nine circles to the pit of hell. So how would you encapsulate what do you think Dante, the poet's purpose is in writing this text?
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Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Well, you know, the, for me, the turning point in reading Dante was when I realized that he wanted to, he wanted to save my soul. That he writes about his own salvation in a way that is intended to cause others to take this journey as well and end up with God. So I think ultimately that's what he's doing. He's in the business of changing people. You know, Rod Dreher wrote a book a number of years ago called How Dante can change your life. And the book is not a whole lot about Dante, it's a lot about Rod Dreher. But, but, but the title is, is I think very apt that, that Dante wants to change your life. Now along the way to do it to, to, to get to change lives, he's going to synthesize all the fields of knowledge available in his day. He's going to explore the geography of Hell in a plausible way. He's going to invent a geography of Purgatory, and he's going to take us through every layer of the heavens as known to the science of his time. He's going to populate them with countless individuals that he either knew or knew of or that we could find out about with a kind of astounding encyclopedic knowledge. But Dante is not, finally, a philosopher or somebody writing a theological treatise about the structure of the afterlife. Finally, he's a poet who's trying to move the heart. He's got an incredible amount of knowledge at the service of that project.
- [33:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree. I think, you know, I think he's very much a teacher, right. The way I look at him is that he's a spiritual master, and he's trying to get us, I think, in a lot of ways to see ourselves in him, to see ourselves in Dante. The pilgrim who's going on this journey, like, do we too, need to go on a journey? Are we invited kind of to go through this kind of, like, pedagogical trip with him? Right. So it's one way to just read this. A lot of people read the Inferno. You know, the furnace is probably the most well known because, like, oh, you get to read these things, and there's, like, you know, rivers of blood and these terrible things are happening, and people are chopped up and, like, you know, oh, do you know, like, the bottom of hell is actually ice? Like, there's all these things that I think capture the imag nation in a lot of ways, but in reality, I think very much what he's actually inviting us to is to be a student of the soul. And I think that you actually mature with the text, right? So as you kind of read the Inferno, there's lots of things that kind of capture your attention and all these things. And then you read Purgatory, but now they're being punished, but they're being punished in a purgative way, right? In a way that's purifying. And they want to embrace this, to be pure. And you get to heaven. And, like, a lot of people don't talk about, you know, the paradise, and, like, there's just saints and these different spheres and et cetera. And one time I told a. One time I told a professor of mine that, you know, I really liked the Inferno, and I kind of liked Purgatory, and I didn't really care much for, you know, paradise. It was kind of boring, but the Inferno really captured my attention. And he told me, well, we like the things that we're most familiar with.
- [34:47]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. Okay, thanks.
- [34:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I'm not going to share my opinion anymore. Right. But we're all painfully aware, I think, of the realities of sin, of falling short. Right. And even if you're non Christian, you're listening. Right. I think there are times, you know, that you do the things that you don't want to do. And that's a fascinating dichotomy of human nature, that there are things that even as you're doing them, you're telling yourself, I don't really want to be doing this, but somehow you're doing it anyway. And that kind of fragmentation of the soul. Right. I think is something that Dante knows quite well and will present that in a poetic sense.
- [35:29]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. And, you know, I'll say it's just the normal thing for readers of Dante that on your first read, if you, if our project is the Inferno, but for those who decide they want to read the whole commedia, the normal experience is exactly what you described, that the Inferno is captivating. Purgatory is nice, Paradiso is dense and obscure. But then as people return to it and read to it again and again, Purgatory becomes more and more dear. And eventually for those who have read it many times, paradise is their favorite. And I think what that says is they've grown along with Dante. You know, they've been following him along this journey. But, but Inferno is absolutely the beginning point. And it's, you know, in that book I'd mentioned by, by Dreyer, he describes going into, I think it was a Barnes and Noble and he's, you know, looking at the bookshelf and he, he picked, he sees Dante's Inferno like, ah, picks it up, opens to the, to the, to Kanto 1 and reads the opening line. You know, he's, and he's. The whole book, the, the How Dante can Change can save your life is about Dreher's midlife crisis, you know, and he, and he reads the first line. Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wilderness. And he thought to himself, that's me. And that was a highly subjective Barnes and Noble Rod Dreher moment. But I think it's dead on. That's what, that's what Dante wants every reader to say. You know, when you, when you pick up the Inferno and you, you read that opening line about, I came to myself in this dark wood. I'd lost the path and, and I didn't know what to do. And we're all supposed to say, that's me. And then we wait eagerly to see, okay, well, so what do I do now?
- [37:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a really wonderful segue into a question of, like, how do we read the Divine Comedy? So how are we supposed to read the Inferno? Right? Because I think this is. Again, we've talked about. There's several things here that are alien to us, right? We're moderns, we're not medievals, we're not ancients. So how do we read this? Because, you know, just to kind of like, maybe unpack a little bit about what you're saying is that we have Dante the pilgrim, this character, as you've mentioned. I've mentioned we need to see ourselves in this character, right? He's an analog, right? He's an analog to humanity, to this fallen humanity that's in this world trying to pursue what's good. And all of a sudden, Dante just finds himself lost from the true path. He wakes up one day and is like, how did I get here? And that is reminiscent of so many moments in our own lives. Maybe someone's life that's listening right now is like, no, I'm. I am in the dark woods right now. Right. That is exactly how I feel.
- [38:18]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
They're howling. Yeah.
- [38:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But it seems like then that, you know, he serves. Then, like we say, Dante the pilgrim is serving as, like, an allegory, an analog for humanity itself. Like, how are we supposed to read the Comedy? Like, how are we actually supposed to, like, approach this text?
- [38:37]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. So, you know, Dante wrote, just before he. As he was beginning to publish the Paradiso, he wrote a letter to one of his patrons, Congrande. And in that, he said a few things about how his text should be read. And he made a pretty audacious claim. He said, you should read it like Scripture. And what he meant there is that scripture has a literal sense, and then it has spiritual senses. Right? It has several layers of sense of meaning. So, for example, you know, King David was a real dude in the ancient near east who really did fight with Philistines and win certain battles and gain possession of Jerusalem and so on, right? And we can read the story of King David in scripture at that level, trying to find out what happened in, you know, a thousand years before Christ in the. This patch of land. That's the literal sense. But then there's this second level at which David is always pointing forward to Christ, and. And you can read that text again looking for that second level. There's a third level, right, Where. Where in pointing to Christ. David is also telling us something about our own lives. We can look for the moral sense, the moral meaning for us. Right, so layers. Dante intends his own text to have similar layers. Right, so what we're going to meet as we go through the Inferno is almost all the time we're dealing with real, concrete, actually existing people. Dante was real, Beatrice was real. We gotta. We're gonna get into the first ring of L and we're going to talk to some people and they were. They actually existed in history, and he'll tell us a little bit about their story. Right? So there's going to be this, and he's going to describe a geography for us which he's making up. But at the level of the sort of the literal sense of the story, it's quote unquote real, right? It's, it's, it's what's sort of really happening in the story. He's going down into actually a physical pit in the story of the Inferno. But everyone we meet also is representative, also is a sort of, as you were saying, an analog for so much more. Right. And that's going to be true of Dante, of Beatrice. It's going to be true of each person we meet in each ring of the Inferno, that Dante doesn't normally deal with abstractions or mere allegories. He operates like Scripture, which scripture gives us concrete people that then point beyond themselves. And so he wants us obviously to follow the story. You know, don't get lost in and not. And forget where you've been or who you've met. Right? Follow the story. But also don't stay there. Don't just stick there like, ooh, look at this. Here's a guy who ended up in hell. No, you have to say, well, but what does he point to? What is he an analog for? There's something about my life that Dante intends to, to speak to. That's one level that we, and I can call the moral level. There's also, I would, I would say, throughout the Inferno, there's something about, about the life of, of the community of our society that he intends as well, that as we get down into the Inferno, we're not only meeting the individual in his tragic end who points to so much about our life, but we're also starting to see how a society falls apart and corrupts as we get down to the center of the Inferno and the City of D. So there's also that level, or if we could reflect on our own society today, and what do we see around us? So Dante Wants us to follow the story, think about ourselves and our moral lives. Also think about our society and what Dante can tell us about that.
- [43:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Beautiful. No, I. Yeah, I very much agree. I like that you mentioned the political aspect because maybe like a warning for first time readers, like, he gets into a lot of details about Florentine politics and sometimes it can be a little overwhelming. You're like, do I need to know all these ideas or et cetera? And I think that, you know, we have to have a decent grasp of the literal. You know, we have to understand, like, who these characters are and what they're doing. I think I read that there's over 200 unique characters introduced in the Comedy, Right. Of these, like, overall, like, there's just. You're just meeting people.
- [43:39]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Some of them just come in, in a line and they're gone. Others get an entire kanto. It's. Yeah, the whole panoply.
- [43:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But one thing I want, I want to lean into there. Two things that come to mind is one that, you know, a lot of times, particularly as moderns, we separate politics from things that are spiritual. So, like this is. This goes back to being atomized, that we naturally, as moderns, have accepted a certain fragmented reality. We don't really think that we live in an ordered whole, like a cosmos. You know, our politics today, in a lot of ways, you know, under liberalism, both left and right, it's kind of predicated on divorcing certain realities from other realities. If we divorce certain higher realities from politics, then we can have social contracts and live together in relative peace. But even when we say peace, we change terms. Like, there's all these things as moderns that you even whether we know it or not, we're the stones in the river. And this kind of just washes over us, informs us in our culture. And so I think one thing I really like that you mentioned politics, because this spiritual journey includes the political. It includes what are the duties of the state, it includes what is the role of the polis, what's the role of the city. And it's really beautiful because those have been joining us for the podcast when we read Homer and now we just worked through Aeschylus, Oresteia, you know, the polis has a certain duty to the divine. And we see that like the soul, the family, the polis and the divine all have to line up for the ancients. Right? This is one kind of ordered whole. And Dante seems to take this lesson to heart and teach us something about the political that again, I think is a little foreign. To us.
- [45:17]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And again, that matches that pattern of he starts with the very concrete, but then he shows us the resonances of meaning that come out of that concrete. And so in his own very individual situation, he was on the losing end of a political battle in Florence. You know, there. The. There was this battle between two factions that had been going back and forth for a long time, and at a certain point in time, he was exiled from Florence, and it turned out to be for the rest of his life. And he wrote the Divine Comedy in exile, and his situation was a direct result of the political situation in Florence. And he doesn't sort of keep that personal situation at bay or wall it out from his poetry. He lets it just flow. Flow right in. And he's constantly referencing that situation that led him into exile. But all the. All the. The references back to Florentine and European politics of his day is, again, a concrete thing that's supposed to show us some. Something broader about society. Something broader about society. Including ours. Including. Including societies. And, you know, and I'll just say to encourage our listeners that my own experience going through the Divine Comedy time and again has been that early on I worried a great deal about knowing who each person was and knowing what each event, what was the backstory there, and so on. And what I found was there's actually not a ton you need to know to get a lot out of the Divine Comedy. Of course, you can always do more, but you should not feel overwhelmed at all the names and all the details and all the history. You don't need to grasp it in all its details. The main thing, the powerful thing to get is that each person is real. Each person Dante meets, each event he references is real. And that's how he's going to punch us in the gut again and again. Because sometimes, sometimes he meets one of his enemies in hell, sometimes he meets one of his best friends in hell, sometimes he meets somebody he never knew personally in hell. And. And the. The fact that these were really historical people and there he is, meeting them in this narrative gives it a kind of power to. To speak to the soul that I think goes beyond if he had sort of invented a cast of 200 people. And that's the main thing, I think the.
- [48:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The.
- [48:07]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
All the details of their lives, not so important for grasping what he's doing. You know, if, if you've got. I. I found. Actually found that. That, that on a given Kanto, you know, three, four lines of commentary are basically all the historical background I need. This guy was. Was so and so. Great. Thank you. I don't need to know his whole biography get. Gets kind of mired. It's very easy reading Dante to get mired in. In. In commentary, I guess, is what I'm saying. And I want to. To encourage our readers that you don't need to do that. A little bit can help, but. But make sure you're reading Dante rather than lots of commentary.
- [48:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, you can certainly get mired. I think it's. Listen, the great books, right, are great because they lend themselves to being reread, right. They have these layers. So I would say, particularly for those who are like, first time approaching the Inferno. Yes. You need to understand that there's like this fragmented political society, not just in Florence, but really in Italy as a whole. We'll kind of see that in Canto 1, because that really informs Dante's. That Dante's writing. But there's also, like, he's pulling heavily from Scripture. He's pulling heavily from mythology. He's playing from the saints. Like, there's a lot of other wells that he draws from that I think that we can spend more time with kind of learning his mastery of than the Florentine politics. I tend to find that that's something that comes later with reading Dante. As you kind of like mature with the text. There's. There's an interest in some of these smaller details. So not that it's good, but I want to echo what you said because just don't let it choke you out, right? Don't let it trip you up, whatever metaphor want to use, because I think that there's a lot there, but it can be a little overwhelming at times. I do want to go back, though, and just really lean into this of how do we read the Divine Comedy? And I'm so glad that you mentioned that letter. Right. He writes to Kongrande, right? What is that, the big dog? Right. This is like his patron, kind of like a warlord kind of character. And when he writes to him, like. The reason I want to, like, belabor this point is because when we say you read the Comedy like you read Scripture, the problem is, again, is that I don't think we actually remember how to read Scripture anymore. So I will say that this caused me to be a much better reader of Scripture because when he writes to his patron, he basically says that there's four layers. So you read the Comedy like you read Scripture. Okay, well, how do we read Scripture? Well, there's basically four layers to the scripture, and he's pulling from St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Thomas Aquinas and is pulling from the early Church Fathers, right? So this is deep within the roots of the church. And so, as you said, right, the first one's a literal. This is the foundation. What's happening? I need to actually know. It's hard, you know, you can't be trying to give an allegorical interpretation of things if you don't actually understand literally what happened. So you got to understand in Narnia that there's an actual lion named Aslan. And what he does, before you understand that he's supposed to represent Jesus, you got to understand the literal of what's actually happened. So you have the literal, then you have the allegorical, which is like, okay, can these things stand for another thing? Right? Are there certain types here? And Dante in that letter gives the example of Moses leading Israel out of Egypt. It's like, literally, what happened? Okay, well, they were freed from slavery. Well, allegorically, what's happening? Oh, allegorically. You know, this is like the sal. This is salvation we see. The church, every Easter asks us to read right now, as we're in Lent, one of the. If you pay attention, a lot of the readings of the church come from Exodus. Well, why is that? Well, because we're in this bondage, we're in this slavery, just like. Just like the Israelites were. And we need a savior. We need someone like Moses to come and lead us out of sin, out of Egypt, through a desert, through a time of purgation, right? Like what we have right now of Lent, into a promised land, into salvation, into Easter, into the resurrection. And so you have the literal, you have the allegorical, right? How does this. Like, sometimes it's called typology, right? How does this one thing stand for another? Egypt is slavery, you know, slavery to sin. Moses is like Christ. The desert is like this life, promised land is like heaven, etc. The third one then, is the moral, which this is, I think, as more as modern. It's like this one and the one that makes sense to us the most because it's like, oh, how's it apply to me? We're very comfortable when it comes to talking about ourselves. So every little Bible study that usually gets started at a parish, we usually don't do the allegorical because it's confusing to us because we're very literal as moderns. But we always ask, well, what does this text mean to you? And how is this going to make you a better person? We like the moral side of things, and so the moral layer invites us to apply it to our own lives. So how is my soul led out of the bondage of sin? How does my soul engage in purgation throughout the desert? Right. How does my soul aim to enter the promised land? And then the last one, the fourth one, is the anagogical, which is a word that we don't use very often. Right. It's tied to our salvation. How does this ultimately lead me to my salvation in Christ? And so I kind of just wanted to sketch that out and give a detailed architecture of it, because I think Dante then, as this kind of master of Scripture, applies the same four levels to the Inferno, right? So we're looking for the literal, and then we're looking for allegorical, like you said, like, how's this thing a type of. What's the. What's he an analog of? What's he trying to teach us? Well, this. Then naturally, I led into what, right, the moral. What's the teaching here? How does this apply to my life? And then anagogical. How does this ultimately lead to my overall salvation? And so Dante is like writing the Comedy with this very biblically based understanding of how to actually read Scripture. And I think this is one of those things where iron sharpens iron, in which I know the first couple times I picked up the Inferno and tried to read it, like Dante told me, I found myself then, when I picked up Scripture, having a much more refined skill set to kind of extract truth out of God's word than I had previously.
- [54:10]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Absolutely. I've had the same experience. Yep.
- [54:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, it's very good. Okay, let's just talk a little bit about brass tacks, like what translations are we using? So I am. I'll hold them up here for those joining my video. So the main translation I'm pulling from is Dante. Well, Dante's Inferno, of course, but by Anthony Esslin, which is a wonderful text. He's got great notes. I think he really captures a lot of the theological underpinnings very, very well. The text I'm most familiar with, actually is the Musa translation, the Penguin classic. This one also has a lot of really excellent texts. It's the one I've pro work through the most. I also like a lot of the graphs and drawings in this one because sometimes it's hard in the poem to understand exactly what he's talking about. And so this one, I think, has a lot of helpful drawings. And then this one I just picked up. This one's relatively new by Jason Baxter. A new translation of the inferno. Dr. Baxter will actually join us on the podcast to work through this with us. But this is like the new one that I'm kind of comparing it to. Which, which translation are you using?
- [55:14]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
So I, I have worked through many different translations over time. I started with Esalen as you, as you're recommending. And I have to say for a first time read, I don't think you can beat Esalen. I think that of course other translations will have advantages over the Esalen in one or another aspect. Right? No, no one translation with notes or whatever contains all the best features. But when you're getting started, I think Esalen represents, he's the best compromise between staying close to the text while also conveying some of the poetry. But he, but he, he. His notes are all at the back and they're not, they're not constantly getting in your way. I often read the Hollander translation, which I think the translation itself may be the best out there in terms of that compromise of delivering the poetry while staying close to the text. But in between every CANTO there's like 20 pages of highly technical commentary that just gets in the way of reading. Drives me back to Esalen. I think that Esalen stays out of your way of as a commentator, unless you need them. Then you go to the back and there are these notes. The notes are not overwhelming. He. He has as much as you need, but not more. And so I, that's, that's the one I would, I, if I would promote to, to first time readers. As someone who's read through the, the Comedy a number of times now, I find myself sometimes also picking up a translation that may be actually pretty terrible, but the notes are really helpful to me. Or maybe I'll pick up a translation that's very, very literal, but doesn't deliver any of the poetry. But it's because. It's because I'm. What I'm wanting to get out of it on this read. But what I'm. What am I going to come back to again and again? This guy.
- [57:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, very good. Yeah. Anthony Esselin's translation of the Inferno. It's going to be kind of our baseline as we kind of move through the next seven weeks, kind of moving through Lent towards Easter. Okay, so let's look at the, the actual text. We've got a lot of preliminaries here. We've set up, I think, Dante. Well, obviously there's a lot of subjects here that will be continue, we'll continue to revisit and kind of maybe deepen our understanding as we see examples in the text. But let's look at that Canto one. And so you already kind of gave us a good example here a little bit. But I want to start off and just kind of read that famous opening line again. This again reading Esalen. Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wilderness. For I had wandered from the straight and true. Probably one of the most famous opening lines of any poem. But what's happening here? Like, we have these dark woods. He's wandered from a path. It's notable that he says our life, not his life. Like what do we see here? What's the kind of spirit that we're taking away here at the beginning of Kanto 1?
- [58:29]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Well, right away, as you mentioned, he says our life, which is. He immediately invites us in and he's. Well, chronologically, just as sort of a note. He sets the story to begin in the year 1300, when he would have been 35, which is exactly half of what the Psalms say the span of our life is 70 years. So he's got this very easy poetic sense going on. I was kind of in the middle of things on the journey of our life. But if you dig a little deeper, he's also got a kind of mathematical precision going on that he enjoys with numbers and scripture and stuff. So there's always that extra thing going on. But the. That second life. I found the second line. I found myself in a dark wilderness. I think we need to. To lean on the words found myself. Like some. This is sometimes translated I came to myself or I returned to myself. It's like I've been. I've been kind of out of myself. I've been. I've. I not only have. Have I lost the path, I lost me. And then there's this moment when I come to and. And I find myself. And when I find myself, I realize, oh no, myself is in a dark wilderness. Right? Because I've wandered from. From the straight and true. I've the direct path that was in front of me. I've lost it. And so I think that that that's. That's a moment that many of us can identify with that with. There's some point in our lives when we suddenly realize where we are in life. When you say, what. Wait a minute, what have I been doing? It's like this, this moment of self awareness. So I think leaning into found myself is also part of what he intends. But the, The. The dark wilderness he goes on to. To say in the next few Lines how hard a thing it is to tell about that wilderness, so savage, dense and harsh. Even to think of it renews my fear. And, you know, I don't know who of our listeners is living smack in the middle of a gigantic city. Right. But we have to. I think it's very helpful to imaginatively enter into what if you woke up one night and you weren't in bed, you were in a. You were in a woods, you have no idea where. It's com. It's dark, there is no path around you. There are little, like noises in the bushes. Right.
- [61:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You're.
- [61:21]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
You would be absolutely terrified. And the fear of the scene is worth dwelling on.
- [61:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. It's interesting because as, again, as moderns, like, we're not really used to being lost in the woods. That kind of, to us, that's like, I'm lost at the state park. And this is annoying because I can't find the path. But it's not like the primal, I'm lost in the woods and we'll see that animals actually show up. But yeah, two things occur to me, you know, one is I went on a bear hunt once, and I was on this bear hunt and the guy that was coming to pick me up. So they drop you off in the woods and you had a place that you would hunt and the guy. But I had to get out of my tree stand and walk like, I don't know, 50 yards or something to the spot I was supposed to get picked up. And the guy was late, very late, like 35 minutes late. And so we're way past sunset and I'm just like out here in the dark with like my headlamp and yeah, there's like this, like, do I have it? You know, am I going to get eaten by a bear? Probably not. Is my chance? 0% no. Right. But it's like as like a modern person, like, we don't have that experience. Right. And so it was interesting being in the woods here.
- [62:36]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Out here in Wyoming, there's a story, I don't know, once every year or two in the newspaper about somebody went off into the woods and never came back. And they send search parties out and can't find them. And, you know, maybe years will go by and they'll eventually find a body, but. But if you can imagine being that person who just went for a hike one day, lost the path, and then it slowly dawned on him, I have no idea how to get home.
- [63:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. The second thing that had occurred to me is I recently was at a coffee shop and kind of counseling a young man, that was like putting his life back together. And his epiphany moment was that he had gotten into drugs. And when he had came to himself, right when he had found himself after coming back down from these drugs, he had wandered off in rural Oklahoma and woke up in the woods with no phone, no anything in the dark and had no idea where he was. And in that primal moment is actually when he realized that God loved him and that God was with him. So I appreciate this because, like, parsing out the dark woods, I think we have to understand this. And I think too it gets juxtaposed with like beasts. And we'll have to talk about those. The one thing I would say before we move on is kind of looking at the moral, right? Kind of maybe shifting, like, okay, what? Like, what's the moral here? It caught my attention on this, like line 10 again, I'm going to use Esalen. He says, how I entered, I can't bring to mind. I was so full of sleep just at that point when I first left the way of truth behind. So one, we get it. The analog is made explicit. The path is truth. I've left that behind. But what really caught my attention here is that he doesn't know when he left it. He doesn't know this. And it really makes me think of like, when I was reading back through this time through Canto 1, what really stood out to me this time was, you know, is he giving us a lesson here about acedia, about slothfulness, this. This cooling of love. So when you talk about slothfulness, we typically think about like laziness, like I, you know, I watch Netflix all day or something like that, which can be that. But also like the marathon runner can be steeped in slothfulness, right? The CEO can be steeped in slothfulness. Because, you know, Kleinist will talk about. It's a sadness regarding, like God. And in regarding what's truly important in life, there's a cooling, like if you look at the. I think Dante is very good about this later on. If you look at even your natural love as like a fire, the desires to consume things, the desires, it's actually built for certain beauties, right? To. To capture them and satiate in them and be happy. Well, sometimes we just make bad decisions and we know we're making bad decisions. And I satiate my appetites on something I know that's not good. But acedia, just like noonday devil that seeps into our life. This like cooling of love it gradually corrupts us, and it's very hard in our lives to realize it's happening. Like, it just. I slowly start to drift away from the things that matter. And it's usually in that being lost in slothfulness that you read lines like this, that I just woke up one day and was like, how did I get here? Like, it's like, well, I. I just slowly drifted off. And so I was kind of curious as I read through this. I was kind of just thinking about Dante, the poet. Like, how much is he trying to get us to understand the sin, like, the true sin of, like, slothfulness here, of this cooling of love that all of a sudden you wake up one day, you're like, I don't even. I don't even know how I got here. It was gradual, slow, subtle corruption.
- [66:21]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. And, you know, and this is toward the beginning of the. The purgatory or. Sorry, yeah. Toward the end of the Purgatorio, when he finally meets Beatrice. Eventually she takes him to task on exactly this point that he had been so on fire with love for her, and she. And his love for her had led him to God and to the path of truth and to every. You know, put him on the straight path. And then after she died, it's not like the next day he got up and thought, well, I guess I'll move on. He still thought, I'm still on fire for Beatrice. But time went by and he met. He saw another lady, and he started studying philosophy. And just gradually he drifted off until, in fact, he had come fairly far from his original love, not only for her, but for everything she had pointed him to. And so I think that gradual cooling is. Is a great way to describe Dante's own experience in. In. In real life. And. And what. And. And. And what he'll. He'll give us later in the commedia. And it may be that a marital relation is a great analog for what you're talking about, that, you know, oftentimes husband and wife just kind of drift apart. They never think to themselves, I hate my spouse, or something like that, you know, but. But the. The love cools. They. They. They talk less and less, and eventually they're leading kind of parallel lives. And. And then one day it comes to a crisis without ever there ever being a moment where one of them said, I'm going to be unfaithful to you. And. But that's just an analog for our love, for everything good, you know, all the most important and deepest things in life. Our love can cool off to where we find ourselves, so to speak, avoiding conversation with all the best things, including God, this sadness about the good itself. And interestingly, you know that line where he says, I found myself in a dark wilderness. What Dante says there is he found himself per una selva oscura. And that, that word, per which we translate rightly in, in a dark wilderness, it also can bear the translation. I found myself through a dark wilderness. Like the, this savage dark wilderness was that day when your drug addict woke up. Well, you know, when, when, when things did come to a crisis. I have a relative who, you know, was an alcoholic and got into cocaine and one morning woke up under the kitchen sink and he had no memory of how he got there. And that was when he be. That was when he went out and joined Alcoholics Anonymous and began to put his life back together and went on to, you know, to do some great things. But it took that dark wilderness, it took that moment of coming to himself in a very dark place because he had just been drifting.
- [69:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, yeah, very good. And I think too maybe there's to push this point a little bit more. I think it's also very telling because the midway point of life and acedia are actually tethered, right? So slothfulness in the middle way of your life are connected. And so one of the nicknames for slothfulness for Acedia is the noonday devil, because halfway through the day it comes in. What the monks would talk about is that halfway through the day is when you wake up and you've got a purpose, right? You've got to wake up, you've got a purpose. I've got these things, I got to do it. And then in the afternoon, all of a sudden there tends to be this cooling. And the thing about acedia is, is that we find ourselves in that which we love. So our self identity is very much predicated upon the things that I love. And it's my, it's the things that I love then that give me purpose. And so the problem, like, right, the monk, like wakes up and he's got, I have a purpose, I have the day, like I'm start strong. And particularly the desert fathers will talk about that. That midway point held a certain danger because now the monk was like, wait, is this really how I'm going to spend my day? Is this, is this really what I'm doing? And it's really dangerous because also at noon there's no shadows. So we don't really expect evil to come, but it still does somehow, right? It Seeps in. And so there's actually a tethering between acedia and a midlife crisis, that midway point of life, because we wake up one day, our loves are cooled, we don't have proper zeal or diligence in our lives, and we don't know who we are. And so this is where you get guys that go out and make really dumb decisions halfway through life. Why? Because they're scrambling. They're like, wait, is this really the life I'm going to live? This isn't me. X, Y, Z. Right. They cool their loves to a certain degree and then wake up in a panic. And so it's interesting that this, he. He very much presents this as I'm halfway through my life. I think that is very much a tethering to the sin of acedia that Dante here, his loves have been cooled and he has wandered off the straight path of truth. And he has to be. He has to find himself somehow, right? And so now he's. He's in this woods, you know, kind of stumbling through, trying to find something, and he. He starts running into animals, right? So let's talk about that. Like what, what is this scene? Like that he starts running into different animals.
- [72:06]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Well, you know, right before he gets the animals, he sees this hill that leads him up out of this dark valley he's in and he's. And the sun is shining on it, and that's going to be salvation, right? That's how I'll get out of this, is I'll just climb this hill. And it says that down in line 19. That quieted a bit the dread that stirred Trembling within the waters of my heart, right? So he thinks he's got a way out, but then it's. It's as he's trying to climb this hill that now we begin to meet animals. And the first one is down in verse, in line 31. Sorry, verse 31. I'm thinking of this length scripture, line 31, right. And look just where the steeper rise began. A leopard, light of foot and quick to lunge, all covered in a pelt of flecks and spots, who stood before my face and would not leave, but did so checked me in the path I trod. I often turned to go the way I came. So this, this first animal has appeared in his way as he's trying to climb up this hill out of the dark valley, preventing his progress. So there, there's animal number one. And then just as he's thinking maybe this, this could work out, he meets a lion down in line 45. And then, worst of all, seemingly in line 49, he meets a she wolf, whose scrawniness seemed stuffed with all men's cravings, sluggish with desires, who had made many live in wretchedness. And he says, so heavily, she weighed my spirit down, pressing me by the terror of her glance. I lost all hope to gain the mountaintop. So this is the point where he just gives in, says, I'm done for, right? The leopard was bad, lion was worse. She wolf, all hope is gone. I can't climb the mountain.
- [74:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And we have. If I understand correctly, we have two sets of three, right? So we've got. We've got, like, the woods and the slope. And then you had this kind of, like, mountain, you know, sunshine, like, you know, area. And then we've got three animals. We've got a leopard, a lion and a she wolf. And so the. The three geographical features, you know, tend to. They tend to be pretty clear parallels, I think, to the dark. The dark woods. There's this lost. This is. This is like hell, right? There's this slope, like this. This. This arduous journey out. This climb is like purgatory, right? I'd have to. I'd have to go through this. And then this, you know, this mountain of heavenly light is. Is like paradise. I think that maybe one thing here that'd be helpful to note is that The Inferno has 34 cantos. So Canto is like a chapter, I guess, if you will. If I remember correctly, it means like little song. So there's like, these. There's 34 cantos, but in the Purgatory there's 33, and in paradise, there's 33. This one has an extra one. And of course, like Dante, you. You know, he also is writing in these tersets, right? He's writing in threes. He has, like, this deeply kind of mathematical understanding that gives an architecture to his poem that I think is deeply rooted in trinitarian thought, right? Of kind of honoring the three. But I think one thing, maybe a thesis to throw out here is that Canto 1 is not an introduction to the Inferno.
- [75:45]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
It's to the whole thing. It's sort of the gateway in.
- [75:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Canto 1 is actually a introduction to the comedy as a whole. And so we're seeing right here at the beginning these analogs, these three geographical features that then represent these three parts of the comedy. But he can't do it on his own because we have these animals. So what do we think the animals are, Right? Because We've got three of them as well. What, what are the animals?
- [76:10]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah, well, you know, of course, as you know, there's, there's differing views on that one. One common view is to, to see these in light of John's first letter and, and see them as, as lust and pride and avarice lining up with, you know, the, the, the, the three desires that John says are in the world. You know, everything that is in the world is. How does that go? The.
- [76:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's the same. I know what verse you're talking about. It's the same verse that St. Augustine uses in the Confessions to paint up. He paints. It's the. Each, each sin corresponds with the three parts of the Platonic soul, right?
- [76:58]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
So you have your intellect, the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life.
- [77:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [77:05]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And so one, one view that, that we could take would be to say the three things that John says are the, the, the, the problems in the world. Dante's identifying here as the things that will prevent Dante, the pilgrim, and you, the reader, from ascending the slope for making the climb that you need out of the dark wood. Another view that's plausible would be to say these three beasts map onto the three parts of the Inferno. That one represents the sins of incontinence which we'll meet first, then the sins of violence, which are sort of the middle, middle part of the Inferno, and then the, the sins of fraud, the deepest part of the Inferno. And it may be that, that Dante is not trying to pin us down to one or the other, but describing the beasts in a way that, that will leave things open for us. It's, it certainly it is, is evocative that this last beast is, is described in terms of. She's, she's stuffed with all men's cravings, sluggish with desires, and, and there he says, who had made many live in wretchedness. She seems he's starting to really push into like. Yeah, she, she's a, she's a vice of some kind.
- [78:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I think the she wolf is the one that, because of his description, it's most clear that of what she's an analog of, of what he's actually trying to show us, right? Because she's like, scrawny because it's this very wonderful picture of things that are corrupted by evil because there's always some kind of deformity, right? So she's, even though she's scrawny, et cetera, she somehow has this insatiable appetite I tend to. Yeah, I tend to gravitate towards the interpretation because I think there's a lot of ink that gets spilt on this one of, like, what do these three represent? And there's some really interesting theories. I tend to gravitate to one. You mentioned that each one represents the three major sections of hell that we're going to see. Right. So the leopard represents the very pit of hell, the worst. Right. There's this treachery about the leopard. The lion, which is probably the leopard, as a symbol of that, is probably the biggest stretch for us as moderns, because I don't know if we really associate the leopard with that anymore. The lion, though, corresponds.
- [79:37]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And it's violence is easy to connect there.
- [79:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right, right. It's violence. Right. So the sect on violence and hell and then the she wolf. Because he makes it so clear. Yeah, it's incontinence. Right. Which is a term that we typically don't use as moderns. Again, but it's a lack of control. Right. It's an inability to temper your appetite, your love. This, like, over consumption. It's interesting. He says that that's something that has destroyed so many men. So I tend to look at it as the structure. You know, one thing I should have mentioned is that Esalen's very good. Esalen's very good about noticing that when there's, like, scriptural parallels. And so Esalen actually notes that in Jeremiah 5, 6, Jeremiah uses all three of these animals in the same verse to kind of represent things as well. So there's, like, you know, Dante might be ripping that off a little bit. And I should have mentioned going back to, like, the very beginning of, like, you know, I found myself halfway through my life, our life, in this dark woods. Esalen actually notes that Isaiah 38:10 says, in the midst of my days, I shall go to the gates of hell. So he has this interesting thing of Dante, I think, at certain times, has these subtle scriptural illusions that unless you're very familiar with Scripture, you're probably not going to notice.
- [81:00]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. And also, I think there's a little bit of Dante telling us. Dante, the pilgrim, at least telling us about himself. That is fraud. Not really his issue. That's not what ultimately is keeping him down from the. From the mountain. Violence. Scary, but again, not. Not what ultimately causes him to despair. It's. It's that she wolf that turns him back finally, that, you know, he.
- [81:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Like.
- [81:30]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
There's something about that area of sin that is preventing the pilgrim from climbing. And, you know, it's, it's kind of interesting to, you know, I think that's going to be a lot of people's report.
- [81:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I like, I like reading that. The attention that he gives that as a being somewhat indicative of maybe were his own life struggles or words. Dante, the pilgrim's life struggles. I actually, I really enjoy that read. So he loses all hope. He cannot do this on his own. And then he kind of comes upon this, this shade. Right. Is this a man? Who is this? He cries out. This is line 65 or so, you know, Mercy upon me. Mercy. And all of a sudden we find out that who's here in this dark wood with him is Virgil, who's the.
- [82:19]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Author of the Aeneid.
- [82:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, who's. Who's Virgil?
- [82:21]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. So, you know, here on the podcast, you spent a year with Homer, correct? Yeah. So we have the, the, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the great Greek epics. Well, Virgil is the author of the great Latin epic the Aeneid. And he's, he's, he's later than Homer and he's very self consciously modeled on the Iliad and the Odyssey. But he tells the story of the founding of Rome and it's called the Aeneid because Aeneas, the main character, comes from Troy, through many adventures and trials, eventually to Rome and founds what will become later the great empire. And this text that Virgil wrote became sort of the great political myth, the great story that Romans could recite and tell themselves. And, you know, when you get to this morning. Morning, I was, I was with students reading Augustine's Confessions, and Augustine was talking about how in his life he was forced to read the Aeneid constantly. That was what little Roman boys were brought up on in, in the 3000 A.D. so he's, he's sort of the great epic poet of the Latin tradition.
- [83:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think too, you know, because one of the questions is like, why is he. Because there's like, who is he? But it's a different question to say, well, wait, why is he here? What's he going to do? So he's going to be the guide. Right. So this is how the text develops, is that we're going to find out that Virgil has been sent and we're going to get, you know, it's going to become a little bit clear in canto too, about how has he been sent? Right. Like, what's actually happened. But I think a question remains is like, well, why is Virgil the guide? Why not someone else?
- [84:11]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
For example, you could, you, you could imagine and I came upon a priest in the wilderness, or I found a holy hermit or, you know, somebody that. That would make sense as a spiritual guide. And we don't tend to think of pagan poets as the likely place we're going to go when our spiritual life has hit rock bottom.
- [84:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, he's. He's an interesting pick, you know, and obviously there's like, a certain things that you stand out immediately, like, well, they're both poets, right? Dante the poet is writing an epic, and so he has a certain affinity for Virgil as a writer of an epic as well. They're both Italian to a certain degree. There's a Roman, there's an Italian. But why Virgil? And it's a question. I think that, again, a lot of ink gets spilt on because you could have had Homer, who is kind of the epic writer par excellence. He could have had Homer. So, you know, why Virgil? I really like the take that, you know, Virgil wrote Eclogue 4, which is, you know, Virgil's a pagan. He's writing before the time of Christ. And what's interesting is that, you know, as he talks about this child, and this child will be born and this golden age will come and etcetera, A lot of the early church fathers took this to be an indirect prophecy of Christ, which, again, is something that if.
- [85:35]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
You happen across that fourth deck, like, you can see why the text reads like Isaiah the prophet. It's kind of astonishing.
- [85:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, so it's interesting because he's like, he's writing it for one purpose. But a lot of the early church fathers were saying, no, no, the Holy Spirit actually worked through him, where he was actually prophesying about Christ, even unknowingly. And we kind of see that sometimes in Scripture. Very famously, David writes Psalm 22, I believe, and he's writing about his sufferings and et cetera. But it very much reads like what Christ is thinking on the cross. Even when Christ cries out, you know, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That's the first line of the psalm. Like the Hebrew listening to this would have thought of that psalm when our Lord cried out, because they knew the Psalms from the first line, like a title. And so there's this interesting thing with Virgil that the early church somewhat saw him as like a link between pagan Rome, the imperial Rome, and the apostolic Rome. And Virgil tends to be. This is presented then sometimes as this link between the two. He's almost like a. Almost like a secular John the Baptist, if you will. Right. Like a link between the two.
- [86:48]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And the imperial power created this enormous tranquil world at peace with itself, with great communication systems and a common language such that Christianity could spread very rapidly, you know, throughout the whole. And so the imperial was a kind of preparation for the gospel as, as. And, and Dante sees how the loss of such a power, the lack of such a power in his own day can be inimical to the gospel flourishing in our own day. So he sees, he very much thinks of the imperial power as not the same thing as a sacred power, but as, say, the papal power, but as a needed baseline for it. And just to clarify one thing that you're saying, neither the early Fathers nor Dante conceived of Virgil necessarily as a kind of crypto Christian. Right. Even though he wrote this text that they took as a, a kind of amazing oblique prophecy of Christ. Dante will make it clear later on, Virgil did not convert. He remains a pagan. And so the, the one who's showing up while he is this linking figure, he's a linking from the other side.
- [88:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right?
- [88:09]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And that's very interesting that, that Dante's in a situation where we have to think about what can reach him, where, what kind of dark wood is he in who can get to him. It's, it takes this, it takes this, this kind of liminal figure, this, this master of words from the pagan side, who nonetheless is some kind of a link to come get Dante out of the woods rather than some more obvious person, you know, say, straight from heaven to come down and get him out.
- [88:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And I really, and I think that.
- [88:47]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
That often is reflected in our lives, right, where, where we find ourselves in a weird situation and we come to ourselves and so on, but we're not really ready, we're not at the right moment to talk to the obvious gods. We need another character that can actually get to us and be a kind of bridge figure for us toward where we end up.
- [89:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's just fascinating, right? So we have a, we have a Catholic who's lost from the, the path of truth and providence is going to provide him a virtuous pagan to lead him through this. And Virgil, Virgil actually died in 19 B.C. so you kind of go into him not being, you know, he didn't convert, like, so he's this link, but he's a link that even live during the time of Christ, he dies right before it. So he plays this like, interesting role that I don't, I don't think we really kind of give him credit for today. I really liked what you said too, because I think it informs a lot of Dante's writing that again, Dante's writing with this Italy that's fractured, that has all these warring little kingdoms and is constantly plagued by political strife. And yet in the history, they're thinking of Italy as the seat of this giant imperial power, the Pax Romana. So I think one thing we're going to see throughout his writing is there is a yearning for that imperial power and the peace that it brings. And he's going to have some really interesting passages on, like how that imperial power then you know, intersects or interplays or sometimes pushes back against the apostolic power of Rome and the papacy. And should. Should the papacy have temporal power? Right, because there's papal states. Should the pope, you know, Pope Boniface viii, should he be leading armies and taking over neighboring kingdoms and things like this? So Dante, I mean, I think his political understanding is not quarantined to Florence. He's thinking about really the west, right? He's thinking about Europe as a whole and that it's missing the piece that comes with imperial power.
- [90:43]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And so this is. So this is a. Brings back to us that Dante, he wants to. He's thinking at a personal level. There's a literal level of which the Virgil shows up to get Dante the pilgrim out of the dark wood. There's this level about the sort of. The personal moral level at which there's some kind of natural wisdom, a kind of vert, that a kind of virtue may be available even to a good pagan that. That Dante needs right now in his life. But then there's also this level of society, and Virgil's going to be a great pick at that level as well as. As the author of the great story of the founding of imperial Rome and representing what that can be, what that unity is that they're missing in Dante's day, right?
- [91:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So what's Virgil tell him? Well, you have to go on a journey. I can't actually just help you go up the slope. I can't help you do these things. You're going to have to go on this journey. And one kind of side note, I would say here is Dante, the pilgrimage. He's like weeping, right? He's crying a lot. We'll see if there's times that he just passes out, right? He just can't take it anymore and he just passes out. I think this is something to watch as a theme, is what are his emotive reactions as he journeys through hell. Because I think, remember, if we take our thesis that Dante the pilgrim is some type of analog for humanity Then there should be some type of maturation as he kind of journeys through hell. If the whole purpose of the Divine Comedy now, as we're kind of. It's starting to take shape a little bit in Canto 1, is that Virgil is going to lead him on this journey, but the journey is for his own sanctification, it's for his own formation. Then I think just something for us to watch is can we track his formation throughout the journey, throughout the Inferno? And I think that one way.
- [92:33]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. One thing just to highlight from what you're saying is as a reader, don't take Dante as always the reliable character who has the correct reaction. He's the character who's growing up and we hope he's, I mean, and we'll get there. But, but watch for his maturation. Don't just sort of think, oh, well, he liked this, so I guess as the reader I should like it, or he didn't like it. So as the reader, I should not like it. He's, he's the guy who's just coming out of the dark woods, remember?
- [93:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, yeah, very good.
- [93:06]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And he's got this very human moment when he meets Virgil where you can imagine Dante, the, the, the, the aspiring poet who's been a poet of some note in his own town. Right. And then he meets Virgil and he has this, this sort of like you're, you're meeting the goat, you know. Yeah, he's. And he, yeah, and he, he's in the worst situation possible and he meets sort of his idol, so to speak. Not literally his idol. Right. But, but, you know, the, the grand master of his craft. And there's a little bit of, of, of Dante the pilgrim geeking out here for, you know, in the midst of his crisis, like, oh, my goodness, you're Virgil. And that's, that's that, that little bit of human touch where this, this is, this is not just Dante the abstract pilgrim having an abstract reaction. This is Dante the very concrete pilgrim going on a journey that we're gonna, we're gonna follow him on.
- [94:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very good. I think that the reactions, like, particularly for first time readers, like, well, how am I supposed to see this maturation or what's happening or et cetera. I think the weeping, the passing out and the role of pity, I think are ways to track throughout the texts of how is he interacting with the souls? Does that change towards the upper levels of hell as they go down into the deeper levels? The other thing I want to say too, just because Homer's kind of fresh in our minds. For everyone who kind of read the Iliad in the Odyssey, a certain cultural dynamic here that I want to stress is that it's not just simply because Dante's Italian that he has some kind of connection with, say, Virgil and Rome, but rather that the church kind of being born out of Rome and this kind of apostolic power and the imperial power that kind of was concomitant with it. We kind of need to realize that the founding myth of Rome with Aeneas is that, remember, Aeneas is like the one refuge from Troy that actually makes it. And so one of the ways to look at this is that Rome was a Trojan colony, and so they find their roots very deep in Troy. Even if you think about the opening of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it actually traces the entire lineage from Aeneas, you know, running away from Troy burning to his adventures to Rome and all the way until you get to, you know, King Arthur in Britain. It was important for them to link that. And even in the. One of the things we talked about when did a year of Homer is even when there were wars, like, you know, so say, you know, Iliad somewhere or Troy falls somewhere around, like 1184 or so, there were still wars between a burgeoning Roman Empire and Greek empires. And historically there are writings that these two powers saw themselves as the descendants of the Iliad. Right. Of the Achaeans and the Trojans. And so one thing I think that we don't really think about much anymore is that and Dante's age in the medieval age, you know, the good guys were Troy. Like, that's where they find these roots, these deep roots. And following Aeneas and the founding of Rome, and these things become very, very providential to them. So in a lot of ways, Virgil too, I think then is like the prophet of Rome. Right. The kind of pagan prophet of Rome. And I think he plays a certain role there as the guide. And so I just wanted to kind of point that out because we'll see this time and time and again in the text where he has a certain deferential to Troy and it's because of seeing Rome as that kind of Trojan colony.
- [96:37]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. And this is also, I think, is our first little taste of something Dante is going to do throughout the Inferno that may freak some people out. Namely, he takes classical pagan things and brings them right into union with his Christian vision, such that we'll meet mythical figures from Greek and Roman mythology just at key points. We'll meet centaurs. Well, you know, meet The Minotaur, these, and they're just real in Dante's story. That's sort of going back to your, an early point you made about that Dante is not necessarily campaigning for the church to adopt his geography as l. No, he's taking great liberties and he's pulling all kinds of things from Virgil, from other classic sources and dropping them as real people and real characters into his story. And Virgil, I think, is our first sign that Dante is going to be fusing paganism, the pagan heritage, with Christian revelation in a way that, that, that bears a lot of conversation. He's very comfortable with Christianity leaning into this pagan past.
- [97:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's an excellent point. I appreciate you making it. What about the greyhound? I mean, this is, this is a character that I think there's a lot of debate around. I'm not really sure anyone has like a fantastic answer. You know, if you look at the commentaries, there's, there's always kind of these different wars going back. But if you look at the greyhound, it's, it's, it's introduced on line 101, right? Many a living soul take her to wife. This is the she wolf. And many shall until the greyhound comes, and he who will make her die in misery. And so he kind of goes on here like, and he's kind of describing the way I take him is like he starts off the greyhound, right? So we have this kind of animal versus animal analogy. This greyhound is going to defeat the she wolf. But then this kind of spiritual victory then seems to lend itself into a political victory of there's like political unification, right? So again, for Dante, the political is not something that can be separated from the spiritual. So we have some kind of like political savior. Because at first when you hear like a greyhound's coming to save us, I don't know, it's a Catholic text. You kind of think, is this Jesus? But then it's like, well, no, Jesus probably isn't uniting all of the fragmented Italian city states. So like, who, who's the greyhound?
- [99:17]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah, you know, I, I'm not going to claim to immediately solve the, the, the question over which, as you say, many experts have debated, but I think a, a key is to go back to what we said about how to read Dante, that he's almost never jumping straight to the end, going straight to the final, you know, most abstract or most universal idea. Often he has a very concrete thing in mind that then points beyond itself. And so I, I, I am quite open to the idea that, that Dante had in mind some particular figure that he thought was going to reunite Europe into the Holy Roman Empire again. And, and he thought that this person would achieve some measure of peace and therefore re. Establish that baseline for the gospel to flourish and therefore for vice to at least be, you know, driven back more to the extremities. But that person that he has in mind, whoever that person is, some people say it's Kongrande himself. So, you know, you know, whoever it was, I really think that then that individual does point beyond himself ultimately to Christ. You know, the description here says that, that he will. He'll hunt the, the. The she wolf. He'll. He will hunt her down until at last he drives her back to hell, whence if envy set her loose upon the world. And that description seems to be too much to bear for any sort of historical personage. That has to be a kind of final conquest. And so I would say Dante has his mind on the situation of Europe in his time and hopes for a resolution to the fragmentation soon. But he sees that. He sees the political life of his time much the way we see the political life of Israel in the Old Testament, right? David is a solution to certain problems that exist when Saul is king and the Philistines are pressing in. But David's not a final solution. He does point beyond himself.
- [101:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think too, just maybe as a side note here, I'm really taken with comparisons between Dante and Machiavelli. So now, you know, several hundred years later, right, we have, we have this. Another Italian thinker. And I think one thing maybe just, I mean that obviously that, that's a whole thing that we can get into. But I think that one thing that really struck me is they're both trying to solve a certain political problem, right? Things, things are fractured. We don't have unity, we're fighting against each other and et cetera. And so Dante is, I think, trying to find this kind of unified, you know, imperium, right? This kind of unified imperial power that's still like, within this, like, Christian cosmos. And. But you can tell that the, the political discourse, right, or this, this discord is grading, it's eroding the spiritual. This becomes clear as we go through here because, you know, Dante is going to put everyone in hell. Everyone goes to hell, right? All these popes are in hell. There's arguably a saint in hell. Like, everybody goes to hell in the Inferno, right? So we're going to. And so he's not, he's not bashful about these things at all. And so we'll take each case and talk about them, etc. But it's interesting because by the time you get to Machiavelli, I think you see that this hasn't been solved yet. And so another couple centuries of this, like, infighting amongst Christians just basically leads to, you know, we need something other than Christianity adopting that, you know, which I realize Machiavelli is a. Another person that there's about a thousand different theories on, but I think, you know, one of the ways to read him is that, you know, he thinks that Christianity has run its course and it needs something else. Right. To actually unify Italy. And so I think as you kind of look at these two projects, if you want to call them that, between Dante and Machiavelli, I think another thing here is how much does the political realm actually serve as a foundation, as a seedbed for spirituality? So even as you mentioned earlier, right, Our Lord comes in the Pax Romana. Our Lord comes when there's Roman peace and there's roads to take. The Gospel, there seems a certain, you know, obviously, like, intelligence about why it's good to come at this time. And so you see how this political fracturing then can erode spiritual realities of like, well, how am I supposed to be holy, how am I supposed to be virtuous when all of these, you know, Catholics around me are constantly killing each other and trying to gain more land and power and glory, and I can't live in peace. Dante's still trying to find an answer to that with inside Christianity. I think Machiavelli becomes very comfortable trying to find that answer outside of Christianity.
- [104:08]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah. And of course, we're all downstream from Machiavelli at this point. Right. I think this is. We've all sort of imbibed a kind of final cynicism about politics and its even potential relationships with the gospel.
- [104:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, 100%. Right. Because now the idea that, that politics, you know, politics basically is better if it's quote, unquote, neutral, Right. That it doesn't. It doesn't adhere to any type of religious understanding. Right. We're. I think we're starting to understand in our own culture that there is no neutral. Right. Something.
- [104:44]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Right. And even. Even at a very sort of at the level of the virtuous pagan represented here by Virgil, the idea that one of the concerns of government would be to chase our lack of control over our desires back into hell. Like, even if you just say, like, could, can, can. Okay. Short of we're going to have a Christian society with a government that, that. That upholds Christian ideals. Can we agree that the government should be concerned with whether or not we can control our passions even there? I think the answer today is generally we say no. The government should just stay out of moral questions. That's definitely not how Dante's thinking of it.
- [105:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I think so. I think it's gonna be really challenging for us, particularly at certain times. I remember, like, even in the Purgatory, I think sometimes is where he takes these things up the most explicitly. But I think in the. The Inferno, it's definitely haunting the text overall. And again, it's gonna be a challenging dichotomy. What's the relationship between the temporal power, Right. The imperial power, and then the spiritual power, the apostolic power? How do these two powers. Right. There are two duo sunt. Right. How do these two powers actually relate to one another? And it's one thing to write about it in the Roman Empire, where there seems to be some level of peace. It's another thing to when that piece seems like a dream and they've never had it. Right. And there's just, like you mentioned, there's exile, there's political prisoners, there's executions. There's things like this. So the gray. It's interesting in this kind of spiritual text where he's a teacher of the soul, teacher of morality, we see the need for a political savior. We see the need for political stability. And how does political stability lead itself then into a moral life? Right. Are you more able to live a virtuous life if you can enjoy a certain level of political stability and flourishing? And I think this is a fantastic question that we typically don't see as a spiritual question. One of the things, I think, that always catches people attention here. Well, a few things in 122. This is when he says another soul is going to become the guide. Right. Virgil the pagan can only lead him through hell. And then, somewhat surprisingly to me, the first time I read this, Virgil is also his guide through purgatory, which I think is kind of fascinating. Right. Because now we've got the pagan that's in hell. We'll kind of figure out soon, where is Virgil in hell and why was he chosen for this mission? Right. That kind of comes up in Canto too. But then we have another soul, and this is Beatrice, as we mentioned earlier, Beatrice will be his guide for most of heaven, and we'll kind of get her role a little bit more in Canto too. But I think another theme that would be really important as we kind of end on this canto is the theme of soteriology of the Logos, right? The logic of salvation, how is one saved, how can one be saved, etc. And I think that it's going to be a lot more surprising to us than maybe we imagine. Because you think, oh, this is a medieval Catholic, most people go to hell, a few people go to heaven, et cetera. Dante's soteriology is really fascinating and there's a lot of souls that you run into. So sometimes you'll run into, oh, wow, this whole level of hell is just brimming with popes. That's somewhat surprising. But then you make it to purgatory and there's pagans, there's a pagan who's committed suicide in purgatory, then you get into heaven and there's like a pagan emperor. And so I think that one thing to take a step back and say, what is it that Dante's teaching us about soteriology, about the salvation? Because even Virgil, I think, has some lines here that is, I don't know, maybe unsettling to us as a modern reader at like 125 or maybe 24. He says, for the great emperor who reigns above which is God, because I was a rebel to his law will not allow me entry to his realm. So Virgil can't go to heaven because he was a rebel against God's law. But we just pointed out that virgil died roughly 20 years before Christ. And so it's not a knot that we're going to untie right now. But I think I just want to flag that this is a conversation of how is one saved and who can be saved is a really fascinating conversation as Dante the pilgrim goes on his journey.
- [109:04]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And it's a question that Dante wrestles with throughout the commedia and eventually has a conversation in Paradiso, you know, where he gets a chance to ask one of the saints in heaven about this very question. Like, how does this work? How is this fair? How is this just. But one thing I just want to flag for very first time readers of the Inferno in particular is it's very easy to slip into a bit of a cynical read of Dante. Like, oh, here's a guy who's going to write about hell and he's going to put people in hell. Wow. If I were him, you know, I could put all my enemies in hell, you know, and then there could be a, I don't know, a little bit of, a little bit of cynicism about Dante's procedure here. I think it's very important what you Just said that Dante has very large questions in mind, much larger than his personal relationships with the different people he's going to meet. And he's, he continually surprises us. There are people you would have, you would have, you know, bet your bottom dollar that they're in heaven and he meets them in hell. There are people you would have just been confident are in the bottom of hell and he's going to meet them in paradise. There. There are people that are very close to him in all three levels. Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. And sometimes he expresses his own surprise. You know, he'll, he'll in, in both, in, in the Inferno and, and in the Paradiso he'll say, whoa, you're here. Okay, wow. And so I, I think we need to, to, to, to. Yeah, be patient and let him teach us something about soteriology like you were saying, he's got. And I think there's also some of our Lord's message in there. Right. Um, that, that the day comes upon us, you know, like the second coming of the Lord or the judgment for us comes upon us like a thief in the night. We don't know what's going to happen. We shouldn't be super smug and self confident about ourselves or about anyone. We know what's going to happen. Dante's in for a lot of surprises. Dante, the pilgrim is in for a lot of surprises. And it's a very fruitful meditation as you go, as you go down through the Inferno. Who, who do we meet and why? And that, you know, high office in the church is no guarantee. Great political reputation, no guarantee, having done a lot of good for your city, no guarantee. You know, and this is. Yeah, he's just a lot more complicated than we tend to be when we think about these things.
- [111:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And I mean, to go back to a point you made earlier, which I think kind of bolsters what you're saying now is that there's a very touching moment in the Inferno where he runs into a friend, a dear friend, and it's very sad to him. Right. So I mean, he doesn't. Yeah. Because there are some really skepticism or skeptical ways to read him. I mean, it's also somewhat funny because people talk about like, imagine like a, you know, member of Congress decided to sit down and write about their trip to hell and they're putting in like, you know, Joe Biden and Trump and you know, all their political enemies in there and like where they think there is. So, I mean, there's a, there's a Cynical slash, kind of like comedic way to read this. Right. But I think. No, you're. You're correct. I think there's some deep teachings here. I think he invites us to take the soul seriously. And I think that these individual people really are analogs to understanding something that really can better our own spiritual life.
- [112:41]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
And Dante is, is. Dante is that guy you were just mentioning. Right. He is that senator.
- [112:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He, He. He.
- [112:46]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
He was a Florentine politician who lost out, got exiled, and wrote about his trip to hell. And what happens? He meets people on the other side in hell. He meets people on his side in hell. The, the political fracture that he experienced in his life turned out just not to coincide at all with. With salvation. And in a way, both sides have, you know, end up in the wrong in one way or another. So that's. And, and we're. I think we live in an age which is very uncomfortable thinking about hell, very uncomfortable thinking about the tragic possibility in life. And so it can be very challenging for readers to meet Dante, who's. I wouldn't say comfortable, but he's tough as nails.
- [113:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah.
- [113:40]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
He doesn't spare himself anything as he meditates on this.
- [113:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, our culture has a certain, you know, we're very habituated to a certain type of relativism. And because relativism robs us of truth, it tends to rob us of our courage because there's really nothing worth dying for. Right. If there's really no truth. And one thing we learned about Dante is, is that he definitely thinks there's truth and he has the courage to proclaim these things. And he has a very prophetic voice. And ages of relativism don't like prophets. We don't like the black and white right. We don't like them. So I do think there. I think we just have to be open. There's going to be times that I think he's really challenging. There's times we say, man, I don't understand this. You know, even people that I think are very faithful to the church, there's, like times, like I said earlier, he's putting popes in hell. There's. There's one argument that he puts a saint in hell that he knew was a saint when he did it. And so it's like, the question, though, is like, what's the lesson there? Like, what is he actually trying to teach us? And he is a masterful teacher of the soul. So any kind of final comments, I would say things that we missed, but there's a million. I mean, there's a lot here. I feel like we, I think we did a good service, but I also feel like we scratched the surface in a lot of ways. But any kind of like, last thoughts on either, you know, introduction, canto one, or something that you think the first time readers should know?
- [114:57]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I would say congratulations on having found a great way to, to, to meet Dante, because over Lent with the Inferno, you can read about a canto per night and there will be days when you miss it, right, where something, you know, life doesn't go quite the way you intended in the evening or whatever, and, and that will all work out so that over the 40 days of Lent you'll get through the Inferno without having had to overstuff yourself. And I, and, and I, you know, a canto at a time is a beautiful pace for reading in this meditative way that we've been suggesting. And I would say, yeah, approach this less as a scholarly exercise and more as a, a devotional one that, that we're approaching a teacher of souls. And you know, you know, let yourself react to the characters and to the scenes and then ask yourself, why am I reacting this way? Right? Maybe you're mad at Dante for something. Maybe you don't re, maybe you, you realize that you're not reacting. You're, you react one way and Virgil doesn't approve of you. Let it, right, let it, let it raise questions. And we're, we're reaching back across a fairly big divide into the Middle Ages to take this trip, and it's just going to take a lot of patience. And so I think this, I think this is a fantastic pace and a fantastic introduction. One thing we didn't mention that, but it's worth tying into this idea of reading this during Lent is that the action picks up at the beginning of Inferno early in the morning on Good Friday. He gives us the sort of the, the position of the, of the stars and the, all the astronomical information we need to, to pin down. It's about six in the morning on Good Friday, and over the course of the Inferno, he's going to be, it's going to be Good Friday and Holy Saturday. And so it's very much that right before Easter thing that, that we're going to be joining him in, so he's liturgically tuned in. So again, congratulations, listeners, on having found a kind of great way to, to live this season in the Church's life. And this is, this is sort of a fantastic examination of conscience that we can go through over 40 days.
- [117:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yep. I really appreciate the, the advice to really pray with the text to allow this, to really have Dante be the teacher of souls and to really allow it, particularly as we kind of go through the certain levels of hell of, you know, what do I learn here? What can I apply to my own life that, that moral read. I, I agree with you. You really can't come at this as like a sterile academic exercise. Right? This is not simply intellectual and like a flat sense. This is something that actually invites the whole person, right. The whole soul to come together. So at the end of the journey, like you're a different person, you've been invited to understand your soul better and the things that tempt us and things of this nature. So no, I deeply appreciate it. Where can people find more about like you and your writings and your work?
- [118:24]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
So I teach at Wyoming Catholic College and the. Where we do read the great books as, as you all listening to this podcast are attempting to do. And I have published one book with Ignatius Press titled Cur Deus Verba why the Word became Words that Reflecting my background in, in Scripture. In fact, I, I'm particularly, I guess I would say privileged to be on this podcast talking about Dante since I am in no sense a Dante specialist. I am like our listeners some a. A lover of the great books who fell in love with Dante. And, and, and now I've been reading Dante I once a year for the past, I don't know, many years now. And I, precisely as you are doing it as a devotional way of growing with Dante the pilgrim. So, so you're not going to find anything by me out there about Dante, but I have published the one book on scripture and the rest of my life really is devoted to teaching students here at Wyoming Catholic College, which you can find out more about that at wyomingcatholic. Edu, where we have a, a very unique, unified, holistic approach to reading great books from across all the disciplines. And as I said, one way to put what we are doing at the college is trying to at least prepare the soil so that perhaps one of our students or one of our students students will become the Dante of our era.
- [120:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That is wonderful. Well, Dr. Jeremy Holmes, we deeply appreciate you being on this episode and kind of introducing us to Dante. And I think you've put us on a wonderful start.
- [120:31]
Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Thank you for having me.
- [120:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
All right, everyone. Next week we are reading Cantos 2 through 5 with Dr. Jennifer Frey, the dean of the new honors college at the University of Tulsa, and Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson. They'll both be on. She's the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University. So please join us next week as we continue in our journey through Dante's Inferno. Check us out on x and thegreatbookspodcast.com we have a whole guide to the Inferno. If you're looking for a written guide to kind of help you through this Lenten journey, please visit thegreatbookspodcast.com and we will see you next week.