← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend, the Great Books Podcast, we finish Dante's Inferno by exploring the frozen hell of the Ninth Circle, punishing those guilty of treachery or complex fraud. We are joined by our friend in Italy, Mr. Evan Amato, who has a strong presence online sharing cultural intrigues and wisdom from the great books. Evan is a really excellent writer, a really excellent cultural commentator. I always enjoy my conversations with him and it's been great to see his presence grow. Online. We discuss, for example, why ice makes for an excellent analog for the nature of evil. We discuss one of the most brutal scenes in the entire Divine Comedy. And we discuss what Dante the poet is trying to teach us with his unique depiction of Satan, the father of lies. Also, real quick, thank you to all of you who have joined us. We've had thousands join us to read Dante's Inferno for Lent. Today is not the last day. We're going to finish the book today and then the next two weeks we'll have some special episodes just kind of reflecting on lessons learned from Dante's Inferno. So please join us for those but today, join us for an excellent conversation as we explore the frozen wastes of the ninth Circle of Hell. Welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I am a husband, father of five, and serve as Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We are recording on a beautiful morning here in rural Oklahoma. If you're new to Ascend, we're a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. Check out our podcasts on the Iliad, the Odyssey, Aeschylus, Oresteia and more. If you formed a small group to read Dante's Inferno for Lent, keep that small group going. There are lots of good texts that you can read with Ascend. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have several guides that help you through the great books. Today we have our seventh and final episode on Dante's Inferno. It has been a joy to learn from Dante the Poet alongside all of you and we finished the Inferno with a conversation on the 9th Circle, Cantos 32 through 34 to help guide us through this final circle of Hell. We are joined by Mr. Evan Amato who is present and joining us from Italy. He runs an excellent account on X filled with spaces, videos and posts about the great books, beauty and culture. Welcome Evan, how are you doing?
- [02:34]
Evan Amato
Hello.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Hello.
- [02:35]
Evan Amato
It is a pleasure to be with you my friend.
- [02:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's very happy to have you back. Our conversation that we had last time, which I believe was on book five of the Odyssey, was probably one of my favorite conversations that I had on Odyssey. And it's interesting because on X, Odysseus denying immortality. I feel like about every three weeks, for some reason that goes viral again and people start having debates about why that happens. So I really appreciate you joining us for that.
- [03:01]
Evan Amato
Well, thank you. You served it up to me with a silver platter by allowing me to chat about that book. For some reason, people can't get over the fact that a man would turn down eternity with a goddess to go back to his own home and brave, you know, the trying ocean seas and all that to get back. But alas, he did and we got a book, a poem, I should say out of it. So, yeah, it was a great conversation.
- [03:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, very good. That's one of the reasons that the great books are great, because we can return to them over and over again. So tell us a little bit about what you have going on. You have a substack. I think you have a coffee business. Like, every time you turn around, I think you're starting something new. You're growing like crazy on X. So tell us what you got going on.
- [03:40]
Evan Amato
Yeah, so I run two different substacks, that being the culture critic email list and Invictus as well, which years basically, practical wisdom from the great men of history. And so doing those two things and then riding on X when possible, because those have kind of taken up the majority of my time, of course, in the background running Imperium coffee, which is just kind of my excuse to actually get out of the digital realm for a bit and, you know, roast something that I can actually know where it comes from, that I can touch it, I can taste it, I can smell, has been very, very helpful. And then, yeah, apart from all that, just living here, Northern Italy, and trying to go and explore on the different weekends and just make the most of it while I'm here.
- [04:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, that's beautiful. I appreciate your work. You do good work. So tell us a little bit about your love of Dante. So you've done a lot of good spaces on X about Dante. Like, how did you come to appreciate and love Dante? As a teacher?
- [04:42]
Evan Amato
That's a great question. I sometimes jokingly say, jokingly, not jokingly, I say that the two things that made me become Catholic were the Blessed Virgin Mary and Dante. And very much so. Reading his work just opened up a whole world to me. And I think Dante more than anyone else showed me the depth of what you can get out of the classics. So he. As you well know, there's so many different ways to read Dante, and we've hosted a space on this before in the past as well. But just the sense that every single time you go back to the text, you get something more out of it. That is something that I just. It's one thing that Dante is a master of, and it's something that absolutely changed the way that I view all of literature, all the classics. You know, it helped me understood. Understand what makes a great book, and, of course, the lessons that can be learned from Dante. I mean, he just opens up the world to so many other things. He is, you know, as T.S. eliot would say, actually, Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third. I think that between those two, you've got everything. So, you know, I'll tell my son when he's growing up, I'll say, look, I gave you the language of Shakespeare, and I gave you the language of Dante. You have everything you need to figure out how to live well. It's all right there.
- [06:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. That's beautiful. Yeah, I. I very much agree. Reading Dante's Inferno in a lot of ways is like being introduced to an entire library of great books, right? He just. He pulls from so many wonderful sources, whether it's scripture or Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Greco Roman mythology, Imperial history, right? He just has this, like, incredibly rich fabric that he's kind of able to weave somehow. And on top of all of that, he does it in such a masterful way that I think the reason I've come to love him is that he's just simply a master of the soul. And I think that's why, like, reading the Inferno and the Comedy overall, you know, really can't be reduced to some kind of sterile academic exercise. But it really is like, an invitation for us to join Dante the pilgrim and to say, what is the. What is the state of my soul, right? Have I made my soul beautiful or have I made my soul ugly? And in a lot of ways, I think what we've seen in the Inferno overall, as we kind of come to the end here, is Dante just seems to be amazing at being able to kind of, like, rip the veneer, the glamour off of, like, human desire and just show underneath it this, like, very ugly reality of sin and how the human soul kind of just implodes. And so I think that as I kind of discern my own appreciation for Dante, I think very much it's him as the teacher of the soul. And I think that, you know, as a cleric, like doing homilies and things like this, it's amazing that sometimes if I see something in scripture, it's like, oh, this is commenting about sloth, or, oh, this is commenting about prudence or something like that. Like, one of my go tos is to look then at the Inferno or the Purgatorio and say, okay, how did Dante, the master, like, present this? He's just really amazing.
- [07:51]
Evan Amato
Yeah. And it's wonderful to see all the different things. I mean, he is so foundational for all of Western literature. So one of the poets I really love, also another well known Italian poet is Torquato Tasso, who wrote Jerusalem Delivered. And Milton actually was a big fan of Tasso. And some of his speeches from like the demons in book two of Paradise Lost, they're just pulled right off the page from Tasso. But of course, Tasso is pulling from Dante. And so you have this, this interplay that's going back for so long. And another work I talk about a lot is actually Michelangelo. He had this edition of Dante by a scholar named Cristoforo Landino out of Florence. And he wrote basically this Platonizing commentary on Dante's Comedy. And it was Michelangelo's favorite book that he owned to a large degree that we can tell. And he knew Dante so well that, that he was able to actually disagree. You see this in the glosses of the text that he owns. He disagrees with the scholar on certain points and like writes out why that is. So. But all this is really cool because that edition, the Landino edition, the commentary, what he does, he ties Dante a lot, very much back to even St. Augustine. And so the different, like, stages of the soul and the different stages of the soul's ascent to God, he shows where that's in Dante. And that in turn influences Michelangelo's own work. So, for example, the Last Judgment, the altarpiece in the Sistine Chapel seems to be very much influenced from his reading of Dante, his reading of Landino. And it's just so cool to see, like, okay, yeah, there's a reason this poem is so enduring. It's easy to talk about Dante and say, oh yeah, he's great, it's a master. Everyone knows I should like him, but the more you actually spend time with him, the more you realize, oh no, he, he might arguably be underrated. And then opening up a whole can of worms as to what that might mean.
- [09:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That is beautiful. Is that commentary available in English? Do you know?
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Evan Amato
I have no clue.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, I'm gonna.
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Evan Amato
You should make it available in English.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
I know.
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Evan Amato
Yeah.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
I mean, every. You know, everything inside me is just going off. Right. A Neoplatonic commentary on Dante's Inferno. That is up my alley. Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, Michelangelo certainly had that bent.
- [10:13]
Evan Amato
It's.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
One of the other books that he tended to carry for large portion of his life was Ficino's Neoplatonic commentary on Plato's Symposium, which very much deals with the ascent of the soul through beauty and the role of beauty. And obviously, art plays a huge role in that, particularly in the Neoplatonic sense, and particularly in the Catholic sense, in which art could have the capacity to surpass nature. If art took up subjects of the divine, that man could actually surpass nature. And you see this, like, in this Baroque architecture that came out. So. No, that's beautiful. And this is one of the reasons I love reading Dante, is that every time I feel like I have a good grasp, I just find out there's a. There's a whole nother avenue to explore and gain more wisdom out of this tech.
- [10:54]
Evan Amato
It is really remarkable. And even Michelangelo himself, he was a poet, which is little known to most people, but one of his poems, he is, you know, directly pulling from this, again, this Neoplatonic reading of Dante, comparing himself to Dante the Wayfarer. And even the structure of the poem, like, it has seven lines, and they're each kind of indicating different stages of the soul's ascent. And I mean, it's just. It's so wonderful how he's. How he's able to do this. And to think that, like, this is a guy, you know, you. You see also kind of his. His humility and his struggling with his own, you know, human frailty. And you see this as, wow, this is the man who did the Sistine Chapel, David, you know, all these incredible works, and yet he's still here, able to work, you know, wrestle with his own soul through means of Dante. It's really spectacular.
- [11:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's amazing how beauty draws us in. There's a. That beauty will draw us in to something divine and invite us in turn, to become something beautiful and something divine. So, no, well, I already. My reading list has grown, so I appreciate that. So let's. Let's jump into the text. Let's look at the ninth circle. So we are looking at the ninth circle in hell. This is the final circle circle. We're in Cantos 32 through 34. And so here in Canto 32, we're introduced to the ninth circle, the frozen pit of Cocytus. And we're getting into complex fraud. We've moved from maybe the simple fraud of the eighth circle into the complex fraud of the ninth circle. And so if we kind of, you know, you're kind of just tracking with each circle, like, what, what sin do we see punished here? Well, again, we're gonna see that this complex fraud. And Dante's gonna introduce us to four different areas. So this is kind of similar to the eighth circle, where we have 10. In the ninth circle, we're gonna have four. So we're gonna have to kind of explore that in a lot of ways. One thing, though, that kind of caught my attention right at the beginning of the Canto is that we have an invocation to the Muses right here. He calls them the ladies. Right. But he calls them the Muses. If, you know, for those who joined us for like our year of Homer. We know, right. All of our alarm bells should go off because we know that if the poet invokes the Muses, particularly outside the beginning of the text, like something important has happened. Right. He really wants the Muses to come in and to amuse him. Right. To fill him. Right. With the capacity to be able to tell what he needs to tell of this area. I think it's a, it's a beginning part of the Canto that really flags for us. How important the section is to the Inferno.
- [13:28]
Evan Amato
Absolutely. I don't have a whole lot to say about that. I prepared some notes on this, and I did not prepare a ton on the Muses themselves, but I mean, I mean, you're right, he's obviously queuing this up because this is going to be incredibly, incredibly important. Not least of which because we see that people can already, in a sense, be damned before their bodies even die, you know, so. So that's going to come later in this circle. And I think, you know, to your point, he definitely wants to set this up so that we're paying attention.
- [14:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So one thing that, that caught my attention here is, you know, what's the contrapasso? And they're frozen. I think for a first time reader, you're like, what? This is the pit of hell. This is supposed to be fire and brimstone and burning and like all of these things. But we get ice, we get something frozen, and we get something that's analogous to the river of blood. So if everyone remember like the violent or boiling in this river of blood, and they are submerged in the river, proportionate to the degree that they engaged in the sin. And so we're going to see something very similar here in this frozen pit, right, where basically the sinners are frozen in this frozen river, if you will, to the degree that they engaged in complex fraud or being a betrayer, a traitor. So we're going to move from people that I think the. The most is that they're at least frozen up to the waist, all the way down to people who are completely frozen in the ice. They can't talk to them. He can't do anything with them. He says. I think he says they're like straw frozen in. In the ice or frozen in glass.
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Evan Amato
Right.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
You just kind of see them in there. So, one. I mean, any thoughts here on either the ice or just anything that caught your attention in Kanto 32 overall?
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Evan Amato
Yeah, this is one of the really, really interesting parts of Dante, and it shows how he just brilliantly subverts expectations with this. So fire, of course, is going to be all of our contemporary expectation of hell. But you have not only not fire and ice, but that ice is also a literal frozenness. So he's. What I'm saying is it's not just about the temperature, okay? It's not fire, I guess it's just really cold and ice. But it's that they're literally frozen in their own sin and they are incapable of redemption. They're frozen in that. So it's just this absolute stillness that. That points to them being capable of redemption here. Now, another point that I always find really interesting about this is, of course, later on in Paradiso, when Dante will go and he will, you know, see the different. The. The motion of God, the fire of God. You know, God is. God is. Well, we have. He's this. He's the love that moves the. The sun and the other stars, you know, but he is ultimately motion, okay? All of the universe is in motion. It's alive, it's in motion. So the fact that they are frozen, too, it's also not just that impossibility of redemption, but it's also a spiritual death. If it's not moving, it's dead completely. And so that's one of the brilliant aspects of this entire ninth circle.
- [16:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I completely agree. So what's interesting here for those who are unfamiliar, is in Aristotle's metaphysics, he takes up an interesting question. He says, how does the unmove mover move all things if the unmoved mover does not move? And so what's he asking here? Well, we see that God is pure act, right? God is. Is full. He doesn't have any potential. Because to have potential means you could change. And you can't be perfect if you have potential, because if you were perfect, you wouldn't need to change. So God is this pure act, right? He's fully actualized. And so he's the unmoved mover. Everything comes from him. And so Aristotle has to take up this question, right? How does the unmoved mover move all things if the unmoved mover does not move? And his answer is love. It's eros, right? Everything in the universe, not just man, but everything in the universe, has this, this eros, this amor, this erotic desire to return back to its maker, right? To return back to God. And so I love what you say there about the stillness, because I think what Dante, the teacher here, is desperately trying to show us is that God then is the one. Like love is something that moves. It animates us, right? We'll talk about the soul, particularly like the amor and purgatory, we'll talk about it as a fire, right? Something that your soul and fire, the reason those two tend to go together is because they both have the natural desire to ascend. Your soul wants to ascend to God. Fire naturally wants to go up. Fire is the sign of the divine, like you said. And so ice, then, that. Use the word stillness, right? The stillness is actually an anti love, an anti movement, right? These people are so far away from love. And this is where we see, because we've kind of thrown out a thesis that the Inferno, the architecture of the Inferno, is predicated on love. And I think this is a really good way to see this, because now here at this pit, we see the people that are most removed from love are frozen. They're in ice. And I think that you see not just the lack of movement, but I think Dante is also playing here on the fact that evil is actually a nothingness, right? Evil isn't really a thing. Evil is simply the privation of the good. It's like a hole in the ground. It's there, but it's only there by an absence. You see this too, with darkness. Like darkness isn't really like a thing. Like, I can't shine darkness on something. Darkness is simply an absence of light. Well, ice cold is the same thing. It's simply an absence of the heat. And so it's interesting here that we. He uses ice, then, as an example of evil here in the pit of hell. And I think there's both like, it's just, he's always brilliant, right? So he just weaves together the nature of the soul, the nature of the cosmos, and why, where we're eventually going to find Satan, he's simply frozen in time.
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Evan Amato
Yeah, Dante again, doing what he, he writes this incredible epic poem to show us this stuff so beautifully. But what he's really just sharing is in some ways common sense. But of course, common sense, you know, it can be easily overridden. And so to that point, we all expect that hell is going to be fire and brimstone. You know, it's all people go, and you burn in hell. Like that sort of language we use all the time. But in reality, there's another part of our language where we do know that common sense, which is when we talk about the warmth of a loving home, when we talk about, oh, my heart burns for her, you know, that, that sort of thing. All of these ways that we describe warmth or something even just warm and cozy, you know, that's, that's the sort of thing that entails love. And so in addition to the motion, which I think we've covered sufficiently, there is also the, the actual temperature aspect of it. And like you said, it's a pervasion of that warmth, it's an absence of it. And so God, again, being not this just majestic, majestic, kind of distant, being in the clouds, but actually being something that is incredible, you know, raging, all consuming fire in many ways. And you actually see this again towards the end of Purgatory. As Dante exits the final terrace of purgatory, he has to pass through this, you know, wall of purging fire. And he does. So it's really interesting on two fronts. The first front is that he's actually. This will come back to Inferno. I know, I'm talking about purgatory right? Now the first part of this is that is actually referencing part of the Old Testament where we talk about, you know, refining metals to burn out the impurities. And if God is again all loving, all pure, all goodness, all beauty, all truth, well, obviously anything that is not that will just burn up in his presence and go to nothing. So in that sense, purgatory is, is a grace because it allows us to be able to withstand the beatific vision. So that's part of what's going on there. But the other thing is this is kind of comical. Dante has a really funny conversation with Virgil because Dante freaks out when he gets to this fire. You know, he says, I'm not going through it. Like, no, no, no, I'm not going through it. And Virgil says, dante, you know, we went to hell together. We, we did this. We were on the back of Gary on, like, we climbed down, you know, all these things, we crossed these rivers, you saw these people, you saw all that stuff. We've just climbed up through purgatory. Like, trust me, God ordains this. Just go ahead and you can do it. And Dante's still freaked out. The one thing though, that eventually gets him to change his mind is being told that Beatrice is waiting for him on the other side. And so it is love that pushes him through that pershing fire. It's not any of the rationalistic arguments. It's not saying, oh, look what we've done. You know, this is ordained, trust me, showing kind of the track record of all this, all that flies out the window. And at the end of the day, he's left with love that pushes him through. So keeping that in mind, going back to Inferno, then the, the ice is just it, it punctuates the absence of this because Dante's very much aware of what it means for God to be again the mover and for God to be this fire. And so all of this again, yes, it's just death on, on every level. The death of love, the death of, of one's, you know, motion, soul, this sort of thing. It's all right there, beautiful.
- [23:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It just kind of shows, like, how intentional Dante is about the imagery that he uses. And that's one of the things that we've kind of pushed back on as we've gone through the Inferno. There's been times in which I don't understand the wisdom of it. I don't understand why a certain contrapasso is tied. And I think that as moderns, our gut reaction is often to critique the author. But I think that Dante exists on such a different plane that really it's a critique of ourselves. Like, it's, it's similar to, like when I read Plato, if I don't understand something or I think something doesn't make sense, it's like, no, I need to stop and really think about this, right? Cause there's some. They're the teacher, right? The author of the text is the teacher, they're the master, and they have something to share with us. I think too, just kind of like pushing forward in the text. So we said that there's these four sections and so Dante gives us two of them in this canto. And I will say too, as a first time reader, I found this so fast like, we get down to the ninth circle and things move quickly. And there might be, you know, some reasons for that, particularly when we kind of get into the. The depth of like, how much he has to actually work with. But I found, like, we move very quickly. And so the first section that we get is Cana, right? This betrayer of families that's obviously named after Cain, of the story of Cain and Abel in scripture. So the first kind of level of this complex fraud, or, you know, complex. I was trying to think, I was reflecting on this too, like what it means by complex. If we say complex fraud, sometimes that means, like, you know, I orchestrated like a very complicated, like bank heist or something like this. It seems to me that the ninth circle is distinguished in a lot of ways by the degree of malice. So these. Because if the architecture of hell shows us sins that are contrary to love, what we're going to see very much in the ninth circle is that these are people who betrayed people around them that they seem to have or should have had a natural bond of love to. Towards. And so there's something deeply unnatural and therefore depraved about the type of treason, the type of being a traitor, the betrayal, et cetera, that these people engage in, right? This type of fraud. And so the first one we see is this Cana, which is obviously like a betrayal of the family, right? You've. You've betrayed your family, however, like, very quickly. And actually it's. It's not even clear that we've entered into a new section. It just kind of, it's just kind of referenced is we get the section of Antonora. Now granted, I'm from Oklahoma, you're in Italy, so if I pronounce some of these wrong, it's your job to just subtly critique me, and I'm going with you. Okay, so, but we have this like, Antinora, who is then traitors to country. So he's moved from the family to the country. And I think that, you know, I'd be interested in your thoughts. Like, I've been really thinking about, like, how, how Dante structures the Inferno. And sometimes we've seen that if you take the thesis that obviously the lower you go, the more depraved the sin, the more severe the punishment. Sometimes his ordering, I think, is. Is difficult to understand. And like here, right? It's like, okay, so wait, betraying my country is worse than betraying my family because the family is a sub political part of the polis. Like, it's, it's a core building block of Western civilization. But it seems like in a lot of ways we had Dr. Prudlo on. I think he helped kind of illuminate this and throw out some theories about what could be happening in certain sections of hell is that Dante seems to be very concerned with how sins affect the community. Right. About this communal aspect. And so, yes, betraying your own family has a deep depravity to it. Right. It's, there's something deeply unnatural to it. But at the same time a traitor to your country, this kind of, what is this, this antinora is a greater sin because you're striking out against the common good in your neighbor. Yeah.
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Evan Amato
So look, there's a lot to say with all of this. Typically, the way that I kind of divide the eighth circle from the ninth eighth we have betrayal. But ninth is treachery. And what, what constitutes treachery? You know, the typically we just hear that and we say that's. Oh, a very bad word. Well, it's betraying someone who held you in, in their trust. So. So as you said, you know, someone who you do have this pre existing relationship with. Now it's one thing if I betray someone, like I sign a contract, I'm going to break it. That's technically a betrayal. But if we're signing a contract about something in the first place, it's kind of like, okay, we're, we're two different parties, you know, this sort of thing. But it's betrayal or treachery, you know, treason against people who, who held you in their trust. Okay. And that is what makes the ninth circle especially brutal. Now you had pulled, at least in the Italian, I would, I would pronounce these. You had mentioned this kyina and antenora. So the. Those who betray their kin is what I would see in kyina. So not just family, I think that's part of it, but it is also a bit more expansive than that. Which is why I, part of the reason why I think Dante's okay with putting it with those who betray their country or their party. Also because there's kind of a political turn to this as well. So. But, but I think that's kind of why he's, he feels a little bit more comfortable putting those two together. But more than that, kind of the second part on that is actually something that we'll see later on, you know, in the mouth of Satan. Okay. I don't want to jump ahead too much, but basically there is this idea that the betrayal of divine and worldly authority is equally damning. And so we can come back to that. We can come back to that. But it's very interesting, suffice it to say that, yeah, I'm just gonna spoil too much. But we won't get there anyways, I think, yes, these two people, sorry, Kaina and tenor are the two zones that we're kind of looking at here. Those who betray their kin, those who betray their country in their party. You know, Dante understands this sense of loyalty. I've actually been thinking about this a lot because I've heard the quote, perhaps you have as well. Loyalty is the only political virtue. And I think the gut reaction of that is to say, no, that's not true. You know, if someone on your side makes a mistake, you have to. You have to be indifferent and kind of in. You know, critique them when they're doing their thing. Now, I've just been considering that recently. I've seen some events with people I know who maybe they've been. Maybe they did something, let's say, that was unwise, a public figure who does something that is unwise. Objectively, we could say, oh, look, you didn't mean harm by it, but you did. It was kind of silly for it to do it, but to see how different people react to that is very interesting because I've seen some ways, in a way, again, I can't name names, obviously, but I've seen certain times where that person gets thrown under the bus by someone who claims just to be the one saying, look, we need to be honest here. We need to say what's happening. And then I've also seen people who say, look, like, yeah, it was a stupid thing to do, but this is a good guy. And so that idea of what does loyalty actually mean? I think this means especially much coming from an Italian. You think of the God Father like Fredo. You don't betray the family. You. You don't betray the family. Like, we could be the biggest idiot, but you don't betray the family. And this makes sense a lot too, when you think of old political systems. You know, Dante also wrote Demonatia about monarchy. And in a monarchy, it is completely coherent to say, this king is an utter moron and I despise him. Long live the king. You can say those two things, and they're not. They're not contradictory. And so it's this sense of loyalty to an outstanding system that actually surpasses loyalty to the individual, to the individuals that make up that system, I should say. And so I think all of this is what's going on at play Here is that Dante really understands the country, one's citizens and. And whatnot, as being part of this body, that it is just equally horrendous to betray because you're betraying, as it were, the system. To be a republican under a monarchy is a betrayal of your citizens. It's not just a betrayal of the system, it's a betrayal of order.
- [32:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I very much like that. I think as an example of that too, just to kind of parse that out, is this Antenora. I say it with less flair than you do, but that's okay. The is actually named after Antenor, who was the Trojan prince. So this is for those who joined us for the Iliad and the Odyssey, which, by the way, go check out those podcasts. Everyone can read those. Everyone can read Homer. There's an interim period. Like there's a period. What a lot of people don't realize is that like Troy doesn't fall in the Iliad, right? The first time I read it, I was like, man, he's got to really pick up the pace here to get to the Trojan horse because we only got like three pages left. I was on an airplane and I felt like an idiot that I got, you know, I didn't know the ending of like this like 3000 year old book. But anyway, as a side point, we all venture into the great books as we can, and so. But there's an interim period here in between after Achilles dies and they're trying to still take Troy. And there's basically, it's like, here's a problem, Odysseus fixes it. Here's a problem, Odysseus fixes it. And one of the problems they have is they have to steal this like sacred object from the temple of Athena inside of Troy. And apparently like Troy can't fall as long as this object is still in the temple of Athena. And so apparently it's Antenor, this, this Trojan prince, it's not recorded in Homer, who then betrays Troy by helping Odysseus and Diomedes to steal this. And so kind of what you're talking about, right? This loyalty. And that's context. Loyalty to the polis, right? To your, even to your kin, to your family, et cetera. He betrays all of that. And so he's the namesake of this section. I think too.
- [33:54]
Evan Amato
There's actually one point I want to pick up on because this, this is just gave me a lot kind of what you were just saying led me to this. And it ties back into Your original question of why does Dante put those who betray their country or party right next to those who betray their kin? You know, isn't it worse to betray your kin? The, the point on this would be about the legitimacy of the British Parliament. This is something on Invictus we wrote about a couple weeks ago. And basically what you have with the expulsion of the last Catholic king, the last Stuart king, King James II of England, is Parliament invites a foreign monarch. So they, you know, William of Orange, they invite him to come and march on England to bring an army to, to conquer their homeland, basically to get out the man that they don't like. So they, for them, the, the oligarchs, who, I mean, let's call what is an oligarchic coup that establishes Parliament. They are doing what's right to their kin, in a sense, you know, do what's best for me. Family first and got to protect that. But it, by doing so, they're betraying their entire country. And in the irony of it too, because this is always, you know, the, the accusers often accuse the innocence of that which they themselves are guilty. You know, Parliament is claiming to be of the people at the same time that they are inviting a foreign monarch to come and, and actually kick out the one legitimate representative of the people. And so, you know, this is to say, obviously Dante is before all of this, but I think this principle of betrayal to one's nation can either equate or perhaps even be worse than betrayal to one's family, not least of which because it's interrupting, you know, the divine order, the way of things. But, but just the destruction and the havoc that it wrecks on a populace, you know, it, it doesn't justify whatever quick win in, in prosperity you get for your family. And.
- [36:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I think that's a good ad. Yeah. It's amazing to me historically how many revolutions are basically the aristocratic class fighting against the highest power on behalf of the poor. Right? They always claim that they're on behalf of the poor, but it's usually the aristocratic class getting power. It's always, I mean, people try and do these things. It's always kind of corny, but I always just love thinking in history, like, man, if Dante was alive and he could have put these people inside his, like, various circles, like, what, what, what pedagogical purpose would it serve to have, like, these souls in which section of hell, right? Like, how would I actually play this out? Because I think it's funny because he's writing all these people are politicians around his time period, it'd be like, someone wrote the American version of this. And there's like, Elon Musk is here and Newt Gingrich is over here and Bill Clinton's here. Like, it seems like corny to us, but this is what Dante's doing. And now it's, like, brilliant. So sometimes I wonder, like, what it would be like if he. If he wrote one today and how he would incorporate this, like a larger history. It occurs to me too. You know, sometimes I'll. I'll stop kind of belaboring this point, but when you talk about the order of things, uh, typically you can talk about it in the order of execution or the order of being. And what that means is, is sometimes when you're saying, okay, which, which one's a part and which one's the whole. So, like, if you think of, like a chair, like, what comes first? Like the legs, the back, whatever, or the chair itself? Well, the parts come first because you have to make the whole. And so if you talk about an order of execution, you. You could say something like, well, you know, the leg of a chair is incredibly important. If you don't have the leg of a chair, you don't have a chair. Right. It's very fundamental to the chairness. And this is what the family is to the state. The family is incredibly fundamental. It's a sub political part of the entire state. However, like the leg to the chair, an order of being means what is the purpose for which this thing even comes into existence? And this is something I don't think we think about as Americans, because we're. We're kind of atomized. But traditionally, in Catholic thought, the family is coming into being for the sake of the polis, for the sake of the state, the common good. Because the family can't not. The family cannot survive on its own. It's actually not an island. And so it has to come together and create these sinews and tether itself to other families to create a common good. Aristotle is very good about talking about this in the opening of his politics. And so I think one thing too here that I think we've both kind of parsed out well is that when you have these ordering. In Dante, sometimes it seems backwards, because I think sometimes what he's doing is an ordering of being where it's like, yes, but the family comes into existence for the sake of the polis, for the sake of the city, you know, the state, if you will, and the common good. Then if the. For instance, if the common good of the polis falls, right. If Troy falls, the family falls. It's not like the chair falls apart and the legs like, well, I'm great, right? I'm doing fine. I'll be good on my own, right? So I think that Dante is very. On this read through. I think one of the main takeaways has been how communal Dante is and his understanding of sin and very sensitive to how these things affect these things. I think is. Has been very good just to push us forward a little bit, you know. This canto ends with one sinner gnawing on the head of another. It's this very. It's a very haunting. It actually leads into probably one of the worst stories, I think, in the entire Inferno. But before we get to that, he interacts with a sinner. And this is towards the end of Canto 32. This is. This is the sinner, right, who won't tell him his name. But then one of the other sinners. Yes, thank you. See, I'm gonna start setting you up so you can pronounce the name the sinner, and we'll work well together. But one of the things that really caught my attention about this is around, like, 97 or so. Dante, we're told. It says, dante the pilgrim. It says, I caught him by the dog hair on his nape and said, I think you'd be. You'd better tell me your name or I won't leave a hair left in your scalp. And he's like, oh, you can rip all my hair off, et cetera. And then at 103, it says, and so I wound his hanks already in my hand and yanked them out in bunches as he yowled. So now we have Dante the pilgrim, who has somehow gone from, like, fainting every time he sees something in the Inferno to now yanking people's hair out as they're frozen in ice. Any. Any thoughts on his kind of. Is this a change in him? Is this a disposition? Like, what's going on in the scene.
- [40:36]
Evan Amato
Is either it'll come to pass that you share your name, or you're not going to have any hair. So I'll pull your hair till you don't have any left, basically, is what he's saying. Um, so, yeah, he. It's like a very aggressive, very aggressive kind of threatening moment. And again, it. It is uncharacteristic. It's very rare that he has this degree of personal involvement, you know, in frustration with something. So, you know, rare physical violence. Again, we don't typically see it. And so the only question, again for me that comes up here, maybe not the only one, but one of them is what does this have to do with the legitimacy of punishing the damned? Obviously, Dante condemns violence typically throughout, you know, and doesn't partake in himself, but here he does. So what about this could have led him to do such a thing? Maybe, you know, you could also say, oh, perhaps it's just a moment of anger, but I think he's had plenty of moments, opportunities to be angry and just as frustrated earlier on. So what is it about, you know, this stage that that justifies that? I think that's the question we have to ask.
- [41:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, that's a good question. I think too, like maybe to give a very non modern answer when that unsettles us, is there's a certain way to read this, that it's like a good, right, that the, the damned are punished in hell and their punishment is a good. And this is one of the things that we're trying to track, and Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson helped us with this is we're trying to track. Does Dante the pilgrim start to align his will with the divine will as he matures through hell, right? Because he's not going on this, like you mentioned earlier, like, he's not going on this journey because he's bored. He's going on this journey because the Blessed Virgin Mary has put him on this path for really the sake of his own salvation, right? He needs to mature, he has to beautify his soul, he has to find himself, right? He's lost. I think there's a lot of Acadia language used around Dante the pilgrim. And so, you know, in certain ways you could say, well, isn't this a good. Right? The sinner's supposed to be here, the sinner's supposed to be punished, and he is participating in the punishment of the damned. And I think, you know, two thoughts occurred to me. One is that, I think what you could say is that Dante has experienced a certain maturity, right? He has, there is a certain maturation, he has undergone a certain sanctification as he's journeyed through hell, where, you know, the main thing that we've been told is that he needs courage, he needs to work on his pity because this, the pity is kind of a subspecies or an example of the will, because he pities the damned and that puts him contrary to the divine will that put them there, and that is man. If I, if I could pick out one lesson for most of us as moderns, I think that's it. Is. Is that, Is that the pity? Your pity has to align to the divine because, you know, we, we're all kind of. We all live in this, like, liberal culture, left and right. Our culture is just very liberal. Even our conservatives are liberal. And tolerance does this to us. We pity things, right? We feel pity for things that are contrary to the divine will, and it causes us. It causes a certain false love to arise in us. And then we make mistakes. We. We set ourselves. We make ethical and political decisions that are contrary to. To divine teaching because we have this false pity. And I think you see that very clearly in an early Dante, the pilgrim in the Inferno. But here too, I really want to stress is that yet it might be better. He might have matured. But I think you can make an argument it's an imperfect maturity because we only get. We're only in the first part. Dante, the pilgrim has to go through purgatory. He has to go through Paradiso, right? He has to experience the rest of it. So I think we can get really hung up on here as like, is this a moral act, et cetera. I think it's better than what he was doing previously, but he might have oscillated a little bit too far to the other side. But it could be an imperfect maturation. But this is a soul that still needs purgatory in heaven.
- [44:42]
Evan Amato
Exactly. I really appreciate the point about pity. I think not only is it applicable where you said, but also kind of on the other side of things, it is a way of diffusing wrath. I think that at least this is something I've been considering lately is that lots of times where it's easy to be frustrated or upset, whether with someone or something, to actually say, wait, what is the. Like, how do I pity this person? Instead, it allows you to. To accept it a lot better to say like and not. Not saying pity them to put them down, but. But actually and kind of like, have this false sense of superiority. It's not that, you know, how can I try to treat them as pitiable? It's not, it's not that. But to say genuinely, like, why? What. What a caught. Like, what awful thing would have caused this person to do that? And what is the crap that they're actually kind of dealing with and going through? And actually kind of in light of that, I can, I can pity this person. I saw, for example, yesterday. I actually just shared this post. I don't often do stuff like this, but there was something on Reddit and it was a woman who had mentioned, like, oh, hey, how did. She made a post saying, you know, how do I get my husband to split the bill for the birth of our child with me? And, you know, craziness that. That someone asked to get to that. And I could see where maybe some people hop on that and they're, you know, you're such an idiot. You know, why would you even have a kid with this guy? You know, kind of like directing that frustration in a certain direction or saying, like, my gosh, I mean, God have mercy on this woman. What.
- [46:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
How.
- [46:30]
Evan Amato
How could she end up in a certain. Like, it actually is insanely pitiable. It's very, very sad. And so that is a type of. Of pity that's also constructive, I would say, if you're able to see it that way and try to say, like, I wonder what, you know, God probably feels more, again, pity for her in the sense of, like, yeah, that's awful. That's not how he would, you know, that's not human flourishing. That's not how, you know, he intended us to live. And so. So it's sad to see that. The other point, though, I was. I was flipping flu through my book earlier. You may have seen me. Justizia mosse il mio alto factore. The fourth line that's written on the gate of Hell. Justice caused my high architect to move. In the Azalen translation, divine omnipotence created me, the highest wisdom in the primal love. So there's this idea, and I'm sure you've already covered this in Canto 3, but the fact that the entire creation of Hell is somehow merciful. And again, it's justice that caused the divine architect to move. It's divine omnipotence, the highest wisdom and the primal love. Those are the things that created Hell. Not wrath, not retributive justice. And so to have that come into play here as well, I mean, I think that all just goes into very much kind of the stuff that you've been saying here. You know, what does this mean for Dante the pilgrim when he's interacting with people here? You know, what does it mean that, again, maybe he's doing so imperfectly, but he's at least coming to better align himself with divine will and with that divine understanding into the highest wisdom, the primal love. Again, in the words of Anthony Aislin, his great translation here.
- [48:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, one. One thing that to kind of stack on what you said, which I deeply appreciated, is. Yeah, just to kind of hammer that home, is that no matter how bad the contrapasso is for a Soul in Hell, it is still an act of mercy because for the. For the finite to dishonor and kick out against the infinite, for the creature to kick out against the Creator, to be blasphemous in your. In your actions, to have that sin against the Holy Spirit by refusing to participate and give justice to God, there really is like, because we're finite creatures, there's really no way for us to actually be punished proportionately for the sin that we've actually committed against God. Because we. He is everything to us, right? He created us, he holds us in being. I mean, the shift a little bit into the Platonic side. This is like a thought that somehow rebels against the mind that thought it. Like, you're nothing without the mind. Like, you. You're hell, you're literally held in existence by the mind itself, and you're nothing without it. And so. No, I appreciate your point and I just wanted to hammer that home, that there is a certain level of mercy in all of the contrapassos simply because the human soul can't actually pay the debt. And that's one reason too. People like, oh, wouldn't hell have to be, you know, finite to a certain degree, or they. Or they'd only have to be punished for a certain amount of time proportionate to their sin and et cetera. And like. No, that's. That's not how that works. Even under justice. That's not how that works. So, okay, but we have a guy chewing on the head of another guy, right? So we gotta figure this out. So this is Kanto pushing us into Kanto 33, the Ninth Circle, right? We're still in this frozen pit. We're in Antonora still. Uh, but then we're going to move in Ptolemy, the third area, so we'll have to see what that is. But who's this. Who's this story? I mean, this has for. Just as a side note, I found this to be the most unsettling story in the entire Inferno, and I'm sure a lot of other people did too. So for those who are reading along with us, if you were disturbed by this, I'm sorry, It is an incredibly disturbing story. Uh, the first time read it, I think I read this canto and had to put the Inferno down for a while and just kind of walk and go outside and remind myself that there are beautiful things in life. And so. But who. Who's this Count? Like, who's this guy that we're introduced to here at the beginning of 33?
- [50:42]
Evan Amato
Yeah, so count Ugolino he is basically a man who is locked in a tower with his sons and starved to death. Now, there's actually, and we'll. We'll get to this, the exact language that Dante uses, because there is a deliberate ambiguity here. And I. I guess I'm curious to see how different people translate it. But there is kind of in Dante's verse, deliberate ambiguity as to what happened, which perhaps actually makes it more scary because you know, that a scary image. Okay, it's a scary image and you can see it. But the more haunting things, I think, like Lovecraftian horror, is actually far more terrifying because there's always something out there that's just in the darkness. It's. It's out there lurking. You can't totally name it, you can't totally see it. You can't describe it entirely. And so that's what you have here, that. I think that's what the ambiguity does. But yes. So Count Ugolino, this is really interesting because he was both victim and victim and sinner in part of Dante's genius, I think, with this story, lies in his ability to make us feel both horror and pity simultaneously. And this is. This is what's really interesting about it. He's basically a case study in how political power corrupts. I think that's part of this horror and pity. We'll get to this later, but, you know, I might. You're probably thinking this even more than I am. You know, tons of correlations here, or at least parallels to Greek tragedy, at least when it comes to the political aspect of things. But, yeah, I think I'll let you share some more of the specifics if you'd like. But I think all this. I'll just queue it up by saying, like, Dante's genius, his ability to make us feel the horror and pity over this man who is both victim and a sinner.
- [52:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think you set that up. Yeah. Really well. Yeah. So, I mean, one thing about the Count, like you said, is that he also. He's a betrayer because that's why he's here. So he can't just be victim because he has to. He has to be a betrayer. So he. I mean, skipping all the 14 politics, he is a betrayer to his. To his party, to his country, because you. You made a distinction earlier, which I think is important, that it's really a betrayal of your political allegiance, because Dante will put people here that betrayed their party with inside the same country, if that makes sense. Right. So he's a betrayer, really, to his party. And so then the archbishop basically betrays him. And he's locked in this tower, and apparently it's with his sons and his grandsons. There's four of them in there. And apparently they feed them for a while. And then there's this haunted. I mean, some of these passages are just haunting, where they hear them come and nail the door shut, and there's no more food coming. You know, what's interesting here is that Dante plays this up and, I don't know, you assume he's doing intentionally, because this is not a story from antiquity. This is a story from. From Florence. So he knows it well. But he presents, or at least my read of it, and Esalen has the same read. He presents it like all these. That they're all children. He presents, like, he puts very childlike things in their mouth, right, as they speak to him. You know, so, for instance, just to kind of like, look at this, not to, you know, unnecessarily dwell on the horror, but, you know, it says, father, this is line 61, father, for us, it would be much less painful if you ate us. Instead, you clothed us with this wretched flesh, now strip it off again. I mean, just like heart, you know? 69. Papa, why don't you help me? Right? He's watching his sons and grandsons slowly succumb to starving, right? And he. And he goes blind. They're going blind because they're losing us. But one thing that's interesting is that Esalen points out that his children would have been adults. And so Dante, like, is really stressing here the childlike nature, because when I first read it, I thought they were all small children because of the tone that he puts in their mouth. So Dante's, like, really ratcheting this up, you know, for some reason. And so, yeah, then the line that you talked about, which I agree with you, is that this is 75. He says, Then hunger did what sorrow could not do. That's. So I'm using. I'm looking at Esalen. Um, and of course, the ambiguity there, is it. Does he eat them? Right. Is he reduced to cannibalism? And obviously, the contrapasso seems to say, yes, right, because what is he doing for all eternity? He's gnawing on the archbishop's head. That betrayed him, right? So they're stuck in the ice together, and the Count is kind of like, on top of him. And the archbishop's not suffering, not simply the frigidity of this frozen pit, but also he has this other sinner gnawing into his head. And so Dante really. I mean, you know, maybe Dante doesn't know if there was actually cannibalism, so he has to stay ambiguous not to kind of get contrary with those who would have knowledge or something like this. But I think from the contrapasso, it definitely seems like, yes, he engaged in cannibalism, and now he's eating the archbishop for all eternity. It's interesting to me about why Dante would spend. I mean, he. He goes pretty fast through all these, and he spends a good amount of time telling us this story. And so I think it's really fascinating, like, what is it about the story that's caught his imagination? And maybe it goes back to what you said. It's like, this is against the common good. This is a story of loyalty. This is that betrayal typically begets more betrayal. Right. So the traitor then is betrayed. I mean, there's a. There's a lot of things that I think he's trying to comment here politically.
- [56:30]
Evan Amato
Yeah. So one of the. You had picked up the line that I wanted to tackle specifically. So line 75. The. The. Then hunger did what sorrow could not do. Now, in. In the original, that word for hunger is. Is not actually the word for. Well, I. I guess it's the word. And that can be meant as hunger in. In Dante's Tuscan, but it's digiuno, which means to fast. So. So it's, you know, used in a similar way, obviously, because, you know, all right, fast. When you're fasting, you're hungry. But even today, you know, when you fast for Lent, people will talk about the digi. All right, and so this is. This is really interesting that this comes up because it's almost. It's highlighting the tragedy of it because it's taking something that's now associated with a religious term and turning it into something that's just brutal. Brutal in so many ways and to the point. I thought this was good about his children. So, again, to go back to the Italian, I can understand why he does so here. So Aislinn translates this in line 69, saying, Papa, why don't you help me? Now, in the original, it's padre mio, it's my father, you know, so Papa, you know, sounds that.
- [58:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But.
- [58:02]
Evan Amato
But I think actually the. The my there, it just makes it more poignant in a way. It's not simply, oh, Papa, you know, why don't you do this? It's padre mio, que numayuti. It's like it. It. Yeah, it just sounds so much more personal that. That they add the. The mio to that. So it is very poignant. But I think to your point of, you know, how old are these kids? Whatever he does put them, the language in their mouths, at the very least, to make them sound very young. But I think it's totally fine. Like, this is one of the things that I think modern readers might get hung up on, like, what, how old actually were they? But I think the fact that they're young just. Or that they're at least portrayed as young is. Is a device meant to highlight the tragedy of it, because it's no less tragic if they were older. It's. It's really not that less. It's a father, you know, eating his sons. It's not that less tragic, but it is to us, because of our kind of, you know, inherent way of looking at it, it will feel more tragic if they're young, which is actually closer to what it is. You know, it's always tragic. It's always tragic. And so I think Dante puts that there, though, to just hide in the scene of. To say, look, it doesn't really matter what age they were. Like, it's horrendous and terrifying. And your reaction to him eating, you know, his younger kids should be the same as it is to him eating kids at whatever age. It's awful.
- [59:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, I agree. I think it's interesting that going off your comment that the. That the phrase there, the hunger has a religious overtone in it, because I wonder if Dante the poet is being deeply, somewhat darkly ironic, because then the sinner is spending the rest of his life eating an archbishop. And so I wonder. I wonder if you can tether those two together, if that makes sense. The other thing too, that I think maybe that Dante's trying to show us here is that, you know, this isn't that. This isn't that he betrayed someone and they came and killed him in the house, right? So I think of maybe, like, Alcibiades, right? Alcibiades basically just goes around, you know, betraying, maybe betraying Athens, but then also going to Sparta, sleeping with the Spartan queen, running away, going to Persia, then running away from them, and then finally he's found later and assassinated. And so, like, Alcibiades doesn't have a lot of time to contemplate, like, how have I done in life? My death is near. What's really interesting here is that this sinner has lots of time, lots of time to think about his life, and it doesn't lead him to redemption. He could have been a soul in heaven. He could have been a soul that we met in purgatory. And I think that's really fascinating, is that Dante shows that despite all the suffering around him, despite him seeing what his betrayal has caused, that his sons and his grandsons are suffering, and they're all going to suffer a terrible death. He's still just seeps down into hatred and does not find redemption. He does not cry out, because we'll get to purgatory in which we'll find out that Dante is actually incredibly merciful. We find these sinners that live terrible lives, and as they're bleeding out on the battlefield, all they can do is cry out to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that's enough. That's enough to at least get their foot in the door. In purgatory, they're gonna have a long time climbing up the mountain, but they got there okay. That's what counts. So it's interesting here that he presents this such a long period of time that the sinner can't find redemption even with all the signs of his sin around him. I think as a final point, too, there's a statue of this that's very horrifying if people want to look it up, where the father's not eating them, but he's sitting there kind of gnawing on his own hand as, like, these small children are kind of sitting around him, and you see, like, this terrible decision that's kind of, like, racking his brain. So I just think, you know, the main question I have is, why does Dante put this story in here? Like, why? And why? It takes up a lot of room at the very end of the Inferno. Like, pedagogically, what is he trying to get us to learn from this? And I think. I think that you and I have, in this discussion, have maybe put forth a few ideas here that why I think this story is important.
- [62:22]
Evan Amato
So I want to. Before we move on from this, though, do, you know, actually spend some time on the fact that maybe he doesn't need his kids. Okay. Because I. We said, oh, it's vague, but then kind of just went into assuming that he does. Okay. And this is So a couple things. Again, just in the original I. Again, credit to Azelin, his line is technically vague. Is technically vague. Then hunger did what sorrow could not do. But it's a very. It's a very hard line to translate because it literally, it's basically then more than pain or more than grief could the hunger. Okay, so. Or did the Hunger, you could translate as like, afterwards, hunger proves stronger than grief. Okay, but the way that. That proves stronger than grief, hunger proves stronger than grief. It could imply that, you know, the. It was not. He should have died of grief, okay, Seeing his. His kids. But then hunger did what grief could not do, and it killed him. So that. That's kind of the reasoning for that. And so, again, it is deliberately vague in that sense. I think there's a. There is somewhat of a more hopeful way. I mean, it's still an awful story, but you could reasonably say that he saw his children die before him. And two days I called their names, then they were dead. When they were dead, then hunger did what sorrow could not do. Finally, I should have died of grief. I should have died of sorrow, but it was finally hunger did me in eventually. That. That's the way to. To kind of read that in other. In here, too, is Dante decides, for whatever reason, to, you know, get alliterative here and, you know, make it a very beautiful line. Portia Pukel, dolor potel de Julio. That, interestingly, I don't know enough about the original manuscript to say there's actually a comma here. Okay. And the Italian edition, that is. I'm just looking probably at the same one that you are of Aislin. There is a comma after pocha. So it. Where there's not in. In Aislin's line in that it gives pause so much more when you read it. So it's posha, which is. It's this archaic word that, you know, no one would really use it now, but it means afterwards or then. So it's not simply, you know, then hunger did. It's kind of like then, comma, what, what pain could not, hunger could. And you know, what. What the job that. That pain could not finish, that sorrow could not finish, hunger finally finished off. So again, left vague. But, yeah, very, very haunting line. But I just wanted to kind of clear that up. We've obviously talked about the. The most negative read of it, which is a fair read, but just as fair of a read is kind of the other way around.
- [65:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I appreciate you kind of parsing that out. Cause I think it just shows, again, there's more levels of depth. Right. If you really want to push into the Inferno, if you want to push into Dante. Right. I mean, and that's one thing I do like about Elson's translation. Not that I have great recourse to it, but that it does have the Italian on it. And so a lot of our guests throughout this have tried to, like, check this and whether they have distinctions and things like that. I think it's also, in a certain way, like a credit to the translator for doing that, right? The putting that original text right there and saying, okay, here's the decision that I made to translate that. I think. I think that's a brilliant thing that leads into scholarship.
- [66:16]
Evan Amato
Well, and I've talked with him about his translation as well, and most any of the criticism that you would levy against him, and they're like, things that you can say, I don't get why you did this or why did you do this, but you have to see what are the options. So. So of it, you know, of all the different things to say, why did you choose this? And most of the time, I mean, certainly they're all justifiable decisions. But I think his. His translation becomes a lot more. You can appreciate it a lot more once you disagree with it, and then you say, no, this was bad. But then you go through it and say, all right, well, if. If I had made another concession, then I would have lost this. I could have gotten that thing I want. But you have to trade off. You know, it's bartering at every time when you're translating poetry. And I think he has a very good instinct of which barters to make, which trades to make, and which trades to avoid. I think he just has a good poetic instinct on that. So it's one reason, again, his translation's great.
- [67:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I appreciate that, and I. I certainly agree. We've enjoyed reading it kind of over these days of Lent. So let's kind of push into the next center that we get here, which is indicative of the next section in the ninth circle. So olamia is the next section. And so these are people who kill their guests. They're a host and they kill their guests. And so this is obviously named after the famous general, General Ptolemy, who invites Simon. Is a biblical story, right? Invites Simon Maccabeus and his sons to dinner and then slays them. And so that's in First Maccabees 16, I believe. And also, I mean, for those of us who read the Iliad, the Odyssey, and then the Oresteia, I mean, this. This is one of the worst things you could possibly do. I mean, so many of those narratives, right, are animated by the Greek concept of guest friendship, of that zinnia, right, that. That Zeus overlooks and makes sure that the guest and the host treat each other according to certain rituals. And if you violate that, well, I mean, whole war start. Paris violates it by, you know, absconding with Menelaus, his wife Helen, when he's a guest in Menelaus's home. If you don't realize, I think that if. If Paris would have just simply gone and laid siege to Sparta and, like, just, you know, wanted to take her. You know, obviously it's a little bit more complicated because there's some. A few oaths and things like this that make it a world war, but that would be a far more culturally acceptable act than being a guest and just like absconding with her. You also see this with, like, the house of Agamemnon, you know, the house of Atreus. So you get Tantalus, right, He invites the gods in and tries to serve them a human. He serves him his own son, if I remember correctly. Atreus kills the children of his brother, invites his brother to dinner, and then serves his own children to his brother. And then, obviously, Agamemnon is welcomed back into his own home by Clytemnestra and is killed by his wife and his wife's lover, Aegistus. And so this is. I really appreciated that this is here because I don't know, as moderns, if, like, violation against, like, this guest friendship, this violation against being a host would. Would be something we immediately would think of when we talk about being a betrayer. But it's a deep theme throughout the great texts, it's a deep theme throughout the great books, and it dovetails well with Homer. But here we get the story of this brother, right? What's this brother's name?
- [69:53]
Evan Amato
So right before we get to that, just real fast, I. I want to talk about the name Ptolemy. So you mentioned rightly, Ptolemy, the governor of Jericho. It's also, and this is fun, it can also be an allusion to Ptolemy xii, who betrayed Pompey. So when Pompey came to him for refuge after his defeat at the hands of Caesar, he of course betrays him and gives his head to Caesar. Caesar, of course, was off put by this. Even he said, no, this is not what you do. This is not what you do. The war was lost. There's no need to do this. And. And it's particularly bad. Dante would, you know, take. Take up issue with this as well, because he's doing it for cheap political points. I mean, it's obvious, oh, I'll kill Pompey and give him to Caesar so that Caesar thinks well of me. I mean, you can see through it from a mile away. And so again, betraying that. So, yeah, a biblical and a classical. The classical kind of illusion there. So, you know, Dante, when he names this. When he names this, the line where he actually names Ptolemy, also, he says, if a soul falls down into sin so great, it drops to Ptolemea, where this one now lies frozen in the ice. And so that's what he finally sees here. Um, finally sees. And, yeah, I mean, it's. It's kind of crazy. I'll. I'll. I'll just talk. So I'm happy to kind of toss it back to you. But this idea that you can again be damned before you die, Dante's suggesting, I guess, with this, to. To kind of close this out, you know, he's suggesting that some of these betrayals are so profound that the soul is immediate condemned, immediately condemned, even before your body ceases to function. It is the ultimate. In other words, the ultimate spiritual death. And so I think for everything that we're about to talk about, you know, this is something that we really need to cover. This is kind of the ultimate spiritual death. And perhaps you can also pick up on, you know, what does actual Catholic teaching say about this? You know, what is Dante kind of embellishing for dramatic effects, but, yeah, there's a lot there.
- [72:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, so the. Yeah, so he's talking to his brother when he tells this story, and this brother, you know, obviously betrayed guests. Yeah, you're right. He gives this narrative that I think is really fascinating, that the soul can engage in a sin so heinous that upon committing it, the soul immediately plummets into hell, but the body is still alive on Earth. You actually immediately become demon possessed. So your body is basically just a puppet. And actually, where Dante pulls this and where kind of Catholic lore, I guess, if you want to call it that pulls this from. Is from Judas. Because when Judas goes and betrays our Lord, the verse says that Satan entered into him. And so there was a way to read that in which Judas soul has been immediately condemned and it's in hell. And Satan now is basically animating Judas body. Judas is like. Like we're talking about here. The person is. Is effectively dead. But this is why Dante's confused, because he's like, wait, your body's still on Earth? What are you doing? He's like, well, my soul's condemned down here. So I think it's a really fast. I mean, we can get caught up on the eschatology of it, but we. We've made several claims thus far in the Inferno that Dante is not writing a theological Treatise on eschatology. Right. Like, this is the actual sections of hell and this is how it's actually structured. And this is who's in hell and who's not. Like, that misses his point. His point is to be pedagogical about the virtue of the soul, what it means for the soul to love. What does it mean for the soul to love in a disordered way. Right. What's the glamour of human desire versus being stripped away in the ugliness of sin? This is what Dante wants to get into. And so I think here he gives this. I guess I would call it a Catholic folklore understanding that I think the pedagogical purpose is that this sin is terrible. This sin is so bad that you are immediately cast from the living and immediately go and plummet into hell. And you. You literally give your body up to the demons who will then animate your body like a puppet until whenever, you know, you die. And they. They pull the. Yeah, the tradition is pulled from Judas. So I think that it's. I mean, it's a fascinating concept. I think it really captures, you know, the imagination. But I think it's Dante the poet, inviting us to understand why is this sin so bad to welcome people into your home as guests and then to betray them.
- [74:54]
Evan Amato
Well, you're. You're right to pull up the example of Judas, because that. That's very. So when this man, Friar Alberigo, mentions this, I mean, he basically just says that. So I need to. I need to see what. How Aislin translates this. Actually, let me. Let me see real fast. But I'll just. In the Italian, actually, it says goberna. So, like, it governs it. So he says, masapique tosto que lani matradice como fetchio il corposuel y el tolto down demon que posha el gooverna. So basically, afterwards, after a soul betrays radishe come fetchio, like as I did, his body is taken from him, from. By a demon. That then afterwards, that polsha word from earlier, il governa. So it's literally just like his body is on earth possessed by a demon. You know, this very much has to go back to what you said about. About Judas. It is. It's very interesting to think that you can commit that ultimate treachery, have a demon take over your body, and your true soul is. Is automatically frozen in hell. Yeah, I just.
- [76:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, let's look at. So in the midst of this fascinating story, I think about the fact the soul can be immediately condemned upon committing this sin. We again, Get, I mean, maybe in its best sense is another example of Dante the pilgrim's imperfect maturation. Because he lies to the liar, he betrays the betrayer. I mean, this is a fascinating concept, right? So if you look at. If you look at. Where is this? Yeah, so if you look at around 115, right, he talks about that. One aspect we haven't talked about in the contrappasso is that they're all weeping. But because they're weeping, their eyes are all frozen shut because of the frigidity, because of the cold. And also there's this wind, and we're not quite sure what the source is of this great wind that hasn't been really revealed to us yet. And so Dante basically tells this soul, Dante, the pilgrim, that, hey, like, if. If you answer these questions, I will remove the eyes from your eyes, right? And he actually even says, if you'd like my help, then tell your name. If I don't clear your eyes, may I go to the bottom of this icy hell. So then guess what? The brother tells this story, which is what we've been discussing, right, about the fact that his soul is immediately condemned. And things like this is at 148, right? The soul, the sinner says, okay, now, now reach down and open my eyes. And we. Dante doesn't say anything to him, but we get Dante the poet saying, and so I did not open them to be villainous to him was a courtesy. And so this is another kind of fascinating thing here at the bottom. And this is why, you know, Dr. Frey was very good on this. Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson was good on this too, is that there is a certain danger in just reading the Inferno, because Dante the pilgrim is not like, right now he's seeing the reality of sin. He really hasn't even started undergoing his own purgation. It's not really until you get the Purgatory. Because I think one of the most fascinating things about Purgatory is you take up the same sins, but the contrapassos in purgatory are different than the contrapassos in the Inferno, because the one in the Inferno is giving the soul over to its sin. The ones in the Purgatory are trying to purge the soul of that sin, right? And so Dante hasn't undergone this yet. And so again, I might make an argument here that, yes, it's nice that he. He is. His pity seems to be more aligned with the divine, that these people need to be punished. It's. It's good that bad things happen to these souls. Because these aren't souls on earth. Right. These are souls that have already been condemned. But at the same time, his maturation is imperfect, if you will, and he still has to grow and learn how to align his will properly.
- [79:11]
Evan Amato
Yeah, I think that's excellent. I couldn't agree more. Purgatory is my favorite of the three canticles in the comedy. I think it's so pertinent too to where we live, because we kind of live in many ways in the, in between. You know, we're, we're neither in hell nor in heaven. And so purgatory is some ways that obviously this is not a perfect metaphor by any means, not a one to one metaphor, but, you know, there's a lot to be learned from that. So you see people working through stuff and ascending, and you see it also in the, the way that the mountain in Purgatory is structured, the order of the sins. And yeah, you have to kind of quote, unquote, get square on one account before you go to the next one and fix that one. And then, you know, every, everything's building on the next in hell. There's, there are elements of that, There are certainly elements of that, but it's just not the same, not the same sense. I think even the, the quote unquote, this wouldn't be totally correct, but the kind of contra paso for the, the, the purgation in Purgatory is a bit more, I can't say, accurate. That's not technically the, the correct word there, but it's almost more apt, I suppose, because what's going on, it's, you could read it as punishment, but if you read it as grace, you understand that. Okay, this is what's being taught to you there. So, for example, when people have their eyes stitched shut, to have them not, you know, focusing out on the world, kind of learning to, to look inwards and actually there's this illusion to falconry as well with, with stitching the eyes of the falcon shut to have it learn how to recognize its own master's voice, its own master's call. And so that in some ways is kind of what's happening to, to the souls on that terrace of Purgatory. So, yeah, wholeheartedly agree with you say with what you say. I don't mean to pull this back to Purgatory again. I know we're here to talk about Inferno, so I will gladly pass it back to you and you can kind of lead us on however you like.
- [81:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, let's jump into Kanto 34 let's jump into the last section, the ninth circle of hell. So again, like, what's a contrapasso? So we're still. We're still in this icy pit. And here the souls are all completely frozen, right? So this is earlier we talked about. He talks about, like, straw and glass, right? You think about things that are frozen within ice. There's no movement. So the other thing too is there's no dialogue with a sinner here, right? And actually there's really no speaking. And I think that's something that really, we have to take that. That's something that I think we have to wrestle with. The first time I read this text, that was really surprising to me. When I. When we finally get to Satan, I expected some grand dialogue between Dante the pilgrim and Satan and something, and there's nothing. And so I think the silence is something that we kind of have to wrestle with. We're in a new area. So we're in the fourth and final area of the ninth circle Judica. Or if there's a better way to pronounce that, let me know, Jude. Yeah, that way. There you go with more flair with the Italian. Like it. This is a betrayer, right? To the masters, to the benefactors. Like, this is betraying people who are literally beneficial to you, right? It's a complete betrayal of love. And so they finally see. I love how he's introduced the creature who had the lovely face. And for those who don't know, right, Lucifer, the light bearer was. It's very often thought of as being the pinnacle of creation, right? So the pinnacle of creation prior to Lucifer's fall is that Lucifer was the most beautiful creature that God had made. And so then obviously, Lucifer falls, and Dante gives us, like, a really interesting description, and I'd love your thoughts on this. So first, so he says, creature, lovely face is line 20. Then he says in line 28, we realize that he's stuck in the ice, so. But not stuck in the way you might think. Like, he's in this, like, pit in the ice, and his wings are just batting over and over again, right? He's just sitting there flapping his wings, but he's not. He's not going anywhere. So we find kind of the source of the wind, right? And he's this giant demon that has three faces with three different colors. I mean, what. What is going on here? I mean, what. What stands out to you or what do you want to tackle? I've got some ideas, but, like, what. What do you want to tackle about this? Imagery of Satan, because obviously Dante the teacher is giving us a lot of imagery to think about.
- [84:00]
Evan Amato
Yeah, well, I think the line that sticks out to me is the line 34, he was as fair as he is ugly now. So it's about this transformation. And it's not only that, but, you know, the whole image of Satan certainly is different than what you would get in Milton. In Paradise Lost, you know, he's not a fiery rebel. He is rather a frozen, weeping, pathetic figure. And, and so it's. I guess the inversion here is that Satan is, is not. Rather than ruling hell, as he does in Paradise Lost, he's its greatest prisoner. I think that's part of what we have to understand. You know, he is the greatest prisoner of hell. He's not the king of the underworld. I think it's so easy to have these, you know, And I think that's the reason Dante avoids it as well, because if he had had this great final boss battle, if you will, and this great dialogue with Satan, he'd be giving him too much credit. But he's actually its greatest prisoner. And you see that again, not just in his physical positioning, the ice. He's kind of like trapped. You know, it's at his belt line, you could say that. But again with that line, he is as fair as he was, as fair as he is ugly. Now. It's. Yeah, in the Italian, it just ends on the bruto. And then the, the rhyme, you know, two lines down, rhymes with that. And so it's just very, very harsh. Yeah, it's. There's a finality to it is what I mean to say.
- [85:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I appreciate your thoughts. I. The silence was something that really struck me when I first read it, because I did, I, I, I wanted to run into Milton's Satan. I wanted, maybe I didn't want, but that's what I expected. I didn't realize how much of my own understanding of Satan was maybe formed by this, like, clever rhetorician, this kind of Promethean figure that seduces, like we see in the Garden of Eden. And I think it's like, really telling here that the father of lies has been silenced. The father of lies can no longer tell a lie. You can see some foreshadowing this. Some people point this out. You know, we had the giants who babble, right? Nimrod babbles. And so the speech as, as you. As we've gone further into hell, the speech has become less coherent until you finally get into this pit of silence. And the father of lies cannot lie anymore. And Speaking of the giants, too, Dante's depiction here of him is. Is both biblical and mythological because he makes him a giant demon. And so what Dante's doing there is. He's pulling from obviously the biblical tradition, he's a demon. And then he's also pulling though from the mythological tradition in which the most analogous thing to the demons were the giants. Right. The Titans who try and overthrow Zeus. And there's. There's lots of different variations of this. And so I think we. We saw a foreshadowing of that with the giants that were chained down as we went down, but now we see that Satan is the giant demon. So that's one thing that I would. That I found kind of fascinating as I looked at it. You know, the three faces is trinitarian. It's an anti trinitarian. Right. As another way to look at that. And I think there's a lot. I mean, typically there's a lot of blood, or not blood, but ink that's spilt on the coloring of the faces. Like, so you seem to have like a ruddy one and then a yellowish one and then probably a dark one. And I think most people settle on these. This is some reflection of humanity. Right. It's the color of the skin. So the ruddy is like, you know, the kind of white Europeans you have, the yellowish white is more of like the Asian and then you have the dark. Because he says, he mentions the Nile there.
- [87:40]
Evan Amato
Yeah.
- [87:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [87:41]
Evan Amato
Where the Nile comes rolling to the plains, men's faces are the color on the left.
- [87:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So there's a. So there's. There's this kind of. It's anti trinitarian somehow. It's also very human. Right. In the, in the way that he depicts this. The source of the winds is interesting because, you know, his contrapasso is making it worse for everyone else, which I think is. Is somewhat fitting. Right. So that's like the wind we just talked about, the eyes that they can't see. The coldness of hell, in a lot of ways is coming from Dante's wings, which I think is really. Or not Dante. Sorry, the devil's wings, which I think is really fascinating that his contrapasso is kind of making the contrapasso for everyone else the father of lies. These are in certain ways his children. Right. These are also the ones who lied. This is the fraud he's surrounded by maybe his spiritual children, if you will, that he's making everything kind of worse for. But he's also impotent. Like he's flapping his wings. But he doesn't go anywhere. Right. He's trapped. And I think that goes into what you said very well, which is, you know, he's not the king. He's robbed of really all majesty. Like, you look at this and you're like, this is not worth rebellion. Like, what is this? And I think that Dante does that very well. But I really want your thoughts, though, on. His mouths are not empty. Right. And I know you've done a lot of work, particularly on, like, the imperial side. So who. What do we see here? What does Satan have in his mouth?
- [89:10]
Evan Amato
Yeah. So we have three traitors. Three traitors. And these are none other than Judas, who maybe you could get that one. But then also Brutus and Cassius. Brutus and Cassius. So those who betrayed Caesar, who led the rebellion against Caesar. But also this is. It's all the more damning because the first time that you think of Brutus and Cassius, you think, okay, they led a conspiracy and murdered Caesar in the Senate. Caesar showed them clemency as well. After he defeated Pompey, famously, he showed a lot of people clemency, but famously, he brought them back into the fold. And Brutus as well, who, you know, he. At this point, sometimes Shakespeare blurs with reality. And you're not sure if you're actually pulling from Plutarch or from. Or from Caesar, but. Or from Shakespeare, I should say. But obviously there's somewhat of an affection, you know, between them, or at the very least, you can say that Caesar takes care of Brutus. And so it's these people who. Who revolt against him. And so I think this is what I alluded to earlier when, very much at the beginning of this, when we were talking about what does it mean to kind of betray your political party. And what we see here is again, Dante aligning in a way, the idea that religious in political treachery is that ultimate sin. Or in other words, it is equally damning the betraying of divine authority with the betraying of worldly authority, because, of course, worldly authority has some basis in divine authority, but also because of the reason that it disrupts this. This great chain of being and that it. It disrupts the natural hierarchy. Dante will talk more about this in Demonarchia, but for now, you know, just. Just think of this point. We have Judas in. In the mouth of Satan, which is obvious, but also Brutus and Cassius. So the betrayers of Caesar, the. The symbol of the earthly order. And I think that's what we have to understand as well. Too. I know I keep on adding to this, so apologies. But Caesar's not just Julius Caesar. It would be enough if he were, but it's also Caesar understanding what he brought about, you know, what his heir, Caesar Augustus, will start. He will start the Roman Empire officially. And the Roman Empire, let us not be under any mistaken assumptions from Hollywood, was infinitely more just and infinitely better for the average Roman citizen than the Roman Republic was. And so to see that as the idea of what's being betrayed, this system of governance, this political stability, that is what they represent, you know, upsetting the earthly order, it's, of course, yes, Caesar, okay? But Caesar's name is that which goes on to the czars, the kaisers, you know, all the different rulers have. Have this. All the emperors will be called Caesar. And so it is them revolting against this political. It being this political entity, this earthly order, which is just as much as damning as revolting against that of the divine.
- [92:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree, and I appreciate your thoughts because I know you've. You've done a lot of work and study, you know, into the Roman Empire and those kind of great characters. Yeah, I mean, you know, another way to look at it is Dante's not a liberal in a certain way, we're all liberals because we're. Our political imaginations are completely truncated by left, right dynamics. We think, you know, sometimes conservatives think they're not liberal, but we still think as liberals, historically speaking. And so Dante, right, he holds the duo sunt. There are two, right? There are two lights that govern man. There are two swords that were given to us. Our Lord gave us two leaders. And so there's a temporal power and a spiritual power, right? There is the Caesar and there is the Pope. And, you know, these two then come together to help guide man to live a flourishing life in both his natural and spiritual ends. And so I think together, right, these kind of serve as a whole a common good, a true common good of man's both natural and spiritual capacities. And so I think it's incredibly fitting here then at the end that as we've kind of been tracking this political idea that Dante has, that here at the end, right, Judas, the betrayer of our Lord and the two betrayers of Caesar would all be suffering together. And it shows us particularly then, I think, a certain unity of thought and living, because we tend. We typically want to divorce religion from politics that I think is very foreign to us with something that's actually very good. I don't know if we mentioned it or not, but Judas is in backwards, right? So the other, the other two, you know, they have their heads out, which apparently is better, I think, right? And Judas has. Has the worst of where his feet are sticking out. And a feet sticking out is interesting because it immediately calls to mind the contrapasso of simony. If you remember, they're the ones that are pocketed into the pockets of hell, into the ground of hell, and their feet are sticking out. And so there's a certain way there that Judas, his contrapasso is mirroring that because, you know, he betrayed our Lord for money, right? So it's interesting and actually, even with that maybe to kind of just push us forward a little bit when they journey out of hell, because again, there's no. There's no dialogue, there's no anything. They just see him when they journey out of hell. And Dante, the pilgrim gets confused because they've gone through the middle of the earth, so they climb down and then start climbing up and he can't figure out what's happened. They see Satan's legs then sticking out of the hole. And it's really interesting that then he has. Satan himself has that same imagery that Judas has, right, that there's been a great betrayal because Satan is the one that betrayed God, right? The ultimate benefactor, the beneficial one. And so that kind of. It's a. It's a funny little image, right? The leg sticking out. But you see it throughout hell. And I think it actually gives a very particular lesson to us.
- [95:37]
Evan Amato
Absolutely. To think too. I think another big thing to pick up on here is part of what gets said as the traders go about their treachery. So Judas famously, you know, wants to suggest, well, wouldn't it be better if we took this money and gave it to the poor? You know, we have, we have this idea for an abstract concept, okay, this, this abstract concept of, oh, why, why don't we just take this, you know, why, why do we. Why don't we save this oil? Why don't we save this money, you know, kind of give it to the poor, this sort of thing. And of course, Brutus and Cassius do so in the name of an abstract republic and abstract good of the people, that first of all, I mean, it's comical because they're the last thing from the representatives of the people. Just history kind of note there about the Roman Quote unquote republic just being the pristine kind of altar of oligarchs and, and where they were able to kind of function and so. But they're doing this thing in the name of the people. Judas is perhaps doing part of what he does in the name of the poor, the. In the name of, you know, something that they're taking this abstract concept, basically, and using it. A concept that, like, is not completely abstract because obviously the poor exist, obviously the people exist, but they. They twist it around to justify their ends and then also seeing what becomes of that. So Shakespeare, in his play Julius Caesar, you know, most people don't realize this. It's not really about Caesar because he dies very early on. The whole rest of the play is about the fallout that happens when you destroy the system, when you try to overthrow this system and the destruction that is left in its wake and how that wrecks havoc everywhere. And so you have that same thing, of course, with Judas and, and, and, and Brutus and Cassius. You know, in the case of the latter, it's more war, it's more destruction, it's more Roman killing Roman. In the case of the former, it's God getting crucified on a cross.
- [97:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I appreciate you kind of parsing that out. I think that's. I think that's important. The. Just like, some final kind of thoughts. It's interesting to me that, you know, because when they climb out, they basically climb out at the foot of Mount Purgatory. And it's interesting that Dante gives us this imagery that basically, like, Satan fell into Earth and basically went down into this pit and that pushed out then the mountain of Purgatory. So his fall then kind of gives us the. The means of an ascent towards. Towards Heaven. It's a. It's a really beautiful image. Right. I love, too, that it doesn't end in hell. Right. So I think that's important for the narrative that it ends with the stars. Do you want to say anything about the stars? And like, you know, because we've only read an Inferno and it just ends with the stars. But did the stars have maybe a motif throughout the Comedy?
- [98:39]
Evan Amato
Of course. Well, very famously, each of the three canticles ends with the word le stele, or the two words, technically, the stars. And the first one here is Usimo arrived, we went out to see again. The stars would be the literal translation. And it's to see again that recalls the very beginning of the journey where he is in a forest, dark. All right. It's kind of, you know, this early morning, and you can sense the stars are still in the sky. And so they've been in hell this entire time, and they're finally coming out to see them again. So it's Almost a. A new beginning, but we're not starting in the same place. It's. It's coming full circle, but in a way that. That is beginning an entire new story. You know, it's like when you go back to. I don't know, you leave your hometown, something awful happened, and you come back years later to kind of come to peace with it. And so you're. You're returning, but in the same way, you are now departing because you've become a changed person, and now you're going out on your own. That. That's kind of what you have here. And so, yeah, Beautiful. Beautiful. And of course, you know, the very end of the poem, in Paradiso, God is described as the love which moves the sun and the other stars. So it's queuing us up for that. But, yes, le stelle e usimo arriveder. Le stelle is how it ends right there.
- [100:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's beautiful. And I love that he ends on that beautiful note. And, yeah, it only continues to grow as you go through the comedy, as we alluded to earlier or discussed, about love being that which moves the cosmos. Not only Dante's particular soul as he ascends towards God, but also the entire cosmos is moved by this amor, this eros. How beautiful. Well, Evan, I deeply appreciate you joining us and kind of guiding us at the end of our journey here through the ninth circle. I thought you brought a lot to the table. Thank you for your correct pronunciation of things. That's very nice. We appreciate that. Tell us again where people can find you and your work.
- [100:49]
Evan Amato
Yes, over on Xerevanomato. That's the best place to engage with me there. Hosting spaces and writing emails at the Invictus substack and also the culture critic substack. But again, all that can be found just on. @ Sir Evan Amato on X. So, yeah, thank you, man. This has been enjoyable as it never fails to be when having a conversation with you. So thank you so much.
- [101:15]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, thank you, Evan. Everyone go check him out on X. It's a really good account. Lots of good cultural and beautiful standpoints. So, Evan, I'll let you hop off. Cause I'm gonna do a little bit of housekeeping on where Ascend is going in the next couple weeks. So we deeply appreciate it.
- [101:27]
Evan Amato
Excellent. Well, thank you so much, man. This has been a pleasure.
- [101:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, take care.
- [101:31]
Evan Amato
All right, see ya.
- [101:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
All right, everyone, if you joined us for reading Dante's Inferno over Lent, stay with us. We have two more episodes. The next following two weeks on Dante's Inferno. Next week we will look at lying as contraceptive speech and how Dante treats lying within the Inferno. The week after that we'll actually look at how to read the Bible like Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas. So if you'd like to take some of the lessons that you learned in the Inferno and now apply them maybe to your spiritual life, to our modern culture, et cetera, I think these will be good two good conversations for you to join us overall. If you started a small group, keep the small group going. Go read the Iliad. The Iliad. We have all our podcasts up on the Iliad. You read one book or chapter a week, get together once a month. That's four books a month to discuss each book's only about 500 to a thousand lines of poetry. It's a good solid pace for an attentive reading. We have a guide that's free on our website on our Patreon that you can go download to help you and your small group. But keep your small group going. Go read the great books. We have lots of tools and things to help you through that if you read the Iliad. We also have the Odyssey. We have Hesiod's Theogony. We're getting into the Greek plays. We just finished Aeschylus, Oresteia, and then we'll be getting back into the Greek plays after our episodes on Dante. So we'll be picking up Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and then we will be looking into Sophocles, Euripides, even Aristophanes with a few of his comedies. And then we will be getting into studies, into Plato and starting to read the dialogue. So please keep up with us and join us if you love reading the great books. We are certainly here to help. And we also should say that next Lent. So next year we are already planning out the Purgatory. So we'll continue with Dante's Divine Comedy. Again, you can't just read the Inferno, so we'll treat it as a spiritual exercise. And next Lent we will read the Purgatorio. Please go visit our account on X where we have good conversations on the great books each day. We're also on Facebook and Patreon and YouTube and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com and we will see you all next week. Thank you.