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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we continue our journey through Dante's Inferno by exploring the last three pits of the eighth circle of Hell, punishing those souls guilty of evil counsel, schism and falsification. To guide us through hell today, we are joined by Dr. Donald Prudlow, the Warren Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa. Guys, Dr. Prudlow is probably the smartest, most knowledgeable Catholic scholar I have ever met. Every time I talk to him, I learn so much. And today is no different. We discuss Odysseus, Islam, the Tower of Babel, and much more. Not to mention, I ask him some of the most difficult, outstanding questions we've had on the podcast about the structure of Hell. You all, you're the best. I appreciate you all. Thousands have joined us to read Dante for Lent. The response has been overwhelming. We love hearing from you. I just want to say thank you to all of you. So join us now for another excellent conversation on Dante's Inferno.
- [00:56]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Foreign.
- [01:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
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 afternoon here at the Chancery. If you're new to Ascend, we're a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. We have a whole podcast series to help you through the Iliad, another on the Odyssey, and another one on Aeschylus's Oresteia with more Greek plays and Plato on the horizon. After we finish Dante's Inferno, you can check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters. Please go visit thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have written guides to help you read the great books, including a reader's guide to Dante's Inferno. Today we have our sixth episode on Dante's Inferno and are covering the last three pits of the eighth circle in hell, those condemned for simple fraud found in Cantos 26 through 31. To help guide us through these last ditches of the eighth circle, we are joined by Dr. Donald Prudlow, who serves as the Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa. He holds the Warren Chair in Catholic Studies and also teaches at the new Great Books honors college alongside Dr. Jennifer Frey, who joined us not too long ago. Dr. Prudlow, thank you for being here.
- [02:29]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Thank you very much. I very much enjoy the podcast and I much, very much enjoy Dante.
- [02:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, that's what I was going to ask I mean, do you have a. Do you have a special fondness for Dante? Do you like Dante?
- [02:41]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
I've been teaching Dante for over 20 years in my classes I'm teaching at this semester right now, and we have a class where we go through the entirety of the Divine Comedy paralleled with readings from St. Thomas Aquinas on the various virtues, vices and theological topics that come up to see where Dante is a good but an imperfect follower of St. Thomas. But I love this text. I'm a historian of ideas, especially in historian of the. Of medieval Italy. And so Dante is, as a medievalist, one of our core texts, one of the most important texts. It's the Summa Theologiae in poetry. And I think it's one of the greatest achievements, single achievements by a human being that's ever been attained.
- [03:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree. Is there a good rough and ready example maybe of where he deviates from St. Thomas or picks up a different theology from him?
- [03:36]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, I mean, we're going to see one today where Thomas, I think, would put heresy as well. Dante puts heresy higher or less serious than schism. And Thomas, I think, would say that. That heresy would be a more serious sin than schism because it adds something to schism. And so you see differences like that pop up. You know, at this time, Thomas was. Was still being appropriated. The people were still trying to figure out what Thomas actually meant by the time that he was doing that. But Dante is a grand student of St. Thomas. Thomas had a student named Remigio de Girolami, who became a famous Florentine preacher. And that's where Dante learned his Thomism in Santa Maria Novella, the great Dominican church on the western side of Florence. So I love to see the consonances and the correspondences and the points of disagreement. I think Dante disagrees a little, or disagrees too with maybe Thomas's depreciation of poetry. And I think we'll see that especially as we get into Purgatorio, when in sort of an ironic twist, Thomas is made to speak in poetry in defense of his. His presentation of St. Francis.
- [04:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. In the. In the Paradise. Right?
- [04:55]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yes.
- [04:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So that's a good example because when we see St Thomas being used in Dante, we kind of find it to be very normative because the angelic doctor. Right. We. He's ubiquitous now. We talk about Thomism, St. Thomas Aquinas, et cetera. But as you mentioned, like when Dante's incorporating him into his Divine Comedy, I mean, is this not a nod to Dante that he realizes how important St. Thomas is like, right off the bat because he's. He's pretty close to him. Yeah.
- [05:23]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
As much as he uses. He loves the classical tradition as much as he loves Augustine, he really attaches himself to St. Thomas Aquinas in terms of. And Aristotle for the philosophical superstructure that he brings to the. To the text. And so it's critical to have a grounding that. But at the same time, like you said, Thomas had just been dead for about 50 years. Thomism took a long time to find its. Get its grip. And this was just written about the time that Thomas was being proposed for canonization. And so it's a work in progress. Thomas was a work in progress. And Dante is one of the most important popularizers of Thomas's thought.
- [06:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's amazing. The. Well, let's kind of take on that subject of, like, the structure of hell. So, like, our general understanding, we've kind of mapped this out several times, but obviously the general premise is that the lower that you go in hell, the more it increases in the severity of the sin. And so we've seen how we've moved from, say, sins of incontinence to sins of violence and now sins of fraud. We're in the eighth circle of simple fraud. Next week, we'll be going down into the ninth circle for complex fraud. But there's been a few times that I think as we've kind of journeyed through Dante's Inferno, there's been a few times that I think we've struggled to understand the rationale or the structure. So, for instance, like, one would be in the seventh circle, which I think is a beautiful circle. And I think he presents it very well, but as, like a reminder for everyone. So the seventh circle is of violence, the sins of the lion. And so we see there's like, the river of blood and people are boiling in it proportionate to how violent they were. Great, that makes sense. Then we have the dark woods with the suicides, which is one of the most, I think, unsettling contrapassos probably in the entire text. But it's really that third area of the seventh circle, the desert, that really caught me by surprise because we have blasphemy, then sodomy, and then usury, which seems to think that then blasphemy is a. A lesser sin than those other two and that it's hard to, like, wrestle with that. Any, any insights into that structure.
- [07:29]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Well, remember, they're. They're all punished in. In different ways, but in. In the same circle. And so in a certain sense, there's an adequation, there's sort of equally bad things. But he does, you're right, he does present the blasphemers first. And I think with Dante, an important point to remember is that sins which corrupt us personally may be seen by him as less serious than sins which corrupt the whole of the community. First of all, because God cannot be hurt by blasphemy. The blasphemer is the one that reflects back on himself when he blasphemes and he corrupts himself spiritually, certainly he may corrupt people that are immediately around him. But when the sodomites or the users, particularly in sort of the pre modern medieval Aristotelian view of money, they're acting directly contrary against God's creation. And in that they're. They're seriously corrupting others. And you can say, so they're. You have the corrupting themselves, the blasphemers corrupting others, the sodomites, and then the corrupting the whole of the common good in the user. So I think I would point to that, at least in that Cantos see what's happening there. Even though I don't think Dante makes it's explicit that one is necessarily more grave than the others. I think that's just the chronological order within that circle that he placed them. But it kind of makes sense to me.
- [08:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I enjoy running with that. Yeah. Sometimes I think we take these things as being pedagogical. Dante's the master teacher. And so a lot of times there something doesn't make sense. You know, my default is that there's something that I've missed in the text. Right. There's, there's some kind of lesson there that still needs to be unearthed. And sometimes it's just hard because he is writing from a deeply medieval mindset. And even though we share the same faith, sometimes there's just presuppositions there that we don't quite recognize. And we were joined by, you know, Father Thomas on the seventh circle, and that's what we realized A lot of times it's just like his articulation of sin as moderns sometimes weren't even things that we thought were sins anymore or we didn't have any kind of guideposts for even understanding how this would be so deep inside hell. So. No, I appreciate that. I think that gives us kind of a working understanding. I have a similar question with the eighth circle, where for instance, in the eighth circle, which now we're dealing with crud, we see, for example, that simony is not as bad, or at least it is above things like being a grafter or barator or thievery and theft. I mean, Dante seems to have a particular hatred for thievery and theft, just given the kind of the unique contrapasso of the snakes and the transformations and things like this. But I think that's a hard one to square as well.
- [10:20]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [10:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
How would the sin of selling church offices be a lesser offense than, say, selling temporal offices or temporal favors or actually just, you know, stealing? I think there was an individual that stole, you know, veterans from a sacristy. I mean, any, any kind of picture on the eighth circle as a whole with it's like ten little ditches.
- [10:41]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, that's so on one sense, once again, we're all within the same eighth circle. So there is a, There's a congruity which. With the, with one another among these sinners about the kind of things that, that they're doing. And so to say that one is necessarily worse than the other. I think that that can go both ways. Now they are. They're continuing to go left. They're continuing, it seems. So it's kind of. Are they going down? That's. That's a good question. They're certainly going down into the. To. To where they cross into the ninth. Ninth circle. So if we do want to say that simony is a lesser sin than baratry or grafting or any of the other ones, Simon, it does occur pretty high in that. I mean, you've got. We can make the same sort of application that we did to the blasphemers, that the simonist creates personal spiritual harm to himself particularly, does he? And because of the strong antidonatist tradition in the Western church, it's known, and Thomas talks about this in summa, that semaniacal orders are conferred validly. And so the spiritual graces continue to flow even though this person has been corrupting his office and may indeed be a terrible, terrible person. But then we get to baratry and graft, which I think for Dante is a sort of secular simony where you are appropriating the common good to private use. And that's because it once again affects so many more. There, There is no, you know, there's no continued. There's no valid, Valid orders that, that are subsequent to. To graph. It just takes away that. That limited pot sort of the same argument with the user as you're taking away from that limited pot. And because of that, you've got a wider application A more immediate harm to communities. And for Dante, the integrity of the common good, the integrity of the human community in particular, is absolutely critical because without good in the human community, and this is sort of very medieval thing, it's very difficult to conceive of how we can have a stable spiritual community if the common good isn't first guaranteed.
- [12:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I like that. Do you think it dovetails into the thesis that the, the Inferno is, is ultimately structured according to love and violations against love. And so that kind of seems to dovetail well into that, where if we're really looking at like, who am I hurting, I'm hurting myself, but these sins that tend to be hurting my neighbor. And maybe we'll see that today, right, because we could have the argument of, okay, what are the sins that are, quote, unquote, the worst at the bottom, if you will, of the, of the eighth circle? Well, we're going to have things like evil counselors, schismatics, alchemists. That's another one. You're like, how did the, how did the poor alchemists make it so far down into hell? But maybe to play out your theory there, right, there's always a defrauding of, of someone else, right? There's a defrauding that hurts the common good. So, no, I like that a lot. I like it as a thesis. And maybe we can kind of play that out as we kind of work through the eighth circle. I have one more question, just because you brought it up, and I don't think we've talked about on the podcast, any theories on why he tells us which way he turns. So for those who are reading the Inferno for the first time, if you notice, a lot of times Dante the poet will tell us that they turned left or they turned left, then sometimes once in a while they turn right. I mean, is there an esoteric read that we should have there?
- [14:12]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, so few times. I can only think of two times in the Inferno when they turn right, it's a constant leftward downward spiral. And just on, on the surface, of course, it's, it's, you know, mon sinister. It's the, it's the sinister term that the right way, Dexter, is the, is the right way to go. And so it would be, I, I think he introduces that there, there may be, I, I, I don't know, a more esoteric reading to that, to, to the two right turns that, that I'm aware of, other than it just creates some differentiation in the movement of the plot. But, but definitely left is associated with, with, with evil and so that's, that's going to be something that, that you'll see. And I did want to sort of get back to your question. The. One of the thing that shocks my students most when we, when we open up in Canto too. And I mean, it's right. Love moved me. Love moved my maker on high. So hell is an expression of God's love. And so, yes, we have violations of the sinners of various degrees of love, but the fact is that the entirety of hell is an act of love. And we see that because God reluctantly consents and concedes to each sinner to remain forever with the thing that they love. So, and I think this is most clearly with, with Paula and Francesca. What did they want more than anything to be together? Well, they got it. They're. They're. They have been fulfilled. They did. They did it wrongly. And, but, but God. God Danes to, To affirm that disorder.
- [15:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I like that a lot. The. You see that too with the damned, whose minds seem to be completely preoccupied and absorbed with the temporal.
- [15:52]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [15:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
They're always asking, well, what. What's happening in Florence? What's happening, you know, these various locations and their minds, their imaginations just cannot escape, you know, this usually very short periods of time, 30, 40 years.
- [16:05]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [16:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And so you see them completely absorbed into that. We've, we've talked about that on the podcast because I think there's a misread sometimes in which you see certain souls in hell that you could say, oh, look, they've conquered hell. You see some really bad reads of Francesca like that. We saw a soul amongst the heretics, right? He stands very rare. Yeah, yeah. Very wrecked and proper. Barely seems to be aware that he's burning alive. You know, we see these souls throughout hell, and there's a misread there to say, oh, look, they, you know, they've, they've conquered hell. They're still very much focused on what it is that they loved. When reality, and I think Virgil points this out quite well, you know, previously in the Inferno, is that their, you know, their sin, their preoccupation with whatever that loved becomes their own punishment.
- [16:55]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right?
- [16:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
They're trapped inside their own personal hell in addition to whatever it is, you know, contraposto, that they're suffering. And so, no, I agree with you that you can reorder the structure of hell according to what it is that each soul loves. And so, because one of the thesis that we had at the beginning of the podcast was that the Inferno is structured, its architecture is according to love. And I think you see that as you continue to move deeper.
- [17:21]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
And it's, it's a hard message to get across today. Right, that this is, that this is somehow structured. Structured into love. But, but that's right. And we're about to see another sinner that, that seems to defy hell too, with Ulysses. And, and you say it's a misreading, but it, it used to be at least quite a popular reading that Dante was being subversive and that he was inserting these attractive characters in order to, you know, thumb his nose at the thought of a paternal punishment or at the church or anything like that. Most commentators no longer believe that. But I mean, this is, there's, there's one reason that this is, was considered the, the romantic terset. Sorry, the romantic Canto. The Canto 26. In the 19th century, this was, this was Dante the free thinker, Dante the humanist, trying to overcome. And so, yeah, I, I, I, you. And I agree it's a misreading and most people would today, but, but it's not an uncommon one.
- [18:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that, that's amazing. That's reminds me of like Milton's Paradise Lost, where Satan is read as the hero. Yes, right. Yeah, it's one of. I have the, I also have the Musa translation, which is the translation that I originally worked through several times. And he has, yeah, he's the one that really alerted that to me in pointing out that modern commentators on the Inferno are often seduced by the arguments of the damned, which is a really fascinating argument.
- [18:36]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [18:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
They get sucked into these and so they misread the Inferno. That's a good segue. So let's look at, let's look at canto 26th. So we're in the 8th ditch of the 8th circle, maybe what we might call evil counselors, deceivers. Right. So what sin is punished here? We're looking at the evil counselors, deceivers. We're still giving species of simple fraud. The contrapasso here is probably one of the clearest. So he sees this field, if you will, this, this circle, this, this, you know, sometimes they're called pouches, these pits that have all these tongues of fire. Right. And I use that word explicitly. Right. So these are people who committed evil through the wagging of their tongues. And so now they are encapsulated inside this giant tongue of fire and burning in this pit. So the contrapasso there seems to be somewhat clear to me. But then he sees a tongue of fire that has two tips that there are Actually, it's unique. There are two souls. And I have to. I have to say here, and this is probably like, this is where I fall in reading the Inferno, is I love this canto.
- [19:47]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
I love it because it's wonderful.
- [19:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I. I like it for maybe prideful reasons, which isn't good, right? I'm being.
- [19:53]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
I'm.
- [19:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I'm having to mature along with Dante the Pilgrim as I read this, because I feel like this confirms my entire read of the Odyssey, because I. When I read the Odyssey the first couple times, and we read it on the podcast as well, Like, I really struggle with Odysseus as a character. Obviously, he has. He has certain qualities that are virtuous. And, you know, even our Old Testament characters are not always completely positive characters. We have to kind of take them as they are. But I think a lot of times Odysseus is read in this really weird veneer of he's like this loving family man who's just trying to come back to his family, and he tried to save all his men, but he didn't. And it's like, that is not the Odysseus I see. So the first time I read this and I found Odysseus was in hell. Like, he's not in limbo. He's not with Hector, you know, he is in hell. I was like, oh, this is. This confirms all of my theories. I'm completely right on how I read the Odyssey, et cetera. But, yeah, that's who we find here, right? Odysseus and Diomedes are burning in the same tongue of fire.
- [20:49]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, it's. It's very powerful. It is one of the. The best cantos of the Inferno, which, Which, for the record, I think is the. Is the least interesting part of the Divine Comedy. I can't wait for you to get to Purgatorio and Paradiso. But so many people just stop here. And so this may be the greatest canto that they encounter. So for. I think for a lot of people, they respond to that. And a lot of my students, I think when they're reading the Odyssey of the Iliad, they do find Odysseus, Ulysses an attractive character. And certainly modernity finds Ulysses an attractive character. Just think about James Joyce's work in that sense as the man, the Faustian character in search of knowledge. You know, why are you trying to hold him back from his. His great search for knowledge? But, yeah, this canto is. It's. It's ambiguous. Dante is struggling as he's writing this canto with himself in his description of, of Ulysses. It's, it's a tour de force. I mean, in a different way than the, the last two cantos, which were, which were he out Ovited Ovid. And I just. He's doing something different with every canto. He's growing in his powers and see, he's writing this text and. Yeah, this is, this is an extremely wonderful consideration, but I always strike. Yeah, go ahead.
- [22:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I mean, I was just gonna say, like, please, I mean, kind of, can you unpack that for us? Or like, what, what is the, the richness of this canto? Particularly for those who are like, first time readers who might have read this were shocked that Odysseus is here. I'm personally somewhat sad Diomedes is here. That's the part that bothered me the most. I really liked Diomedes. I thought he was a good guy. You know, his chapter in the Iliad is. When I first time I read the Iliad, his chapter was the one that finally kind of kicked me in the gear. I'm like, oh, I love this book. This is great. I mean, how can you not like Diomedes and Athena and the Chariot and they're stabbing Ares in the gut and he goes up and whines. I mean, it's a wonderful scene. And now he's sitting here burning in hell. So, so maybe just as like you've kind of, you know, laid on here that this is a wonderful canto. Like, help us unpack this a little bit. Like, what is it about this Kanto that stands out?
- [22:52]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
And poor Diomedes doesn't even get. He's in the pit for bad counseling. He doesn't get to talk, he doesn't get a single word in this. It's all Ulysses all the time. But I'd say in sort of a big picture, one of the first things that I would point out is look at the sins in the Inferno that are punished with fire. When people hear Inferno, they think it's just going to be fire all the way through. But the sinners that are punished with fire are the heretics, the sodomites, the simonists, and the false counselors. And so there's something special about this. Fire is the most noble element in Dante's world. And so it's the most refined punishment, as it were. The punishment that makes us think of purification and destruction. And all of these are fundamentally unnatural abuses, right? They, they abuse some special gift that God has given us, right? The gift of faith, the gift of appropriation, the Gift of communication, the gift of the Holy Spirit itself. And so once you hear that Holy Spirit, and I think you were alluding this to this today, that you start to see, oh, that each of these sins is in a special way an anti Pentecostal sin, that each one of these are being punished as a counter pentagon, Pentecost. And so that's. And this is the last sin that's punished in this way. So it's first for Dante, it's the most most serious. But Dante is a Ulysses character himself. He's going on a journey seeking virtue and self knowledge. And, and we see him in here as he's reached this, like I said in the last two Cantos, a peak of poetic ability in going past beyond Ovid himself, that now he meets one of his heroes. And I think this is challenging for us. Ulysses is a hero for Dante. And so he's got to restrain his several famous tercet in the beginning where he's trying to restrain his genius. He's restraining his genius because genius untethered to virtue is one of the most dangerous things that can possibly exist. And that's. I think we see that a lot in the world today, right? We see people that are certainly geniuses, but maybe untethered to virtue in the way that would make it more serviceable to the broader community. So I think that he wants to avoid being Ulysses while at the same time he's engaged. He wants nothing more than to talk with Ulysses and to ask him about his journeys.
- [25:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think there's a beautiful parallel there between Dante the pilgrim and. And Ulysses Odysseus. You know, one thing that occurred to me this year or last year when we did our year of Homer and we read the Odyssey together, is I never really noticed that when Odysseus is introduced in the Odyssey on Calypso's island, that Calypso's island is a dark wood. And it's a really interesting parallel to really think about how similar those journeys are because Odysseus is trying to get home, that even once he comes home he has to have this penitential journey for what he's done wrong. And then even once he gets home, he has to leave again and go on a penitential journey carrying the ore and doing these kind of things. So I do think, you know, my understanding is that Dante does not have direct access to Homer. But it is really interesting how many times I think he seems to understand Homer really well. And it's my understanding that the story in here of Odysseus's death is the invention of Dante. And I find that. I find that to be amazing because, you know, personally, as I read the Odyssey, I think he pegs Odysseus completely, right? These lines, I mean, maybe we should kind of turn to the text, but these lines in which he says, like, you know, not even the love of wife or son, or like all the things that when we read the Odyssey, we're like, oh, he's trying to get back to Penelope. Look, his son. He's trying to get you reunited with Telemachus. These things can't hold him. It's the quest for knowledge that governs all. And so he has to leave again. And so this, this story that Dante tells, I think really takes the core problem with the Odysseus character and just puts it on full display.
- [27:08]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
I totally agree with you. I think he has an insight, given his lack of text, that is remarkable, but that also is a testimony to the power of the tradition. Right. That even in the absence of Homer, the Homeric stories were told and passed on, mediated certainly through. Through Virgil and through Horus. So he has a good idea of the beginning of the. The Odyssey where Horus does an ode, where he. That Dante would have known, where he tells a good bit of the story of the first. The. The first book of, of the Odyssey. But, you know, it is good to remind ourselves who is, who are the sources for, for Ulysses here? And they're, they're all Latin sources, particularly book two of, of the Aeneid, but also Ovid, Homer and Cicero in De Finibus, where Cicero, Cicero is praising Ulysses. Search for knowledge. And so Dante has to distill a picture of Odysseus secondhand, as it were, but comes to such a deep realization, just like you said, I couldn't agree more, that that's what he manages to do even in the absence of those original texts.
- [28:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, he says here, I'm reading from the Esalen translation. This is line 94. He says, nor the love I owed Penelope to bring her joy could drive from me the burning to go forth to gain experience of the world and learn of every human vice and human worth. I think that, you know, and calling, going back to our year of, of Homer and for those who haven't read the Odyssey, you know, we have all kinds of podcasts up to. Gonna help guide you through that text. I think sometimes we forget, like the siren song. The siren song was an offering of knowledge. When he's hearing the sirens, he's seeing this, this particular offering of knowledge. And this is really what's part of that Odysseus character, that wit, that intellect. He seeks this. So maybe just like to push into this narrative a bit, you know, he leaves Ithaca again and he gets. He gets a crew together which eventually, you know, all the, all of those of us who had maybe a negative read of him in the Odyssey or all your alarm bells start going off when he puts a crew together to go sailing somewhere because they're all expendable to whatever his journey is. And so he gives them this speech about why they're going to do this. And so they sail past the pillars of Hercules. And as moderns, that might not mean a lot, but my understanding there is like the pillar of Hercules were like the end of the known world, right? You don't really sail past these. And so he sails past them, right? He's going to go and find human experience. He really is that kind of like. I thought it was interesting earlier you talked about that humanist kind of renaissance read of him. What ends up happening? Well, he goes out into the ocean and he gets close to Mount Purgatory. He gets close to where the living are not supposed to go and God the divine basically brings down his ship and they all die in a terrible watery grave. And I just think that this picture of Odysseus as this soul that cannot find rest, he can't find peace in his home, he can't find peace in his station as king and father and son and husband, he can't do that. He has to go find knowledge again. I just think Dante really pegged this one and pegged it.
- [30:16]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Well, he is. When. When in that, in that very passage, right? When he talks about son, father and wife, he becomes the anti. Aeneas. He is the, the who is only concerned about. He's got to rescue his father, his son. He goes back for his wife and that's what. And. And the continuation of his family is what is of absolute importance to, to Aeneas. And that. That relates back to what. What. It's interesting what Dante says he's condemned for. It's not necessarily the, what we read as the, the curiositas, the vanakuriositas, the, the search for knowledge untethered to the end. But he's condemned for the Trojan Horse for deceiving Achilles into the war in order to. And that leads to the suicide of his, of his girlfriend and then the theft of the, of the Palladium. And. But everything, remember, everything in, in Dante has. There's a secular analog and A sacred analog. And so there's got to be the story of the secular fall. We're going to see later the story of the. Of the secular bauble with the giants. We're going to see the story of. And so this is the. The original sin for Dante, for Aeneas, for Virgil, for the Romans, the Trojan horse was the original sin. It was the original sin of deception. And at the end of this, again, we'll see Sinon there in the next canto, who was the one who counseled them to take the horse. But I want you to notice, too, that this is the necessary fault of the secular world, of the secular Greeks, just like the original sin is the necessary fault that gets for us a redeemer. The Trojan horse is what enables Troy to achieve its true destiny in Rome. And so Ulysses is the. He causes that. And so I think Dante has to even provide him with two more sins just to show that, that, that, yeah, this was. This was a bad thing, but it led to good. It's another part of Dante's sort of providential worldview that what might look to us like horrible disaster is going to lead to absolutely astonishing things. But, but you're right, it is. Is the anti. In the Assyri, he does not care about. About his family. And that's. That. That's a brutal. That's a brutal line right there.
- [32:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I love that understanding of this being like the original sin. That's fascinating. I'd like to think about that more because we've kind of talked about on the podcast that, you know, the medievals have a fondness for Troy that sometimes us as moderns, we don't quite understand. And it really is that. That Roman connection, right? There's even. I was reading that even, you know, centuries later in which Rome was kind of this fledgling society and they were having war, you know, with Hellenized cultures, the, you know, opposing generals were still contextualizing themselves with inside, like Hector and Achilles, right, that one of these battles finally need to happen. And obviously Rome ends up being Troy's, you know, final revenge. But then Rome, right, for Dante becomes the seat of both the imperial power and the apostolic power. And this is what then gives formation to the medieval mind. So Troy tends to have a deep ramification that I don't think we quite always appreciate. And obviously his guide is Virgil, which tells us the story of Aeneas. And so, no, I think there's. There's lots of connections here.
- [33:36]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
If you look at the founding. If you look at the founding narratives of almost Every society, not just Rome, but I'm talking about France and Spain and Portugal and Britain. They all claim to be descended from the Trojans. There is no subsequent European culture that claims to be descended from the Greeks. Everyone wants to be Trojan. That's the key.
- [33:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, you see that too. I always think about that at the beginning of Sir Gawain in the Green Knight. He traces all the way from Troy and then all the way up into how you get to King Arthur in Britain. Shifting gears a bit though, going back to the Pillars of Hercules, it's always struck me that in Francis Bacon's kind of seminal work, the, the front piece of that text is a ship sailing past the Pillars of Hercules. Right. So this is, this is what modern man sees, has himself, right? Modern man is going into where the divine has said not to go and he's seeking these experiences and this knowledge and etc. So you can see very clearly, I think, why there would be modern misreads that would, that would read Ulysses here, Odysseus, as a hero, right? Someone who actually, you know, sought this knowledge despite the kind of, you know, protestations of the divine.
- [34:52]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
That's right, yeah. It's the, this is the limits of. And this is what modern man would not recognize, that they symbolize for the medievals, the limits of human reason unaided by grace. Because what is Dante about to do? He's about to achieve the island. He's a man just like Ulysses. He's on a journey. He's looking about virtues and knowledge. And with the help of grace, and only with the help of grace, he will attain that knowledge. And that's something that modernity, either either modernity says all of that knowledge, that arcane secret knowledge that the Church was trying to keep from us, that's for everyone now, or they say that such knowledge is not important. It doesn't exist. Knowledge of spiritual realities or things like that. And that's where a modern reading this sort of has to change their, their perspective. The idea that you, that there would be areas of knowledge that you shouldn't, that you shouldn't pursue is, Is anathema. And it's, it's, it's an unchean thing to, to say that there's something that, that, that we cannot take on our own. And it's, it's symbolized really by a comparison of the summa, sort of the organized cathedral of wisdom directed everything going up of all things from God and the return of all things to God and encyclopedia in which there is no, there is no principle of organization whatsoever except the. The convenient Alphabet. And just. There's no. Because there's no end to the knowledge. Right. We're not knowing for a purpose. I mean, other than the Baconian will to power. Right. Just dominate over nature, which. Which hasn't been going great for us lately. That's the. Nature's kind of trying to bite back a little bit.
- [36:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, she has a. She has a habit of doing that. I really like the parallel between Dante and Odysseus to kind of bring that full circle that Odysseus tries to make it to Mount Purgatory and is condemned and fails, but then Dante will make it by grace. I think it's a wonderful parallel. Uh, let's push forward though. In the Canto 27, the eighth ditch of the eighth circle.
- [36:57]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
We're still staying 26 all day, but we can. Let's. We must move on. Like Dante, he only has 24 hours in hell, right?
- [37:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So the. So now we're still in the evil counselors. This is just kind of continued. You know, one thing I already mentioned, but that I just find fascinating every time we bring it up, this is around line 28 or so that we just see that the damned are just completely stuck in the temporal. They just. They. That's all their minds and imaginations, right? That is what they love in certain ways. That's what they made into their God. That's what they lived their lives for. And so it's so fascinating to see Dante the pilgrim go through hell and all of these souls constantly asking him what is going on on Earth. Because that's the only type of glory, particularly if they're cared about the reputation, right? That's the only type of glory. It's the only type of immortality that's actually beneficial to them. And I think there's a. It's a wonderful lesson, I think, for those of us still amongst the living of, you know, where do we actually find our happiness, where do we find our worth, where do we find our glory? And you know, for all eternity, what is it that we would be thinking about?
- [38:01]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
I mean, what I see is the theological position here that's also. Also kind of unpopular today of the fixation of the will at the moment of death, that the. That the time of choice where we're able to make temporal choices is ended. And so just like the angels had a moment of choice and then their wills were fixed forever, so we have temporal choices throughout our lives and that is ended. We. When we become spiritual, purely spiritual creatures, there's no more changing of the will. And so our wills are fixed in the ways that we've fixed them in our. In our lives. And so the. The damned are actually following the will that they pursued in life, and they're pursuing it forever. And it just so happens that their will is intrinsically temporal, and so can only ever conceive or consider that at this time.
- [38:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But do we kind of feel bad? I mean, who is this. Is this Guido, right? Do we. Do we kind of feel bad for him? I mean, he throws. You know, Dante has no love for Boniface the 8th. So here goes. So here goes. Here goes another story about how terrible boniface the 8th is, right? So my. My typical understanding here is that, you know, this was a soldier, he retires, he becomes a Franciscan friar. He's trying to amend his life. Boniface VIII has need of his particular skill set and basically tells him, like, listen, you can go back and commit all these sins. I forgive you ahead of time, right?
- [39:25]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
You have.
- [39:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You have, you know, absolution for sins you have not committed yet. And so he tells this, like, actually really haunting story, right, of when he dies and St. Francis comes to get. I mean, it's a. It's a beautiful but haunting image that St. Francis comes to get his soul, and then the demons come and grab him away, right? Because he has claimed. Right? He's. He's claimed absolution on sins uncommitted, and you can't do that. And so now, trusting in the Pope's words, he has been dragged down into hell and is now suffering in a tongue of fire in the eighth circle.
- [40:00]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah. What's. Well, we always have. We know we have to be careful when we start to feel sorry for the sinners, because that's what Virgil's been chastising Dante for in this. But Guido is such an interesting character, right? I mean, he just was a false counselor his entire life. His entire life. And he tries to convert, right? He affiliates himself with the Franciscan order and becomes probably a lay brother in. In the Franciscan order, which was a common thing in the Middle Ages, to affiliate yourself with a religious order and take the habit. So he would have been habited just like a regular Franciscan. Whether or not he received holy orders is a debate. There's some different translations, whether. I have some questions about Esalen's translations in here. It's not always my favorite translation, but in any case, Guido is Boniface viii. Yeah. Does not come off well in this. In this work. I always think of that because Boniface VIII's tomb is in. Under St. Peter's I always think of that when I, when I walk by that I, I feel bad for him because he got, he got a lot of press and only some of it was. Was merited in my opinion. He certainly did merit some, but Dante for the particular political configurations and fortunes of central Italy. I can understand where he was coming with Benedict and this was a particularly bad story. And so Benedict called, sorry, Boniface calls him out of retirement and says, how do I reduce Palestrina, which if you know anything about Rome, Palestine is about 15 miles away. It's. It was the. Under the control of the Colonna family who was opposed to Boniface the 8th. And Boniface was. He's. He's giving crusading indulgences for his soldiers to go and, and reduce this rival family. And there. And so what he eventually does is it's, it's sort of like the false counsel that. That Sinan is later going to give that you will promise much with scant observance. So essentially what it does is he promises them a truce, he gets them to come out of the city and then he abducts them and raises the city to the ground. Now my question when I'm reading this is. I think it's, it's a tragic one. If Boniface the 8th is truly as bad as. Because you think, you know this, this famous condottieri, this warrior is going to give advice on siege engines or something like that. No, he just tells. He just advises deception. And if Boniface VIII was really as bad as everyone claims he is, it seems that Boniface could have come up with this plan on his own, which makes the condemnation of Guido that much worse that that Guido that he should have. Yeah, I mean that's one of the big what ifs, because could. Could Guido have avoided this? If you just simply seen the absurdity of the claim that Boniface was making about. About pre absolution. I think I'm going to ask my, my priest about that next time the confessional about pre absolution. I'm planning on three or four sins next week if I can just get a. Get a clear the board for that. And this has actually had an unfortunate effect because all sorts of anti Catholic stories, anti Catholic literature in the Reformation was sort of built on this line as if this was something that the Church was doing and it was absolutely not because as the demon says very clearly, the Church cannot do it at the end. And then this thing about St. Francis and the dark cherubim and the cherubim represents knowledge, which is kind of interesting. So he's a fallen knowledge, a perverted knowledge. This story doesn't make St. Francis look good, it's just sort of that simple. Does St. Francis not know that has God sent him on a wild goose chase, as Francis set himself on a wild goose chase? But it makes several important points. The first important point is that the devil knows logic, the devil knows the principle of non contradiction. And so don't get into, you know, legal, legalistic arguments with, with the devil, because the devil is going to win it also. And this might not be a popular reading, but given the rivalry between the Franciscans and Dominicans, this may be a Dominican sort of lightly gently mocking Francis, well known aversion to the intellectual life. And so I would just suggest that as my own opinion, that is not something that you find in the commentatorial tradition. But in terms of my research, I kind of saw it that way as well.
- [44:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
What's really interesting to me here is like we see in so many other circles is that the sin itself, we just see every character that we're introduced to is somehow engaging the sin.
- [44:50]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [44:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So obviously the irony here is that Guido, who's been an evil counselor his whole life, receives evil counsel from Boniface VIII and then relies on it and is condemned for it. Do you think? What do we think though, Dante the pilgrim is doing here? Because I found this really fascinating. So this is at 61. Actually, no, before I ask that, I have to go back. So you did a drive by and so I'm going to call you out on it. So if you don't like Esalen's translation, what translation do you like?
- [45:20]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
I've always been extremely partial to Hollander. I'm dubious in translations that to try to do in meter, because when you're translating poetry from another language into poetry in your own language, it's essentially three different translations. You ever put something in Google three or four times back and forth to a language and it gets kind of garbled. You have to translate the Italian poetry to Italian prose, translate that into English prose, and then translate the English prose into poetry. And you either overexplain or miss things or omit things in an attempt to get the meter. Hollander doesn't try to do any sort of poetry at all. And maybe, maybe this is my non poetical side coming out, because I love the poetry in Italian. Italian is amazing. This is why, you know, Shakespeare doesn't come across well in German. Even if, you know, Schiller is Translated. And so Hollander is such a. I think, just the towering Dante scholar of our age. And one thing that I can see about the Hollander translation is it's done by Robert and his wife Jean. And I think there's something rather astonishing about a husband and a wife translating together, that they get the male side and sort of the female side of the valence of the language in a way that. Now, I don't agree with all of Hollander's writings. I like the Musa translation. The Mandelbaum is fine. The Siardis basic, and I don't like the Durling translation at all. But Esalen is okay. Sometimes Esalen imports later Catholic ideas into a medieval context, and I. I find that as a historian, also a little jarring. And then he'll do things like, you know, when they're talking about the. The tarantella dance that they did in southern Italy, he replaces that with the word polka, which I about just dropped my. My coffee when I read that translation. But Esalen is. Is a wonderful guy, and some of his notes are his commentary. Some of. Some of the best commentary I've ever. I've ever seen.
- [47:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Good. No. Okay. I appreciate you going back and explaining that because I wanted to know your thoughts. So, going back to the text, the line 61, Guido says, so what. What is happening here? Because he's actually. He's telling them a presupposition that he has of why he's going to tell his story that's not true because his story is going to make it back to the light of day, but Dante the pilgrim doesn't correct him.
- [47:49]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, it's interesting. Do you have any thoughts about that? I mean.
- [47:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I. None that are, like, overly refined. I mean, one of the things that we've seen throughout the entire Inferno is that Dante is kind of a master of each character, including Dante the pilgrim, and sometimes even Virgil giving different facets of a particular sin or even maybe a contrary virtue. So obviously, like, some really clear ones, right, that are kind of painfully clear is, say, like, with wrath. So the boatman's angry, Virgil gets angry. He can't get in the dis. Dis is angry that they're even there. The angel gets angry that he has to come down and talk. Right. Like, everyone's angry, right. In this whole passage. So it's kind of easy to see there, but sometimes they're more subtle. And so here, you know, with evil counsel, which is really, I think, to be quite frank, if I understand correctly, sub. Some of these pits in the Eighth circle. Dante never actually just states, and now in this pit, this sin is now punished. So we have to actually extrapolate from the examples what sin is being punished. And so I think, like different translators, I'm pulling for Musa. So I think Musa calls them evil counselors. They're also called deceivers. So we have to extrapolate the sin from the examples here. So it's just curious to me whether or not Dante the poet was making Dante the pilgrim somehow engage in the sin, or he has his own. He has his own failing, or what is he doing here by the fact that this sinner Guido clearly has a presupposition that's wrong, that's the basis of why he's gonna tell his story and no one corrects him. I mean, to do that in a pit that's on evil counsel, obviously there's an intentionality there. I'm not sure how much weight I would put into, like, the pedagogy, like, the lesson there is not clear to me, but it's a fact that I found really fascinating on this read through.
- [49:32]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Remember, no one is compelled to say the truth in every situation. Right? It's. He. Guido could have stayed silent, but instead he gave his. His false counsel. Dante could have. And so this sort of maybe a contrapasso back towards the sinner from, from Dante, he could have disabused him and told him that his fame was. Was going to go. But he. He's under no obligation to say anything like that. So maybe sometimes it's better to keep silence than to utter false counsel. But your idea is quite possible too, for sure. And Dante, these are multivalent texts. It can be any number of these things at the same time.
- [50:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Yeah, it's more of a. I'm not sure how much I'd push into the meaning of it, but the literal, just the factual event itself really captures my attention there. Right. Okay, good. Any other, Any other thoughts in Canto 27 before we. We leave for the schematics?
- [50:31]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Let's see. The. I mean, there's. There's all sorts of interesting things. The, the Bull of Phalaris. I mean, the, the order of conversion here and how he misapprehends the order of conversion. Dante, we temporal beings, there's a certain order that we have to put our conversion in, right? I mean, well, when we sin, so we have to conceive of the sin, and then we have to have the sin, and then we have to have the sorrow for the sin, then we have to have the absolution. And so all of these things happen to happen in the right order, and it's happening in the right order. And Dante gets to witness it being out of the right order here, and it causes him to think about, oh, okay, that's. You have to have the contrition, the confession, the satisfaction, you know, and all of that. So everything is being. The passions are being fixed in Dante. His will is being mended through all of these examples. And once again, we have God bringing good out of evil. Dante's conversion is being affected through seeing these false conversions.
- [51:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that a lot. Yeah. It's pedagogical for Dante, the pilgrim, which. That means it's pedagogical for us. Right. Because he's the analog for humanity. I like that a lot. Yeah. Let's look at canto 28. So this is the ninth ditch of the eighth circle, the schismatics. Right, Schism. So, you know, what punishes or what sins punished here, obviously, we're looking at schism. This contrapasso is actually probably the most clear contrapasso in the entire Inferno, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, even, like the. I think even in Musa, the. The line at the end where the soul holds his head up. Esalen has a slightly different translation, but if I remember right, Musa actually says, behold, in me the perfect contrapasso.
- [52:18]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right. So even Dante uses contrapasso, though it's the only time in the poem that he uses contrappaso.
- [52:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, it is, yeah. So Musa translates that quite literally. And so you see in this character, you know, holding it up that he is this kind of perfect example of a contrappasso. So why is this perfect? I mean, obviously the schismatics are people who have rendered the body of Christ.
- [52:41]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right?
- [52:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
They've rendered the Church. They've lopped off some part of the body and split the body. And so obviously they're a contrapasso as they're walking around in this pit and there's a demon who then chops them up.
- [52:53]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [52:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And so they're. They're being maimed, like they maimed the body of Christ. My. My kind of understanding of this was that they. They go around and it's not clear to me that they're healed then. I mean, healed might be a strong word. Or they're. They're put back intact and then they're, you know, hacked again. Right. Yeah. And so there's this constant maiming effect. And so it's really. It's really a beautiful contrapasso. But I Wanted to go back to something you said earlier. If you kind of help us out here a little bit. You kind of already alluded to this is. It's always been fascinating to me that schism is so far down here in hell, but heresy is up in the sixth circle. And I just, you know, can we get maybe a little bit of a parsing on the distinction between heresy and schism? And do we think that Dante, or maybe I don't want to say is he wrong? Because that's, Dante's the teacher here, and that's, that's a little thick for me. What is Dante's purpose? Like, what is he, what is he trying to teach us by this ordering?
- [53:52]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right, because we talked about. Thomas would put it the other way. He thinks that heresy is something. So if you're, you're a heretic for Thomas, that also implies you're a schismatic. You're already, you're already rejecting proper authority. You're already introducing dissension in the body of Christ, and you add to that a defect in faith, right? You've not only failed in, in proper obedience, you've now failed in, in faith as well. So heresy is worse for Thomas. And I think people that read Thomas on heresy will, will see that pretty clearly. So Dante reverses that, and I, I think he has very good reasons for reversing that. First off is Dante at the very deepest sees schism as a sin against charity. And since charity is the highest virtue, because it's a lack of fraternal charity, it's a lack that, you know how good it is for brethren to dwell in together in unity, that faith, you know, faith and hope will pass away, but charity will endure. So therefore sins that are against charity are the ones that are going to be punished. The worst that gets back to the idea of love, it also talks, also speaks to Dante's commitment to unity. One of the main themes, of course, is love, but it's also unity. And this is, this is a theme that goes all the way back into ancient Greek philosophy, right? We, we pursue happiness through many different multiplicities, and it's never totally satisfying. And so Aristotle and Augustine, Boethius tell us that, no, we need to focus on the one, on unity, and any destruction of that unity. And I want to stress here, indeed we do see religious schismatics here, but we also see secular schismatics. And so anyone who disturbs the common good, both of church and state, in Dante's mind, anyone that disturbs the good of the riven City, as he calls Florence, is going to be some of the most punished people in the world. So I think that's. That's what's going here. I don't think that's a. A fundamental theological difference. It's a difference in the way of looking at the content, imports and implications of the various sins.
- [55:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like what you said about tethering unity to love. We see that very clearly in John 17, when our Lord is in the garden and praying for the church. You know, he. He particularly states there that they will see our love by our unity, that our unity is a sign of our love. And so if you just go back, I mean, take it at face value, or you see his critiques of Boniface viii, one of the things that we didn't mention there, but he has a really scathing, heartbreaking critique in there in which he says, listen, this guy's never even warring against the Muslims and the Jews. All he wars against is other Christians, right? Other Catholics. And you see then how that fractures the community. And in that. In that disunity, like, how is charity supposed to flourish? How can charity flourish amongst this kind of fractured state? I think we're seeing that, too. I like you picking out that the schism can also be in the temporal power as well. And I think those two go together, because how much can Florence, or really Italy as a whole flourish in its own Catholic faith if it's a constant battle of city states warring against each other all the time? Right. There's no. There's no peace. It's like the opposite of the Pax Romana. And you see, you know, you're the historian, so try not to die inside if this is terribly wrong. But I've always. I've always really been captured by the comparisons between Dante and Machiavelli, because I think in a lot of ways, they're trying to solve the same problem. And so Dante is. Is seeing an Italy that's completely fractured the temporal power. And in a lot of ways, I think that the papal power, the apostolic power, has filled a vacuum. The imperial power has not taken root. You have all these warring little, basically republics, basically city states, et cetera. And then when you get the Machiavelli, you're still facing this type of fractured Italy, and they're still trying to find a unifying factor. But by this time, Machiavelli has completely given up on Christianity. Christianity can't solve this problem. And so we need something that's. I mean, there's a million different ways to read Machiavelli but one of the ways I read them is that we really need something that's post Christian.
- [58:06]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [58:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We need someone to come in here, unify us, and bring something that will actually bring peace, because Christianity can't do it. And so I think that the tethering here between unity and charity is something that I'm not sure we appreciate as much as we should as moderns, mainly because we're so habituated to autonomy and disunity.
- [58:25]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right. And I don't want to make a false dichotomy there because. Well, let me go back to the point. So Dante loves. This is. And this is tough to get your mind around. He loves Florence. He loves his particular community. He loves the spiritual community of the Church under the leadership of the Pope. He loves the unifying power of the Roman state, of the secular empire. And he thinks that the ideal Christian world will be the Church minding its own business, ruling the spiritual world, the empire minding its own secular business, ruling the whole of the Christian world, which will leave a space for the thriving of local communities. Dante sees. Dante loves freedom. Dante loves liberty. In that sense, he is sort of a proto modern person. Dante loves the human being created in the image and likeness of God. I mean, the Renaissance commentators got this right. He was. He was a proto humanist in that sense, but only embedded within these unitary communities that we can only achieve the flourishing of Florence within the Roman Church and within the Roman Empire. Now, of course, this is a very fanciful vision at this time, even at this time in Wall street, but Dante sees these concentric circles of unity as making possible the kind of civic, republican liberty that he values so much in his. In his city.
- [59:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think. Yeah, I appreciate you parsing that out because I think his politics. I think there's a lot of dangers there, Right? Oh, yeah, because you. Yeah, people can read him as like, he's a. He's a proto, you know, liberal. Right. He wants these things. A lot of times they read his. A lot of people read his critiques against the papacy, but not understand his support of the imperial power. And so, yeah, you have to understand that he has the certain balance.
- [60:23]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [60:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I mean, this is, I guess, you know, to use a historical phrase.
- [60:27]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [60:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
This is the duo, sunt.
- [60:28]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [60:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There are two. There's a temporal power and there's a spiritual power.
- [60:32]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [60:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And, yeah, he. And he has very particular thoughts on how these two should interact. And even. Even our current pope, His Holiness Pope Francis, has commented on Dante's views.
- [60:44]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [60:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Of how politics should work. And things like this. And even Pope Francis has made interesting moves on this. Right. He recently, going by memory, you know, clarified that the seat of Peter, by its nature, you know, has a certain level of temporal power to it. And so this, this conversation of how these two things come together, I think is. It can seem very antiquated to us, but I actually think it's. It's still very much alive today of how these powers actually interact. But Dante's is very complicated and really lends itself to a misread. So I appreciate you parsing that out.
- [61:17]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah. I mean, we have to be careful. He's not a proto liberal in the way that the 19th, 18th, 19th century are reading him as proto modern. In that sense, he is. Dante is a medieval. He's not a Renaissance character. He's a. He's a. He's an imperfect Thomas. He's a man of his. Of his time and place and his. He just wants things to be ordered. Right. He's very much in the Thomistic, Aristotelian tradition that the office of the wise man is to order and that these are how things are ordered. These are the two swords that are to rule. And the problem is each one is trying to grab the sword from the other one and are screwing things up. And Florence, my Florence is caught in the middle of it. And. Yeah, well, I laugh, right.
- [61:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Because the, the famous analogy of the two swords, that there's. There's a temporal sword and a spiritual sword, comes from Boniface viii.
- [62:06]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, right, right. Well, I mean, it predates him. I mean, like, he, he just raises it to practically a dogmatic level.
- [62:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. But I think that, you know, those, those. Yeah, the duo. Soon that there. There are two. There's also a beautiful letter that was written around the same time period, I think, in the 1100s, in which it talks about, you know, the church is like the sun and the state is like the moon. And these are the two. These are the two lights upon which man uses in his pilgrimage towards God. And just like our conversation on unity and charity, if these two luminaries, the sun and the moon, are at war with one another, if they're darkened, if man cannot see, he doesn't have the light that he needs, then the pilgrimage is difficult. The pilgrimage becomes very arduous. And so, no, I think Dante is very aware that the Christian walk, the call to theosis, the call to sanctification, this ascent that we see so clearly in the Divine Comedy, happens within a cosmos. It happens within an ordered whole. And we're just A part of it. And if the whole becomes disordered, it becomes very, very difficult for the part. And I think he sees this and sees this. I think he doesn't see it. He's suffering it, right? That's what's happening. He's writing this out of suffering.
- [63:20]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
And just as a side note, and this is sometimes difficult to explain to Catholics, that as long as there's been a Catholic clergy, there have been lay anti clericals. I mean that being anti clerical did not mean that you disbelieved in the hierarchical nature of the Church. It meant that you were really irritated that the local priest was getting so much burial bequests and adding onto his rectory. And so, and so you could be, for instance, against the Pope's political program and still remain very much a good Catholic. And so we have to, we have to help, you know, people to, to understand that, that anti clericalism is sort of part and parcel of, of the whole. We don't see it in America as much in American history because the, the clergy and laity have cooperated so well in, you know, for most American history. But in Europe it's, it's very, very common.
- [64:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So we see a soul kind of going back to the, the ninth ditch here of the eighth circle schism. So we see this soul that's down here and he is split from mouth to anus. And I think this is really somewhat surprising to us because Dante tells us this is Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Why what is going on here? Why, why is Muhammad in the section that punishes schism?
- [64:42]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Well, first of all, this is probably today the least politically correct canto for, for sure this is a canto that can cause a lot of, a lot of upset. But you, you have to first of all remember the, the absolute reality of, of Christian Islamic conflict in pre modern world, you know, as, as little as, as 300 years ago. I mean Muslims were at the very gates of, of Vienna that by Dante's time there had been the Crusades had been going on for about 150 years, almost 200 years at that time. But the Islamic aggression against the west had been going on for 700 years. And so this was a very deeply ingrained conflict. Now the surprise, as you, as you mentioned, is finding him presented as a figure of Dante surprises us with the figures that he picks. Right? I mean when we think of Cato in Purgatory in the future, when we think of the heretics, right, Epicurus and Farinata, these aren't what we think of as typical Medieval or even early Christian heretics. So here we have Muhammad as a symbol of religious schism. And it comes from a, a medieval idea which actually goes all the way back to St. John of Damascus, one of the first Christians to write against the last Father, the last patristic writer, tried to analyze this, tried to read the Quran. And if you read the Quran, a lot of things start jumping out like, okay, they like Jesus quite a bit, they like Mary a lot. They believe in the virgin birth. In fact, Muslims have a sort of a higher Mariology than most Protestants in my opinion. The. You have the idea that Jesus is actually the Messiah of the Jewish people. And so where did he get this idea? Muhammad was in a marginal area that if we know for sure that he came into contact with both Jewish and Christian. In fact, one of his advisors, a cousin, was a Christian priest. So he knew, he clearly knows the proto Magellan of James. He knows something that he calls the Gospel, probably Tatian's Diatessaron. And so a lot of ideas are coming, are in the air when he's writing. But then as you read on in the Quran, you start to get dissonances. God has no son, that God is absolutely one. That Jesus only appeared to die on the cross, that the Messiah would never been to undergo this sort of problematic death, this ignominious death. And so what we're getting hints of Jesus is less than the Father. You get gnostic instances, docetistic tendencies. And so what it, what it can kind of look like to a Christian in the 7th century or the 13th century, that this is some aberrant form of Christianity, that this is not sort of a singular new world religion coming out of nowhere. Islam had a context too. And so it was common to, and sort of legends started to spring about this, that, that he was a, a disgruntled priest, priest who was disappointed in being selected. There was even a story that had circulated that he was up for election to Pope. And in his disappointment, he split off from the church and started a whole new, started a whole new religion. And so that, and when you say, well, okay, well what that signifies is that Dati doesn't know too much about Islam. I don't think so. Because the next character we meet right next to him is Ali, who is the last of the rightly guided caliphs, who is the one whose death occasioned the great split that continues to this day in Islam between Sunni and Shia Muslims. And so he clearly knows that schism begets schism. I think that's what he's what he's telling us here. There's going to be an endless multiplication of sects based on this. But Dante continues to surprise us, putting unexpected people. I don't. The. The schismatics that he would have been most familiar with would have been the Greeks at this time. And he doesn't make a Greek Orthodox patriarch the subject of schism. I think that's for a couple reasons. That they knew that the Greeks shared a faith and that there were current efforts in 1274, all the way up to 1438, that were aggressively working for the cooperation between the Catholics and the Orthodox and for Dante's religious and political mission of unity. The Greeks needed to come back. The Roman Eastern Empire. The Roman Western Empire needed to get together and the Greek Orthodox needed to return to the submission of the papacy. Yeah.
- [69:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That seems to just fit his model of a cosmic order. Right. An ordering of the whole. And so that's a really interesting theory that you would not include, say, the Orthodox or any kind of Eastern Christian group there for political reasons, as more of an invitation to invite them back to the table. I like that. I like that theory a lot. It's also really fascinating that the last church, Father St. John Damascene, experienced Islam.
- [69:49]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right. So the last church, he was basically the prime minister in an Islamic territory. I mean, the. The Muslims, once they conquered, they had no skill in governing. And so it was the local Syriac and Greek Christian communities that they employed. That's how they learned about Aristotle. They apprenticed themselves to Syriac monks, translated Aristotle from Greek to Syriac, Syriac to Latin. Sorry, Syriac to Arabic and then Arabic back to Latin. Yeah.
- [70:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's a fascinating. It's a fascinating time in Church history, one that we're typically not terribly familiar with, also because in the west, we tended to think of someone like Augustine as the last Church father.
- [70:22]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [70:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Somewhere in, like, the four hundreds. Not Saint Jam. Saint John Damascene in the seven hundreds. And so having an early Church Father that's actually conversant with Islam, I think it's kind of a fascinating conversation. So, yeah, the schismatics, I mean, they. They have this clear contrapasso. I do think I like tailoring this to Dante's own particular view of things that he sees how damaging schism is simply to the community. And I like our tailoring of this to unity and love. Right. So I think it's a. It's a conversation that comes up a lot in Catholic apologetics, that Catholicism tends to have a very thick understanding of the connection between unity and charity. You know, so we can't just say, oh, we all love Jesus, but then we all believe different things. For the Catholic, that doesn't make sense. And so this is something that we're, I think we're constantly kind of tugging with when we talk about apologetics or, you know, some type of ecumenism. So let's look at the Canto 29, the 10th ditch of the 8th circle. Fascinating. This would be, you know, under our current theory, this would be maybe the most severe sin. And these are. What do we call these? I mean, these are the falsifiers, Right? These are. These are alchemists. These are counterfeiters. Again, like a counterfeiter, really, the guy who's making fake money is in a lower section of hell than the schismatics. So, I mean, this is. Again, so we have. Dante the poet is trying to teach us something here. And so, I mean, one thing too. Even before we get to. We're in Canto 29, but before we actually switch over to the falsifiers, there's this really fascinating section in which Dante's relation is in Hell.
- [72:01]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yes.
- [72:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
What do you think Dante the poet's trying to tell us here?
- [72:05]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Well, Dante never takes, never misses a point where he can make some sort of personal interjection, because not only is this our journey with Dante, this is also Dante the poet's, you know, journey as well. He is. He's settling a couple scores. He's making a couple, you know, broad, broad generalizations. But here it's this interesting part where he meets a relative. And the relative was not a nice guy. The relative was a bad guy. And Dante realizes that. And, but the problem is, for Dante, the. The early 14th century Italian Florentine, is that this family member has died unavenged. Sins of vendetta. He has not been. And the honor, the code of the time was that somebody, maybe not Dante himself, though Dante appears to feel some sort of personal compunction that he hasn't been involved in something like this, that this was considered absolutely normative at the time. And the, the problem then, which, which relates back to the, to the other Canto, It's. It's very important that almost always we get a Christian example, a religious example, I should say we get a secular example, like Curio giving false counsel to Caesar, which started civil war, and then he. Moscow a local example of, of discord. So Mosca, whose name means the fly, and the fly gets in the ointment and he screws up everything. And it's him that gave the Initial council to. For the Florentine families in 1215 to go to war, creating the Guelphs and the Ghibellines in the first place, creating the riven city which are the prototypes for things like Romeo and Juliet's, the Montagues and the Capulets in Verona. And so I think that that leads, that leads into it, that, that, that you have now. We've go, we go from universal religious, universal secular, particular Florentine to particular family now. And he's. And so Dante's struggling with himself. Dante the poet, Dante the pilgrim too. What should I do in this situation when I get back? Should I be thinking of avenging this person that I know is an evil, terrible, horrible man, but he's our evil, terrible, horrible man. And, and we don't, I mean, in sort of an Anglo American society, we've gotten away from the idea of vendetta so significantly that it's difficult to understand how powerful this is. And I draw an example that Dante is trying to transmute the values, values that are not always very healthy in his own society. And one of the big ones that he's trying to transmute is the Courtney Love tradition, right? Dante, much like Augustine, is in love with love, but you've got to love rightly. And love for family is a good and important thing. And so maybe avenging is a good and important thing, but how to stop the cycle of vengeance in that way? So Dante gives us a glimpse of a personal struggle and conscience here with this. And it's an example of his maturing conscience.
- [75:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's really fascinating because on the, on the podcast, right before venturing into Dantes and for Lent, we are reading through the Greek plays. And the triad that we just finished was Aeschylus's Oresteia, which talks about Orestes having to be a Blood Avenger, having that duty laid upon him. Unfortunately, the person who killed his father, father happens to be his mother. And so Escalus uses this as a catalyst to kind of show a certain maturation of justice. How justice is supposed to move from the Blood Avenger model, which is very familial based. Right. It's, it's the right. It's not the police that go and solve this. It's you. You need to go do this to a more procedural justice. It's, it's fascinating to me that we're getting this play in what, the 400s that talks about this maturation of justice. And now here with Dante in the 1200s, we're getting the exact same problem which Might show that there's maybe been a little bit of a backtrack with civilization. Right. There's some kind of stepping back into maybe an older problem.
- [76:32]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Well, I mean, we see it throughout the medieval the Knights, the Lays of the Knights, the Song of Roland and things like that. The vendetta is still a very live option in a sort of debased modern form. We see it with the Godfather movies and the Mafia. It is still very much a part of even pseudo Christianized societies because it's incredibly natural. The sentiment with which we seek to inflict vengeance is natural. It's confirmed by the Old Testament, and it's only challenged by the New Testament. But notice how the New Testament, how the scripture, the Christian tradition does it. It doesn't say that. It says that revenge. When I take revenge upon someone, and I'm not the power to do such a thing that I do wrong. Not that vengeance itself is bad. Vengeance itself is a virtue, Thomas says, except that how is that vengeance to be accomplished? It's to be accomplished through God. God will be the one who will. But vengeance will be accomplished. And it's a good thing that. That vengeance will be accomplished. When we try to accomplish vengeance, though, it happens, it's almost impossible for us to avoid a disordered response.
- [77:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's fast. That's fascinating. Yeah. Okay, so kind of rooting us back into this ditch, right? Kendo 29, the tenth ditch of the eighth circle. So again, we see these falsifiers, we see alchemists, we see counterparts, fitters. The contrapaso here is kind of interesting, right? They're sick. And I mean, when I say sick, they are really sick, right? I mean, this is, you know, I wrote in my notes, like, this is like bodily rot. I mean, they. They are falling apart. I mean, some of the descriptions, you know, his. His descriptive words here really kind of, I think, show us a. He's trying to paint a very particular picture for us. So what do we think, though, about. You know, the contrapassos all have, like, a pedagogy. So what is the relationship between sickness and this kind of bodily rot? And being a falsifier, like being a.
- [78:39]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Counterfeit, it's sort of a spiritual leprosy that desiccates the body from inside. And so that's what's happening to the soul with this falsification is that you eventually start to convince yourself of your own lies. And so you're very. The thing that makes you a man is being. Is scabbing over. I mean, you're constantly Scratching at it. And it's. And it never really heals. And what you're doing is essentially spreading the disease and making it worse. So that's how I read the contrapasso here.
- [79:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I think the contrapasso is interesting because in the next canto, it takes on a few different elements that we have to. It continues to develop, which is interesting, I think, maybe to use an example, because I think he's the most clear. In Canto 30, we'll see Master Adam or Master Adamo. And I think that one way to look at that is, you know, he's a counterfeiter. And in certain ways he becomes a counterfeit of himself. Right. Man becomes something fake. So in this sickness, it kind of robs him of his bodily integrity. And so it's interesting, I think, that you could. You can play that out a little bit, that these falsifiers through the means of sickness are somewhat becoming false versions of themselves. Right. They're not. They're not whole. And so it's kind of a. I think it's a real brilliant use of sickness. But you kind of have to see the depravity of the sickness that he does. I think, to show the rationale of the contrapasso.
- [80:12]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah. If we can go to Master Adam. I mean, that's. He's getting dropsy, right? I mean, he's get. Which is a disease. That's edema. And so he's becoming overweight and overweight and constantly thirsty with a thirst that can't be slaked. And so what is he doing? He's polluting the body politic, right. With his. With his counterfeiting. He's introducing distrust. He's introducing. He's destroying the possibility of legitimate exchange between people within. And all. For to glut himself, which can never be saved is. That's one of the issues with the pursuit of wealth in all of the ancient writers, is that you never know. There's never enough to act.
- [80:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I do appreciate that Dante's kind of rationale behind these sins really does push us into understanding how certain sins are an attack on the common good and an attack on our neighbor in ways I'm not sure we always appreciate. What about alchemy, though, right? So in Canto 29, he talks to two alchemists, like, what. What is alchemy and why is it a sin and a sin that merits being all the way down here in the eighth circle?
- [81:20]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, it's difficult to. Alchemy is a capacious term in the Middle Ages. I mean, There were. There were saints that were interested in alchemy. St. Albert the Great was interested in alchemy. And if pursued like St. Albert did, or Roger Bacon, which is basically looking for principles in the natural world that can be used for. For good purposes, then it's morally neutral. I mean, it's just simply. It's what's later going to be called science. What Dante and I think he's. He's channeling Thomas here is when we're. When the alchemist finds that they're not going to get. Which is the. The target of many of them, at least in the popular mind, was, you know, turning base metals into gold. Just like with divination, almost invariably they're going to turn to demons in order to. In order to achieve this. And. And demons can. They do have the potential to rearrange natural things in such a way as to appear to be creating real, genuine gold, which also is going to have an effect on not only the individual spiritual state of the. The alchemist himself, but is going to introduce a new type of disorder, a demonic disorder into the community.
- [82:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That is fascinating. I. My mind just immediately goes to our own techne, to our own modern techne. Right. That tends to be at times so perverse and so inhuman. I think this is too. Isn't this like one of the basic premises of C.S. lewis's science fiction trilogy, right, that there's a. There's a relationship between a disordered science and scientists that are in league with demons that becomes so perverse and disordered to the natural order of things?
- [83:06]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
I mean, when you see. Look how the tradition developed this. One of the greatest sinners in western history is Dr. Faustus. And what is he but an alchemist at heart that leads to the invocation of demons because he's looking for power over. Over the natural world. And that's. I think that would be very much in the tradition of this canto and.
- [83:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, very good. Yeah. So let's. Let's just jump to canto 30 then, as we've been talking about, which really kind of introduces Master Adama. This is the 10th ditch of the 8th circle. Falsifiers continued. So one thing that's interesting here is around line 25 or so, there's a new contrapasso that's kind of introduced and it has actually there. Actually we actually get a host of new details which I think is kind of fascinating about what's going on here. So one, there are madmen running around that seem to be slightly distinct, a slightly distinct sinner. From those suffering of the disease. Or at least this is a disease of the mind, right? Maybe there's some tethering that we could do there, but there's violence that occurs. So now we see souls in this ditch are being violent towards one another. So that adds to the contrapasso. And then even towards the end of this we find out that they're trying to move. So I think it's Master Tomo says, you know, I haven't moved an inch in a hundred years, right, because he, like you said, he's, he's this bloated Jabba the Hutt looking math human and he can't move. So what. It's really, I guess my first question here as this kind of contrapasso continues to develop. I'm really intrigued by the idea that there's madness in hell. So there's. Part of me likes this and part of me doesn't. So maybe you help me through my own conversion.
- [84:50]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
I like, I like. Let me start with the first point that you made, which I think is really good, that the movement, right, the movement is starting to slow down as we get to the bottom of hell until it's eventually going to stop entirely. And in the medieval model that's so well described by C.S. lewis and discarded image, right, God is the first mover and the things that are closest to him move most perfectly and most harmoniously. And as we get further and further away from the prime mover, we have the anti prime mover. It's just the, the, the frozen in ice, frozen in mobile. We're going to see that with the giants in the next, in the next Kanto. And so I think that's part, that's part of it here in terms of the madness. It's I think of back in, when Dante confronts the animals, the bestia sansa pace, the beast without peace. That, that, that it becomes. Remember that so many times in the tradition you say, well, the human humanity is the only organism in the entire universe that can either look up to God or down towards the beasts. Either the beasts are looking down, the angels are looking up. And so we make ourselves through sin into beastial. And that's, that's been a sort of a light motif through a bunch of different, a bunch of different Cantos. And there's also a poetic progression here. We have gone from the heights of bovidian metamorphosis in 24, 25, one of the most beautiful rhetorical cantos in 26. And all of a sudden things, the wheels are starting to come off here until we're now confronted with sinners that are rooting around, running around like feral pigs. And that's. And so there's a movement in the Italian too. The poetry is getting rough on purpose. Dante is hanging up his alto ingenio, his high genius, his style Dolce steel. And he is. He's trying to remember Dante. The. The pilgrim is trying to describe progressive horridness. And. And at this time, it's difficult. It's difficult to even see the order anymore in hell. It's become so dark and so cold and so noisy and so awful that. That the analogy he gives is. Is one of. Is one of madness. So let me ask you what. What is the discomfort you see with. With madness in hell?
- [87:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I appreciate many things you said. I appreciate the. The comment on movement. I appreciate the comment that things are becoming a little chaotic, because that's how I feel. In Kanto 29, we kind of knew what was going on.
- [87:19]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Okay? This is.
- [87:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
This is the contrapassa. They're sick. And Kanto 30, like, random things start happening, and random things don't happen in the circles of hell. That's not a thing that happens. So what? Well, one of them is here with the mad imposters. And maybe this is like, what degree that you read this madness. There's a part of me that likes it insofar as it seems analogous to the disease. Right. So we have diseased bodies, like Master Adamo, but now we have diseased minds, and so they're suffering a certain madness. I have a question about whether they represent a different type of sinner, because usually we've seen this before, like in the forest of suicides. You. You primarily have the trees, the suicides, but then you also have. What were they? Profligates who have had a violent destruction of their own property that are suffering a different contrapasso inside the same circle and are kind of intermingling here. There's a similar analogy, but I'm not sure exactly how to parse out how the mad ones are different. And then my. My question, my pushback that I become slightly uncomfortable with is the idea of insanity in hell. Because if you really have lost your intellectual function, then are you really suffering the contrapasso? And so that's something I would have like. So if you've really become, quote unquote mad, then how is the contrapasso supposed to be actually punishing you if you're not really aware of it? If that makes sense.
- [88:41]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, no, that does make sense. I can see where you're coming. And so he gives us these similes, right, to classical stories. The madness of Hekuba, and she sees her daughter sacrifice and her son murdered. Hecuba, sort of like this classical example of how much a human mind can take before it. Before it finally breaks. Because, I mean, we always. We need to be careful about this, right? This is a sort of a common thing. Oh, you know, ex sinner. Well, Hitler was insane. That's why. That's a terrible thing. So Hitler was absolutely sane, otherwise you absolve him of the guilt that he assuredly incurred for those things. And so I don't really. I don't really have an answer to that. I think that's a good. That's a good point. Point. I think he's being. It's being used here to show what humanity looks like. So. So things are moving very fast, like you say. And. And when I think of sort of the Boethian world, right, as we get further away from God, things are moving faster and faster. And what looks like chaos to us is not really chaos. Everything is foreseen within the providence of God, Even this first furthest spot away from God's. God's notional presence in. In the medieval model. And that. And that madness is an apt way to. To try to. So I suppose I wouldn't read it as literal madness, but the acts of mad men, that's how I would do it. But, yeah, it's a good point.
- [90:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, I mean, that is the question, like, because you read that and he doesn't quite explain, like, to what degree that madness has taken root. So I. Trying to. I'm just trying to root that in that contrapasso. What about Sinon? We've mentioned him a few times. He comes in at, like, 116. So again, this goes back to the Trojan horse narrative. Now, for those. So you just mentioned, you know, Hecuba, that is famously Hector's mother. So those of us who read through the Iliad together, you might remember her character, if I remember right. Yeah, you're right. She becomes like the famous classical example of just, like, breaking and becoming insane. And I think a lot of times her contrast is Hector's wife, right, who actually tries to hold it together, even having to witness, you know, Odysseus. This is another reason I don't like Odysseus, right, Having little Styanax tossed off the walls of Troy, right? Hector's son. So. But here we go back to the Trojan horse narrative, which, again, we've kind of, I think, parsed out why this is so deeply ingrained into Dante's mind, right as he looks at Rome and Rome being, you know, basically a colony of, of Troy. But this narrative though, is not in the Iliad. This is an interim narrative between the Iliad and the Odyssey. So who is this character?
- [91:30]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Well, Sinat is. Once again, we go back to the, the Aeneid. I mean, the narrative of the Trojan Horse comes from Virgil. It may have come from earlier stories, but Virgil is the one. Just like we see Dante sort of retconning, sort of remaking classical stories. Virgil did that too for his, for his own purposes. And so Sinon is. This is another trick of Ulysses, right? Ulysses says go into the Trojan camp, pretend that we were going to use you as a human sacrifice. And in order to. Because we can't leave unless we make a human sacrifice, Sinon sneaks in, in Detroit and convinces them that the only way to end this war is to accept the religious gift of the Trojan Horse. This is another thing sacrilege. This is another thing that shocks readers is that people in hell are punished for their sacrilege to the pagan gods because in their terms they should have known. If they had known the true God, they would have done sacrilege against the true God as well. So they're punished for their sacrilege against what they conceive to be God. And so Sinan is one of the worst. He's the one that enables Odysseus to bring off the, the ruse of the Trojan Horse. And then it's he and Master Adam who are just attacking one another. The contrapasso is sinners attacking each other in this one, just like they introduced such dissension into their, into their own societies, both through that the awful lot, the sacrilegious lying that Sinon does, or through counterfeiting. And sometimes it's hard for people. We're near the bottom of hell. And like you said, I think you're pointing out, like what is the deal with counterfeit as being this deep? And counterfeiting destroys the social trust. The debasing of the coinage leads to cycles of economic recession that are absolutely awful. Another name for counterfeiting today might be called inflation. And so when we see the effects of inflation and the debilitating effects of inflation on this is what's happening when, when societies are being subject to, to counterfeiting that the, that their coins the very, the very thing that makes civilized human life the means of exchange which leads to rising trust and increased poverty and eventually horrible community dissension at least to the destruction of societies. Both of them are. That's what Dante is pointing for. Both Sinan and Master Adam were complicit for their own goods, for their own ends, in destroying whole societies.
- [94:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think one thing I really appreciate about Dante the Teacher is that he forces us to understand the effects of our sin upon the community. Yes. That sin is never private, even if it isn't. And obviously you can move from one extreme to the other, but even if it's not, you know, attacking the bonds of trust with. Inside of society itself, even when you debase yourself and there's no other person involved, you're still a member of the society. Right. You're still having to participate in this. And I think that's one way to really look at the architecture of hell, particularly rooted in love, is that there's a deep communal aspect to Dante about how we actually come and live together. He just seems to be particularly sensitive to these certain sins that on their face we would say, well, that can't be that big a deal. But that actually destroys the social bonds. He just seems to be incredibly sensitive to this.
- [95:01]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
We have this sort of libertarian dream today that there's such things as victimless crimes or a sin that doesn't hurt anyone. And those are massive laws. Every sin hurts not only the person involved, but has ripples out. Tolstoy's short story, the Forged Banknote is like this. Oh, I'm. It's. It's exactly about counterfeiting. And it says, oh, what is? I'm going to print up a couple 20 ruble notes. And Tolstoy goes through following the ruble notes as they destroy life after life after life from this victimless crime that then was perpetrated. And so, yes, exactly. Dante is reminding us of that. And that's something that modern society needs to be reminded of very, very significantly.
- [95:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You know, when we were crossing the wrathful and so we had the boatmen and the wrathful are all vi. It's another. It's another passage in which the damned are fighting against one another. Right. They're part of their own punishment. There's a section there in which Dante sees one of the damned dragged back off the boat and back into, you know, this kind of hellish pit of souls. It's interesting because it's actually Dante, the poet that tells us that he still relishes that moment to this day, which is a really fascinating line, because he's. If it's not the poet, that means he's actually already gone through his whole journey. So this is. This is supposedly the Dante that has been, you know, sanctified to a certain degree, or at least some type of maturation of going through purgatory and paradise. And also we see that Virgil, you know, at certain points will praise Dante for seeing, you know, he's kind of moving from pity to. To actually understanding the contrappassos, that these souls being punished as part of God's justice. And that's a good. That's an actual good thing. So what's the distinction here? Because Dante the pilgrim is watching Master Adam and Sinon fight, and Virgil seems to be disappointed in him. Right. This is line 131. He seems to be disappointed that Dante's enjoying the fight between the damned souls. Like what. What are we missing?
- [97:09]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Well, first of all, these two are masters of invective. They have been inventing and hurling insults at each other and will continue to do. And so this is an. A very popular poetic style called tensome, where you insult each other back and forth. All right? I mean, sometimes, you know, guys will do this sometimes to see who can have the sickest burn on the other guy. And Virgil's disappointed because this is sort of a. Sort of a youthful form of poetry that Dante, even in later works, will say, I moved past. I shouldn't. I know I shouldn't do this. This type of thing anymore. It's just so fun. It's just so entertaining. And even there, even. Even if it is recognized as in fun. How does he say it at the end? Do not forget I'm always at your side, should it fall out again, that fortune take you where people are in wrangles such as this or the wish to hear such things is base. And so I think of that so much today. People love this stuff. They love to watch people fighting. They love to watch people litigating against one another. They love to watch the flame wars on the. On the Internet. And they get glee out of this. And it's almost an alienated glee where people are lurkers and just waiting for. Just waiting for the. The latest. The latest fights to start. And they take pleasure in that. And what. What. I. I don't think it's a what. What really hurts Dante and Virgil's rebuke is it's not necessarily a sinful thing as much as it is a base and ignoble thing. And Dante is a. Is a. Is. Is very interested in that. So we're all, you know, fare la bella figora. We have to. We have to. We have to do things certainly well in terms of morally. Morally. But we also have to do things in a good and fine and noble and upright way. And wasting your time with wrangles such as this is beneath you, Dante. And he's getting stung. So he's not. I mean, earlier, yes, he was having morally wrong pictures, morally wrong responses to the sinners. Now Virgil the great stylist is helping to hone Dante's character in a better way.
- [99:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I appreciate you parsing that out. Yeah, I think of that sometimes, often with sin. The Great Books podcast, we're very active on X, the new Twitter. And if you post something that's like, hey, you should read the Iliad, it's a beautiful work. Here's a guide for you. It gets like 2,500 impressions or something. But if I post something like, hey, all these new Reddit books are garbage and you need to read the Iliad, then it like skyrockets in popularity. Like anything that has, like, conflict or insults in it, et cetera. It grasps people attention so much more. So I appreciate you kind of showing the humanity of this section because I think we have to, we have to know these things because we're watching Dante the pilgrim mature, because hopefully his own maturity, then we can glean lessons from that for our own souls and how we need to actually grow.
- [100:15]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, absolutely.
- [100:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So let's look at Canto 31, our last Canto of the afternoon. This is a kind of an interim canto, right? This is the pit of the giants. This is the journey into the ninth circle. So who are these giants? Right? He thinks they're towers at first, but they're actually giants chained into this pit that goes down into the final. Into the ninth circle of complex fraud. But who are these giants that he sees?
- [100:45]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
They. So these are preparatory for the final descent, to see. To see Lucifer. And so they're, they're sort of like a, a guard of dishonor around, around Lucifer. And when, when we look at them, it's, it's once again, it's very multivalent. You have references back to Genesis, right? With the Nephilim, the sons of God and the daughters of men. References back to people like the Philistines and Goliath, but also to the classical tradition, always interweaving revelation with the, the classical tradition and figures like the Titans, or figures like the, the giants who were sort of a second generation of God born of Poseidon, who attempted to, to assault Olympus one day. They tried to take over from the Olympian gods and all of that Dante ties together in this very sophisticated Canto that ties it together with Nimrod and the mighty hunter before the Lord who tried. Who was the one who coordinated the at least part of the construction of the Tower of Babel. So all of this interweaving is taking place here, but it's also homely how Dante, you know, refers to it. He refers to the Song of Roland. He refers to the towers in Italian cities. And if you've ever been to Tuscany, particularly Bologna, the garrison, the tower which he talks about in this canto has been leaning in the center of. And I've gone there and I've looked up and done the exact same thing Dante did 700 years ago. The towers are symbols of pride. They were. They were built by families, and these medieval cities would have dozens and dozens of towers in them, and they would serve as. As bases of operations to control various sections of the city. So once again, harkening back to the ribbon city, the. The pride, who could build the highest tower, who can control the most neighborhood. And so they're compared to. To that. It's. So it's. It is an analogy. Analogy to arrogance, which we're finally going to get the consummation in pride with Luther. But yet it is an arrogance that is impotent. They're buried up to their waists and they can't really move much, much at all. Sometimes they can't even speak. So a lot of things going on in this canto Dante, it's. I mean, he's just waxing in his. In his power. It's just interweaving these stories and these. That delight us with all of these different references to biblical and classical history.
- [103:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, It's a really beautiful Canto. I actually really enjoy it. Yeah. So just kind of stacking on some of the things that you said. Yeah. A lot of people might not know that according to tradition, it was Nimrod that led the construction of the Tower of Babel. That's why we actually see him babble in this Kanto. Right.
- [103:42]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
He.
- [103:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He can either speak, no one understands what he's saying, and he can't understand anybody.
- [103:47]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [103:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So he's kind of stuck in this. His arrogance has now kind of stuck him for all eternity in this. But him being a giant, I think, is. Is somewhat fascinating. It takes us off guard. You know, you mentioned the Nephilim. You know, that's a fascinating theory. But also, I think another thing too, for those who. Of us who are not as familiar with Greek mythology, the use of the Giants here, I think is really brilliant by Dante. And in certain ways they serve as pagan analogues to demons. Right? So these, these Titans tried to overthrow Zeus. And so in a certain way they're a secular, not secular, but they're a pagan analog to the demons. And you already alluded to this, but just to kind of make this point is that, you know, when we see Satan in the ninth circle, when you finally see him, we'll see how Dante has been building this up, that then he becomes kind of a zenith of these two traditions of both the demonic and the Titan, the gigantic. He becomes kind of the zenith of this itself. And so I think the first time I read this I wasn't quite as familiar with the Titans. I didn't understand how they served as examples for rebellion. And I think sometimes particularly first time readers would get too caught up on trying to read this as is Dante running interference for Zeus or what does he mean here? But a lot of times Zeus kind of serves as an analog for a natural understanding of God. It's what you said earlier. The best example of this I think has been that the blasphemy example in Hell was against Zeus. And I think sometimes people get tripped up on that. But Dante's not running interferes for Zeus. He sees that, as you said, as this is a person, a finite creature seeing what he thinks is divinity and rebelling against that. And as Thomas states, religion is a natural virtue and so man naturally desires to give God his due. And so you can use then these examples in paganism, when they kick out the recalcitrant against the divine, as analogs to the true Christian understanding. And so here the giants are pagan analogues to the demons that rebelled against God.
- [106:00]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yes, I mean, it's interesting what isn't in the Divine Comedy and, and we kind of miss it because in a certain sense the Greek gods are on every page of this, but they're not there. They're not like physically anywhere. There's no Zeus, there's no Juno. Their names, their associations, their stories are there, but there's this sort of divine absence and what makes it there. Dante redeems the classical tradition by making all of these sort of characters like Cerberus and Charon and the River Styx and all these things, and the giants as his stand ins for the demons. But the gods are not there, they're gone. And so he knows those are false gods and so he doesn't try to bring them into hell at all. But sort of the effects of the pagan tradition are retained Dante does not adopt the patristic idea that the pagan gods were themselves the demons, which is. I've always found that very interesting. So when you read City of God and things like that, well, oh, it's pretty clear that Zeus and the other gods and the gods of any other ancient culture, they're just demons parading as. As gods. This is a really bold move on Dante's part. He says, no, they represent the natural religious yearning that somebody, I don't know, like Gregory the Great would talk about when he says, you know, should we burn down. Should we take down the pagan temples in England now, sprinkle some holy water in them and start saying massive. Because it represents a natural good religious impulse, and now we're directing it correctly. And so the divine. The absence of the Greek gods is a powerful thing here, and only sort of their intermediaries remain as monuments in hell. But. Yeah, that's right. What you said is that that natural religiosity I think, is definitely there and it's really impressive for Dante. It's quite original, I think, for him.
- [107:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I'm glad you pointed it out, because I do. I do think that people draw a contrast between Dante's use of Greek mythology and a lot of the commentary by St. Augustine. Some of that, and maybe it's not historically as sound as I want it to be. Some of that, I've always chalked up to the fact that St. Augustine's still in a culture in which those gods are being. Still being used in some real way. Right. Whether it's just. Even. Even if it's like a superstitious way, um, they're still actually being sacrificed to, prayed to, et cetera, which, by the time you get to Dante, they've been completely neutered of. Of any type of actual cult. And so it seems like he's able to gut them and then reuse them as some kind of natural analog. What do you do, though, with Pluto?
- [108:39]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, that's. I mean, so he's. So the. The dis. The characters things. I think it's because it plays such a big role in the underworld of Virgil that he's got to be some sort of character in that. But I mean, it's. It's Zeus. Zeus and, And. Or, sorry, Jupiter and Juno that are. That are the ones that are going to be the most focused. And I think. Yeah, you have a point there. The same thing happens in the later prophetical books where the prophets begin to identify the gods of the. The Canaanites as. As demons as well. So it has a very legitimate pedigree. But the. This is also that parallel tradition, and it parallels, I think, what's happening in. With Thomas and with the universities. It says, okay, we've sort of purified the pagan tradition. Chesterton talks about this, how we can have, you know, cherubs on. On Valentine's now without, you know, worrying about a relapse into idolatry. We've sort of domesticated that now that we've to use another patristic image now that we've shaved the Egyptian slave girls and paired their fingernails. Now that we can. Now that we can take them to wife, we can take the wisdom of the Egyptians and the wisdom of the. And find out what's true in them, find out what was oriented towards God and put it on the right path. And that's, I think that's one of the greatest parts of the medieval period.
- [109:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Who gives the slave girl analogy?
- [110:00]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Jerome. Jerome. Jerome talks about this. It's in the same part of despoiling the Egyptians. And so the allegorical meaning of despoiling the Egyptians is taking the wisdom because it's. Since all truth is one, and since, you know, God is truth, therefore whatever's true in those, we can take and we can use, we can domesticate to our. To our use. We can. We can baptize Aristotle now that we've. That we've domesticated the pagans.
- [110:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. Yeah. No, I really appreciate you parsing that. I think that helps because, again, I do think a lot of people can become kind of tripped up when looking at how much Dante, the poet, he uses Greek mythology, these creatures, particularly. Like, sometimes, you know, I'm sure we have Protestants that have joined us to listen for Lent, and sometimes that can be very alien to them, very foreign to them.
- [110:46]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Right.
- [110:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And so, again, he's not making, you know, his. His claim here in the Inferno is not one of eschatology trying to tell us exactly what's happening in hell, but rather it's. It's a moral lesson. Right. What is the soul? What's its desires? He's kind of stripping bare the things that we love. I think he's showing us the ugly reality of sin and what it transforms us into. Right. I think, you know, most recently, Master Adam tends to be the most grotesque understanding of that.
- [111:12]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Yeah, no, absolutely. That, though Dante the poet doesn't let us off easy when he, you know, turns to the reader, he breaks the fourth wall and says, I was really there and I saw this. And how are we supposed to respond to that? That passage that's, that's, that makes it very interesting.
- [111:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's true. Anything else kind of, as we kind of wrap up here, kind of moving to the final stretch, anything that we've talked about or anything we've missed or you want to go back to just.
- [111:35]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
A final note on this one with Nimrod and Babel. Language is so important to Dante, and I think that he considers that one of the greatest tragedies in human history was the breaking of the common language. And he tries to do his impression, his really bad impression of what he thinks Hebrew sounds like in here, because he may, though he says something different in the convivio, that Hebrew was the original language, the language of God. And so that somehow poetry and language and even the vernacular language can be a vehicle through which properly purified, just like Thomas says, Augustine, or, sorry, Aristotle, properly purified can be a step up on the, on the ladder to God. So too can poetry and beauty. No.
- [112:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Wonderful. You know, so, you know, next week we're going to continue in our journey. We're going to look at the ninth circle. That circle can be very surprising for people who aren't familiar with it. It's. It runs contrary, I think, to some of our kind of like, popular understandings of Hell. And we'll kind of have this kind of, you know, overall view of, you know, that's our last leg. I mean, last week was our. Our last week, you know, moving through Dante's Inferno proper, any kind of just like words of wisdom or what to look for as we move it to the ninth circle.
- [112:50]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
The look, I. The thing that usually strikes people is, is how cold and motionless it is, and which is, you know, contrary to popular images of, of. I always love how big. You can actually calculate how big. Dante gives us clues to calculate how tall Lucifer actually is. And he's big, but he is absolutely, at the end of the day, utterly powerless. If you start at the top of the universe with power, omnipotence, you get to absolute impotence at the bottom. And that, I think that that shocks people. Dante doesn't give a lot of space to. All these people are trying to make excuses for what they did. And it was their wills, it was their corrupted wills that drew them away from the good. It was their refusal to accept grace. And Lucifer is the final sign and symbol of that. And then just like all of the three parts of the Divine Comedy end with a view of the immovable stars, right, the fixed constellations that Dante, even at the very bottom of Hell, continues to give Us hope through this horrible ordeal.
- [114:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, there's a lot of things about how he depicts Satan that when I was a first time reader, really surprised me and almost in certain ways I was almost disappointed in this kind of zenith and what you're expecting. And I had to kind of reread it to understand, you know, what's the lesson there that Dante the poet has for us. Well, Dr. Pridlo, I greatly appreciate you kind of being with us today and working through the Inferno. Greatly appreciate all of your insights. I think you've helped us tremendously. Where can people find out more about you and your work?
- [114:36]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
Well, they can look at some of the books that I've written. I've written a book on, on Thomas Aquinas that in a certain sense talks about Dante. I've given talks where I examine the person of, of Thomas Aquinas in Dante. I examine Ulysses, I compare Ulysses to Thomas Aquinas. You can find that on, on YouTube, on the Angelica on the Thomistic Institute site, if you'd like to go, if you'd like to pursue that further. But I always happy to talk about Dante. It's my favorite thing, him and Thomas, if I could talk about them all day. So thank you very much for having me.
- [115:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, we'll have to have you back on to talk about those two. And people should know that after Dante's Inferno, we're going to go back into the Greek plays and then later on we will pick up our studies into Plato and Dr. Prudlow will join us for that to discuss the Euthyphro. So you'll be back on in. We very much look forward to that.
- [115:29]
Dr. Donald Prudlow
I do too. Don't forget about Purgatory and Paradiso sometime. You can't just leave people in hell.
- [115:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, so our current theory, I would have to play all of our cards right now. But our current theory, even though the Sin the Great Books podcast is this chronological move through the great books so we can see this great conversation, we do plan on taking breaks to read things together for Lent. And so our current understanding is that we will pick up Purgatory next year for Lent and we'll actually continue this journey. Those who want to can read it beforehand, but we'll come back together next year and continue the comedy. All right, everyone. Next week we will finish the Inferno with these last couple cantos. We'll explore the Ninth Circle Complex Fraud with Mr. Evan Amato. Please visit thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have written guides, including one to Dante's Inferno. You can visit us on Twitter or X, YouTube and Facebook and visit our Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters and we will see you next week. Thank you.