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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Dante's Inferno Ep. 2: Cantos 2-5 with Dr. Jennifer Frey and Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books podcast, we continue our journey through Dante's Inferno. Dante the pilgrim enters the gates of Hell and observes the souls of the lukewarm, marching behind a banner for all eternity. Virgil will lead Dante into the first circle of Hell, Limbo, where we see Homer, Aristotle, and a few surprises before entering the second circle of Hell, where those who allowed lust to batter their souls are punished under a torrent of battering winds. Dante the poet, our spiritual master, invites us to understand how each punishment removes the glamour of human desire and exposes the ugly reality of sin. I am joined today by two amazing guests, Dr. Jennifer Frey and Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson. And we discuss such topics as the importance of Dante the pilgrim conforming his will to the divine, how Dante the poet has turned the traditional hero's journey on its head, and even how modern scholars of Dante are often seduced by the damned and misread the Inferno. So join us today as we learn from our spiritual master, Dante, and continue through his Inferno. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm 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 morning here in rural Oklahoma. If you're new to Ascend, we're a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. We are currently reading Dante's Inferno at a slow, attentive pace over the seven weeks of Lent. Check us out at Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters. You can visit thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have written guides to help you read the great books, including a reader's guide to Dante's Inferno, Breaking down the Circles of Hell, and other useful information. Today we have our second episode on Dante's Inferno and are covering Cantos 2 through 5 with two excellent guests and friends of the podcast. So first we have Dr. Jennifer Frey, who is the dean of the new honors College at the University of of Tulsa. Welcome, Dr. Frey.
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Thank you. I'm super excited to be here.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's nice to have you back. We had you on to discuss the Odyssey. And then second, we have Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson, who is the Fletcher Jones Chair of the Great Books @ Pepperdine University. Dr. Wilson, welcome back.
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Thank you.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, you were one of our first guests, actually. You helped us with the Iliad and we were just. We were actually, when we first started, we were just doing them at the studio at the chancery, and the guy that I Was doing them with Lost the whole episode like this airs. I can't remember when I reached out to you, it was just like in a couple weeks. And I was like, would you like to talk about this? So you're like one of our first. I think you're only one of two guests on the entire Iliad because we were just kind of getting started. So now I.
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Funny. Well, it was fun. I enjoyed it.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
It was good. Yeah, I greatly enjoyed it. The. So as we kind of get started, we're in our second episode working into Dante's Inferno. You know, you both, you know, have these wonderful great books programs. So maybe like Dr. Frey, we'll start with you. Like, you know, do you guys read Dante's Inferno? And if so, like, you know, why? What are you hoping your students get out of it?
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah, so we do read Dante's Inferno, but not just Dante's Inferno. So many great books programs will just read the Inferno. I don't like that because I think if you only read the Inferno, you get a very distorted picture of, of the comedy and what Dante is up to. And so we do selections of the entire poem so that our students understand why it's a comedy and not a tragedy. I think if you end, if you just read the Inferno, you might think, well, I don't, I don't understand this at all. So we, we go through the whole thing and our program, you know, we're an honors college. So honors colleges typically are just a different way of walking through your general education no matter what you're studying or majoring in. And so we have, you know, engineers and nursing majors and just people from all sorts of backgrounds reading great books, essentially from Homer to Hannah Rent. So it is a two year, four semester sequence of the great books of Western civilization. So Dante is in. So our students read Dante the spring semester of their freshman year in a class that we call Long Middle Ages, which basically emphasis on long because really stretches into the late Roman Empire. Because we begin with Augustine's Confessions. Like Augustine's not really a medieval figure, although he codes medieval just because he's so influential for what happens after him. So we begin with St. Augustine's Confessions and we get all the way to Calvin. So we cover a lot of ground. And we read Dante just after we finish working our way through Aquinas, because I think Aquinas is like a brilliant little setup to Dante. So, you know, I sort of read Dante through a scholastic lens, non apologetically. What do I want my students to get out of it? I think with the long Middle Ages in particular, I just want them to understand that the medieval period is wild and wonderful, but also like very important. Most of our students knew. Know absolutely nothing about the Middle Ages except for, honestly, a cartoonish caricature. And that's not their fault. I. I had the exact same impression when I took medieval philosophy for the first time when I was 18 years old. So I want to just give them that knowledge of our Western tradition. But I also think that the texts that we're reading are really helping our students think about themselves. Right. Really, the goal of a great books education is to help you grow in wisdom and self knowledge. And I think that Dante's Divine Comedy really is such a wonderful text for that. I mean, it's possibly wonderful, one of the best texts of all time for that. So, yeah, I want them to understand better what it means to be a human being.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, beautiful. I think your husband, Dr. Christopher Frey, who's on X, posted the other day and went viral actually showing all the books that are read in the long Middle Ages. And it was wonderful to see that commentary. Dr. Wilson, what about yourself?
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
In this way, Tulsa is very similar to Pepperdine's Great Books program because we do the same four semester sequence. And so our students just finished, you know, the Odyssey and the Aeneid from last semester. And now that they're in their spring, which is what I'm currently teaching, we too do the long Middle Ages. Last week I was setting up Confessions with the Gospel of Luke. The first day and then the next day was Perpetua's Testimony. And I only mentioned that in the context of Dante, because what we tried to talk about was this idea that when Mary has faith, unlike Zachariah's response to the news that a child is going to be born, she's able to sing. And I think I'm trying to invite my students into this conversation where there could be a way that you could sing, that you could speak, that you could respond to life's invitation. I mean, I make it almost an existential moment for them, even those, even those who don't have faith. Right. This idea that it could allow you to have your voice and find your voice. And so as we're going through Dante's Inferno, we talk about, like how to teach and instruct that voice. Like how life is a journey in which you learn to see everything and that everything has meaning and everything matters. And even in the midst of crisis, how is Dante singing? Why is he singing? In the midst of crisis, you Know, why does he take all these things that he's learning as kind of travel supplies for eternity, to use the language of St. Basil? And why is he taking all those things on this journey with him and then turning it into a song for us? So in the same way that Dr. Frey, you know, makes it about them, how can they see themselves in this? How can they see the story that they're in? We're trying to draw that same connection. How are we wayfarers? How are we learning? What does this learning have a purpose in the end, what's the tell us of all these things we're doing? So really trying to invite them into it and, like, imagine themselves as these same kinds of pilgrims, like Mary singing the Magnificent, or like Augustine's Confessions, seeing themselves in Augustine or in Dante. You know, how. How to. Are you a pilgrim as well?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
So. Yeah. No, that's beautiful.
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Long Middle Ages is longer than ours.
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Well, a week. So we have. We have one week set up because it's like I. I started thinking about just jumping into Confessions, and I have too many students that have zero knowledge of, like, this Bible thing. Right. And so at this point, they're just so unaware of who this Christ would even be that he's talking to at the beginning of Confessions. Right. Or that it would matter or that it would, you know, and so. And also, he is about to be in the Empire, like, where Christianity is. Okay. And I feel like they at least need one story from, like, Perpetua, who's also doing a spiritual autobiography. That's like, Christianity wasn't. Okay. Like, Augustine doing this is like. I don't know. I wanted some context, but not every professor does that. That's just how I started it. Just to, like, make confessions, you know, sing a little differently for them this time.
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah. We sort of solved that problem by. So our ancient class. Three ancient cities, Athens, Rome, Jerusalem. We end that with the Gospel of John.
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Oh, do you.
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Okay, so we're finally like. Oh, yeah, Christianity, Right.
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
So. But that's really kind of the only setup they get. Well, I mean, we do read books of the Hebrew Bible. Yeah. Earlier in the year. So they've got, you know, you gotta have Genesis version. I think there are four or five books of the Hebrew Bible that we try to get them through. Yeah.
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
And I think this is all really relevant to Dante because, you know, this is. This is the tradition he's stepping into. Like, when he is beginning his text, he has all of these things in mind. And I think that that's what Our students are doing by experiencing it this way. Like, they just got the Hebrew Bible and the Aeneid and the journey of the Odyssey, which, even though Dante didn't know Greek, like, he had these stories in his imagination, too, and he's jumping into this tradition. And so our students are getting to see the same thing that. That Dante was experiencing.
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah. Are you guys. Are you guys gonna do the Bible on Ascend? Like, are you gonna get.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
So, you know, our kind of current, like, working theme, right, is that, you know, Greek reason coupled together with Hebrew faith under Roman order, prepared the world for Christ. And so right now, right on ascend, we're kind of working through the Greeks. So we did a year of Homer, Iliad, and Odyssey, six months on each. And now we're kind of working through the Greek place. We just finished the Oresteia. We're kind of taking a break, right, to kind of match ourselves to liturgical season and read something for Lent. And then we go back to the Greek plays and start working through Plato. But, yeah, once we get to a certain point on the Greeks, we'll stop and then pick up the Hebrew thread, go through that, maybe have a year on Scripture. I haven't planned it out yet. And then go into the Romans and then really, hopefully understand the culture that our Lord came into and kind of how he's in dialogue with these things. So, you know, ascend is a. We're a slow burn. We're slow burn here. So, you know, because you have these survey classes, right? You guys have these survey classes, and they're good because they have to introduce a lot of texts. And I really appreciate what you said kind of about the. The formation of the imagination, because so many things are very alien to us. And Dante is a master, right? He's a master teacher. He's pulling from all of these different sources, many of which now that were very illiterate. You know, I was just watching something the other day, and someone made a reference of crossing the Red Sea. And the. The person who heard them had no bearing. They had no guidepost to understand what the person was talking about. They're like, you know, like Moses. Like, who's Moses? Like, there's just no. I don't know if we really grasp. You guys probably do, because you're. You're teaching younger people, but, like, the kind of cultural illiteracy that we have. And so Dante, on the other hand, I think, why it's a very beautiful text, but also very challenging, is that he's drawing from all of these in A lot of ways, he's kind of a zenith of this age. Right. He's kind of weaving them all together. We'll see that today. Like, all of a sudden, Greek mythology characters just, like, pop up, and we have to kind of handle, like, you know, what's going on. But I do think, you know, if people read this and they feel very challenged by that, you know, I think you can kind of take it in layers and steps. Right? You don't have to know everything about Florentine politics to read the Inferno first. Right? There's, like, layers that you can pull out. And I think first kind of seeing those. Those Christian ones, these, like, biblical allusions, like, how's he using scripture, then understand Greek mythology? He pulls heavily from Aristotle, St. Thomas, Aquinas, like, really Dante. Reading the Inferno is like, kind of really. The whole comedy is really kind of exposing yourself to a whole library of great books.
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah, it totally is. And I think it's. You know, I just think for that reason, it's a book that you can just keep coming back to again and again and again. In part because of the way that it's structured. You know, you can just read a canto, but also, you know, most editions are very heavily annotated. Um, and I really encourage my students, you know, to go back and look because there's. There's so many layers to it. It's so rich. And I think I would just want to encourage, really, anyone to feel that they can pick it up and get something out of it. But I also think that podcasts like this do such a great service for humanity, really. I mean, I follow you on Twitter, and I see men on their third shift reading Homer, and I'm just like, wow, that's. That's so incredible. And it just makes me so happy.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's been very humbling. It's been a. It's amazing. I mean, it was kind of the impetus of the podcast because, like, I started the Sunday Great Books Group, which is a men's group at my house that reads these things. And it's been, you know, really humbling because then, you know, the podcast was born out of me posting online and then people saying, like, I wish I had that group. I wish I had someone, or my whole friend group wants to read home, but none of us have ever read before, and we just feel very lost. And so ascend, kind of coming alongside people and serving as. Like, we can be your small group or help facilitate a small group or, like, you know, whatever you. However you want to engage it really has been humbling because they got people posting pictures of, like, hey, I picked up the Iliad, or, hey, I can do this, or, hey, I'm listening to the podcast, you know, and all of our stuff is evergreen, right? It just goes up and then, you know, because this year we're, like, promoting the great plays. But a lot. Our most popular video in January was was Book one of the Iliad. So you had a lot of people that were kind of engaging, right? So. And hopefully, like, you know, being exposed to Dante, you know, if you're not used to all these different sources, then this kind of, what's your appetite to be like, okay, I need a better understanding of Scripture, or I need to dig back down to the Greeks, or, like, I really don't understand, like, what kind of the Roman influence is. You know, Dante's a wonderful exposure to that. So let's dive into the text to kind of be cognizant of our time. So we're starting off in Canto ii. So my kind of high level, my understanding here is that The Inferno has 34 Kantos, but Purgatory has 33, and paradise has 33. And so the Kanto one, we kind of ran with the thesis that Canto one is kind of an introduction to the comedy at large. And so then Canto 2, in a lot of ways is an introduction to the Inferno. So we kind of see Dante, you know, we kind of get this narrative of, you know, this really can't be me. I can't be chosen for this journey, right? This. And he kind of gives all these different people where he talks about St. Paul, he talks about Aeneas that have gone on these journeys. And so he has to have, like, the courage to actually undergo this journey. But what is this, you know, right at the beginning here? I think for those who work through Homer, all the. All the alarm bells start going off. You get an invocation to the Muses. Like, for those who are unfamiliar, like, why is an invocation to the Muses important?
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah, well, it's right next to, oh, hi, genius. So just what you said about Aeneas and Paul, he's very intentionally bringing these two threads of conversation together from the Christian world and the pagan world. So he's doing the same kind of thing with, like, oh, muses, Aeneas's world, O high lofty genius, which is God, Paul's world. So he's recognizing this need both for the classical education that he's received that's been this resource to him for his faith journey. So he's bringing those two into conversation. And then if you see it's a third one. Oh, memory. So it's these three threads that he's saying is going to help begin his journey or help write his poem, which is the classical education, the faith that he has in the scripture and then the memory he himself. Right.
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Well, and I would just also add, first of all, I agree with all of that, but I would just add to it. You know, I think Dante is very self consciously throughout this, placing himself in a certain lineage. Right. And it's a lineage that goes back to Homer. You know, I think that, I think Dante knew how powerful the thing was that he was writing. And, and it, and it, and it. And it basically became a great book right away.
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
I mean, there was no gap there. And I think he's constantly signaling, you know, that he, he, I think he takes himself to be writing something of an epic. Right. It's not. And, and so I think we get all of these little hints, you know, along the way. But of course he's doing something very different with it. And just to take it back around to the text I'm teaching right now, which is Augustine's Confessions. Well, you know, and also, and not. But not just Homer because obviously we. Virgil's his guide. That's not accidental on so many, so many levels. But obviously, I mean, one thing that I really would recommend that people look at before reading Inferno is book six at Theanid. Right. I mean, just because that's where you get the journey into Hades and so much of Dante's hell is coming from that. And you know, and Virgil is, is the guide on so many different levels. I'm sure that you talked about this last time, but like, you know, there's Dante the pilgrim and Dante the poet and we just kind of have to see what he's doing on, on both levels.
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah. And to Jen's point about the pilgrim and the poet, if you look at book one and. Or Canto one and Canto two. Canto one is about the pilgrim initially. Canto two is the introduction to Dante the poet speaking. So, you know, in the first one, he very much throws himself in like, this is just a story that's happening. This is a story he's telling about as though it's like real. Right. He wants to very much clarify this is not just a vision I'm having, this is something happening. But then in Canto 2, he kind of steps back and shows you Dante the poet. And now let me introduce myself. And why am I doing this? And why is this happening to me if I'm not Aeneas and if I'm not Paul, what gives me the right to do this? So it's almost like two different kinds of introductions that are happening in Inferno.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I really appreciate what you said about like, he's cognizant of the fact that he's writing this great epic because we'll see. Actually, in the passage that we're going to discuss today, there's like this almost comical scene where he's almost like welcomed as the great poet. But it tethers actually really well because if you recall, when Odysseus goes down into the house of death, there's also like a comical scene where like, you know, there he meets Hercules, which is like the Greek hero par excellence. And Hercules, like, oh, you're just, you're like me and you have your labors and like, you know, so like, here's Odysseus retelling the story of like, hey guys, Hercules thought I was awesome and I'm like, like Hercules, right? So it's funny because there actually is a thread of that in Dante as well. We probably should note too, just in the tradition, it's kind of like hero's journey into the underworld, right? So we, like, even when Homer's writing about it, there's already been, you know, these journeys into the underworld. And then obviously Odysseus has one, Aeneas has one, like we mentioned, Hercules has one. Obviously our lord, right, has his journey into the underworld, this like harrowing of hell, which kind of haunts a lot of this text actually as we go through like the topography of hell. So there is like, I think an important note here about this descent. And this is, I think what Dante's kind of pushing back against is like, who am I, right? You have all these grand heroes. This is a hero's journey. I'm the guy who's lost in the woods, like, why would I go on this? And I think one thing we've asked or we've flagged for like first time readers and even those who are very familiar with the text is what's the formation, like, what's the maturation that Dante the pilgrim is going to undergo, right? So we have these themes of pity that come up a lot and we have to kind of explore that. You know, Virgil's chastising him here because he kind of needs courage, like you need to have the courage to do this. So I think one thing, like, particularly if you're looking for like themes to Track I think one is like, how do we notice, or what should we notice about the maturation, the formation of Dante, the pilgrim as he kind of goes through the Inferno.
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah. Dante is going through a transformation, Right. And. And it's bigger than him. But it is interesting how much of Dante's sort of understanding of the afterlife or his imaginative vision of it, which is really the best way to talk about it and think about it, is what's the imaginative vision of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven? Because I don't for a second believe that Dante thinks, oh, this is what it's like, Absolutely like. But it is interesting how much of it is coming from pagan sources. And this is something that it's, you know, it's. It's always, well, by the time they're with us now, they're like, by the time they're done with the Middle Ages, like, our students are super comfortable with the fact that, like, medievals are super pagan in all kinds of ways. But, you know, they sort of. It takes a while for a lot of them, because they come into it with this kind of naive dichotomy. Well, there's paganism and there's Christianity and they're extremely different. And it's like, well, yes and no. Right. I mean, so much of the Christian imagination is watered and fed by pagan sources. So let's talk about that. What could that mean?
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
I think also the point you made about who is he? Who is this guy compared to the hero's journey is a really good point because it is different post Christian because the pagan journey, Odysseus gets to go into hell because he's chosen by the gods. He's beloved by Athena for all his cleverness and his abilities in war. Aeneas is pious. Right. He's chosen by the gods for his piety. And then he gets to have this mission to found Rome. So there's these things that are intrinsic to those people that make them heroes, and thus they get to tell this story. What's so cool here is he really is influenced by Augustine. It is not his amazing merit that allows him to go on this journey. It's the fact that he's such a sinner. I mean, when Beatrice comes down and talks to Virgil and says, this is why he's going on this journey. It's not like Dante's amazing. I mean, you have to choose Dante because he's a hero and he's a brilliant poet and God just ordained him to go on this journey instead. It's like, he may be so Far gone. Nothing's gonna work but sending him to hell, right? Like, nothing's gonna work unless he goes through hell and climbs up to heaven and realizes, you know, he's lost his way. And so this is like, he is so far gone, we gotta smack him in the face with this journey. That's a different starting point. It's very much Augustine's starting point. Augustine's starting point is like, I am the worst of sinners, and so I'm gonna tell you my story, right? But it's a very post Christian, like, confessional stance to take that doesn't match with the pagan stories that he's imitating.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. And there's a certain. There's a certain humility, right. In the text, we have this chain that occurs, right? So we have Mary, and then we have St. Lucy, and then we have Beatrice, and they have this kind of intercessory chain that comes down and then talks to Virgil and then Virgil has to go and intercede. But it's really interesting, like, what you say, because I think, particularly going back to Dr. Frey's point, too, of, like, the paganism in the text can be a little jarring at the beginning if you're not familiar with it. And so it's like, okay, we have a Christian, right? We have this Catholic who's lost and needs to find their way, so we're going to give him a pagan guide, right? So it's almost like it kind of shows you how far Dante has fallen, right? Because I think that we were kind of looking for analogs, right? So Dante the pilgrim tends to be an analog for humanity, right? The formation of the soul, our own kind of journeys of the soul through life. You know, Virgil, right. We've kind of explored, like, what could he be, right? Is he this, like, human reason, right? Unaided by grace, but like this, like this perfection of human reason, right? This natural capacity, look like, look what Virgil can accomplish even without grace, right? So how far have you fallen? And then Beatrice, too, comes down and she kind of plays this role of, well, then a grace field figure, right? Who is she to actually, like, reach down? So, no, I think the role of Virgil as a pagan guide, and it's always surprised me, too, that he continues to be the pagan guide through purgatory, Right. I've always found that to be fascinating. I think does give us a glimpse into, like, where is Dante, the pilgrim, really at the beginning of this journey?
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Well, I think it matters that all those people are sent, right? Oh, it's not like Beatrice wakes up one day, and she's like, I'm gonna go get this guy he sent. Right. And so is Virgil. Right. And so. And I. I think, yeah. I mean, Virgil represents funny things. One of them is just reason on its own, you know, unenlightened by grace, but also, I think, art by grace. And. And yet he's a guide. He's truly a guide. And this is most clear in the Inferno, you know, where he really has. Because Dante is just really a hot mess in hell. You know, he's. He's, like, growing and in various ways through his journey. But, like, in the beginning, he's just, like, passing out left and right. Like, he cannot. He's literally described as lots of confused and blind. Like, this guy needs a lot of help. So it's. It's a serious. It's. I. I believe that we're meant to take seriously this idea that, no, he is a guide right now, but he was also sent. Right. And there's a lot to that. I think that he's like. That he has been sent from something much higher. The whole thing is graced.
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
And two. I mean, maybe the couple with that. I find it intriguing, maybe at least something to note that Mary seems to be moved by pity. Right. Again, pity is a theme that I've read the Inferno, I don't know, a couple times, and the first time I don't think I caught it. But the second time I think I read through, pity was the theme I really tracked. And you'll see that Dante uses that word a lot. Dante the poet. And, you know, he'll have. Actually, we'll see here. He'll have pity for damn souls. People have pity for him. And I think that's a question, particularly with moderns, is like, what actually constitutes an ordered or disordered pity? Right. What. What's the actual, like, standard there? And so that's a. That's like a maturation arc that we can watch in Dante. And I think, too, when you both mentioned out that you can have somewhat of a truncated view if you don't read the Purgatory in Paradise. And one of the reasons is. Is because our character, Dante, the pilgrim, isn't fully formed by the time he gets out of hell. Right. He's only. He kind of goes back and forth. He might even go too far in certain situations, like, he still has to go through his journey. So we only kind of get a snapshot here. But I think pity throughout the Inferno is a. Is a good theme to track if we're trying to Understand how he matures.
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Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the ways to look at his maturation that's kind of easy is every single one of these Cantos is going to have these different circles of hell, and each circle of hell aligns to a different sin. And Dante actually participates in every sin of every canto. So it's just kind of an easy chart. Hell is meant to be easy, right? It's easy to descend. So Inferno, in that sense, is a lot easier to read than the other two volumes will be. And so this one just kind of matches up. The correlations are kind of easy to find, but you'll find, like, he thinks that he belongs in limbo and he's excited about it. I mean, that's right. So he has that false sense, lust, and we'll get into it, but, like, he falls for love. He's this romantic outpouring. Like, he believes that this is that Francesca's right. And he faints like a romantic hero. So in every single one of these Cantos, you can be looking for what are the ways that he participates and thus becomes, by the end of it, the worst of all sinners before the next part of his journey?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I think that's fantastic. I do have one question that I really don't understand. And so hopefully you two can pull from the depths of your wisdom and let me know so we can sally forth, right? So one of the things I don't understand is when Beatrice comes down and she speaks to Virgil. This whole conversation between them, I think, is really beautiful. I love when Virgil says, why are you not afraid to be here?
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Dr. Jennifer Frey
Right?
- [31:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And Beatrice gives this kind of wonderful line up towards 88, right? The. The only things that justly cause us fear are those that have the power to do us harm. So, like, you have this gray soul that goes into hell to get Virgil, and she's untouched because nothing here can harm her. It's a beautiful picture. But what I didn't understand is maybe I'm just missing something. Is on line 73, she tells Virgil, when I shall stand before my Lord, I vow often to speak to him in praise of you, right? And so she. On its face, it's fine. What she's saying is like, hey, Virgil, if you go do this thing we need you to do, I'll tell God about you, right? I'll tell Jesus about you. And I'll say, like, hey, like, this guy Virgil's a good guy, but what does that matter, right? Like that, like, he's in hell and there's no getting out of hell. So it was an interesting. It's always been an interesting passage to me of like, you know, is that just a longing that can't be met? And so, like, Virgil knows that the Lord knows something good about him. He did a favor, but there's nothing meritorious about it. Like, it doesn't actually get him out of. It's an interesting. It's just a fascinating line that I've struggled with to understand. Like, what. How is this efficacious? Like, what does this actually do for Virgil?
- [32:17]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah, I'm going to speak off the cuff here, so this isn't an answer that I've thought about, but when I imagine that each of these people in hell are getting what they want in limbo, this is what they want, the praise is. Is something that works for them. Right. And so, I mean, Virgil tries in all humility, when he enters back into limbo, be like, just ignore them. They're going to think I'm the highest of all the poets. You know, it's a role I play here. Right. But it is. It does seem to be that that's. That is what they want. There's different sections of limbo, even that you get to be esteemed. You get to be higher on the hill of the empyrean. Like the worlds that they created are still the worlds they live in. So I don't know if she's just saying we're going to continue to give you what you want. Like, it's not efficacious. Right. But you don't fully understand grace, so.
- [33:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [33:09]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
I. I'm not sure if that. If that's why that works there. I don't think she's manipulating him. I think she's just giving him what he would. Would want and desire.
- [33:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that.
- [33:18]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
I'm not understanding narrow sense of efficacy at play here. I mean, she's saying that she invokes the love that moved me. Right. Which is God's grace. Right. The love that moves the sun and the stars, that moves everything. The love that this poem is about, and I believe in various ways for Dante, she's an icon of that love or some sort of special channel. It's hard to really say exactly what's going on with beit3j but. And if we think about. I mean, you kind of have to. You don't know yet, because we haven't been to Dante's heaven yet, but. But we do know that the people in heaven are. Are simply praising God in a way. And so. And right. When you praise God, I mean, part of that is praising God for the good things. Right. And presumably, I mean, I personally believe that there's a tremendous good. Even outside of, you know, Christian belief and practice and worship, there's tremendous. Good evening in pagan society. Now, it's not perfected in the right. The relevant way. Right. And we can talk more about this when we get to limbo. But I don't see why we should be worried or confused about it because not every prayer is like petitionary, do you know what I mean? Like, it's just praise of good things.
- [35:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it could be.
- [35:16]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
I mean, I think the question was more like, why would Virgil care that he's being praised before God?
- [35:21]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Why would anyone care? Right.
- [35:23]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Well, most of us would care because we have eventually a destination to get there. But Virgil's trapped.
- [35:29]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
The thing is, people have to get there, have a destination to get there. Right, Right.
- [35:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But he's eternally damned. That's the problem. Right. So he's being praised by. And I think I actually really like what Dr. Wilson said. And we'll kind of get in this when we get to limbo because we have to kind of figure out limbo's again, something that's alien to us. And so what is their torment or is there a torment? And I think, just like, broadly speaking, humans are made for God. That's our final end. And so I think there's something going on there that she's going to praise Virgil to God. And I think Virgil maybe receives that as a certain honor, but it's not going to do anything to move him from his current eternal state. Like, he can't actually get out of that. So there's like. It's like an echo of the good that his soul actually longs for to the degree that he can't understand it. Because that's another thing that's interesting in the Inferno is that there's, like, moments in which Virgil kind of shows us that he doesn't quite get Christ. He doesn't quite get the Christianity. Right. He kind of saw it because he was actually in limbo when Christ came down in, like, herald hell. So he was there and he kind of witnessed some things. So it's a fast. It's. It's. I think it's a good maybe segue into just, you know, understanding then the soteriology in the Inferno and the comedy of, like, where are souls, where they are and can they move? And, like, what's the justice that we see? I think, with Virgil, you know, the first Time I read it, I was like, oh, well, Virgil get like, you know, he, he'll get like, get to stay in purgatory. Like he gets like some special thing. And Virgil leaving is almost heartbreaking when you get to that part in a comedy. It doesn't happen in the Inferno, but when he leaves in the comedy, it's like, it's almost a heartbreaking scene.
- [37:11]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah, I think this is also probably a good point if you're going to move into book three now and kind of look or Canto three now, Sorry, I'm in Augustine too, so I just keep thinking books. But now as you're moving into Canto 3, to think also about will. Will should be one of those words that anybody new to the Divine Comedy should start circling. Right? And so as you're going through Dante in the very beginning of canto too is like, my will changed and then it changed and then it changed. And I couldn't decide whether to follow Virgil. Right. And so then that's why he asks like, why me? Why should I do this? And Beatrice says, this is God's will coming from Mary to Lucy to me, this is God's will. And at the end of Canto 2, Dante says, I'm going to put my will to follow Virgil's will so that our wills are combined. Right. He doesn't yet have the will, Right. The strong enough will to kind of be master of himself yet, which is one of the points we would need to get to. But instead he has enough will to say, I'm going to follow this person who has the will in mind. And so then even as you look at each level of these different cantos, Virgil says, I'm acting on God's will. When he talks, you know, to Minos and when he talks to Karen, I'm acting on God's will. The one who wills, who actually the will aligns with what things are and what things should be. And so it's, it's good for first time readers to see, okay, how does Dante's will change and how is God's will at work in contrast to Dante's will actually through most of the poem?
- [38:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I like that a lot. I think that's underneath watching pity, right? Because if the problem is, is like, you know, is there, is there a type of pity that actually places your will contrary to the divine will? And so, no, I really like that tracking of the wills. Final thought on canto too, that I thought was interesting is that in the Inferno, kind of as a thing of Dante, the Poet's piety. In the Inferno, he will never refer to Jesus or Mary directly. He will not use their names.
- [39:16]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Oh, interesting.
- [39:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He always uses some kind of euphemism for them. Yeah, it's always the one, it's the lady. It's something he'll. In other books he will, but here he won't. When he talks about hell, which I think is this an interesting kind of note of piety. So, yeah, let's look at Canto 3. So the journey begins, right? So they're going to go on this. He's summoned the courage. He's going down. I just want to read this because I think this is one of the best kind of lines in the entire Inferno. So this is what's written on the gates of Hell. So I'm reading from the Esalen translation. It says, I am the way into the city of woe. I am the way into eternal pain. I am the way to go among the lost. Justice caused my high architect to move. Divine omnipotence created me the highest wisdom in the primal love. Before me there were no created things, but those that last forever, as do I, abandon all hope, you who enter here. There's the last line there that I think always gets a lot of the attention. Right. Obviously, because it's. Well, it goes back to our statement, right. Virgil's in Hell, so there's no hope. Right. So hope is this theological virtue that it's usually shown as an anchor. Right. So I'm trying to anchor myself in my final end in God.
- [40:35]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Right.
- [40:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I have hope in God. But if you go to hell, part of the. Broadly speaking, part of the punishment is there's nothing to hope for anymore, for all eternity. I'm never going to be satisfied. We kind of think about Hell as like, oh, you're punished for these various sins, which is true. But there's like this overall overarching architecture to hell, which I think is actually motivated by love.
- [40:57]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Right.
- [40:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think Dante uses love to give a structure to hell. Is that the soul, that for which the soul was made, God, the soul is eternally deprived of. And that's like the just existential crippling effect that hell has. And so that abandoned hope. It's just a powerful line.
- [41:18]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
- [41:19]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
I just want to note, like, a small point of translation. So there are some translations that will put it less as a command, like abandon hope, you know, like, get rid of it, and more of like an indicative, like, you who enter here have abandoned hope. Right.
- [41:39]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Like, it's.
- [41:39]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Precisely. And. And that. That's an interesting. I'm not saying which is the better translation. I'm just saying that it lands a little bit differently if you recognize that there's no need to command you to abandon hope, because that's how you got here.
- [41:59]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Right.
- [42:00]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Precisely. Because you lacked that theological virtue. But, yeah, there's definitely no hope in hell. And also, there's no hope in heaven because you just don't need it.
- [42:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [42:09]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah. In Purgatory.
- [42:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah.
- [42:11]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
I think a translation is really key here, too, for the gates. Because one of the things I don't like about Esalen's translation is I am the way it's giving agency to this gate. And the reality is that justice, the high architect, is the one who built this gate for these sinners. Right. And so what it actually says is. And it sounds a little bit. I was reading it in Italian last night. My Italian's really bad. So, Jen, if yours is better. But I was reading it to my husband. I kind of felt like I was, like, in a seance or, like, around, like, a. A cauldron or something, just because the opening lines sound that way, because they're like, perme si, vane per mi. Si, vane per mi. Si vatra. Like, it sounds like you're, like, chanting a spell. It's actually very crazy creepy.
- [42:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right?
- [42:59]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
And it's through me, through me, through me. Right? Yeah, it's through me.
- [43:05]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah.
- [43:05]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
And I think that's why it's a little bit scarier. Like, there's no agency to these gates. But the way that it's done in that spell, like, form that he has here, you can imagine how scary this would be for Dante. You know, he's about to say, like, these words are really hard. I don't like. I don't like these words. And I don't think we understand how fearful it is until you read it in the Italian. And it's like, three through me, through me, through me. And I'd be like, I don't want to go. I'm not going through that.
- [43:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. So, yeah, it's easy to chastise Dante the pilgrim for his lack of courage until you really start thinking about what he's doing. Right. Yeah. I just pulled up the Baxter real fast, and. Yeah. He says, through me, through me one comes into the city of sadness. Through me one comes into eternal sorrow. Through me one comes among the lost. That's interesting. So there's three tercets here. You know, we've kind of talked about the beginning one and the one at the end, the one that really Caught my attention this time is the one in the middle. That one, the thing that sticks out to you is love. Right. Like, primal love has moved me. There's no love. What's love doing here in hell? But also that it's trinitarian. It has this, like, trinitarian. So this is a whole act of trinitarian, you know, love and life to create these gates of hell. And I think this is like one of the really first, like, shots across the bow of like, do we really understand what love is? Like, do we like, you know, usually if you're like, what's a sign of love? Or you're usually not thinking of gates of hell and the architecture of the various circles. And so. Because even, like going back, Dr. Wilson, your point about the wills and the aligning of the wills, I think it's subtle here, but. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I would push into this. He says Dante's first reaction is, I saw these words going back to Esalen. I saw these words of dark and harsh intent and engraved upon the archway of the gate. And it's maybe not entirely clear, but I'm a little skeptical here of like, is Dante critiquing the gate? Right. Like, he's saying, look, these are harsh words. These are dark words.
- [45:05]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
I think Esalen's actually. That's a bad translation too.
- [45:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You think so?
- [45:07]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Sorry. Well, look at it. Puesto porole di calore oscoro. Dark color.
- [45:13]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah.
- [45:14]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Colore ascoro. Even if you don't know Italian, dark. I mean, it just says that they're dark colored words.
- [45:21]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah. Dark in hue.
- [45:22]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
That's all it says. Yeah.
- [45:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Okay.
- [45:24]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Harsh intent is reading it metaphorically, but it could just literally be dark words. Like, they could be like black.
- [45:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. These words. This is Baxter. These words whose color was dark.
- [45:36]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah. I mean, that's the literal meaning of it. I do like that about Jason, is he's. He's doing the literal words.
- [45:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Because it's more helpful. Yeah. Because my, my concern there, Right. Is that as we're looking at these lining of the wills, one of the things that we'll see in the Inferno is are there times that Dante the pilgrim critiques. Right. Or even pities souls that are there. And it's a really subtle thing because, like, who is he critiquing? Well, he's critiquing the judge that put them there, which is God. And so there's this thing here about. So that's interesting about whether you read that literally or metaphorically, because it's always been a little skeptical to me about, like, you know, he sees these gates, saying, these are harsh. It's like, is he placing. Is he. Is this Dante the pilgrim who's still kind of nascent in his journey, still not entirely in harmony with the divine will or the purpose of Hell itself?
- [46:26]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah, he doesn't understand.
- [46:28]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Right.
- [46:29]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
I mean, and this is the contrast to Beatrice, who does. Right. She's not afraid, and she knows she understands Hell, but Dante doesn't at all. And I think, you know, as readers, we don't understand Hell. And even when we put down the Inferno, we still are not in a position to get it. And that's, again, why I don't like it when people just read the Inferno, because you're just really getting literally a third of the picture here. And you cannot hive Hell off from Purgatory and Paradise and really understand Hell. And so, yeah, Dante doesn't get it. Yeah.
- [47:21]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
I think one of the ways that I try to tell people to read all three, because I have people push back. Why read all three? Right, right. Why not just read Inferno and you get a sense of what Dante's doing? Well, yeah, you get Good Friday. So can you imagine the Christian story if it ended on Good Friday? That makes zero sense. And. And this is what happens with Inferno. He is. It is Good Friday in March, literally, when he's descending into Hell. And then if it stopped, it would make no sense.
- [47:47]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Right.
- [47:48]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Because Good Friday without resurrection is just pointless. Right. It only becomes a Good Friday because of Easter Sunday. Other than that, it's just a Friday where a guy died. And that's. That's this. That's this Hell, too, is like this hell. If you can't see it in light of the fact that the other option, your other will, is to be blessed by God eternally. And you've chosen this. You know, like some people who don't have grace or, you know, I. I've been taught by Dante scholars who don't believe in Christianity and they can't stand Hell. They. They feel sympathy for Francesca. They think that Dante's in the right for loving Francesca and that even Dante couldn't help how amazing Francesca's story is when he writes it. And that's why it's so persuasive. And he thinks that it is God that's punished. This is one teacher I had. It is God that was punishing these sinners. And it's like, no, the whole time they've chosen where they are, and they all get what they want. For eternity.
- [48:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, we're gonna circle back to that because I. I actually think that's. That. I think it's a watershed moment. And how you read the Inferno is the circle on lust. The. So kind of moving into the Canto 3, we kind of get our. So we get our first group of souls that are punished. And this is maybe somewhat surprising because we're not even in, like, a real circle yet. But he starts to hear this, like, wailing. This is at line 22, right? Their sighs and moans and utter wailing swept like, what. What's he starting to hear? And there's this group that are, you know, broadly speaking, right? They're. They've got a banner. They're marching, slash, running behind this banner. They're stung by wasps and flies and things that kind of keep them going. There's maggots at their feet. And this is really fascinating to me because these are. These are the lukewarm. These are the milquetoast, right? These are the people who, like, well, you weren't bad, but you also weren't really good. And you just kind of lived this lukewarm life. And I think, obviously, the illusion here, I think that a lot of us think of immediately is our Lord, right? Be hot or cold. But the lukewarm, he spits out of his mouth. And Dante even does something here that I think is interesting, that I'm not sure if it's his creation, but I don't really know if any roots. It has an actual doctrine, but there's angels here, too. So it's not just souls, right? It's not just souls that were lukewarm in life. And I mean, the fascinating thing here is, right, is that both heaven and hell reject them. Yeah, but if heaven and hell reject you, you don't get to go to a third place. You still get to go to hell, but they kind of shove you right by the gates. You can just stay out here. And so we have people, we have angels. And these. Yeah, these are the lukewarm.
- [50:29]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah. I mean, the way he introduces them is line 18, right. They've lost the good of the intellect. So what is the good of the intellect? It's choose God to know God. And so, because they used their intellect, almost machinaceous, like, I'm gonna follow this group. Oh, wait, it's reasonable now to follow this group. Oh, wait, it's reasonable, right. Their choice was never. I'm going to choose and follow through with that choice on the will. It was always, like, misusing the intellect to See, whoever. Whoever's in power, whoever been like, it's just really. Power is the wrong word because they're not even thinking power. They're just so easily swayed.
- [51:11]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Just think of that line from the big Lebowski, right, where he's like, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism. It's an ethos.
- [51:19]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
There you go. Yes, good. Oh, I like that.
- [51:22]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Like, the totally perfect encapsulation of this. These are people who just never, never chose one way or another, and that's why they're sort of on this eternal treadmill, right? Because you. If you're on a treadmill, you're not actually. You're being moved, right? And so a way, it's a representation of their loss of agency, right? Because, you know, what makes us in the image of God and thus born for, you know, born for heaven is that we have freedom, right, to direct our. Our own lives to a certain extent. And that can be. And that extends to. Right. Making the most fundamental choice, which is to be for God or against him. And these are people who just kind of never really made the existential orientation one way or another. And it's kind of interesting because it flips a script. You know, it flips a cultural script, because I think a lot of our students think it's good to, like, not really choose, you know, be open minded. I mean, agnosticism, right, is sort of taken to be almost a virtuous position because it rejects this kind of certainty that is closed minded, or I'm open. I don't know. It's really. Right. And Dante's saying, yeah, no, yeah, no, you do actually need to live your life for the good, the highest good, which is to say God or. Or not. But you. You need to make that choice. And, And. And these souls did not. And I think Jessica said, you know, in hell, people get what they want. And that's true. That's a weird way to think about hell because hell's suffering and punishment, but it. But it befits the soul, right? And I think what's interesting and so valuable about Dante's Hell is that it really actually exposes human desire.
- [54:01]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
- [54:02]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
So a friend of mine always says, well, you know, Dante's hell is an anatomy of the soul, and it's also a poem of love. So, like, how do those fit together? Well, because it's an anatomy of human desire, right? It's anatomy of loves, and particularly those loves that were disordered. But I think what's really powerful about the contrapasso is that it's human desire stripped of all of its illusion and fantasy, and it's actually like. It's very ugly. Right. Like, so Dante is showing people what their desire was really like in a way that is, of course, very painful. But the punishment of hell is. Is what that soul actually wants. And I think once you start to see that and understand every contrapasso in that light is very powerful and potentially, you know, transformative, because you see that desire in a very different way, and that forces you to think about why Dante sees the desire that way and is he correct and why.
- [55:29]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah, just to read. I'm just going to read one line from Mary Jo Bangs that follows up on what Jen said, because it's really. It's exactly right. But this. This is a very. She says loose translation. So she tries to put it into 21st century vernaculars. A lot of people don't like it, but sometimes she hits the nail on the head. And here she says they never lived and now will never die. So it's this idea of, like. Right. This lack of existential decision that Jen mentions. And I love the Lebowski quote. Right. They never had an ethos that's so good.
- [56:02]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
At least it's mythos that's good.
- [56:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There's a guy in my Sunday small group that will talk about great books, and he's phenomenal at somehow always tailoring it to some scene from, like, a 1980s movie. It's just on the cuff all the time. It's really impressive. But I want to go back, because on our podcast and our kind of journey through Dante, this is our first exposure to the punishment of souls in hell. And so I just want to make explicit what has already been mentioned is two things. One is that the punishments in hell are tailored to the sin. And so, look, here's the lukewarm. Right? Here's the people who really didn't live for anything. And so what are they doing? They're marching for all eternity behind a banner. So guess what? Now they get to stand for something. Now they get to actually work. And so, as Dr. Frank said, but.
- [56:49]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
It'S a blank banner, right?
- [56:52]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
That's what they stuck.
- [56:54]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
They're all.
- [56:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, they got to have some motivation, right? You got to. You got to get some motivation.
- [56:58]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
It's all external, right? Like they're being stung by wasps. Because actually, that's how they lived their life, right? They were only being moved from the outside.
- [57:10]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah. So good. And they're naked as the day they were born. I mean, it's just like they have nothing to show for. For who they were.
- [57:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. So our vocab term that we're going to make explicit here, that was already mentioned. Right. Is this is the contrapasso.
- [57:23]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Right.
- [57:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So when we talk about contrapasso, what are we talking about? We're talking about that these punishments in hell are tailored to the sin. And what that means then is for our read, and what was just mentioned, which I think is very good, is that the punishments in hell are pedagogical to the reader. Right. So as we kind of understand, like, you know, what's going on in the circle of hell, the way they're being punished should teach us something about the nature of the sin, which then leads into that moral reading. Right. So in our first episode, we talked about how to read the Inferno, the comedy as a whole. We talked about the letter to Congrande and the four levels. This is how you read Scripture, but you can't just say that because no one knows how to read Scripture anymore. And so we kind of went through the four levels. And so I think that it just needs to be mentioned here that these contrapassos, how are people punished? Well, that's. And that's why people love the Inferno, because it's like, oh, then there's like this gruesome thing and that grotesque thing and like, whatever. But they actually have a pedagogical purpose, and it teaches something about sin and it teaches us something about ourselves ultimately.
- [58:17]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
- [58:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So let's look at. So there's a lot of firsts here. And I don't know if I appreciated this the first time I read it, but let's look at the first person that he recognizes in the entire Inferno. And I think this is where I think Dante comes out swinging, which I think is really fascinating. So this is like 58 again, looking at Esalen. He says, when I had recognized a few of these, I saw and knew at once the shade of him, the craven one who made the great denial.
- [58:49]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
- [58:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Now, there's a safe translation of this and a not so safe one, Right. So the safe one is that this is Pontius Pilate. And you can see why. Right? Because he's not named in the text. Dante doesn't give him a name. And so one of the theories is like, oh, this is Pontius Pilate, Right. He washed his hands of Christ. Right. He washes his hands. And so he's somewhat indicative of this indecisiveness, this lukewarmness, et cetera. The not so safe one, or the one that's I think slightly more challenging is that this is actually Pope Celestine V. Yeah, that's what I have in the notes. Pope Celestine V is the one who abdicated the Papacy in 1294. So this is what Dante thought of. And Pope Celestin V was considered to be a good man, right? He's a monk. He ascended to the throne. Dante was very thrilled because we're finally going to have a holy and pious man on the throne of St. Peter. And then he quits and he abdicates the throne. And this is actually Pope Benedict xvi, who also abdicated, went and visited his tomb kind of some symbolically, months before he abdicated. And so there's like, this connection. So. But one of the things that makes this, like, really fascinating is that Pope Slussen V is a saint, and he was a saint when Dante put this in there. So the first person that we recognize in the Inferno is a canonized saint by the church.
- [60:12]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Spicy.
- [60:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I told you. Dante comes out swinging. So he just comes out swinging. He's like, this is what I think of all of you. So I think the. So let's play this out just a little bit, because I think that I have read this with people, and this becomes a huge stumbling block, right? It's like, well, look, he's contrary to the Church, or like, what's he doing? Et cetera. So this goes back to previous conversations of one. What is his purpose? Right. What is the purpose of the text? The purpose of the text is not to give us a geographical understanding of the levels of hell and how hell is structured. It's also not the purpose of the text for him to prophesy and mystically reveal who is in hell. Right? So the way I read this, I mean, again, he is spicy. He's coming out swinging. Is that this is pedagogical, right? So he's intentionally putting this person in hell. Notice, though, he won't name him. So there's like a little bit of plausible deniability slash piety kicking in. But he puts him in here to make the reader think about this. Like, was this really the right decision? Did this actually help the Church? Like, is this really the right thing to do? Because famously, this then leads into Pope Boniface viii, who Dante very much does not like. And so I just think there's a way to read it.
- [61:25]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Follow you.
- [61:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, it's nice because of how he read it, right? That Dante. Dante could prophesy certain things that he already knew to be true. Right? Because of how the timing Works on this. So anyway, I just wanted to point that out because sometimes it's a stumbling block, but I would say it's something pedagogical that he's doing saying, okay, here's this person here. Why would this person be in hell? How do their actions. Can we examine their actions? And is there a lesson there?
- [61:51]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah, I think it's an unfair reading of Dante that he takes himself to literally be describing hell because for one thing, like, everyone in hell's Italian or a mythic hero.
- [62:04]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
- [62:05]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Like he couldn't have possibly. Yeah, right. I just personally give Dante more credit than that. Yeah, but. But I. But I do think, you know, because like, the cynical read of Dante, cynical and tired reading of Dante is he was mad, he was in exile and like, this was revenge porn. He's just putting all of his enemies in hell. It was. I mean, come on, if that's all that were, we wouldn't still be reading it. But I do think that, I mean, here he has a lot of plausible deniability. Right. And you could read it multiple ways, which is rich and great. But I do think that for everyone he chooses to put in Hell, it is pedagogical. Right. Like he's not just enacting his revenge. I don't know, but I just don't read it that much.
- [63:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, that's a really. I think most of those reads too, of are just flat reads that I think the actual intent and purpose is not actually tethered to the text. It's usually just to be dismissive. Right. And that there's no reason to actually read Dante. Yeah.
- [63:16]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
I think that this is where I found Jason Baxter's introduction to his new translation. So good things I hadn't read because I'm not a Dante expert. And he points out that there had recently been a lot of sermons on St. John's Apocalypse. So when you look at Revelation, Revelation is not meant to be a literal prediction. I mean, this is the problem that people make when they read Revelation is like, this is going to happen and this is how the world ends. And that's not how Dante read it. Dante read it as, this is teaching the soul to not give your will to the empire, but to instead have your imagination be formed. Right. Like a prophet and be able to, even in these hard places like exile, be able to speak the words of God. Right. To be brave enough. I mean, we'll see that by the time we get to Paradiso. Do not be too timid a friend to truth. Right. He has to Learn to not be a coward by the end of the poem in order to write the things that people need to hear. So here we have a clear example of him kind of copying the book of Revelation by not writing something literal, by writing something allegorical in which he's not too timid, friend to truth. He says the hard things so that people can learn from it and do differently.
- [64:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I agree. I very much agree. Just kind of like pushing the text forward a little bit. I just want to note that on line 103, you know, he's viewing the damned. So they're coming to the river. So this is another moment where it's like he's really incorporated, you know, kind of Greco Roman mythology, right? Because we have the boatman that's going to take us across the river. And again, I think sometimes people get hung up on this. It's. He's not giving us a literal thing. He doesn't think we die and people go to hell and there's like a river. Like, he's giving us something that's like, pedagogical, right? But what's really interesting is. Is, like, the words that he puts in the mouth of the damned at like, 103, right? They hurled blasphemy at God and at their parents and at the whole human race. The place, the time, in the seed of their begetting and their birth. They blame everyone but themselves. Yeah, right. They blame absolutely everything. Everyone here is imploded. And they. I just think it's a wonderful way to present that. So he goes, they.
- [65:26]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
They're going across teenagers.
- [65:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The. I'll leave. I'll leave that one alone. The. You know, so they're going across the river, and then we get kind of this, like, very. What will become kind of a pattern at 136 is that he passes out, right, As a man falls, whose sleep has overcome him. And so this is another thing. We're talking about his courage. We're talking about pity, we're talking about the wills. He falls asleep, right? He passes out.
- [65:54]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
So, okay, I also want to clarify. Okay, he does fall asleep here, but it's different. We have to see how he faints differently from when we start to look at five.
- [66:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Okay, so what distinction would you make?
- [66:07]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
So here he says he's overcome with sleep. This is like the person who doesn't want to make a decision. I'm just going to curl up under the bed and pretend the world goes away so I don't have to do anything, right? Like, that's how he's so he again is participating in the sin of limbo by passing out here. It's a different kind, right? He says he vanquished all his senses. He's turning off the world. He's turning off his self. I fell as a man who's fallen asleep and had been overcome by sleep. Like, it's a Sadie that takes over, like, I'm done. And that's different than when we see him faint. And you'll see the difference, I guess, when you get to five. So we can't just say that he just faints. We always have to see it as, like, how is he writing it in such a way that he's showing you a participation in that sin?
- [66:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I'm glad you mentioned Cedia, because that was one of our things that we discussed in the first episode, is how much of Acedia informs that first canto of him being lost in the woods, of him not knowing how he got there. We talked about acedia as that cooling of the love. And then you kind of lose your purpose. And all of a sudden you wake up day, like, how did I get here? And it's very much tied, right, to the noonday devil, the midlife crisis. I mean, this ties into, like, why we find him halfway through his life. So, no, I like tethering those two together. So let's look at Canto 4 and look at limbo.
- [67:27]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
I love Canto 4.
- [67:28]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
- [67:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You're so good. It's funny, right, because you've just been introduced to. You've just been introduced to all of these terrible things that are happening, and you would get somewhat of a respite, right? It's like, oh, wait, no, there's this place here.
- [67:41]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
I mean, It's a total 180. Right. I mean, it's disorienting. And I think, you know, I'm going to double down now on a claim I made earlier that didn't get a lot of traction. But, I mean, I think that. So I take very seriously the idea of a virtuous pagan. And it's a controversial position. I'm well aware of this. And. And I read Dante as taking seriously the idea of a virtuous pagan. And I just think there's tons of evidence for that. And I have the same view about St. Thomas. Now, we have to make a distinction between perfect and imperfect virtue if we're going to use that language. Because obviously the pagans lack faith, hope and love, Right? They lack the theological virtues. The question is whether there's any virtue outside of that. Right? And And. And I. I believe that there is. And I believe that Dante thinks that there is, in part because of what Beatrice said. I think that's a tiny bit of evidence for it. But, I mean, just look at limbo. Like, I'm sorry. Limbo is pretty nice. Like, it's nice. And, you know, Dante's like, yeah, they're sad because they're not in heaven, but.
- [69:15]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [69:16]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
It's real nice. They basically live in a castle. It's a giant garden party. It's basically like, you know, like, hey, fraternity. I get to hang out with Homer and Aristotle and Plato. And I'm like, I don't know. It's not that bad. Especially in the lobby out there. It was terrifying.
- [69:38]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Right?
- [69:41]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
It's a garden party.
- [69:43]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Right? At least be a humanist. Like, if you're gonna, like, at least have the ethos. Right, Right.
- [69:48]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
You know, it's like, I'll take it.
- [69:51]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Well, and this goes back to, like, you get what you want. I mean, this is. They just. These are the people that first wrote a description of the underworld. Right? I mean, these are the people who kind of came up with this idea of, like, Empyrean. Like, they're just gonna live there forever and, like, shades of Elysium. Sorry, I was, like, saying the wrong thing because I'm getting ahead of myself. Like, the shades of Elysium, like, this is just where you hang out.
- [70:13]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
I.
- [70:13]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Again, this is not my favorite translation. So sorry I keep using it, but some of her phrases are really good. This is Mary Jo Bang. And she says, it's a veritable cocktail party of eminent men. And when Virgil describes it, he says, heaven is impressed with the honors and renown that still echo on Earth, and the favored ones maintain their distinction in limbo. And so I think this just kind of goes back to, like, why would Virgil want praise in heaven? Because it did matter, and that's what he needed.
- [70:41]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
I'm always trying to remember the very first time I read Dante. And this is where, like, my ignorance was bliss in a way, because, like, I. I just had no idea what it. What it was going to be. I hadn't heard anything about it except that, like, I should read it. And I was literally just, like, so confused. I was like, wait, I thought this was all terror and horror. I don't know. This sounds pretty nice.
- [71:07]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
- [71:08]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
And then I kept waiting for them all to lose their heads or something.
- [71:12]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Like it was a trick.
- [71:16]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
And it was especially jarring because we had already, I mean, abandoned all hope. And I was like, I Don't know. I couldn't. I feel like. And I was not a Christian yet also I read it. I was like. I feel like I could hope for that, actually, but that.
- [71:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So that's a good.
- [71:31]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
It just is very disorienting.
- [71:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a good segue, though. It's like, what. So how. What is their contrapasso, Right? So what. What they. The hope. They've. They're not. See, they're inside the gate, they're not outside the gate, right? So. And this is. And this is the first circle. This is the first proper circle, right? So we're in the first proper circle. Limbo. You know, if you think about, like, what is limbo? Well, if you think of. Like, if you think about Abraham's bosom, you think about the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, right? This is. This is that structure, right? So there actually is. There is a little bit of, you know, biblical revelation here, because if you remember the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, they both die. They died before Christ, and they go to this interesting place in which there seems to be a chasm. And the poor man, Lazarus, is reclining on Abraham's chest, and he can see across this chasm the rich man now in torment. And it confuses a lot of people. Like, wait, where is this heaven? Is not, like, right next door to hell? Well, this is all hell, right? And so there's like this, Abraham's bosom, this limbo, this limbo of the Fathers in a certain way, is this untormented natural paradise. It might be too strong of a word. But this is where Christ comes in Holy Saturday, right? So Christ comes down because this is where everybody went. So Moses, you know, Adam, David, prophets, like, they can't go to heaven when they die in the Old Testament because grace has not opened up, right? They don't have the portal of salvation. The grace has not opened this up to participate in the divine life. So they go to this waiting place that is a place in hell, but not of torment. And so Virgil talks about this, that he was there when Christ came down. But Christ doesn't take all the souls. He only takes some of the souls, right? The righteous that are waiting for him, but they're all there together. And so, you know, and then obviously, the medieval mind with Dante tends to entertain that this is a place that was retained in hell, that our Lord would still send souls to. And so even after Christ, because a lot of these souls here, we see Homer, we see Aristotle, we see these kind of People, but we also see Muslims, which I think is really interesting. I think Dante's soteriology is fascinating. Who, who is saved. So not only do we see, like, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. Aristotle's like, sitting on the throne. He's the master of those who know, right? I mean, it's just highly deferential to, to Aristotle's scholastic thought. But we also get Saladin, Saladin, the, the famous Muslim general in the Crusades. We also have the famous Muslim commentaries or commentators on Aristotle are in limbo. So this is actually, for Dante, this is a place that virtuous souls, unbaptized, virtuous souls. Because he mentions it once, but he doesn't play on it heavily, that infants, children are also here, the unbaptized infants. This is still a place in hell, this like, untormented natural paradise that souls can be sent to. But it seems like their punishment goes back to that conversation on hope that the human being is made for God. And so they want to naturally go to God to satiate in him, and that's deprived of them. So while they're not technically tormented, there's a certain, like, existential unsettledness that they have that, that for which they were made. They don't get to participate in, like, fully, if that makes sense.
- [74:51]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
I mean, it says they're neither sad nor joyful. And it also says that there's grief, but without torment. And so it is this limbo, this suspension. It is very interesting me, and has always struck me that he does use the language of wisdom, but he does still call them wise, right? And. And yet their intellects will never be perfected. And so to me, that's just very strong signaling that there is a kind of wisdom, you know, that is imperfect but very real and deserves the name. And these souls had that, but it falls short of perfection. But it is such an exalted state that God is not tormenting them, right? Their, their desires got as far as natural reason can go. Like, if you think of the ladder of love, right? They were trying to get up that ladder. Their loves were well ordered, but they didn't know Christ. They didn't have revelation. And so when Christ comes down, right, to, you know, take his people, they are not among them.
- [76:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, some, some are not, right? So that's one of the things like, that's one of the truncated parts. If you don't read the rest of the comedy. Is that right? Is that all of a sudden, like. That's what I'm saying. Dante, Dante's question of salvation you think he's a medieval and he's just going to be like really harsh and say, nope, you had to have baptism, you had to have sacraments. You're like, look, you put children in limbo, etc. But then when you show up the purgatory, like the first person they run into purgatory is a pagan suicide. And like the first and the first. He's gonna be the last person to enter into heaven.
- [76:58]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
I still think that should be Socrates and not Cato, but that's just me.
- [77:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's.
- [77:01]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
At least Socrates was killed by the city and that's true. Forced to drink hemlock. I don't know.
- [77:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I want to. Let's push this forward because I want to set up Dr. Wilson for something she mentioned earlier that I think is really important. So they move on from limbo and they go to the second circle, right? The circle that's punishing lust. And so again, what's a contrapasso? Right? We're trying to give like a mapping a structure to this. I think this kind of is confusing to some people. At first you're like, why? But it's like, oh, they're lustful, they're blown about by the wind like a hurricane. What is this and what we see here? I think what's the pedagogy here that Dante, the poet showing us is that these people now are battered about for all eternity as they allowed their soul to be battered about by their passions. So these lustful people that allow their passions to take over them are now, they're treated like they treated their soul for the rest of eternity. And we should mention too that the kind of structure of hell. Remember in book one, if you read the three animals as giving a certain structure to hell, we're in the she wolf now, right? We're in this incontinence and an inability to control your appetites and over satiation of love. And so here is a disordered love of an over satiation of love in another human. And so it's really fascinating because we get, we get some characters like Helen of Troy is here, Achilles is here, which is weird if you read Homer, but he's pulling from a different narrative where Achilles was like tricked into, like he was going to go marry someone, they tricked him because of his lusts. He gave into this and they were able to kill him. It's not a narrative that we get in Homer. But then he gets into these, these two lovers at the end, right? He wants to talk to them because they're still intertwined and so Virgil calls him over, if providence will allow it. And she comes. What's her name again? Francesca. Francesca, yeah, Francesca. She comes and she tells this story of them reading, like, Lancelot together. Right. Her lover Paulo is still kind of coupled with her, but he's crying. And so maybe to hand the baton to Dr. Wilson. Like, what are we supposed to take from this narrative?
- [79:08]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah. So this is my favorite canto. And when you get to Paradiso 5, you'll get to see what Francesca could have done. Right. So here we get the story from her perspective, and it looks like I had no choice. And this is someone who Dante says, It's like line 39, their reason was made subject to desire. Right. So it was lowered. The good of the intellect, again, was beneath the desires that took over them. And as you have Francesca, so she's a real person, as opposed to. We haven't mentioned the fact that there's a lot of mythical characters. Like, we keep saying it, but, like, they weren't real. If this was ever an argument for pedagogy versus his literal thoughts on hell, you should realize a lot of these are mythical, like, fictional people, but this one is real. And this would have been close to him. This would have been people that they would have known about, probably like grandmother age for Dante. So he would have heard this story and known this story. And the way that Francesca tells it is our first signal that we have to pay attention to how the sinners talk if we're going to learn something. So if you look at lines 100 through 106, when she speaks, this is the Esalen, she says, love seized him. So you just watch, kind of just pay attention to, like, the. The subject verb. Love seized me. Love led us to death. Going back to your point where you were talking about the outer realm outside of limbo, in which people didn't make choices. They're hurling blasphemy at God. They're blaming their parents, they're blaming their birth. They don't see themselves as the problem. Same here. Right. She says it was a more that caused it. It was the problem. It sounds very similar to what Beatrice just said that. That Jennifer read back in, like, the beginning, where Beatrice said, love led me here and bade me speak to you, Virgil. But that's the actual love that's moving them. This is a pretend version of love that she's blaming here for what happened to her. Not the love that is the love of God. Right, yeah.
- [81:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Which so well into the contrapasso. Right. Like, it's the winds that batter them. Right. She's. She's saying, oh, this, but she's giving up her own agency that she allowed this to happen.
- [81:21]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah, yeah.
- [81:22]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
And what.
- [81:22]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
I love acting this out with my students, which is really fun just to kind of, you know, I say, let's look at what actually happened. They're sharing a book, right. One day we're reading together, which means the book is like in between the two of them about how love had mastered Lancelot. So they're reading like a medieval version of like a dirty book together, you know, and this is a romances, right? What?
- [81:48]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
I mean, Lancelot, you know, it's a medieval romance.
- [81:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah.
- [81:52]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
But adultery is like one of the worst sins of that. Like, right. Pre the courtly love tradition which tries to exalt it. Dante's schools in the ancient world, which knew adultery, ruined families and caused the children to be disinherited. Like, adultery is like one of those really bad sins from the ancient world. And yet here his culture is lifting it up. So I think he's responding to that in the way that he like puts Lancelot before them. So they're reading this kind of story that they know what's gonna happen and it's two people who shouldn't be reading it together, who have to sit close enough to read it together, and they shouldn't be in that room. So when I talk about it with students, it's like, it wasn't just that love got the best of them. This was. They put themselves in the wrong place with the wrong person at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing before they even sinned.
- [82:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Correct.
- [82:45]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Right. They kind of set up everything for the sin. And so as they're reading, they're going pale, they're blushing. There's all these moments of like, you could stop, you could stop reading that with your brother in law. You just could, you know, like at any moment you could get out of the room with your brother in law and stop reading Lancelot and like, move on, on. We catch each other's glance and then we're conquered. And when we read this moment, right, we started kissing and it says, now this man whom nothing will divide from me. And it's such a ambiguous line. Kind of like, you who enter here, abandon all hope, right? It's. Is she happy about Nothing will divide him from me or like, nothing will divide him from me. Like, now I'm stuck with the choice I made forever. That's part of my punishment, right? And then they. It says, that day we did not Read another page. Well, Jen and I are reading Augustine's Confessions right now, and this is just a complete turnover of Augustine's Confessions, because Augustine, who says, you know, save me, but not yet. Forgive me, but, like, not yet, because he doesn't want to give up his life of sexual immorality. Then he opens the pages in which literally the text says, says, give up your life of sexual immorality. And he says, that day I read no further, and he becomes a chaste priest or becomes baptized, etc. Long story, but here, that day I read no further leads to consummation of adultery. And so she's flipping the narrative, she's using these stories that Dante knows in order to get him on her side. She's misusing the rhetoric in order to convince him that her sin was right. And he falls for it, right? His pity comes. Death, like fate faint. And I dropped like a body stricken, dead, right? It's again, it was stricken. It struck him like he's being hit, like lightning. Love, like lightning knocks him down.
- [84:36]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
So. But I also think that one reason why Dante passes out, is completely overwhelmed by Francesca and Paolo's story is that of course, Dante became quite famous for being a lover poet. And this is sort of one of those moments where he realizes, like, my poetry could have been the cause of someone's undoing. And. And I also just want to underscore the fact that this is a sin of passion and to say something about the topography of hell. So how Dante's hell is like a funnel, right, that keeps going and narrowing till you get to the pit of hell where Satan is. And the further down you go, like, the worse off souls are, the worse the sins are. And so it's kind of interesting that sins of passion are, in a way not that bad, right? I mean, it's hell. It's bad, right? You don't want to be in hell. But I think that this is picking up on some scholasticism that Dante would have been aware of, which is a. A division of sins into sins of ignorance, right? That which is the pagans, right? I mean, there's. Oh, and of course, there's culpable ignorance and there's invincible ignorance, but so there's sins of ignorance, there are sins of passion, and then there are sins of malice, right? And. And Aquinas is really clear that, like, sins of malice are sins par excellence, right? Whereas sins of passion and sins of ignorance are still sins, but they're like, in a way, a little bit defective as sins precisely because they're not wholehearted in the same way that sins of malice are. Right. Sins of malice. Like, you are committed to that sin fully because you know it's a sin, and you are after that sin. What's going on in a sin of passion? It's not that Paolo and Francesco were. Sorry. Francesca and Paolo were really dead set on adultery. They kind of fell into it. And you're right. Like, okay, you know, maybe you shouldn't been cuddled up with a book. Fine. But really the problem was that they didn't have that inner fortress of temperance. Right. And so when these feelings are elicited from the love poetry, they get literally swept away. They are literally swept away. And then it's just kind of their bad luck that, you know, her husband comes in and kills them, which he does later in the Divine Comedy. Spoiler. But, you know, but he's in a lower part of hell, so. So I just want to. I just want to underscore that. I think part of Dante's being overwhelmed is that, one, it's a kind of dangers of reading scenario and he feels implicated in that. But two, it's like. And this is, I think why people do really genuinely feel sorry for Francesca and Paolo, rightly or wrongly, is that we all recognize our susceptibility to passions that move us, but that it can be very dangerous, which is why we need that inner fortress of temperance, so that when. When an occasion of great passion comes, we are not overwhelmed. When St. Thomas talks about sins of weakness, he always uses Peter as his example. When Peter denied Christ, why did he do. Wasn't because he was a traitor, Right. That was Judas. He just was scared to death, Literally. He thought, these people are going to kill me. I'm just, you know. And then as soon as the crowd leaves, he goes outside and weeps. Right. And this is distinctive of a sin of passion. Once the occasion of the passion subsides, and it's like a cool hour of reason, there's typically regret or remorse or there's at least a chance for that. And these poor souls don't get that chance. Right. Because they're murdered. And of course, that just shows the dangers of passions and the danger of lacking virtue. But it is kind of. It's very intense. And then there is, as Jessica was saying, there's this wonderful parallel to. To really the top of Mount Purgatory, where lust is finally burned out of this.
- [89:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah.
- [89:50]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
And just going off of, like, how you watch the sins go deeper and darker and worse and worse. If you also think of this Whole poem, like a medieval bestiary. Right. In the beginning, we have they're being stung by wasps, but they're not being compared to wasps. Right. They're still kind of themselves selves. And then when you get into the outer ring and you see limbo, they're not even talked about as though they're animals. They're just human beings. It's not until now that we start the animal references. And it's like the highest animals you can think of. Like, they're birds in the air. Like, it's a. These are kind of the sins that are up here. Right. They're still higher in that sense. Once we get into the lower realms, they start being like beasts tearing each other apart and devouring one another. But here they're birds flying around and lost by the winds. And so things become harder and harder to reckon with as the sins become worse and worse for the soul.
- [90:43]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah. And just as kind of. One last thing that I think is so brilliant about Canto 5 in particular, which is one of my favorite cantos, but not my favorite. It's. It's just that, again, it strips all the illusion and fantasy out of this kind of romantic passion, which we really, you know, we live in a culture now that I think even aspires to that. Right. Like, your life is somehow missing if you are not, in fact, swept away in this way. And we, I think, have a great deal of not just sympathy, but even admiration for people who will leave a passionless marriage for, you know, something more passionate. And. But the thing is, the movie never shows. You know, the movie always shows, like, the passion of falling in love. It's so hot and it's so romantic and blah, blah, blah. But it never shows them, like, 10 years later when they're just fighting over who's going to do that. Right. But, like, that's where they're headed.
- [91:49]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah. And that's where they are. I mean, she's 10 years into her marriage when this happens with children.
- [91:55]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [91:57]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
And she's in the passionless point and needs compassion.
- [92:00]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Yeah. And I mean. And so I just find it just really wonderful to talk to young people about for that reason, because it's kind of like, well, what kind of. What kind of union is this, really? Like, do they. Like, they are stuck together now for eternity? Do they seem happy about it? I don't think so.
- [92:19]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yeah.
- [92:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I want to go back to what you said, too, about the structure of hell. And so I think, you know, one thing to. Because you can say, right? At the top of hell. Right. Structured according to severity. And I think what we'll see, we have to explore it a little bit, but that it's in relationship to love. Right. So how, how is this in relationship to love? And a certain way. Right. That what Dante the poet is saying here is that, well, of all the sins, lust is kind of the most like love. It's just, it's disordered, it's, it's usually an excess of some sense. Right. This, this sin of incontinence, you didn't bridle it correctly, but it's not that bad. But on the other hand, I always think of our lady of Fatima that says that more souls go to hell for lust than any other reason. So severity can be different. Right. So severity is like the worst sin, like sin per se, but the other one is like the worst sin insofar as what causes people to fall into sin. And I think lust then is, is incredibly high. Right on this. And like you said, like a lot of times for our culture, we're even just trying to convince people that things are sins. I mean, we're, we've adopted this so much.
- [93:27]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Right.
- [93:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think that this goes. So maybe the dovetail into this because I, I think this is one of my favorite moments of the whole Inferno is these commentators that then read this and say, look, they have conquered hell. Love between these two people, you know, have conquered hell. And Dante rightly sees this. And I think, you know, one of the best, one of the best lines is like, I originally read the Musa, that was the one that I was introduced to this classic. And he has a wonderful line in this in which he says, all the commentators that state this have been seduced by Francesca.
- [94:02]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Yes, right.
- [94:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That they make the same mistake. Their own immaturity matches Dante the pilgrim, and they get seduced in the same way and then misunderstand Dante's teaching, Dante the poet. And I think that's the fact that you have modern day commentators falling into the same trap of the rhetoric of the damned is fascinating to me.
- [94:24]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Well, and so just this will be the last thing I say because I know we have to go for time. But this is what Jen was saying when she first read the poem. It's hard for me to go back and remember when I first read it, but that's exactly, exactly why students need to read this poem. You read Limbo and you're like, I mean, I could do that. Like, I could stay there in like a castle and like hang out. Like, that sounds awesome. But you're committing the same error as Dante, where you're like, I was the sixth in the academy. Or here you're like, oh, Francesca and Paola, like this sad love story, and you, too, participate in the sin. So even as Dante, the pilgrim kind of participates, you, the reader, are participating. The good news is then you get to participate as you climb Purgatory, and then you get to participate when you get to witness the beatific vision. So there's this participation element in his poem that makes it so wonderful to experience. It's a very, like, emotional experience and not only a reasonable experience when you read this. Right. And I think that's why it's such a good poem. You're on the pilgrimage with him.
- [95:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's also one of the reasons that we like the Inferno the best, because we like that which we're most familiar with. Right. That was. I told. I told that story in episode one that I told a professor once that I was like, man, I really like the Inferno. Purgatory is okay in paradise. I just don't really get it. And he's like, oh, it's okay. We're just. We like what we're most familiar with. And I was like, okay, thanks. I'm. I'm. I am done giving comments in this class. Um, so anyway, yeah, so, like, any. Any kind of, like, final thoughts on this canto or just, like, the reading as a whole as we kind of continue the journey through Dante's Inferno?
- [95:55]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
I mean, I do think it needs to be a journey. I know Jen and I have said this probably too many times, but you just really can't stop. So even if you're only reading with the podcast Inferno right now, you need to go ahead and grab the other two. Because, yes, Inferno is very relatable, but the hope comes when you start taking the other two parts of the journey. Because really, it's about. This is a very dehumanizing poem for the reader. It's supposed to be right. You're supposed to be stripped of all those things till you get to this beastial core and you realize, like, I am the worst of all sinners. Like, that's the realization that comes at the end of this. And you shouldn't stop there. That's a horrible place to stop, is that feeling. And if the poem's done well, that should be the feeling you have. Which means. Which is great for Lent. It's a great poem for Lent for that reason. But there is more to the story. There is. Now you can come out and be rehumanized when you get to Purgatory, and then you can be transhumanized by the experience of reading Paradise.
- [96:55]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
I guess I would just say really briefly, one is I would actually put in a plug for the Musa. I grew up on the Musa because I went to iu and he was the great Dante scholar, the great Dantisti at Indiana University. But it's also just a cheap Penguin paperback, and the annotations are amazing. It's just, like, a really great entry point. And. But I would also just say generally for people reading the Comedy, is that it is a comedy, and you don't understand that until you get to the end, but also is a poem of love. And I think if you always, in every canto, return to the question, how is this a poem of love? You're going to be on the right track in understanding it. Because I think where people get off track, especially with Inferno, is that they're like, this is a poem of suffering and punishment, which it is, right? But the suffering is not meaningless. It becomes much more clear in Purgatory because you recognize, oh, there's a totally different kind of suffering, which is a kind of pure, purifying suffering. You know, the thing that's tough about the suffering in Inferno is it's not help. I mean, it's not helping anyone except the reader. So is the. Is the suffering of punishment, Right. But it is. It is an expression of divine charity. And so I think that's really the task is understanding that. And I love what Jessica said about, well, what would we think of the suffering of Good Friday if we didn't have the resurrection? Right? It would be. It would be gratuitous and awful. And we need to think about that when we're reading the Inferno. Right? Is that this suffering is not meaningless, but we do not understand the full context, the full meaning of this suffering until we have read to the end.
- [99:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Beautiful. All right, Dr. Frey, Dr. Wilson, I greatly appreciate both of you guys being here today and helping us through the Inferno.
- [99:12]
Dr. Jennifer Frey
Oh, yeah. Appreciate it.
- [99:13]
Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson
Thank you.
- [99:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Everyone go follow. Both of them are active on X, so if you want to see their hot takes on everything, please go and follow their accounts on there. Next week, we are discussing Cantos 6 through 11 with Dr. Jason Baxter of Benedictine College, who recently published his own translation of Dante's Inferno. It's been referenced several times. Everyone go Visit our website, thegreatbooks podcast.com, where we have a guide to the Inferno and guides also to the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Orestia and some other texts, and we will see you next week. Thank you, everyone.