Dante's Inferno Ep. 3: Cantos 6-11 with Dr. Jason Baxter

Summary

Ascend - The Great Books Podcast: Dante's Inferno Ep. 3: Cantos 6-11 with Dr. Jason Baxter

Host: Deacon Harrison Garlick
Guest: Dr. Jason Baxter
Release Date: March 18, 2025

---

Introduction

In this enlightening episode of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast, hosts Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan delve deeper into Dante Alighieri's Inferno, specifically focusing on Cantos 6 through 11. Joined by Dr. Jason Baxter, a scholar and author with a fresh translation of the Inferno, the conversation explores the intricate layers of Upper Hell, characterized by sins of incontinence, and transitions into the foreboding City of Dis, an entrance to Lower Hell where malice prevails.

---

Guest Background and Motivation

[00:00] Deacon Harrison Garlick:
Introduces Dr. Jason Baxter, highlighting his credentials as the Director of the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College and author of several books, including A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Comedy and his recent translation of Dante's Inferno. Garlick emphasizes Baxter's commitment to bringing Dante closer to readers through meticulous translation and scholarly insight.

[03:49] Dr. Jason Baxter:
Shares his inspiration for translating the Inferno. Baxter explains his desire to move beyond mere teaching points and immerse himself in Dante's masterful language. He likens the translation process to learning a complex piano piece, aiming to internalize Dante's rhythm and emotional depth to capture the poem's original energy.

---

Exploring Cantos 6-11

Canto 6: Gluttony

Dr. Baxter provides a vivid analysis of the third circle of Hell, where the gluttonous reside. He likens modern gluttons to "food snobs" and "epicures," individuals who seek happiness through excessive consumption of food and material goods. This contrapasso, or punishment by the crime, places the gluttons in a filthy rain, symbolizing the irrationality and disgust of their uncontrolled appetites.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Jason Baxter [04:28]:
"If I could capture that type of rhythm... then I would help sort of restore the incredible energy of the original."

---

Canto 7-8: Avarice and Wrath

The discussion shifts to the fourth circle, where avarice and prodigality are punished by rolling heavy stones in an eternal, futile struggle. Baxter draws parallels between Dante's portrayal and contemporary political conflicts, comparing the endless opposition between hoarders and spendthrifts to a never-ending presidential election, underscoring the futility and self-destructive nature of their obsessions with wealth.

In Canto 7, the wrathful are depicted thrashing in a muddy Styx-like river, embodying the chaos of unmanaged anger. Dr. Baxter connects this to modern "party culture," where excessive and irrational consumption often masks deeper wounds and unresolved issues.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Jason Baxter [07:52]:
"Dante sort of almost felt it as a parody of bliss, of a parody of joy... It’s this easy excess."

---

Canto 9: The City of Dis

As Dante and Virgil approach the City of Dis, the sixth circle, they encounter formidable defenses including half-beast creatures like Medusa and the Furies. Here, Dr. Baxter highlights the transition from Upper to Lower Hell, emphasizing the limitations of Virgil—an embodiment of human reason—as he cannot overcome the city's divine barriers. This necessitates divine intervention, symbolizing the need for grace to progress beyond pure reason.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Jason Baxter [65:55]:
"The Christian poet has to come up with a language which begins with Virgil and then stretches it on either end... because this is grace coming from on high to help us achieve the deepest possible depths."

---

Canto 10: Heretics

In Canto 10, the focus shifts to heretics, particularly Epicureans who denied the immortality of the soul. Dr. Baxter discusses Farinata degli Uberti, a prominent Florentine politician and a leader among the heretics, illustrating how Dante portrays political obsession as a form of intellectual violence against oneself. This canto serves as a critique of narrow-mindedness and the destructive fixation on temporal matters over spiritual truths.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Jason Baxter [85:46]:
"The heretics might be related to the violent in that way, or at least adjacent... altogether, a desire to hurt someone in their words and their mind and controlling sociological situations."

---

Structure and Thematic Insights

Dr. Baxter elaborates on Dante's architectural metaphor of Hell, structured into Upper and Lower Hell based on the nature of sins—sins of incontinence (lack of self-control) and sins of malice (intentional wrongdoing). He emphasizes the hierarchical severity, with malice being deemed more grievous due to its rootedness in reason and intentional harm.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Jason Baxter [100:40]:
"These are rowdy, irrational excesses, whereas malice is a corruption of our unique capacity for speech and truth, creating a 'perfect evil' that fractures reality itself."

---

Political Context of Dante's Florence

A significant portion of the discussion delves into the intricate political landscape of Florence during Dante's time, involving the Guelphs and Ghibellines factions. Dr. Baxter provides a comprehensive overview of their origins, motivations, and the enduring impact on Dante's portrayal of political and intellectual corruption in Hell.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Jason Baxter [88:35]:
"You can recognize it as two huge tectonic plates grinding against each other—the Pope's new moneyed Guelph supporters versus the Emperor's old aristocratic Ghibelline supporters."

---

Philosophical and Theological Reflections

The hosts and Dr. Baxter explore the interplay between reason and faith, the role of grace, and the psychological dimensions of sin as depicted by Dante. They discuss how Dante's alignment of sin with psychological states like righteous indignation and acedia (sloth) offers a profound critique of human moral failings.

Notable Quote:
Deacon Harrison Garlick [99:49]:
"These souls that we've just encountered weren't able to think iconically or maybe even better refused to think iconically about the things in their lives because they wanted to lock them down as their personal quantitative possessions."

---

Conclusion and Takeaways

As the conversation wraps up, Dr. Baxter and Garlick emphasize the enduring relevance of Dante's Inferno in understanding human nature, morality, and the consequences of our actions. They highlight how Dante's vivid portrayal of Hell serves not only as a theological construct but also as a psychological map of human vice and virtue.

Final Notable Quote:
Dr. Jason Baxter [112:23]:
"Inferno is the act of discreation. Inferno is sort of like running the seven days of creation back, melting human souls into this sort of like pure plasma... and then it can be reformed into something which is beautiful, but we've got to encounter the fear of the Lord first."

---

Additional Resources

Listeners interested in exploring Dante's Inferno further can access the provided 115 Question & Answer Guide to the Iliad and other resources at thegreatbookspodcast.com. Dr. Jason Baxter's works and his insights on literature and culture are available at jasonmbaxter.com and his Substack, Beauty Matters.

---

This episode offers a profound exploration of Dante's Inferno, blending literary analysis with theological and psychological insights. Whether you're a first-time reader or revisiting the Inferno, this discussion provides valuable frameworks for understanding the complex architecture of Hell and the timeless lessons it imparts.

Transcript

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Today on Ascend, the Great Books Podcast, we continue Dante's Inferno and our journey through Upper Hell, which is characterized by the sins of incontinence, or rather those souls that had a disordered attachment to some good like food, wealth and even anger. We'll then cross over the River Styx into the city of Dis, an infernal city that serves as the sixth circle punishing heretics and serves as the antechamber to lower Hell, sins characterized by malice. To guide us through the rest of Upper Hell, we are joined by Dr. Jason Baxter, who recently released his own translation of the Inferno. We'll discuss what led him to translate Dante and what he found most surprising in doing so, and then have an interesting conversation on Dante's great great grandfather being knighted in the Crusades and how Dante's chivalric blood informs his depiction of Hell. Be sure to visit thegreatbookspodcast.com to check out our guide on Dante's Inferno, which has over 80 questions and answers to guide you or your small group through the text and join us today for a fantastic conversation on the rest of Upper Hell. 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 evening 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 on Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters. Also visit thegreatbookspodcast.com we have written guides to help you through the great books, including A Reader's Guide to Dante's Inferno, Breaking down all the circles of Hell and the information you need, particularly for first time readers. Today we have our third episode on Dante's Inferno and are covering Canto 6 through 11, discussing gluttony, avarice, wrath, heresy and more. To help guide us through these circles of Hell, we are joined by Dr. Jason Baxter. He is a Director for the center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College. He is also a speaker and author of seven books including A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Comedy, a new translation of Dante's Inferno, and most recently, why Literature Still Matters and you can find his popular writing on his substack Beauty matters. Dr. Baxter, welcome to the podcast.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Thank you.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

You also have another book too Right. That recently came out on C.S. lewis.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

I do, yeah. It's called the medieval mind of C.S. lewis. It's also read rather magnificently by Simon Vance. I find myself just purchasing his readings of the Dallas phone book. He's such a good reader, so, I mean, he's major upgrade for the book. But, yeah, it's a lovely reading and it's really fun to do.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Wonderful. Well, I have two of your texts right here in front of me, so I will hold them up that I just mentioned. So one, the Inferno. And so I read out of this one for tonight's episode. And then also a Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy as well, which I also enjoyed reading the selections that were pertinent for tonight out of this. So kind of tell me, like, what led you to translate Dante's Inferno?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yes, I'm a professor of the great books, and I've taught Dante a number of times. And I realized that it's very easy, as you teach, to slowly get into the habit of just teaching your talking points. And, you know, there's a lot to read. People read really fast. You know, you don't have. You don't have, you know, finite time. And so I found, you know, I could just. I could sort of get away with not talking about the difficult bits like the Guelphs and the Ghibellines and exactly what battle Farinatha is referring to, and all this kind of good stuff.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Right.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

You just sort of leave that for the notes. And so I felt like, look, I love this author. I love him like he loved Virgil. I feel close to him, but I want to. I want to be closer to the master. And so I thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could just translate this whole thing? And then you'd be like a kid at the piano. And you sort of. At first, you're sort of playing it, you know, sight reading something, and, you know, very laboriously moving your fingers to correspond with what your brain sees, but then eventually get it down well enough, you close the book and you close your eyes, and then you can play it. And it feels differently, doesn't it? It's no longer in your brain, it's in your pulse, and it's in your veins. And so that was my goal, just to sort of draw close to the master. It was for me. But in the middle of the process, in the middle of the exercise, being forced to look at every single one of these little words, I became really fascinated with how, with, you know, use a fancy term, the Periodic structure of Dante's sentences. In other words, how he makes his sentences work. Right. Is it more like Hemingway, or is it more like Charles Dickens? Right. Is it these kind of like short, fast, quick sentences, like, you know, Hemingway's, you know, man in the. Man of the sea, right. He came down to the sea, he saw the sea, he got into a boat, he went. Right. This paratactic syntax, Right. Well. Or in contrast to that would be something like a sort of Dickensian sentence which goes on for a whole. A whole page, right. Dante, as a young man wanted to write with what he called a prolixitas, using a Latin word, but a sort of sense of slow motion, gracious slow motion, almost like a floating. He said that was the goal for poetry. And then all of a sudden, he started writing this Inferno. And I started picking up on all these little conjunctions and these little adverbs when Dante says things like, and then, and then, and then, and then. And I noticed too, that he was wrapping up a whole grammatical sentence within a single line, whereas the younger Dante would have allowed it to spill over 9, 10, 14 lines in that kind of Dickensian way. And so if the young Dante was trying to create this floating sense, this prolixitas, this gracious, you know, am. You know, ambling pace, all of a sudden, this Dante of the Inferno is creating something which has. Has a pace which is moving fast. And it struck me as something almost like a heartbeat that. Or I guess you could put it another way in our world of cinema, it struck me as his soundtrack, right? His sort of noir soundtrack to the background in order to try to create the atmosphere for this poem. And that's when I knew that this project was. Was exciting because it was overflowing, being merely a fun and good thing for me as a scholar and as a lover of Dante. But if I could capture that type of rhythm. Some of my reviewers of the translation have called it an iconoclastic translation. Right. But if I could capture that sort of noir feeling and the fastness of it, then I would help sort of restore the incredible energy of the original.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

That was very beautiful. What is the. As you kind of work through this kind of labor of love, anything that, like, surprised you the most, that maybe you thought you knew about Dante but then changed or something that you just didn't even know was there?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, I mean, I think. I mean, already what I've mentioned in the. The sort of heartbeat. The heartbeat and the pacing of it, right. His attempt to create this incredibly fast thing that was a Huge discovery about Inferno. I guess another one is. I think I sort of knew this, but I didn't feel it till later. Dante mixes registers in a really funny way. That is, he uses high registers and low registers in English. And I joke about this in the introduction to the translation in English. If we're talking among our friends, we talk about our tummy ache and we complain about our brother and our sister. In other words, we use this sort of register of our Anglo Saxon and heritage, but all of a sudden we stop into, you know, step into our. Our therapist office or the doctor's room, right? We switch to this Latinate French thing, you know, we refer to intestinal disorder and sibling rivalry. And so we sort of. We have this sort of swapping of registers all day long. And Dante does something like that as well. But for him, it's particularly grating because he had made all these rules for himself, like, don't use double Z's in your poetry and don't use double X's. They sound harsh and brutal. They sound like men, you know, like cavemen. He says this kind of stuff in. In some of his earlier treatises, but then he goes and uses all this stuff in the Inferno. So that was super interesting to see that. But I suppose now that I know this is beyond what we're talking about for today, but now that I'm. I've got the Purgatorio in draft, there have been a number of things that I've been very surprised by. And it happened today, actually. It was really cool. The last Kanto I've been sort of cleaning up is the one that I've been postponing procrastinating on because I thought it was boring. It's Purgatorio 25. I guarantee none of your guests will. Will even touch it. It's so boring. Stacious is talking about, I jokingly call it Medieval Discovery Channel, where babies come from. And it's all this weird Aristotelian biology about like. Like how all. It's super weird and it's really uncomfortable. And so I've been sort of, you know, dreading getting to this. But as I was reading it today, I realized, oh, wow. I finally realized what he's doing here. And that was. That was a sort of breakthrough moment for me in which he's sort of describing the very human body and its constitution as related to the elements of the world. Thus we're sort of built into this world, capable of reading it, capable of loving it, and capable of responding to it almost in a Sort of Augustinian way, from caterpillars to supernovas. We've got, you know, we have the capacity to bring it all into a sense of praise anyway. So there. There have been a number of moments like that for me, and I guess we, you know, we'll get into it eventually. But another one of those kind of surprise moments for me was Inferno9. I think that was the sort of breakthrough moment for me when I compared it to what happens in Virgil's Aeneid. Of course, that's a text that Dante knows cold. It's maybe one of five or six books that he can't forget. Maybe one of five or six books that he probably practically has memorized. Right up there with the constellation of philosophy and a couple of Aquinas's commentaries and different books of Aristotle. But the. But Virgil's book six. So the fact that he rewrites a little chunk of Aeneid 6 at this moment is highly significant, especially given the fact that he himself says, hey, reader, you're paying attention, aren't you? So those are been some of my sort of exciting moments where when I finally give, as you said, you know, the attentive read that the master deserves, it's been richly rewarding.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

I appreciate you saying that. Yeah. I mean, Dante, that's the way we're approaching this, right. Is that Dante is the teacher. He's the one that we come before to learn these lessons. Yeah. I think that there has been multiple layers over the years when I've read this text. I mean, it's funny because at certain ways I feel like I really have a good grasp. Like, oh, yeah, I know what's going on in these Cantos, et cetera. And then I come back and revisit it and I realize, like, nope, there's whole layers here and kind of like strata that I still have not quite figured out what he's doing. It's just amazing to me how much you can return to this text and, like, learn something true, good and beautiful from it.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it reminds me of one of my. One of my friends said, right. That a mystery is not something. You know, there are two types of mysteries, those which are puzzles, like a detective novel. And then you discover what's wrong and then you figure it all out and you never read it again. And the mystery that you keep going back to because no matter how much you know about it, you haven't explained it yet. And I mean, surely that must be very close to the definition or at least the experience of A great book. And how the heck an author achieves that is another super exciting question. But yeah, maybe it would take us too far beyond our Conti for today.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, very good. Okay, well, let's jump into the text. So let's look at the Canto 6, the third circle. So I guess that's like here on a high level, like who do Dante, the pilgrim and Virgil find here in the third circle of hell?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, the gluttonous, right? It's Dante finds, finds Choco. He finds the, he finds those. Well, everyone, everyone, as is explained at length by professor virgil In Inferno 11, everyone who's outside of the city of Des, right outside of those walls, which is what you could call deepal, is in this higher up area. And they're there because they, because they did not yoke their lower animal appetites, which are not bad in and of themselves. The sexual appetite, the desire for, the desire for food, the desire for possessions such that you can meet your physical needs, right? Those are those sort of natural drives and instincts are not bad. But in Thomistic psychology, which seemingly orders the architecture of hell, what is bad is when those appetites are not controlled by reason. Why? Because they're like some, you know, dumb horse that will keep eating until his stomach explodes. Right? Those appetites are never satisfied. Right. One, the appetites in and of themselves, right? We, you know, hunger, you just sort of keep eating and eating and eating and eating forever, right? You, you know, you only have to go to a college campus for, for the weekend to walk around for 35 minutes to realize the party culture, right? There's no say, there's no satisfaction to this, right? There's no satiation to these types of appetites. We do this every single Friday and every single Saturday and also every single Thursday if we don't have Friday classes, right? So I think Chaco's kind of, you know, among those types of characters basically. And I think it's, I think this whole sort of gluttonous. It's not just people who, you know, who go bad, go buy bags of marshmallows and cram them down in the car, right? Not just those types of people, but I think for Dante it's, it's food snobs, it's epicures, it's like, it's like snooty fine dining people, right? It's, it's people who spend more money on a meal than, than high school, high school English teachers making a month. I think for Dante, basically the gluttony is anytime and, and he, obviously, he wouldn't have done it, but I think he'd probably put casual marijuana users in this category as well. But I think it's. It's drinkers, it's party folks. It's, you know, it's. It's frat life, right? And it's, well, as sort of like snooty, epicurean type of people, basically. It's anyone who wittingly or unwittingly places their beatific happiness in consumption of material goods, right? As I think I put it in the Beginner's Guide, those who can't do anything but look forward to the weekend, right? It's almost Saturday night. Or, oh, it's almost Saturday night. The new restaurant should be open, right? I hear they're serving. Right. Again, none of these things are necessarily bad in and of themselves, right? Alcohol, wine, food. Maybe marijuana cannot be done in any temperate way, at least in my feelings, but I think so. It's an intemperance of the appetite. But what it belies and what it betrays is a secret desire to find my beatific happiness in the consumption of material goods. And that's why, as Dante himself points out, right, look, there might be punishments which are worse, but there's nothing more disgusting, right? It's this nasty rain and it stinks and seemingly like all kinds of, you know, gross bodily fluids, right? Which happens when we over consume it is absolutely sort of disgusting place. And Chako sort of temporarily wakes up. But what I've found super interesting is that he seems to unplug himself. He seems. He seems like sort of. Dante says, well, tell us, you know, what is wrong with our city? And Chaco says, look, I mean, it's. It's full of pride and envy, envy and avarice. Of course, it's ripping open like a sack that's spilling over. But as soon as sort of Chaco moves kind of toward the center of the heart, that kind of invisible wound, and begins to sort of touch it, he sort of jerks back and says, but we're done here, and then goes back out into oblivion. And that's always just seemed to me probably how he. How he lived his life, right? Is that sort of constantly consuming materials in order not to have to deal with the inner wound, right? That's. And so I think. I think there's something super interesting here. It's not just, you know. Yeah, the contrapasso is pretty obvious, isn't it? They're getting pelted by disgusting, stinky fluids, right? This is what happens when you over consume things. If you drink too much alcohol, everyone knows how you feel and what happens next. Right. If you eat 10 times more than you should at Thanksgiving, everyone knows how you feel afterwards. Right. And so I think the contrapasso sort of slaps you in the face is so disgusting and obvious. But I think what's much more interesting is this sort of psychological comment on, on Chaka, who precisely, as he grow, draws near to this, this deeper wound. He's practiced his whole life at ignoring matters of seriousness and like, well, let's not talk about that. That's just, that's the deep stuff. He never did it. And so here, now that he's in hell, he's sort of, you know, locked into almost like, you know, like a wax sculpture that you, you know, put a nickel in and it starts to talk to you. He gives the same thing and reverts back to his old habits because now he can't change.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, no, very good. Yeah, the contrapasso here. Yeah, it seems like really clear. You know, other imagery that you kind of imagine when you're reading this Kanto, is that they're like pigs, they're like wallowing. They have this like disordered relationship with food. And so I appreciate what you say. There is what we're seeing kind of in this, like upper hell, this, this area of incontinence is there are goods here. There's, there's food, there's sex, there's wealth. These are things that are not, you know, evil in and of themselves, but rather these people have some type of disordered appetite and therefore they've abused a particular good. And so, yeah, we see these souls kind of wallowing around. Dante uses, Dante the poet uses a lot of dog imagery. One of the things that we see here is Cerberus, right, The three headed dog. One thing I find fascinating because the Dante's, as we've kind of talked about previously, Dante's Inferno tracks in a lot of ways the Aeneid. And so Virgil is his guide. And so there's these, these parallels. Well, when Cerberus has to be like satisfied in the myths previous to the Inferno, right? He's like fed like honey cakes. And these things here, they pick up magical.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

They're magical as well. Like they have magical potion of soporific, Right?

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah. Here he picks up like part of this disgusting mud, this slime, feeds it to him to satisfy him. And it seems there, like if we take a step back and say, okay, what is this an analog of? It seems like what Dante the Poet's teaching us there is that this consumption is irrational, right? It's like it's this irrational relationship with consumption and food.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Well, yeah, and everyone who's been around it, and I suppose almost everyone has been around it at least a little bit, knows that part of the whole kind of gluttonous mindset, which I really prefer to call party culture because you call gluttony. We just think. I mean, our culture is like really worried about body images, right? And so we sort of, you know, zero in merely on the kind of overeating thing. That's something we can get behind. But there are a hundred ways to commit gluttony. Right. Um, but anyway, I just sort of think of it generally sort of party culture. Anyone who's been around party culture at least a little bit, you know that it's not just irrational, but it's a delight in the irrational. Right. It's not just that I drink more than is healthy for a human being's, you know, blood circulation. But I think that's hilarious. And I think it's great to drink, you know, this X amount of, you know, of. Of alcohol. It's great to almost get to blood poisoned alcohol, right? And there's this kind of like weird kind of exaltation in it. And I think Dante sort of almost felt it as a parody of bliss, of a parody of joy, right? I mean, Paul says that we should be inebriated on the Holy Spirit and be sober, right? A sober inebriation. That is if we're really flourishing as human beings and we're sacrificial and we love people and we have eyes which are quick for love and feet which are quick to serve, then we have a kind of inebriation and we do have a kind of overflow. And that's what happens on, you know, and party culture in general in Dante's. Dante calls it, you know, Gula. That's the Latin. That's what I wanted to name the ice cream store that opened up in my. My town. I wanted to call it Gula, but they rejected it and chose something I think better for marketing. But any case, I mean, I think that's. That's what Dante sees is this kind of, again, not irrationality, but exaltation in the irrationality. Why? Because I'm taking this act of excess. And again, in a. In a. In a spiritual mode, there are certain modes of excess which are laudable and praiseworthy, right? Read the beginning of Augustians Confessions and you'll see, you'll hear excess except as excessive praise and excess of love. Right? But in this case, it's. It's an easy excess. It's a commodified excess which you can go just pick up at a dispensary, you know, for $17. Right? I mean, true things, beautiful things and rich things cannot be commodified in that type of way. But they also give a kind of sober inebriation, which. Which is much greater. But these guys pretend that they got the real thing. And. And I think that's one of the funny things that's being continually acted out down here.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, no, well said. The. Before we kind of move on from this canto. There's a really interesting discussion at the end of the canto where, you know, Dante's. Dante, the pilgrim is always asking Virgil these questions. He's trying to learn as he kind of, you know, in his journey downward. One of the things he asks him here at the end is, you know, how will the final judgment affect these souls? Because one of the things that I don't know if we've, like, fully realized as we've journeyed, but this is our flag to realize it, is that these. All these souls are disembodied, right? They don't have their bodies. So just like this quick sketch of, like, you know, Catholic theology here, when you die, you undergo a particular judgment. You stand before Jesus Christ and you are immediately judged. And so, you know, you could go straight to heaven, you could go to Purgatory and then eventually go to heaven, or you're going to go to hell. But everyone has this, like, particular, immediate judgment. But you're disembodied. You don't have. The bodily resurrection has not occurred. So then at the end of time, right, you think of, like, Matthew 25, all the nations are called before God. You think about the. The sheep and the goats and this kind of separation. Everyone is judged, but this also part of that is the bodily resurrection. So it's interesting that Dante, the pilgrim then asked Virgil, like, well, at the end of time, in this kind of bodily resurrection, at the final judgment, not our particular judgment, but the final judgment, how will this affect people down here? My understanding is what Virgil tells him is, well, you know, we'll become. These souls down here will become more who they're supposed to be, right? We're composite creatures. We're made of body and soul. And so therefore, the pain that they're experiencing, so say, like the gluttons here kind of wallowing in this filth, their pain will be perfected Right. The contrapassa will be perfected in them, you know, once they have a body.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, no, I mean, seemingly Dante's does what he always does. He's mixing together his favorite sources and trying to find like, like a scholastic. He's trying to find a synthesis of these things. And one of his sources are of course, his Virgil. And Virgil calls the souls in the underworld, he calls them shades. Then he has these moments in which, you know, of course, Aeneas tries to hug his father Anchises, and he goes right through him. Right. So that's something that Dante's. Virgil, of course, doesn't feel the need to be technical about it. But then Dante has his good Aristotelian psychology, but he also has a sense of Augustine's sign theory, in which one of the unique gifts of a human being is being able to express out here what I feel and hear. And thus my heart can talk to your heart by means of my words. But also, even for Augustine, even more naturally, my gesture, my tone of voice, my expressions. Right. My facial expressions, my laughter, my sorrow, my tears. Right. And thus for Dante, a little bit of Aristotle, a little bit of Guston, a little bit of Virgil. There's no such thing as a disembodied soul. Every soul has to have something of a body, even if it's tenuous and thin. And so here they have sort of bodies seemingly of air, of air molecules, and they can feel with their air molecules and they can do things and they can walk around and they can, you know, be. Be punished, like the awful punishments among the schismatics coming down later. But yeah, for Dante, I think it's a fascinating thing is that we're such, we're such sign using animals that we have to have some type of vehicle for signifying what's in the heart. And thus he comes up with this really interesting explanation that they're kind of airy bodies.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

I like that. I like that a lot. Let's push forward just a little bit to Canto seven. Right. So we're introduced, say to the fourth circle. So let me kind of sketch this out as how I understand this because it's kind of, I think one of the most interesting and kind of fascinating pictures. We also start to get this theme of two different sins in the same area. And I think there's like a lesson there that we have to learn. So Dante comes down, they're in this fourth circle. You know, they see Pluto right at the beginning. He has this kind of like language that they can't Understand. I'd be fascinated if you had any comments on that. I think the first time I read it, I was very confused. Why Hades? Right. Pluto was like, here in the wealth section. It wasn't until I read Homer that I realized that because he's the God of the underworld, he's also the God of the earth and all of the precious minerals and jewels and gold and silver that are in the earth. So there's a relationship between Hades and wealth. And that was something I didn't. I don't think I clicked the first time I read the text. Go ahead.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

No, that's awesome. I mean, Lewis says that in Discarded Image. Yeah.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah. So it's an. It's an interesting image that wasn't immediately apparent to me. So they kind of come over and they see this four circle, and there's two different groups. So they're forming an actual circle, almost like a wheel, if you will, and it's broken in half. And there seem to be two different groups, and they have these. These weights, these stones that they're rolling, and in these kind of semicircles, they'll roll, and in the middle, they'll crash into each other, and they're accusing each other, right? They're yelling at each other, and they kind of roll the other way, and then they crash into each other. And so my. My understanding here is that we're dealing now in this four circle with a miss Use of wealth, right? So if we're just leaving a disordered appetite towards food, now we're going into a disordered appetite towards wealth. And these two groups represent, you know, the hoarders and the spin thrifts. Like, what. What can we learn about this section?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, I mean, at some point in my writing, I jokingly say it's like a. It's like a presidential election which never ends. Right? It's, you know, one. One group cannot think. It doesn't even have its own positive platform. It's. Its whole campaign is those other guys are sick and perverted, right? That's it. And then. And then the group B has the exact same, you know, campaign strategy. No, no. Group A is sick and perverted. And all they do is talk about how sick and perverted this other group is, right? They're just absolute. There they are. There they are. Right? And so the groups sort of come. They clash. They're carrying the same sort of worthless things. They have the same platform, right? They. They analogously to the. To. To the gluttonous who think that consumption of things is going to bring beatitude. These are those who. Who either in one of two ways, either through type of reckless spending and spending beyond my means, right? Purchasing elaborate things that I can't afford, not worrying about where it goes to on the credit card, right? Buying things for other people. The sort of like up, you know, uproarious, gregarious, fun, but kind of falsely magnanimous spin thrift, right? Versus the other who's constantly checking his. His accounts and, and is, you know, his earning potential and basically can't think of any interaction between human beings except in terms of financial. Obviously it's sort of somewhat anachronistically bringing it up into our day, but these are the misers and these are the spendthrifts and they just can't stand each other. But I think. Yeah, you're absolutely right, Deacon. That the funny thing is, is that they share this thing in common, that they've placed their beatitude in material possessions, which now of course is symbolized by these big lumps of rock, right? Oh, you like stuff that comes from the earth, do you? Here's a huge lump of it. Push that around. And now that it's like someone in the middle of the desert still carrying around his briefcase of millions of dollars, but dying of thirst and yet unwilling to let go of the money out there, it just means nothing. It's worthless. It can't do anything for you, right? And it's sort of analogously in a sort of grander sense of the cosmos, right? The things that, as we'll learn in the Paradiso, right? The gems and the jewels of heaven or of course the souls who have loved and the sort of impressions and memories of sanctity. But these poor guys, both sets crashing into each other, can't see that. They just think that through wonderfully exaggerated spending, right? The thrill of, of. Of that big purchase or I mean, or you know, the. I mean, we all kind of get into this mindset, I think especially in a. Kind of. In a. In a democratic capitalist society, right? We like work really hard, right? We, we measure our times, we count our steps. We, you know, measure our sleep. We work really hard on our productivity. And if we're really productive in this quarter, then we might be able to 10x it and you know, in the next three quarters and then, and then, and then. But when the thing finally comes, when the promotion, when the, the goal is hit, it's just this big downer, right? You know, quantit, quantitative realities again, not that they're. Not that they're Wrong. Right. I mean, I think we have to be prudent, we have to be smart. But I think what Dante realizes, that quantitative realities can. Can asphyxiate us, because what we want is. What we. What we want is infinity. What we want is the qualitatively and that which is unbound, that which is on fire, and that which is love. And. But these poor guys didn't know that in life, and now they get to act it out in this sad, pathetic, dramatically ironic play which everyone but them can see.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, I really appreciate that. Yeah. One of the things, too, I mean, just to kind of build on what you said, you know, what we're seeing here, and we're going to start seeing a theme, is that one of the things that Aristotle will talk about is that virtue is found in the mean. And so when we approach goods, right, things like wealth or food or sex, right, there's a mean on how we're actually supposed to approach it. And so what we're gonna see, like, in this circle is you'll have sometimes two different sins related to the same good, because one is like an excess and one is a defect, right? And so, you know, one has too much of something, one has too little of the other, and it leads into how people can have a disordered appetite, you know, towards the same good. One thing here, though, in the imagery overall, that I think Dante's playing with, that as modern readers, I don't know if we're immediately aware of, but then obviously, Virgil gives us this talk that kind of helps pull it out, is that, you know, they make this wheel and, you know, they're. They're attached to wealth. And so there's an imagery going on here of Lady Fortune. And so, if you remember, like you already mentioned, right, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and you had Lady Philosophy, and she's often contrasted with Lady Fortune, who has this, you know, literal wheel of fortune. Sometimes, you know, you think you're doing well, and sometimes she just spins it and she's capricious, and you don't know what's going to happen. You and men spend their whole lives trying to seek a fortune, and this Lady Fortune can just turn it all upside down at a moment's notice. And so it's interesting because in Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, he seems very much to contrast these two women, Lady Fortune and Lady Philosophy, and why we need to gravitate and attach to Lady Philosophy these perennial truths, wisdom, things that are stable, not this wheel. What really caught my attention here in this canto with Dante is that that somewhat negative veneer that I would, I would read Boethius has on Lady Fortune and Dante seems to be gone. And now Lady Fortune, she's like an angel, right? She's a, she's an agent of God's providence, moving this fortune as God wills it. I mean, it's a beautiful image. But what is, what has Dante done to Fortune here?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, yeah, she's sort of giddy and almost like, you know, I've got one of these, a seven year old girl who's like, you know, pulling off flower petals and just tossing them everywhere and running around in a circle, right? Like in her mind, like, it's this kind of like incredible act of generosity, isn't it? Right. Like here's more flower petals, right? But for her, you know, basically they're, they're not super, super important, but also it's kind of, you know, it's kind of indiscriminate, right? It's just, I'll give, I'll give you what I have as long as I have it. And thus it sort of falls as this type of blessing. But then of course, according to Dante, right, We become sort of fixated on it, right? And we think, well, if I got that much this month, I'm going to see if I can 10x it for the next quarter, right? And then it doesn't come. And this is both easy to point too, isn't it? Right. And then we're angry that we've been cheated, even though the original thing was an act of generosity, right. The fact that we live in a wealthy country is just pure grace. But it doesn't mean it's going to be like this forever. I mean, other countries have been wealthy and collapsed, right? Other countries are poor right now. It's just kind of, it's going to change, right? This sort of situation and factors of history are going to move and political parties are going to collide into each other and weaken and vitiate their own countries. And you know, when no leadership, you know, things will just fall to pieces and that just happens and other places rise up. And so I think, yeah, I think Dante sort of sees, almost feels, to me, has a sort of like Franciscan flavor to it, right? Like that Lady Fortune is also kind of, I don't know, you know, borrowing a little bit from the playbook of lady poverty, right? It's all good, right? It's all blessing and I'm just spreading it around. And your goal is to, I mean, you said earlier temperance and I like that. But then to also maybe think in an Augustinian way. Your goal is to see things iconically, right? Your goal in the meal is for the communion of the people around it in addition to the nourishment, right? But it's not just the consumption of the calories, but it's a chance of a higher level, an emergent good of, say, togetherness. And analogously with these goods, your goal is to see them iconically. Your goal is to see them as enriching people's hearts. And that's wealth. Well used if it enriches people's hearts. But we have to sort of see through it. I've got an icon hanging over my shoulder, right? But there are these sort of two dimensional things which we're almost meant to look through as a type of window and sort of think our way into this third dimension. So I think these, I guess another way to put it is that these souls that we've just encountered weren't able to think iconically or maybe even better refused to think iconically about the things in their lives because they wanted to sort of lock them down as their personal quantitative possessions which they could count and hold forever. Right. Even though that's not what they were for. They were, they were just meant as a, as a sign, maybe as a way, as a vehicle, as a path for these richer and greater goods. Which is exactly Virgil's speech in this. Right? Woe to men who do not appreciate those goods which, when they are divided, everyone becomes richer, right? Incredible, incredible, right? If you have $100 and 100 friends and you divide it among them, you know, you get richer every time, you get poorer every time you divide it, right? You go from 100 to, you know, to one. But there are some goods and their loves and their virtues, things like passion and compassion and solidarity and maybe even love of fine things, of music, of literature, of humility and, and the cheerful love of poverty and chastity and service. These are types of things that, the more people who share in these wealths, the wealthier everyone feels. It's one of, it's. And this is the sort of fun paradox. These, these are the types of wealth objects which, when the, when divided or multiplied, and I think that's also sort of inherent. And, and Dante's rewrite of Boethian material stuck in Virgil's mouth in this. Kanta. Right?

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, no, yeah, I like, I like the reference to inexhaustible goods, Right. So not the thing like you mentioned the dollars or, you know, sometimes they Always talk about, like, the pieces of pie, right? It's an exhaustible good. There's only so much that can be shared. But there's also things like justice or truth or beauty. Insofar as, you know, you having justice doesn't mean justice is denied. To me, we continue to share. And these are really, actually, I think more of the higher common goods that build a really healthy culture.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Right.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

So, yeah, I just think what Dante's done here to Lady Fortune is really beautiful, that he's kind of moved her from being maybe something that's even contrary to the virtuous life or something that's always tempting you in the virtuous life to hear. She is this. I liked your analogy of the girl just picking flower petals because almost how he presents her, she's. She. She does not care, Right. She's not tied into these things. And Providence uses her to distribute goods as Providence wills. And so, yeah, she's an angel. She's a messenger. Yeah.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Boethius, she's like the bad girl who was already cheating on you even though she knew you were in love with her. And she's just delighted when you discover that your relationship has been a sham for the past six months. Right? That's Boethius, Lady Fortune. But, yeah, no, I think this one is very angelic. Right. It's almost like a lower level of the primum mobile, but the sort of. You could almost call her. This will start to sound kind of weird, but yeah, she's almost like the angel of history, the angel of sort of like the distribution of the wealth of nations. Right. Like, why do some countries get geniuses born among them who create these, like, fabulous opportunities and wealth, Right. How does that happen? And it seems like for, you know, for Dante, I mean, I think obviously we're in a different economic and political world. And. And I mean, the whole modern enterprise, as Machiavelli himself says, is taking Fortune by the hair and pulling her. Right. We think that we've created an economic system in which we no longer will ever lose domination of the flow of wealth. Right. That might be an interestingly wrong supposition, but we don't have to cover that there. But going all the way back to Dante, right? Who doesn't have the laws of economics and political theory or whatever, right? He has some, but I mean, he doesn't have. He's not an economist, obviously doesn't live in a modern economy. Just sort of sees these things of just sort of sprouting up and going. Right, but you're right I think there's. There's a. There's a good. There's a good feeling to it. It's all in a major key. It feels generous.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

I really appreciate you.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Here's your opportunity to love something even better. Going back to my example, you can imagine some weirdo, right? Like the little girl tossing her flower petals, and you get a couple in your hand, right? Well, of course, what we love about that is the more beautiful thing of her innocence, right? It's the higher level. Good. That her innocence and her joy and the flowers are merely an icon, a symbol of that higher level. But what a weirdo, right? If you gathered up the flower petals and said, three, I want more. Right. And so I think for Dante to have that type of disposition. And again, I feel this very sort of Franciscan. I can think of some really cool poems by Jacopone da Todi, right? The Franciscan poet who makes it onto my top five list of underappreciated poets of all time. But Jacopone Dattoldi, I feel like, is lurking under a lot of these scenes of this sort of. This kind of this joyful, exuberant, overflowing heart.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

No, that's beautiful. I really appreciate you mentioning Machiavelli, because I think that's just the capstone on this, is to look at how Lady Fortune has moved through the great books, right? We talk about the great books being in conversation with one another, that there's this great conversation we can join. You see how Boethius presents Lady Fortune. You see how Dante then kind of perfects her into an angel. And then we'll see how Machiavelli, yeah. As you mentioned, basically uses rape language.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Turns into a prostitute, right?

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah. She's no longer. She's no longer this servant of Providence that we receive goods from, but rather she's someone that we can, you know, dominate. And I think that's the mindset, as you've mentioned. Right. That's the mindset then, that moderns have when we approach Fortune.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yes.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

So no, I think that rounds it off really well, and I appreciate that. So let's look at the fifth circle. One thing to mention here is the pace is very quick here at the beginning, right. We're getting two circles even in one canto. And so what's the fifth circle? Who's here? We're still in this upper hell. Incontinence. So who's here? Well, they come to a river, the River Styx. And for those of us who worked through our Homer, in a year, right, we'll remember the river Styx. This is the river that the gods would make oaths on. This is the river that Achilles was dipped into. So we get the river Styx, and what do we see here? There's. At first glance, there's all these angry souls that are just obviously angry. That's wrath, right? That's the sin that's here is wrath. And they're just. Honestly, the way he describes the river is. It's less of a river and more almost akin to the gluttons. Right. It's. It's like a mud. It's like a mud pit. Yeah. And so they're all just kind of thrashing in anger in this. But then as you kind of look closer, there's this other group of souls.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Nice.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

They're just kind of like, you know, percolating underneath the surface. They're not moving a whole lot. Dante can see kind of the bubbles coming up to the top. And these are. Right, this is acedia. This is the slothfulness. And so I think, again, right, we're getting these comparisons between two sins of an excess and a defect. So we see this wrath, right, this kind of excess of zeal. And then we're also, though, seeing this acedia, right. A lack of zeal, a cooling of the love. We had a good conversation in our first episode of kind of the. The hints that Dante the poet gives us in the first canto that Dante the poet, or excuse me, Dante the pilgrim, is suffering from acedia. He's. He's lost in the woods. He's halfway through his life. He doesn't know how he's got there, you know? And so here we see, I think, wrath and acedia contrasted with one another.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, You.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

You have a really. You had to put you on the spot, but you had a really wonderful little analog that I had not seen anywhere else. You had it in your beginner's guide that Dante first sees Styx as this spring, like the small kind of spring that's bubbling up that then becomes this large river with all these wrathful souls. And you kind of gave a really marvelous picture of why that was an analog or an icon of the problem with this sin. Do you mind leading us through that?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, yeah. Just this idea of sort of wrath pooling up. Right. I mean, Aquinas, again, Aquinas says that it's possible to sin by not being angry enough. Interesting. And we might sin in that way a lot as moderns, but what that means is that the passion of wrath, the passion of anger, is essentially a good thing. It Is the desire to obtain the difficult good or the disappointment, sorrow, and sadness of the obstacles in our way between us and the difficult good, right? The athlete experiences. I mean, we love watching this among. With athletes, right? On the Nike commercials where they're lifting heavy weights and beating themselves with medicine balls in the abs to. Right? Like, what we love about that is that they've committed themselves to a difficult good, even if it's kind of on a low plane of goodness, but nevertheless, it's good, right? And so, I mean, it's possible to sort. Yeah. So, okay, that's just a sort of natural kind of function or operation of the human soul. But then Aquinas, as soon as he says that, he starts talking about how hard it actually is to do what our Lord says to sin. Or what does he say? Be angry without sin, right? That it's theoretically possible and it's practically incredibly difficult because all these other things begin to creep in, right? Like maybe. Maybe I began to mainly get angry. Not because it was an injustice, because it was, but because it was an insult to me personally, right? Don't they know who I am? Don't they know what I've done for them? And obviously, as parents, we feel this almost every single day, right? I mean, the amount of time I've labored and the money I put it, right. I don't want to repeat anyone's, like, you know, living room conversation from two hours ago, right? But I mean, that's not good anymore, right? That's an anger that's beginning to sort of bleed off in this kind of icky way, right? If it begins with something which is a clean fire, but it sort of, you know, tears something in the soul in the meantime, and it begins to sort of bleed and pull up in this kind of dark, icky, you know, colonized spot, right? I think that's. I think that's the sort of image. I was thinking that we. The cleanness of our anger is hard to keep, right? The cleanness of our. Of our. I mean, it turns so easily into this kind of sinful, infected stuff. And not just that it pulls up, right? You get angry at. You know, you get passed over in a promotion for the position that you were obviously better qualified for, right? And you begin to sort of build resentment. But anytime that's touched, it comes out again and, you know, it bleeds a little bit more. It trickles down into the soul, and pretty soon your soul is a swamp of unforgiven people, right? Whose. Whose careers you do not want to see Flourish. It can get nasty in a hurry. And I think it just sort of pools and it sort of collects like this. Like this disgusting swamp. It's scary.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah. No, very good. What's interesting too here is that, you know, we're coming to it, but we haven't really got the full picture of the. Of the structure of hell. We've kind of had these hints at what it is. We had the three beasts that we kind of looked at and said, you know, are these kind of a foreshadowing of a structure? So what's interesting here, though, is that, you know, one of our theses that we had was, okay, well, there seems to be incontinence, the sense of incontinence. Then there seems to be violence. So we had, like, the she wolves, and then we have the lion, and then there seems to be, like, treachery or fraud, and that's the leopard. So one thing that's kind of interesting here to note that in talking about wrath in the area of Upper Hell of incontinence, is that this is a wrath that takes hold of this soul and they lose control of it, but it's not necessarily translating in them to violence.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

That's right.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

We're going to see those souls lower down. So this is interesting because this is like a. Because, yes, we. We actually feel like. I think is like to have a moral read. We tend to feel like we handle anger well as. As long as it doesn't, like, manifest into some kind of violence. But, you know, these people that, like, you know, this wrath is just churning inside them, they're sitting.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

As long as it trickles down and stays in the swamp and no one else knows about it, I'm good. Right?

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah. I mean, to go to what, you know, you observed, right. There's this. The small trickle that they observe here is the small wound. And that small wound becomes this giant river. But as long as it's just churning inside us and it doesn't actually translate to being mean, it's okay. And I really think Dante is calling that out here. Like, no, you're constantly putting your soul right and you're. Because that's what we see. This contrapasso is this. It's chaotic. All these wrathful souls, they're not. It's not as violent as we'll see below, but it's just a chaotic. They're all angry. And then there's like the slothful ones that are just kind of getting beaten underneath the surface. Right. But it is a distinct sin, and I think It's a little bit more refined than we're used to talking about.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Right. Yeah. I mean, I guess you could say maybe the difference between the wrathful here and the violent that we'll encounter is that they didn't use their reason to guide their instincts, to cleanse their instincts, to think through their instincts and to make them, to teach their. To teach their emotions. Trained sentiment is what Lewis calls it, an abolition of man. Right. Is the goal of old education. Whereas below, the violent use those irascible appetites and sort of motivate them and incentivize them in order to achieve evil things. Right. So, yeah, I think you're right here. They're intemperate and they don't correct it. They don't. They don't ever apply the. The sifting tool of reason to their natural instincts and cleanse it. Right. But lower down, they take that and say, now utilize it. Now weaponize it. And. Yeah, and that's th. Those are the violent who misuse their irascible appetites or motivate their irascible appetites to achieve goods they want, as opposed to merely letting a fire of the soul intemperately flame up and not translating it, purifying it into clean. Into clean anger. And anyone who's known clean anger, I think it's a very rare experience. Every once in a long, long while, if you're a teacher or a parent, you realize that you've said just the right thing. And there might be some hard words, might be some tough words. It might be like a real demand of the, you know, of those who are in your charge. But, you know, you didn't say it for yourself, to make yourself look good. You didn't say it because you were wounded. You said, because you're trying to correct a cosmic injustice and to deal medicinally with those with whom you're interacting. And it can happen. Clean anger, I think. Super fascinating, though, this Filippo Argenti. Here's what I say in the note. Filippo Argenti, a member of the Adamari family, had a reputation for vanity and arrogance in his day and certainly plays out here. He belonged to the black guelphs, and his faction was responsible for exiling Dante's white Guelphs. There are even some early commentators who suggest that Filippo's brother was the one who over who took over Dante's Florentine property after his exile. This is the guy who didn't just get your job but bought your house from you. This is the guy who ruined you. And Dante sees him here and just so it's really weird that Virgil praises him. And it's very. It's very strange. And it doesn't feel like a very Christian reaction. It doesn't feel like Virgil was made to memorize the Beatitudes in school. I guess he studied Homer at school, not the Beatitudes. Right. But I think, at least in my read that I try to develop in the Beginner's Guide is that. Is that ultimately human virtue is like a fugue, like a complicated Bach fugue with all kinds of melodic lines and scales and chords going in different directions and interacting. And one of the things that the classical pagan Virgil can understand is righteous indignation. Right. Shame on you, you dog. Right. For committing such an act of theft. Right. Or, you know, or your family. Right. And your. Your vain, arrogant family. I can recognize that and call it what it is. It seems like at least one of the things that. That you. Dante thinks we have to have is a sense of righteous indignation. We've already talked about how difficult that is. But a sense of righteous indignation which comes from a recognition of injustice. But I don't think it's the only thing that Dante thinks that his pilgrim will have to acquire. And so I think in a way, he's sort of like, been successful in a unit quiz, but there will be other unit quizzes that he'll also have to be successful at. And I don't think Virgil knows all of them. I think Virgil is pretty darn good, but I think the closer he gets to the center of the earth, well, the less experience he has down there, as he himself explains, but also I think the less he understands the mysteries of. Of the Trinitarian God who made this place. And so I think. I think for. For those who are puzzled by. Seems like Dante, through the mouth of Virgil, is able to acknowledge a thing that we should have a sense of indignation. But I do not think it's the end of the story. And Dante will have to add in some other more complicating, you know, harmonizing chords, not all of which Virgil can supply.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Yeah. Kind of pushing in there into Canto 8. Crossing the river Styx in the city of Dis. Yeah. I think one way to look at it, in a way that I've read it, is that we understand that Dante, the pilgrim has to undergo his own formation, Right. So the pilgrimage that he's undertaken is for his own good. He has to have a certain maturation. And we've seen him like you know, there's things that he lacks, he lacks courage. Virgil's kind of critiqued him for that. We also see that we're not really sure if his will is aligned to the divine will because he pities some of the souls here in hell, right. You think about in the. What is that the second circle with lust, right? He kind of falls into the trap of that seductress and he pities her and then he swoons. And so I think that in a certain way here, what Virgil's praising or the way I read it, is that when Dante seems to delight in the punishment of the damned from Virgil's pagan eyes, and that's something I appreciate, you said that because we have to understand, it's like a Platonic dialogue, right? We have to understand where the lesson is coming from, right? Who is the interlocutor that's actually telling us this lesson because that we have to contextualize it properly that Virgil then praises this because Dante is actually aligning his will more with the divine, that this soul does receive punishment. And what's interesting here, I think actually the most challenging verse or line, I guess in this is that I think it's easy to say, well, you know, Dante's formation is not complete, right. It's incipient, so he's got to go all the way through hell, but then he also has to go through Purgatory and then he has to go through paradise. And so it's premature to say that his delight here is technically the right thing to do. But I think what's really fascinating is that there's a line in there where Dante says that he still feels delight. Dante, the poet says he still feels delight even to this day, which means that he's already gone through, as he makes that comment, he's already gone through the Inferno, in Purgatorio, in the Paradiso, and he still delights in the punishment of that damned. And so I think there's something here that may be unsettling to us as moderns, that we see Dante the pilgrim starting to align his soul, or his soul really, but his will with the divine will. And part of that alignment is that the damned are where they should be, that it's an act of justice that the damned are suffering in this contrapasso.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah. And shortly after that I saw the mangling inflicted on him by the mud dwelling people. And still I praise God for what I saw and thank him. Yeah, it's a very uncomfortable line. And contemporary secular Dante, professors at universities, I have A terrible time. I have a terrible time getting through this. But I think, like I said, I think there's no way around it, but to think that, like, look, I mean, Dante's from a medieval chivalric warrior culture, right? He believes that is just if you get punched, to punch back hard, and if your enemy yells in pain, that is a good thing, provided that it's, you know, an act of justice. Right. And provided that you have the right disposition, this chivalric courtly disposition. Right. So I think however much we might wish to refine it, that's why I'm just sort of stating the sort of like lowest common denominator. To believe that there's some type of sense of righteous indignation which is actually necessary for a soul, Right. Not just to sort of like not be, you know, not do bad things, but to loathe it. Right. To have your stomach churn in the presence of it. That's actually a necessary part of the moral formation in Dante's mind, Right. I mean, being good for Dante is not. Not being bad, right?

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah. I mean, Dante, you know, he's. I think one reason that it grates against us as moderns is that Dante is thoroughly a pre liberal. Right? He doesn't have some of the presuppositions that we have in our culture of, you know, tolerance and these kinds of things you said earlier, which I agree with, that we talk about the wrathful a lot. But really, you know, which. Which one do we see more in our culture? That there's an excess of that anger on an anger that we should have and there's an excess of it, or is there a lack of that anger? I would say actually in our current culture there's a lack of righteous anger. Right. We're very slow to get angry even about the things that we should become angry about. Right. We've kind of been habituated to cool that and to bridle that in us. Right? So just do whatever you want. Be a Catholic, don't be a Catholic, Go to. Go do whatever you want to do in your life. Just don't be overly serious about it. Right. Don't take. Don't let zeal consume you. Just kind of like curb these things. And so, yeah, I think Acedia, there's a wonderful book called the Noonday Devil by Archbishop Nalt, I believe, or Abbot Knolt, and it's a historical treatise or treatment of Acedia. How the early Church fathers saw it, the Desert Fathers, and how we kind of lost track of what it really meant. As we called it slothfulness, and we thought it was laziness. He really presents it there really beautifully as this cooling of love, which really matches some of the lessons that Virgil gives really well on the terraces of Purgatory. So I think that we talk about where are these sins, like, in our own culture, when we see Dante, like, delighting in the punishment, I think there's something as modern as that that grates against us a little bit. But this is where Dante, the teacher, I think, can kind of help us align our own souls in a certain way.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

So let's push into Canto 9, kind of the coming of the angel and the City of Dis. I think you used the phrase that the City of Dis is the antechamber of Lower Hell. I appreciated that. So we're kind of coming to understand that hell is. It's, you know, conical. It's this. It's this spiraling downward, the rings of Hell. These circles are becoming smaller. And the City of Dis now is. Is going to be a demarcation for us between Upper Hell and Lower Hell. But one of the problems they immediately run into, right, is that they're barred. The City of Dis won't let them through. And we get all these creatures, which I think it's really interesting that all the creatures are kind of like half beast, half animal creatures. It's like Medusa, it's the Furies, I think there's Harpies, there's all these kind of like humanoid, but kind of beastial creatures that won't let them in. And it's interesting because Virgil gets frustrated and because we've seen several times already in the Inferno in which, you know, someone will say, you can't go any further or you can't do this, and Virgil will kind of stand up and chastise them, and then they're allowed to go on their way. But here I think what's really interesting is that Virgil can't complete it. He can't complete the journey. There's something about the City of Dis that Virgil, which we've been kind of tracking as an analog to human reason, can't complete the journey. And he has to wait for a divine act. He has to wait for grace. Right. For this angel to come. What do you. What do you think Dante, the poet is. Is trying to teach us here?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, yeah. And Dante, you know, ask us to. To focus in on this moment, right. He says, reader, this is. I. I don't know if you have that. The lines in front of you. Right. But reader, this is. I am doing something of extraordinary importance here. And you've got to sort of pull back the veil to see where. To see the secret meaning behind my strange verse or something like that.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, he says that there's a hidden. Yeah, yeah, he says, according to your translation, it says, o you with intellects healthy and sound, look hard for the teaching that's hidden beneath the veil of my extraordinary verse. And this is obviously Dante, the poet, you know, speaking to us. And he does this as a preamble, right, to the coming of the angel, because then the, the tercets that follow are actually some of my favorite in all the Inferno, because he paints this beautiful picture of all of hell trembling as this angel comes kind of streaming down.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

I think that's the part of my book I'm the most proud of, honestly.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Really?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah. So if you, if you're, if people listening want to get the book, you know, I mean, just, just read that Kanto 9 and then you can send it back to Amazon, you'll have got it. Right. I, I think it's, it's my favorite part right after this. But. So here's what I think's going on, okay? Medusa comes up. So the Furious are up there, and Virgil just says, hey, look at the Furies. Watch out for those girls. They're really bad, right? But then they say, let Medusa come. Let Medusa come. And I tried to put it in this weird kind of incantatory, magical kind of language, which I feel that I hear in the Italian. And then Virgil freaks out. They want to turn him to stone. And then it pauses in those lines that Deacon Garlic just read, right? Hey, reader, look beneath these extraordinary verses. And then comes the angel. So I think what's going on here is that we got to remember is that in The Aeneid book 6, this is exactly where the journey of Aeneas stalled with the Sibyl. The Sibyl brought him up to the gates of Tartarus, which is where the truly evil and wicked, the infamously evil, are kept in, in Virgil's imagination. And the Sybil said, you can't go in there, you can't see any of that stuff. It's not for pure eyes. We're going to continue on our way to the Elysian Fields. I can describe to you some of the things that you could see in there. And then she goes away. So now we've come to the moment where the poet Virgil had walked away. Now the character Virgil tries to get in and is Unsuccessful. He can't get into these sort of, like, deep things where the sort of, like, deepest possible evils dwell. And he's sort of. And he's impatient. He knows he needs divine assistance, but he's not exactly sure when it will come. There's like, a suggestion that he might think it might not come, that they might have been abandoned, right? And then when it does come, it's an extraordinary moment in Dante's poetry, kind of like we were talking about earlier, in which is this mix of registers, the high and the low. It's frogs. I even went so bold as to translate snake as water moccasin in this section. And anyone who's grown up in the south, like, immediately has this sort of embodied, like, experience of heebie jeebies, right, for that. But it's just incredible embodied experience in which, again, Dante ranges from the high to the low, right? From the humble to the sublime in a single passage, in this huge roiling hurricane of divine energy which comes powering through, right? It's sublime discourse which blows away, in terms of its linguistic range, anything Virgil had ever done at the very moment that the classical hero Aeneas had to walk away. And I think what's happening is that we have both a sort of ethical demand that you want to be a Christian, deal with it. You're going to have to kick open the doors and you're going to have to go all the way down to the root of the human heart, and you're going to have to discover, right, those things which have been frozen, right, Those warm affections that very draw to God, which you've forgotten by being drawn to the periphery of your life. You're going to have to go in there and deal with all the muck and the brokenness and the inherited issues that define your life. The Christian poet, the Christian. The Christian's hero has to go down and the Christian poet has to come up with a language which begins with Virgil and then stretches it on either end, right? He sort of, you know, begins with Bach and all of a sudden you feel it's turning into list, right? He's going all the way up and all the way down, you know, the treble clef and the bass clef, and then combining it in this incredible, transcendent, sublime passage of poetic energy. Because this is grace, right? This is grace coming from on high to help us achieve the deepest possible depths. So I think it's just such an incredibly fun passage because there's so many cool things happening here, right? One, the Christian poet is now supplanting the wonderful but pagan poetry the Christian understanding of. Augustine had said that the pagans were laudable because they had seen the blessed isle from a high, from a high view, but they were too proud to go down. And thus Augustine himself, developing in a Christian way upon this Neoplatonic paradox, right, the way up is the way down. And ultimately, right, if we could just sort of imagine Dante's world, right, as we sort of go down and down and down and down, we get, you know, to Antarctica, right, and then go up and up and up and up, and then keep going up into heaven. But it's. It's all linear. Even though it feels like descent now, it's actually part of an ascent, Absolutely speaking from a wider purview. And so I think there's all these incredible moments. It has ethical implications, it has psychological implications, it has poetic and linguistic implications. And I think it's my favorite Kanto. Since you're only interviewing me for this one section, I can just boldly say that if there would be others, I'd have to be more cautious because I'd probably say it, like seven more times. But I think Inferno 9 is something really, really special. And I think it all has to do when we realize if we can understand what this threat of freezing the heart is all about, and if we can understand the very limits of the Virgilian world, where the Virgilian world came and turned back, and now the Christian comes and says, this is where we have to go down. The way up is the way down. And like I said, psychological, ethical, spiritual, mystical, poetic implications all folded into one magnificent canto.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Very beautiful. Yeah, I really appreciate, you know, what you've said there, seeing this really kind of maybe as that step moving from a paganism to a Christianity of reason to faith, of nature, to grace. I really appreciate that, particularly here, drawing in Virgil and his Aeneid understanding. Kind of like this lesson that we're getting in these poetic terms, these signs that we might not be familiar with if we're not familiar with all of the backstory that he's playing with here. I think another thing that occurs to me on a more mundane note, not a large architectural note, is notice that all the characters that we've been introduced to are all giving us different examples of anger. So we. We didn't really talk about him, but there was the boatman, and. And he's angry. He's angry at Virgil and he's angry at Dante. And then we have Virgil, and he gets angry about the city of Dis and that he can't. He can't make it through. Dante gets angry, maybe in a right way, but we get another example of anger at the damned soul, the Furies. So on the podcast, we actually just worked through the Oresteia, so we're painfully aware of the Furies, right? These kind of vengeful female deities that are really kind of horrible and horrendous to look at that really. Their violence, their satiation, their desire for blood really fuels this blood avenger model, right? We see them pursuing Orestes, so they're kind of like wrath incarnate almost. But then the angel is angry. The angel comes down and he gives, I mean, one of the, I think, best speeches when he comes down and talks about, you know, why do you kick out against Providence? Why do you have this pride? Because really, you're nothing. This angel comes down and they all scatter. The, the, the. The. The line before. Yeah, the line about the frogs, too. You're right. It's a different register. It's very colloquial. But it also is so demeaning. So we move from like, oh, my gosh, Medusa's coming and this would be terrible, and Virgil's afraid to. Now all these things being compared to, like, these little amphibians that just jump out of the way midst of. In the midst of something that comes that's actually a little bit more real than everything around it. Angel is presented as something more real. And we. One of the things that we didn't talk about, but like a small detail, right? When Dante gets on the boat, it's the only time the boat then shows any type of weight. Dante is somehow more real than what all the rest of hell is composed of. And we see that in text. I think we see an antecedent of it in Homer. When Athena gets on the Chariot, it groans under her weight. She's somehow much more real than even the men around her. And then kind of like, most famously, C.S. lewis's great divorce plays off this heavily, right? The damn souls go to heaven and these shades can't even bend the grass. Actually, the grass hurts them because they can't even bend it. So it's this really poetic, beautiful picture that evil's not really a real thing, right? Evil is actually a privation of the good. It's like that darkness isn't real. Darkness is simply an absence of light. The cold's not really real. It's simply an absence of heat. And so, you know, you could have all heat or all light. You don't have to have cold or darkness. Just like you can have something that's all good, but you can't ever have anything that's all evil because it's a lack. It's like a hole in the ground. And so there's like, these little pictures that Dante the poet gives us, these little catechetical lessons. And, yeah, the angel coming down, I think, is probably one of the best.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, Well, I feel like that's also a cool transition into Canto 10. And these souls, we know that they're epicurean. They denied the immortality of the soul. And one's a famous politician, Farinata, I think a Coleman notes that George Washington of Florence, right. He's a magnanimous hero. He not only got his Ghibellines, you know, his imperial supporting Ghibellines to win a battle and fight back in and take Florence, but then he magnanimously opposed opposition in his own party to completely destroy the Guelphs and erase the bad guys forever. Right. Change the voting laws so that the bad guys will never win again. Right. That's sort of temptation of the victor. Farinata opposed that. He's a really magnanimous guy. But it's always sort of struck me that his first question of Dante is, who are your ancestors? Whose team were you on? Republican or Democrat? It's like, not like, hello, my name's Jason. May I have your name? Like Republican or Democrat? And so he sort of immediately moves into this type of mode, but he's also talking about politics, which were playing out when Dante was just a kid. Right. And so it's almost like, you know, meeting someone at a. You know, at a cafe and, you know, an older. An older person who buttonholes you and says, yeah, but you don't understand the Carter years. Like, yeah, yeah, that's true. Right. I don't. I don't understand, you know, what it felt like, the Jimmy Carter years. But f. Not to sort of fixate it on this. On this period of history. Right. And you really get the impression that he'd love to continue this conversation with Dante forever. And they would just sort of duke it out and Dante would set forward his Guelph politics and say, yeah, well, you know, my people were able to return and they've kept your Ghibli. And. But he's like, well, yeah, but. And he'd be really delighted to have this conversation forever. That there was this moment of history in which the politics were intense, and he was intense. But the man who denies the immortality of the soul can't see beyond those 40 years of his activity. And that is what he is sort of continually fixated on day in and day out. Like, you know, you'd sort of imagine him down there in the tomb, right, Going through his memoirs again, like, oh, yes, January 17th, right. And rereading it in the meantime, the father of Dante's poet friend, the poet friend being Guido Cavalcanti here. Cavalcanti. Cavalcanti is shocked that Dante is here and his son Guido is not. He says, look, if you are led by your intellect, where's my Guido? He was one of the most talented people of his generation. And they don't seem to know who Virgil is. And they don't seem to recognize in some sense the miraculous. Well, they haven't heard the angel. They don't know all these things. The sort of focus on life is so narrow, right, in these couple of decades and these couple of loves that they become fixated on these things and can't see this wider picture of supernatural interaction. Both, I guess you could say, yeah, both along the Y axis of sort of supernatural interaction, but also the depths of the soul which has to be cleansed, but also just other sort of chronological things, right, like reverence for the past. They're just sort of locked into these couple of decades in which they lived. And I think in that way they're though intense with respect to the fullness of history. Well, the very fact that we don't know who they are anymore is sort of telling, right? They confine themselves to their couple of decades. Right?

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah. No, very good. I appreciate that. Because I think one thing that's a little bit confusing maybe to first time readers, or it was to me as I moved through this is like, okay, so we're now in this, we're now in lower hell, or we're getting there. We're kind of in the city of Disney. We have this circle of heretics immediately, like I think of, like, oh, like what, what early church heresy is, is Dante going to pull from. You think of like some of the christological heresies. You think of some of the Christological heresies that basically split the empire. There's all these examples and then, you know, how he kind of structures this, as I understand it, is that we basically have all these tombs. The, the, the lids are off, there's multiple souls shoved into these tombs. And each tomb kind of represents a particular heresy. And each one has its like, arch heretic. And the one that we get the arch heretic is a Pagan, like that's, that's a really interesting juxtaposition, right, because he, and obviously that's an incredibly intentional choice. Again, I'm finding myself that reading Dante like I read Plato, where, you know, obviously he chooses these details intentionally and could have chosen so many others. And so the way I read this is kind of, I think your, the way you just presented it, I think laid it out really well. But just to make it explicit is that these, you know, Epicurus, you know, basically denies the immortality of the soul. And so these people he's talking to, it's not clear, I mean, some of them it is, but it's not clear that they explicitly denied the immortality of the soul. But it's very clear that they lived in such a manner that the soul, that they acted like the soul was not immortal. Right. So just like all the politics, nothing, not there was nothing on the horizon of the internal, it was all the temporal. And even in hell, because a certain way, I think there's a misread here, right? Like he's presented, still very dignified. He seems to have, he doesn't even seem to show that he's suffering. And so I think there's a misread of like, oh look, he's somewhat conquered hell, or he's still here. But really what you realize is that his intellect and his imagination is incredibly myopic, it's incredibly imploded. That's great on this, like what you said, right? This like 40 year stretch. So it's interesting that he uses this example because I think it's a, it's a much more subtle critique of heresy that a lot more of us would actually be subject to. Right? Oh yeah. Well, I believe in the immortality of the soul. Yeah, but, but do you actually live your life like it? Well, no, I don't.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, I love that. I, I, I remember also just checking a date here. He's Pavalakanti, sorry. Farinata is talking about the battle, the battle of Montepati, which was fought in 1265. And so which is five years before. Before, before Dante's birthday, or sorry, 1260, which is five years before Dante's birth. So I mean, this is, you know, you know, pick, you know, readers, listeners, pick your, pick your date, you know, 10 years before you were born and imagining someone engaging you in passionate politics. Right. I mean, for me, like the Jimmy Carter era. Right. But for others, like, well, what did you think about Dwight Eisenhower's decision? And you know, like, I don't know if I have, you know, A strong opinion on that. But I also. But I think it's really interesting too that now we're. We're inside the gates of Dis, aren't we? And we're just about to get to the plains of the violent. And so you wonder too, if there's almost a kind of psychological violence that the heretics committed against themselves, right? A kind of intellectual suicide. And I bet we all have friends like this. I have friends like this. People are so committed to one particular ideology. Activists for certain causes. Right. You could choose left or right, but activists for certain causes. I know some activists for well known progressive causes who have committed themselves to a certain style of life and to a certain cause and have grown more and more unhappy as their lives continue decades and decades and decades in the cause. But they've gained celebrity in the sort of progressive cause. They can't sort of disassociate themselves. But surely, you know, 30 years and the type of misery you have reduced yourself to, surely there must be some sort of alarm bells or microwave dings going off in your brain that this is intellectually, this creed. This creed is shabby, this creed is shallow. It doesn't bring contentment and it doesn't bring happiness. And it seems in a way this sort of heretic commits violence against themselves, himself, sort of surgically removing those doubts. Nope, we're committed to the cause and disengages from all possible dialectical engagement with the world. And so I think, I suspect that what is really kind of a hypothesis, right, But I suspect that the heretics might be related to the violent in that way, or at least adjacent.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, no, I like that. I've seen it. I've seen it kind of presented as, you know, heresy is like this kind of attempt to have violence against God in a certain way. Trying to understand where heresy, like, fits into the, into the structure. I think one of the things that's, that's most interesting about this, Kanto, is how the damned understand time, which I thought was really brilliant because, you know, the damned keep so even. In this canto, right, we see the damned are prophesying like, oh, this is what will happen to you, Dante. But then they don't know current events. And that's a really interesting thing. So they seem to not understand the present, but they can tell the future. And so Virgil gives this, I mean, somewhat horrifying depiction that, well, yes, so what ends up happening is, is that they understand the future. They understand then that this, like, judgment, this final judgment, like we talked about earlier, is Coming. They seem to understand things between now and then, but not the present. But then at some point there won't be any temporal future anymore, right? There'll be a new heaven and a new earth, and then they'll just be stuck in this kind of like present eternal unknowing, which is kind of a horrifying existential place to be, if you will. And so, I don't know, it's really fascinating. I'd like to think about it more about how he presents the damned like this, where they can give prophecies of the future but they can't understand the present. And kind of what the pedagogical purpose of that is.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, that's great. I don't know. I know that Dostoevsky magically creates that very experience at the beginning of his dream of ridiculous man who shoots himself in the heart and dies, but is aware after death and sits in his tomb underground for who knows how many years. But I think something like that, I think that's a pretty. I think that's a pretty spectacular, spectacular vision. And that's what I always emphasize is that, yeah, Dante's pretty medieval. You know, he's got some, if you know the painter Hieronymus Bosch, right, He's got some bosh in him, right, he's got some medieval stuff. But he also has this sort of new element of this sort of this in tuned subtlety to psychological realities. And I think this is one of them.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, I think he's doing something very particular here. And like I said, I'd like to think more about it before we move on. We kind of bring to a close here on Canto 11. Can you just kind of give us like a high level sketch of these different political parties in Florence? Because there's like white and black, but then there's two larger groups. Can we just have like a high level sketch of them?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Sure, yeah. I've got a couple of pages on this in my introduction to the translation. It's called Guelphs and Ghibellines and all that. But essentially how far do we go back? Charlemagne? When Charlemagne in 800 AD gets crowned the Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope for his services against the Lombards, he is given sort of titular claim to Italy. And yet he goes back over the Alps and he continues to rule from north of the Alps. He divides his kingdom among his three sons. There's, you know, sort of division of territory, but for a long, long, long time, those who in some sense passed down the paper documents of the titular claim to Italy, to being the Roman emperor. All lived north of the Alps, but this goes on for a couple hundred years, in part because there's. There's division, because the Carolingian Empire collapses and it was replaced by others. And a new generation of the Holmstuffen rise up. And Frederick Barbarossa in particular is really interested in renewing the titular claim of being the Holy Roman Emperor. And this begins a whole series within Dante's day, especially with Frederick ii, who comes down to Sicily and creates a kingdom in Sicily. And Sicily has this kind of, like, incredible cultural flourishing moment in which it's multilingual. And the court of Frederick ii, but Frederick II is hoping. And his son Manfred helps his father, and Manfred shows up and, oh, by the way, Frederick II is among the heretics here. And Manfred will meet in purgatory. He's kind of like a unlikely convert, but they're starting to creep back into Italy and slowly sort of fighting different sort of city states who had grown accustomed to their own independence. Now those city states themselves are fighting each other. They're both worried about the emperors coming back in, and then they're also fighting each other. And so it creates this kind of like fractal of political alignments in which essentially you have the Pope and his new moneyed Guelph supporters, and you have the Emperor and his old moneyed aristocratic noble title, Ghibelline supporters, the Pope. And so. But sometimes it'll go like city by city, and sometimes a whole city will sort of flip from Ghibelline to Guelph allegiances. If Guelphs can get into the city and kick out the Ghibellines, and then the city flips. It's like a red, blue map, right? But sort of Italy sort of. The cities are divided against themselves, jockeying for positions. The Emperor's trying to come back up to Rome, the Pope is trying to keep him off. The Pope is using new money lenders in order to purchase mercenaries to fight against the imperial forces, and also is trying to enlist the assistance of the French crown, which comes in. So when Charles Valois comes into France, comes into Florence at the Pope Boniface's request, as a peacemaker, he comes in and stamps out Dante's party, the white Guelphs, and a number of them are immediately sent into exile. He came in sort of ostensibly as a peacekeeper, but really takes these black Guelphs, who were the Pope's most fierce supporters, elevates them and finally gives them their moment of power. But this is the kind of Crazy kaleidoscope that's, that's happening, but essentially you can recognize it as two huge tectonic plates grinding against each other. The Pope who had grown accustomed to engaging in practical political affairs in Italy in a sort of absentee imperial government north of the Alps. Germanic, Germanic blooded emperors who now want to reclaim, who want to claim that they are Caesar Augustus and want to enter back into Rome and unify the empire. And they have their old fashioned aristocratic estate owning, castle owning, chivalric, Ghibelline supporters, kind of old money imperial, new money lenders, papal, but also French. These sort of present the big, the, you know, the big grid in which everything works. But then, but then what's fascinating is that these sort of huge international politics get mapped into even local cities such that old fashioned family feuds, right between long standing families tend to get sort of pulled in the direction of Guelphs and Ghibellines or in the state of Florence when, when the Florentines kick out the Ghibellines, Varinata's party, they still have some people who lean in the direction of some of those, you know, aristocratic values. And so they become. Right. So then you have this division into black Ghibellines and white Ghibellines. So in some sense, like you have this two party system which controls local politics and how you feel about your neighbor across the street. Don't we see this whatever political sign, your neighbor stuck across the street? Right. Like, of course, of course, you know, of course Katie would put a sign up like that. Right. And you have these sort of like local affairs being kind of pulled into these international affairs. And that's exactly what happens in Florence.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

I really appreciate that. I appreciate you mapping that out because I think that, you know, what we've kind of said for first time readers is if the Florida Florentine politics is somewhat of a stumbling block, I think there's a lot of other things that you can pull out of like your first read of the Inferno. But I also think that one of the things about the, this kind of like the political, I really like the idea of, you know, the plates kind of grinding against each other because Dante is going to have a lot to say about the relationship between the imperial power and the apostolic power, between the church and, you know, state, there would be an anachronistic term, but the temporal power and the spiritual power. And again, I think that he incorporates this into a religious conversation in ways as moderns that we are not familiar with. Right. We are very much accustomed to separation of church and state religion does not have anything to do with the temporal. And for Dante, I think he's seeing this kind of fractured Italy. And so he's going to have a lot of commentary as we kind of move through the Inferno and then particularly, you know, if we go through, say, Purgatory as well. You know, some of those passages are very explicit about the relationship. And he also wrote a whole book, you know, on politics as well.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, I think in general you could think of Dante as a Ghibelline leaning in his politics and that he's an imperial supporter. He writes several letters to these Holy Roman emperors, these German, begging them, urging them to come into Italy and re established claim. He thinks that Italy is now this disgusting overgrown garden. I'm sorry, overgrown like weed infested place, whereas at once it used to be a garden. And so Dante's sort of Ghibelline leaning, even though he does say, I had to become a party unto myself. So he thinks that he's sort of like above it all. But there's a there. But Dante's sort of Ghibelline leaning and obviously anti papal. But because he thinks that the papacy is trying to meddle in political affairs and is thus actually in secular affairs, is thus actually making people worse, he has a very Franciscan vision, spiritual Franciscan vision of what the papacy should be. He thinks that it should be radically apostolic and radically evangelical in that. I think he thinks that if the papacy looked like the Franciscan order, at least according to spiritual Franciscans, right after Francis, then the church would actually be efficacious because the church would divest itself of its. Don't want to get into contemporary ecclesial questions, but if the church divested itself of all these properties that it owns, if defrocked bishops weren't paid off millions of dollars a year, if. Right. If the church didn't have like fabulous investments and things, he wouldn't worry about those things. He would walk around in poverty like Francis with sandals maybe, and then people would actually respect its claims that it would make to the spiritual world. That's sort of Dante's very sort of radical Franciscan spiritual take. And so he's kind of Ghibli leaning and very pro imperial.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

No, again, I appreciate you mapping that for us because I think that's going to give us a lot of ways to navigate a lot of these conversations. So again, I appreciate it. So let's end on Canto 11, where we finally get kind of the easy one. Well, we get the architecture of hell, Right. So we finally kind of, we've kind of hinted at it, Dante, the poets hinted at it. We've kind of given some fill in the blank and filling in gaps here when we've talked about it. It gives some type of navigation. We kind of finally get this large picture. And so maybe I'll take the first foray into trying to understand this and then I'd love to know your thoughts. So basically how I take this from Virgil is that we see, as we've kind of already mentioned, that hell is structured in three major parts, right? And so we have the sins of incontinence which we're attaching, you know, to the she wolf that we saw. Then you have this section of violence which we attach to lion, and then we see this section on fraud which we attach to the leopard. And so you have three categories of sin, mainly expressed in two geographical locations of hell. So you have an upper hell, if you will, and then you have the city of Dis. Is that kind of demarcation. I like that. The antechamber of deep hell or lower hell. So then lower hell is going to contain the violent and the fraudulent. Right. And I think one thing that's, that's really interesting, particularly as a first time reader, is man, we're burning through the sins of incontinence quickly. Right, so like circle one, that was limbo, that was the unbaptized, right. These are people, they're contrapasso. You know, they, they have. Dr. Jennifer Frey called it a garden party, right. They're having a garden party out by the castle. But they're deprived the beatific vision, right? They're actually deprived being able to actually satiate pressed.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Garden party, right.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a garden party where everyone knows that there was a better party that they wanted to go to, but they don't get to go to.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Right?

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

So you got this, you get the unbaptized and the, the virtuous pagans, also virtuous Muslims. Right. Dante's soteriology, I think is, is really fascinating of who goes where. So we have, we have limbo, then we had lust and then gluttony is the third circle and then the fourth circle, as we said. You know, we had the hoarders and the spin thrifts and now then we get wrath and acedia and then we have the city of this. And then we're going to get into violence where we see that there's, you know, a violence against neighbor, a violence against self, and even A violence against God in nature. And then fraud is going to be very complicated. We're going to have, you know, the eighth circle is going to have 10 different like ditches, if you will.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

That's right.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

With like 10 different types of maybe what you might call simple fraud. And then the ninth circle is going to have four major areas of complex fraud. So what, I mean, one of the things I think that's interesting and maybe for first time readers is when you think of like, hey, what, what sin is really bad? Like what, what sin is really bad? And he's like, oh man, I think murdering someone would be really bad. But Dante puts, I mean one of.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

My bad is photocopying a $20bill and spending it for ice cream at your local grocery store, right?

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

So one of the things that's really interesting here is that he puts fraud down at the very bottom. And so one of my favorite examples is that in the, in the section on violence you're going to have, you know, people that basically committed like genocide, right? You're going to have these like warlords and they're in a less severe section of hell than those who engaged in flattery. Flattery is punished in the eighth circle because it is a species of fraud. Right. You're lying to people. What. Any comments on like how Dante is actually structuring these sins? Like what, what's the actual, like rationale for the actual architecture of hell?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, no, I mean seemingly it's according to the natural appetites, according to Thomistic psychology, right. Of sort of the, the, the animal appetites are those incontinent sins. And then of course there you have irascible appetites. What Plato calls the thumotic, the sort of the, the desires of the chest, right. Which could be both sort of like strong love or courage, but then can be sort of misused in these and weaponized in these ways for, for violence. And then there are the rational appetites, the desire to, to use language, to find truth and then to say something in a way which is compelling to others to see. So I think for Dante, the striking thing, and he disagrees with Aquinas on this, the reason that the Ivy League political scientist who now works for the multi billion dollar whatever bad corporation and lies to the public about what's happening. Right. You know, the, the PR representative for, for nice. If you. Fred Lewis is head of your strength, right. Or the PR representative for, for Egan Enterprises. If, if people are watching Severance.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

I.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Think he thinks that's so, so wicked is because, is because we are icon making and icon loving animals. Of course, we're language animals, we're rational animals. But Dante's a poet. He doesn't want to just say rational animals. We're also language using animals. That means we don't just say things which are true, but we say things in a compelling sort of way which also inspires hearts to long for things and for the people who sort of muddy the intellectual waters so that you can't know what's true and can't love the sort of true thing. At least you know that the local chapter captain of your Hell's angel biker gang is a debauched and violent man. You're not tricked or fooled by this, but you might be tricked and fooled by the PR representative for the corporation that's doing unethical things, right? Or for the world's most polluting corporation to say it's going to be carbon neutral within just 25 years. Those sort of things, not just in terms of politics and economics, right? Those are just funny examples that came to my head, right? But yeah, I think Dante thinks that the bad college professor who destroys in his students the ability to speak truth and to love truth and to have hearts which are full of passion for it has secretly, like a fox, robbed them of something without them even knowing it. So I think it's that sort of element of secrecy. Dante was very. As his great, great, great gun Father Cachaguida says to him, hey, Dante, you know what your poetic mission is? Where they itch, let them scratch. That's how Dante describes like a big, you know, a big part of his poetic mission. So Dante, this man who prides himself on his frank straightforwardness, I think despises this like, disgusting, like, flattery of words in which we say, oh, yes, of course, that's right, right. Where we, we run fake searches and we have, we have protocols. All these things invented in. Invented, you know, in order to achieve, achieve certain ends. But everyone pretending that it's not like that. I think Dante just despised that. I think he wanted to know what he was up against. He wanted to know what he's fighting as opposed to these, these little snakes and foxes sneaking in and out and, and as well as Jerry and himself does in just a couple of Conti presents the face of an honest man. Hey, man, how you doing? Hiding the tail of a scorpion. Who are you? Actually? Just tell me who you are. Who are your ancestors? Let's do this right. Who are you playing for now? Let's go. I think Dante just so sort of delightfully frank and straightforward. Just thought, I think he thought that was the sort of noble chivalric heroism, right, of a knight because he's from an aristocratic family. So he thinks of himself as a knight, right? His great great great grandfather was. Was knighted in the Crusades. So he thinks that his, his blood has been refined and nobled, right? And then a knight doesn't fight in the dark, right? A knight declares battle and fights in the open. Kill me or not. But at least we know what we're doing. So I think for Dante, I think these, all these sort of things, his poetry, his attachment not just to truth, because the poet doesn't just tell truth, but makes it burn with both heat and light, right? The poet is sun. Like he doesn't just illuminate, but he also warms. And anything less than that might not actually be an actual disclosure of truth. And so I think for Dante, those who murky, make murky statements and smooth things and hide around and sneak around and make back deals and sell governmental offices and wink at each other on golf courses, just disgusting to him, right? Stop sneaking around, stop cheating, right? Just come and tell me who you are. If you're a churchman, do you actually believe in Jesus Christ or not? Stop faking, stop pretending, declare your allegiance and then we'll know what we're doing. I think that's how Dante felt.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, no, very well said. Yeah. The only thing I would add to that, just kind of going back to like just simply mapping hell is one way to look at it is, is make a distinction based off malice. So the sins of incontinence, right, the inability for you to control your appetites towards a good are not really malicious. But the lower hell, right, Lower hell is, then you can see it as broadly speaking, the entire lower hell is dedicated towards malice. And so then you have violence and then you have fraud. And so I think that, yes, taking.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

What you said, malice being the desire to hurt someone, right, and you can hurt them in their body or you can hurt them in your words and your mind and controlling sociological situations. You're right, both. Yes, exactly, both. All of deep hell are malicious sins.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

So one way I think to re articulate some of the points that you made is that so you, when Dante's trying to categorize, okay, these sins of malice, like which one's more severe than the other one? Well, we're, we're rational animals. And so there's certain things that we can do that are the same as the sensible animals or the non rational Animals, right? So like the. The lion can be violent. You know, the tiger can be violent. There can be this violence. But what's really unique about man is that he's rational. And so you can kind of think about the. You know, the. The higher the angel, the greater the demon, right? So the higher. The higher the power, when it's corrupted, the lower it falls. And so notice that when he puts that fraud down at the bottom, right. Even things like flattery and stuff like that, it's because it's a corruption of the human intellect, right? So the intellect's an appetite. It seeks truth. Our speech has the purpose, Right. The teleology of speech, it's telos, is to convey what is true. And so there's something inhuman, there's something dehumanizing about us when we use our intellect, which you gave lots of different examples of. Right. When we use our intellect to share a lie, there is no noble lie, right. In Christianity, because Christ is the truth. We have to share the truth. And so doing something that's contrary to our highest power, the intellect, that's corrupting our unique capacity for speech and then is also, in a certain way, very uniquely Antichrist. Right. It is an anti. Statement against who Christ is. Christ is the truth, but I speak a lie, and when I speak a lie, I divorce another intellect from reality, right? So think about flattery. Why is flattery wrong? Well, because when people get together and they're flattering each other and et cetera, they're divorcing intellects from reality around them, which causes them to have a false engagement with what's truly real. So I think Dante, I mean, obviously we're going to explore the rest of hell. But I think, just as a preliminary note, because his structure can be kind of confusing to people, I think that he really is seeing that man is unique because of his intellectual capacity. And when he corrupts it.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Yeah, just the whole flattery thing. Remember, this is not telling, you know, Aunt Betsy that she looks good in those green shoes. Right. This is like the intent to harm now, but if you're trying to get into Aunt Betsy's will and exclude all of your siblings, and you tell Aunt Betsy that her green shoes look great on her over and over again. Now we're talking about sort of manipulating reality to harm people.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, yeah. There's that malicious element, Right. That has to be there.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Exactly.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

No.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Very good. Well, that brings us to the last canto. I mean, anything else that you think we missed or anything else that you want to add at this juncture.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Oh, this is great. This is super fun.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Good.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

We really hope that listeners like it as much as I have.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

I hope so. I mean, I think this is a beautiful journey as we kind of go through the Inferno and not simply something that's there for our intellect or like, in an academic way, but something where I think Dante, the teacher is really inviting us to beautify our souls. Right. He's really inviting us to configure ourselves to Christ showing the various lessons that are in the Inferno.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Or he will eventually.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Yeah, he's got.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

He's got to use the rock hammer first. Or as I, as I've been putting it recently with my students, inferno is the act of discreation. Inferno is sort of like running the seven days of creation back, melting, melting human souls into this sort of like pure plasma a second after the Big Bang. And then it can be reformed into something which is beautiful, but we've got to encounter the fear of the Lord first, and that's what the Inferno is.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Very well said. Where can people find more about you and your work?

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

I have a website, jasonmbaxter.com and I have my books, and I sell my books off the website and I sign them for people. And I've discovered that people are excited about the signature, but what they're thrilled about is I just grab sort of like random lecture notes that I give to my students and wrap my books in them. And people like those lecture notes. That was so cool that, like, I guess Jeff Bezos doesn't wrap books from Amazon and lecture notes, so. So jasonmbaxter.com if you're interested in my books. And then I have a substack called Beauty Matters. And I write about a lot of academic things, but on my sub stack, it's more sort of cultural engagement.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

Oh, very good. Well, Dr. Baxter, we really appreciate you being here this evening.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Thanks. It's been a delight.

[Deacon Harrison Garlick]

All right, everyone. Next week we continue our journey through the Inferno. We are discussing Cantos 12 through 17 with Father Thomas, a Cistercian priest. It's going to be a wonderful episode, so I hope you guys will join us as we continue to read through the inferno. Please visit thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have lots of guides to guide you through other great books like the Iliad or the Odyssey. And we will see you all next week.

[Dr. Jason Baxter]

Thank you.