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Today on the Stan the Great Books podcast, we have something new and something exciting. We are taking an article from the Ascent, our sister company over on substack, a top 100 substack in faith and spirituality. We're going to take one of the most popular articles over there, the Hidden Meaning of the Endless Winter of Narnia. Is there an allegorical meaning or a hidden meaning to the endless winter in Narnia? It's a deep dive into CS Lewis, Dante and the problem of evil. We're going to take that article and we're really going to explore those concepts today in a very deep and thorough way. I'm really looking forward to sharing it with you all. And we have many good things happening here on Ascend. We launched an Instagram page, so if you're into Instagram, please go check us out over there. Also, our Facebook page is much more active, so if you're on Facebook, make sure you found us there as well. And of course we have a new exciting 12 week study of the Odyssey coming up before the Christopher Nolan movie. So we start that on April 28th. April 28th we start book one of the Odyssey and then a 12 week read leading up to the movie and an episode on the movie itself. So yes, I have to go see the movie now. And then we're going to have an excellent conversation on a new book by Dr. Patrick Deneen, the American Odyssey, which discusses the Odyssey in the context of the 250th anniversary of America. So many, many good things on the docket. But today join us for an excellent conversation on the hidden meaning of the Endless Winter of Narn. Welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father of five and serve as Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We're recording on a beautiful afternoon here at the Chancery. If you're new to Ascend, we're a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. We can be like a small group to you. We have wonderful conversations leading you through the great books. We've talked about the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod's Theogony, many of the Greek plays as well many of Plato's dialogues. We just went through Dante's Inferno, Lent of 2025, Dante's Purgatorio, this Lent in 2026 with Paradiso on the docket for Lent 2027. And we are gearing up to read Homer's Odyssey, a 12 week study of Homer's Odyssey before the movie comes out. And then after that, we are taking up Plato's Republic and doing a deep dive. A very slow, attentive read of arguably one of the most important philosophical texts in the entire Western canon. It's going to be an absolutely phenomenal read. We've actually already recorded on the first four books. I'm very much looking forward to it. You can join us on X, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. We have Instagram now, so go check us out over there. I found someone to run the Instagram page, which I'm very happy about, and also Patreon. You can go check us out on Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters who have access to our written guides and also to community chats where people can discuss and dialogue back and forth about the great books that you are currently reading. And visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and more information. Okay, so today, today we have something fun, something new, something very good, and I think beautiful as well. So, as you might know, we have a sister company, we have a sister publication called the Ascent. So we have Ascend the Great Books podcast here, helping you read the great books in kind of a small group setting. But we also now have the Ascent, which is a substack that is mainly focused Christian spirituality, theosis, sanctification. It's very much entrenched in the Western canon and the great books as well. But really looking at how can we become more beautiful like Christ is beautiful. And so we publish two articles a week. On Tuesday, we have a short article that comes out that's free for everybody. And then on Fridays we have kind of like a deep dive that's for our members only, even though there's kind of a sneak peek at the beginning for everyone following along to the substack. So it's been wonderful. I've launched it along with the Culturist and also Evan Amato. They've been fantastic. We are a top 100 substack already in faith and spirituality. So I feel very humbled by that fact. And so something new that we're going to do, which I think is going to be really wonderful, is that we're going to start taking some of the top articles on the Ascent and discussing them here on Ascend the Great Books podcast. And so the first one that we're actually going to take up is the hidden meaning of the Endless Winter of Narnia. Is there a hidden meaning, a deeper meaning, an allegorical meaning? To see C.S. lewis's use of Winter of The cold in the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And our thesis to kind of start off here is that C.S. lewis uses the endless winter as an analog for evil, that it's allegorical for evil. But what does that mean? Well, we really have to dig into it. If we dig into what CS Lewis is doing here, you realize that his insight, which is very profound, tethers him also to a profound insight in Dante's Inferno, who also, surprisingly, particularly for a book called the Inferno, uses the ice and cold as an analog for evil. So we're going to jump into that today. I think it's going to be a fantastic discussion. I'm looking forward to discussing it with you. So where would it begin? Well, let's begin with just a little bit of background. So, as a lot of you know, the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe starts off with Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy leaving London during World War II. So think of the bombings of London into the countryside like a lot of children do. And so they go to this mansion held by this kind of eccentric professor. And long story short, Lucy's playing one day, goes into the Wardrobe, and the Wardrobe leads into a magical land of Narnia. And so eventually all the kids discover Narnia. They go into it. And through kind of an adventure with some talkative beavers and some other mythological characters, they understand that Aslan has come. Aslan's coming. And this is the lion figure. But what's interesting about Narnia is, is that it's suffering under a endless winter. It is always winter, but never Christmas. And this has been overseen. The antagonist here is the White Witch. And so, as many of you know, Lewis plays with our expectations and with the expectations of the children. And so Aslan does not immediately come in as this military, victorious hero, as he is expected to be, because there's a gathering of armies and the retaking of Narnia and things like this. But rather, we see that Aslan then defeats the White Witch, ultimately through self sacrifice. And it's actually through the death and the resurrection of Aslan that that Narnia is ultimately saved. So this is a very famous allegory that most people know that Aslan in the Narnia series represents a christological figure. It represents Jesus Christ. And so as Aslan died and rose from the dead in Narnia, so too is that analogous or images the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in our life. And this is one of the. As a side point, this is one of the beautiful things of reading the Chronicles of Narnia to your children is that one of the. The real benefits of reading the Narnia series to your children is that it actually habituates them to allegory. It habituates them to. To a slow, patient read that understands that narratives have meaning, that narratives have layers. And this is new for a child's mind, that one thing can stand as an analog for another, that one thing can be an image of another. That when you read a story about Aslan dying on the stone table and rising from the dead, you kind of read that narrative to them and you say, does that sound like anyone else? And you can watch their young minds start to be habituated to allegory. And this is honestly a tremendous service that you can do to your children is to habituate them to the fact that real narratives have strata, that real narratives have layers. And we have to work through these layers if we're going to then understand the reality around us. Because two important things have this type of strata. One is holy Scripture. So many of you might know, and we've talked about this both on Ascend, the Great Books podcast, and on the substack, the ascent is that there are four senses to holy Scripture. There's the literal, there's the allegorical, then the moral, and then the anagogical. So first we understand just what is the author's intent? What is the literal meaning here? What's the genre? What's the historical setting? This is the literal. Then we understand the allegorical. We understand that one thing can serve as a type of another, that one thing can image another thing, that manna in the desert. We see Israel going through the desert on their way to the promised land, can be an image of the Blessed Sacrament. That can be an image of Christ, the bread of life, who's come down amongst us, who will then satisfy this hunger. As we see in John 6. You also see, say in the Old Testament, we get the ark of the Covenant, this gold box, the dwelling place of Christ on earth. And in the New Testament, a lot of the early church fathers point to Mary as the new ark of the Covenant, the new dwelling place of God on earth. You also see Christ make another famous allegorical comparison where he compares himself to Jonah. That just like Jonah was three days in the belly of the whale, so too will our Lord be three days and then rise again. So not only is this a way to habituate a child's mind to Scripture, but also it's the way that our Lord interpreted Scripture. So understanding how allegory works, understanding analogues how one thing can image another, sometimes called typology, a study of types, logos and type, a study of types, this thing can be a type of another, is incredibly important for your own imagination, but very important for the imagination of a child. Then it's in that richness, that tilled soil of a literal read along with an allegorical read, that then we can talk about moral. How does this apply to my life? A lot of people who read Scripture, who don't seem to get a lot out of it, they don't understand how this applies to my life is because they're skipping from literal to moral, and they don't do the allegorical read. And that's where a lot of the richness comes from. And again, your child can benefit then from Narnia, helping them to understand the strata, helping them to understand the allegory. So then when they start reading scripture themselves, they too will be accustomed to looking for the images, looking for the layers. Honestly, habituating us, you should habituate the child to the fact that good narratives, good stories, have layers. They have maybe allegory, or at times they just have analogues where one thing stands for another. And then at the end, we get the fourth sense, the anagogical word. We don't use very often, but it simply means that we're focused on the end of our life. It's our final purpose. So how does this thing that I'm reading in front of me, how does this apply to my final end with God? How is this going to help me achieve my purpose? Because keep in mind, it's by a thing's end that we judge that thing to be good or bad. So, for instance, if I said this was a good knife, you would know that the knife must be sharp, because the purpose of the knife is to cut. And so it's by the purpose of the knife that you can judge whether the knife is good or bad. You can also then start to judge whether something is good or bad for the knife. So if it helps sharpen the knife, if it helps strengthen the knife, then it's good for the knife. If it makes it brittle, if it makes it dull, then it's bad for the knife. The good things we call virtues, the bad things we call vices. And so the same thing plays for humanity. In God, we understand what our final end is, and therefore we can judge what a good or bad human is. We can also judge then what is good or bad for that human. The anagogical read is rooted in this. Does this help me achieve my final end with God. And so these are the four senses of Scripture, which is very much rooted and anchored in a good understanding of the allegorical. And if you read Narnia to your children, if you read the Chronicles of Narnia, it helps your mind expand and stretch and kind of understand, I think, a thicker understanding of reality that is actually applicable not only to Scripture, but the second thing is that it's actually applicable to reality itself. The medieval Christians read reality according to the four senses, that everything in this world around us actually images a spiritual reality, that the material images the immaterial. So what would be an example of this? We see this with St. Paul. St. Paul tells us not that we call God father because he's like the earthly fathers that we see, but rather that we call the earthly fathers father because they are like God. That's a really important distinction, because when we call the earthly fathers father because of God, what that means is that the earthly fathers, the fathers in a family, are actually the metaphor. They are the image of God, as opposed to. If you said that we call God father because of the earthly fathers, then God being the father is the metaphor. It depends on which way do you think this is going. Is the material imaging the immaterial, or does the immaterial image the material? And this is something that C.S. lewis is profoundly sensitive to, because for Those who know, C.S. lewis has some deep Platonic inclinations in his own writings and his own beliefs. Also, being a medieval scholar, if you want to see a wonderful text on his medieval mind, check out the discarded image, a C.S. lewis book that's not discussed nearly enough. And so a lot of this imagery is baked then into Narnia. And if you can understand the allegorical, you'll be a better reader of Scripture, and you'll actually be a better reader of reality itself and how reality is structured according to the divine authorship of God. Now, that's Aslan. That's what Aslan introduces us to, because he's such a clear analog. He's such a clear allegory for Jesus Christ, but, again, a wonderful introduction for children. But our question is, what is CS Lewis then doing with the endless winter? That's an analog that's not discussed as much. And our thesis is, is that it stands for evil. So how do we see that work? Okay, well, the first question we have to ask ourselves is, what is evil? So one thing you have to understand that's really helped me in my own kind of intellectual life is that your mind will move from grammar to logic to rhetoric. And what does that mean? It means that you have to understand terms before you can actually logically think about them and apply them. And then only then once you know the terms and you've applied the terms can you successfully actually talk about them. Now, here's our problem. Today we typically skip the grammar stage, which means we don't define our terms and we kind of do something that seems like logic, but we're really just focused on the rhetoric. We just like to talk at people and share what we think without really actually tilling the soil, without the difficulties of actually preparing our minds for good intellectual thought. So if we're going to take up this question of what is the meaning of the endless winter and our thesis that it stands for evil, then let us actually work on our grammar and take up the question of what is evil? Because we don't want to equivocate. Aristotle talks about equivocation. This is where two people come together to discuss something, say, like evil, but both actually have equivocal different grammar. They have different definitions of what that word means. If you want an example of this, basically check out any social media argument you've ever witnessed online is that people bring different definitions to an argument and they just talk past one another. So let's look at then, what is evil? So there's something in Christianity called theodicy. So not the Odyssey, as by Homer, the epic poem, but theodicy. T H E O D I C Y Theodicy. And this is the fancy theological term for the problem of evil. Now, why do we call this the problem of evil? Well, one of the reasons is how we view God. As Christians, it kind of goes something like this. God is good. Everything that God created is good. But evil exists. So therefore, where did evil actually come from? You see, a lot of religions take up this problem by creating a certain duality. So they say, okay, well, there's a good God or a good force, and then there's a bad God and a bad force. And these things are basically, they're competitive, they're equal opposites to one another, and life is really about this balance. Or life is about trying to move towards the good force, away from the bad force. And this makes sense on its face in many different ways because we see that evil does exist. But this is not a claim that Christianity makes. Christianity makes a very unique claim that there's only one God and that God is good and everything that God created is also good and that evil. And this is very key. Evil is not an equal opposite to the good. And we see this, it's shown to us we don't have like maybe the philosophy, the theology, but we see this in narrative in the Old Testament where we have God, but then his quote, unquote, opposite, is a creature. It's creator to creature. We have God, but then we have Satan, just a fallen angel who in no way, shape or form has the same power, the same majesty, the same omnipotence as God does. It's a creator to creature relationship, not a relationship of equals. And so one of the images, one of the narratives that we receive in the Old Testament is that there is no equal opposite evil to God. God is simply good. Everything he creates is good, yet evil exists. And that's the problem. And this problem of evil actually raises many other problems as well. So, for instance, it's not something that evil exists, but that evil has an effect upon us. So the good God allows his good creation to suffer evil. And this might be maybe somewhat tolerable if it was only the adults that suffered, because, you know, we've all kind of committed evil as well. So maybe there's a justice to it. But then we see that children suffer, we see that the unborn suffer, we see that the innocent suffer. How can a good God allow these things? One of the best depictions of this, I think, in literature is the Brothers K, the Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. Why? Because in that text, right, if you've read it, you have Ivan, you have Alyosha, Ivan is giving these examples not for why God doesn't exist, but for why God is not good. And he gives this string of horrendous examples of children suffering abuse, which I've heard are not just simply tied into the fictional narrative of the Brothers K, but rather these were actually real examples that Dostoevsky had brought into his narrative or adapted into the story. And so he tells these gut wrenching stories of these little children suffering abuse and crying out for God to save them. And he does not. And they die in these terrible ways. And so one thing here is we simply scratch the surface of the problem of evil. The problem of theodicy is that this isn't reducible to some kind of sterile academic conversation, but rather this is something that we all suffer through. We have loved ones that suffer through. And a lot of times it seems profoundly unjust. How could a good God allow this? And so this opens us up to all kinds of questions. What is evil? Why do good people suffer? Why does God permit this, etc. And so what we need to do is work on our grammar. We need to work on what do we mean by evil. And this is what we turn to C.S. lewis, and we turn to Dante to try and teach us, as these two great masters of Christianity, what then is evil? And they don't necessarily tell us, but they show us, and they show us through the analog of the cold of winter, of ice. Okay, so then what is evil? What is our working definition? If we're going to work on our grammar, if we're going to turn to CS Lewis, if we're going to turn to Dante, then what is evil? What's our grammar? What's our working definition here? We're following St. Augustine, who then is also following kind of the Neoplatonists. We see that evil is unreal. Evil is not a real thing. You might push back and say, well, that can't be true because we just talked about evil. It's something I can name. It's something that I see. I see the suffering, I see this corruption. Evil has to be real. I can name all these evil people, all these evil deeds. So when we talk about evil not being real, we kind of talk about it in the same way. Like a hole in the ground is not real. Certainly you can say, well, isn't that a hole in the ground? Can I talk about it? I can see it, etc. Yeah, sure you can. But the hole itself is not real. It's a lack of something, it's a privation, it's an absence of something else. So, for instance, kind of think of it this way. You can't have the hole in the ground without the ground. You have to have something to have a hole in it. So the hole is only real insofar as the other thing does not exist. And this is, I think, a really good picture then of what we think of as a relationship between good and evil. That God is good and everything that he creates is good. Evil then is not the equal opposite of good. Evil is like the hole in the ground. Evil is a corruption, it's a privation, it's a lack of something. In other words, you can't really have something that is pure evil. Just like you can't just simply have a hole in the ground or a hole. It's like, hey, look, here is this hole doesn't work. It has to be a hole in something else. Evil's the exact same way. Another analogy is a lot of people will point to light and dark, that the darkness is really just an absence of light. And that is Actually, how it's measured, it's light that is the real thing. I can have a flashlight, I can make the light come. The darkness is not its equal opposite. I can't have some mechanism that shines darkness out. They're not equal opposites. The darkness is simply an absence of light. And so just as the darkness is an absence of light, so too is evil an absence of the good. Or just like the whole is an absence of the ground, so too is evil an absence of the good. And therefore what that does is. Is that it? We can see it as something that is uncreated. It's not something that God created, but rather it's a corruption, a privation of something that God created. And this is a good. This is like. So if you're looking for your kind of Catholic definition of this, St. Thomas Aquinas, again following St. Augustine, who's then following the Neoplatonists, will talk about that. Evil is a privation of the good. That's our kind of working definition. It's a privation of the good. And again, you can talk about this like thick, philosophical, theological grammar, but we see it, we see the images of it, we see the narrative. Holy Scripture a lot of times shows us the answer, it doesn't tell us the answer. And so go back to the Satan example. Satan is fundamentally good. Satan is a creature of God, and God created him good. But ultimately he chose to rebel, and therefore he becomes a corruption of himself. So one thing to keep in mind is a simple theological principle that might help you, is that the corruption of the best is always the worst. And so Satan, Lucifer before his fall, was the highest of all the creatures in creation. But in that he suffers from pride and then he falls and he becomes the worst creature in all of creation. And so the same thing too. Like, for instance, your intellect is the highest faculty in your soul. And so when you corrupt your intellect, you corrupt the image of God in you. You act in some of the worst possible ways because you're using your highest faculty, what's highest in you, in the worst possible way. But what's really important here, I think, for our purposes, is that Satan actually shows us, I think, a few fundamental principles that we need to in mind when we talk about evil. So one is that everything that God created is good and that evil is a privation. And what that means is, if we stop and kind of think about it, what that means is being. Existing is actually convertible with goodness. Or in other words, to the degree that something exists, it is also good. Because existence itself, being itself, is good because it is authored by a good God who is goodness itself. And so Christianity makes this very unique claim that goodness and being are actually convertible. And what evil is then is a privation, a corruption. So in really, in certain ways, the more evil you become, something becomes, the less you actually exist. You're participating in unreality. You're like a being of light that is slowly being corrupted into a shadow. You're like the ground that is slowly giving way to a collapse, to an abyss, to a hole in the middle of it. To the degree that you embrace evil is the degree that you no longer exist. Evil is an unreality. So that's one of the first examples or principles that I think we can pull from Satan. The second one, too, is simply the origin of evil. So if evil doesn't exist and God didn't create evil, where does it come from? You can say it's a privation, you can say it's a corruption, but where does that actually come from? Well, it actually comes from free will. As we saw with Satan, as we saw with Adam and Eve. It comes with the capacity to choose, that we can actually choose something other than the good. And one distinction I do want to make here is a lot of times when you hear people say that free will is the origin of evil, they usually say something along the lines of like, well, if we were truly going to love, if God wanted us to love him back, then we actually had to have free will. And that's correct. But then they'll usually say something like, so we had to have the capacity to choose evil. And so I want to push back on that just a little bit, because God would not give us something that is actually designed to ever choose evil, because that's not what he is. Everything he gives us is for the good. And this is one of those things where, again, we have to recapture our Christian grammar because our grammar has been corrupted by modernity. One of the very dangerous things about the modern age is that it uses our ancient Christian terms, but in a new way. And again, your mind works from grammar to logic to rhetoric. So when they change the definitions of terms which think right now of all the terms in our culture that they're constantly trying to change the definitions of, if they can change the grammar they know, they automatically change your logic and then your rhetoric. So part of you having to purify and keep whole and protect your Christian imagination is to protect your grammar, to actually know what words mean, and they actually signify a true Reality. And so freedom, this liberty that you were given by God, it's not what the world tells you. The world tells you that freedom is kind of the. The capacity to satiate desire. It's a plurality of choice to satiate your desires, that the more choices you have, good or bad, the more free you are. That's not freedom. Freedom was never designed to choose between good or evil. Freedom given to you by God was actually given to you to choose amongst the goods. It was given to you as an intellectual creature that can reflect upon your acts as acts to be able to choose amongst many different goods. Because goods exist in a hierarchy and not all decisions are between good and evil. Most of the decisions that you make every single day are actually just between different types of goods. What should I be doing now? Which good is more important? How should I spend my time? We navigate a hierarchy of goods as an intellectual creature according to our freedom, the capacity to choose evil. And the choosing of evil is always a deep corruption of freedom and liberty. It is never a true exercise of one's liberty to choose evil. So just as a side note, another word in your grammar that you're going to have to reclaim from the modern age is liberty. That is the capacity to choose amongst goods. It is not a plurality of options the satiate desires, whether those options are good or bad. And so up to this point, we see that there's maybe three principles or three truths that we're trying to hold together. One is that evil is a privation of the good. Two, that the origin of evil is the misuse or the corruption of freedom. And three, this interesting claim that Christianity makes that goodness and being are convertible to the degree that something exists, it is also good. And every time you choose evil, anytime anything participates in evil, you're participating in an unreality. Okay, so if that's our working definition of evil and the kind of the general effects that we need to understand around this conversation, then how does CS Lewis and Dante show us this truth? How do they invite us into a deeper understanding? Okay, so let's return to CS Lewis. How does he show us this lesson? Our thesis is, is that the cold is an analog for evil. So according to what we know now about the definition of evil, how does this play out? Well, this endless winter, this perpetual winter that represents the evil that's overcome. Narnia is another wonderful analog for evil because it presents the cold as an absence of heat. So just like the darkness is an absence of light, or the whole is the absence of the ground, so too, is the cold an absence of heat. It's another natural analog for evil. And what's really interesting about CS Lewis using cold as an analog for evil is that it actually has a whole nother layer to it that we might not see exactly in the darkness to the light, or the hole to the ground. And it's this is that your soul in Latin is called an anima. This animus, this anima, which is your soul. And this is where we get a lot of words in English like an animal animation to be animated. Things that move have a soul. There's movement there. Movement indicates life. It's why things that are inanimate, they have no anima, are things that don't move, like your desk or your TV or things like this. And we see that God then, is the spirit of life. And we always have these pictures of God as love. And so there's a warmth there. There's something then that as we draw closer to God, we're on fire. Think about the seraphim that are flying around the throne of God, singing, holy, holy, holy. They're the burning ones. They're on fire. The closer you get to God, the more heat there is, the more warmth there is, because he's truly goodness itself. He's love itself. So the more you draw away from him, the colder you become. But with that coldness also comes death. You start to have a cessation of your animation. So the further you draw away from God, the less movement there actually is. And this is, I think, a picture of why the cold is actually a really excellent analog for evil, because it not only has the privation aspect, but it has the cessation aspect as well, that you start to slow down as you. As you become more and more cold, until eventually you would simply just be frozen and stop moving. And what's really interesting is, is that C.S. lewis incorporates that aspect in the Chronicles of Narnia as well, because the White Witch is kind of satanic figure in this allegory. What's her main or worst superpower, if you will? Well, she turns you to stone. It's a complete cessation of your life. Evil comes in and the movement completely stops. The anima, the soul, that which actually animates you, is frozen. And so C.S. lewis presents us that as this is like the zenith of this evil. That's a complete cessation of life. Now, notice how he continues this allegory, because how do you. All the little animals, all the mythological creatures, et cetera, how then do they get restored? To life. Well, Aslan comes the Jesus figure and he breathes on them. And this is a beautiful passage. You could say it has certain allusions to Genesis. God breathed into Adam and he has life. I would also think though of John's Pentecost. So you have the Pentecost and Acts which most people think of, the tongues of fire on top of their head, they're waiting for the Holy Spirit to come down, etc. A lot of people skip over John's Pentecost. And this is where the risen Lord breathes the Holy Spirit directly into his apostles. And what's very fascinating about that passage is that it is intimately tied to the forgiveness of sins. And he tells his apostles that those sins which you retain are retained and those sins which you forgive are. Are forgiven. And so if you think about this, particularly in a Catholic context, there's two types of sin. There's venial, these small mistakes that we make throughout the day. But there's also mortal. And the mortal sins are called mortal because they cut off the life of God in you. They cut you off from grace. Grace, again, working on grammar, is the divine life when we participate in the divine life of God. But as John tells us, we have these venial sins or we have mortal sins. And so it's just really interesting that in John's Gospel, Christ breathing the Holy Spirit on his disciples, is tethered then to the forgiveness of sins, the capacity to breathe life back in to Christians and bring them back into the fold, even if they have committed a mortal sin and cut themselves off from the divine life. And so we get a really interesting kind of image of that in Narnia, in which the mythological creatures, say, like Mr. Tumnus, have been turned to stone by evil. And it's only through the breath of Aslan that they are actually resurrected, that the soul, the anima, continues then to animate them. A really beautiful picture of Christ breathing life back into a soul that has suffered a complete cessation because of the effects of evil. So I think that C.S. lewis gives us many, many wonderful pictures and images in the Chronicles of Narnia to kind of discuss what then is evil as kind of a comparison. To see this in another kind of poetic context is this is also always a huge surprise to first time readers of the Inferno. First off, the book is called the Inferno. It's by Dante Alighieri, Dante the poet. It's the first canticle of the Divine Comedy. The book's called the Inferno, and it's about hell and when you get to the very pit of hell, you're probably expecting a giant inferno, the lake of fire, and the whole nine yards. But what you get is a frozen lake of ice. And as they go deeper into that ninth circle, the souls are frozen more and more into the ice, until finally, when they get into the deepest, deepest pit of hell, the souls, Dante says, are like straw frozen in ice. Like, think about straw that was lying on a. On a lake, and the lake has frozen, and you just see the straw every which way, frozen in the ice. Absolutely no movement. That is what the damned are like in the frozen pit of hell. At the bottom of the ninth circle, they are completely frozen. Now, Dante presents this because Dante also knows that God is love, that God is the love that moves the cosmos. He is what brings motion to everything else. You know, what's fascinating about this is that even the pagans started to understand this in Aristotle's metaphysics. Aristotle has to answer the question of how does the unmoved mover, who we call God, how does the unmoved mover move all things if the unmoved mover does not move? It's a good question. How does God as the unmoved mover? Nothing moves him. And God has no motion because motion has potential. And if you have potential, that means that you weren't perfect because you can have change. Think of it this way. If I said, hey, here's the perfect steak. And then I said, well, wait, stop. And then I sprinkled some salt on top. What's the problem with that? Well, it must not have been perfect, because if it was perfect, you wouldn't change it. And that's what perfection actually means. It means that you've fully actualized your potential. There's no more potential for you to actualize because you are absolutely perfect. This is why God can also be called pure act. And so Dante knows then that God has no motion. And so Aristotle, even a pagan, then has to answer this question. How does the unmoved mover move all things in the cosmos if the unmoved mover does not move? And you know what the answer is? Even for Aristotle, the answer is love. The answer for him is eros, the natural love. All things that exist have a natural eros, an erotic appetite, in the best sense of that word. They have a desire to return and satiate into God. They have a desire to play out the path, the teleology that God has given them and return back to him. In Catholicism, we talk about this as the exitus reditus that creation exits from God and then yearns to return to him. And that desire to return back to him is Eros. It is that natural love in you. Dante knows this very well. Even though he's not writing in the Greek, he knows this concept incredibly well. And so he writes then that it is God. God is the love that moves the sun and stars. He understands that God is then this motion throughout the entire universe, that he is the source of it. Even though he himself does not move, everything desires to return to him. So God is always presented then as where the motion comes from, where the heat is, the fire, the warmth, the love. So the farthest you get away from that will be cold. There won't be any motion. You'll be frozen. And this is the brilliance of Dante's picture, is that at that height of heaven is then this fiery love that moves all things. And the farthest away that you can get from him is the pit of hell in its frozen solid. And it's actually the wings of Satan who's trapped in the center of the earth. It's actually the wings of Satan flapping that causes this freezing wind throughout the pit of hell. And so all those souls then, that mimicked Satan in their life, because at the bottom of hell, particularly in the ninth circle, are traitors. They're the treacherous. They had a malicious, fraudulent sin in their lives. They betrayed those closest to them, whether it was family or their country, or those who took them in through hospitality, their hosts or their benefactors, like Judas betraying our Lord, or Brutus and Cassius betraying Caesar. These are the treacherous. It's ironic, then, that they who mimicked Satan then are frozen in the ice due to Satan's wings. And so Dante, just like C.S. lewis, actually invites you to a very deep pedagogy into what is evil and what is its relationship to the good. And again, they don't really tell you these things. They show you to them. They give you an image of that Christian wisdom in trying to navigate a really pertinent question for your life. What is evil? And that if you start to grasp this question, you can then start to understand, I think, more difficult questions about why do people suffer? How do I handle suffering in my life? Why would a good God allow me to suffer? Those deeper conversations start here with a good grammar about what is evil? And if you want to understand, whether you know this well or not, you can look at the endless winter of CS Lewis, and you can look at the frozen pit of Dante's Inferno. So just in recap, what are the things? A few things that we've learned today. We've learned that evil is the privation of the good, that evil is an unreality. We've also learned that the origin of evil is a misuse of our freedom. But that freedom, when we use that term, it does not mean your capacity to choose between good and evil. It does not mean your capacity to to satiate your desires by how many choices you have. It means your capacity to choose amongst goods. That's why it was given to you. And three, we see the interesting claim that because God is good and God only created good things, that being and goodness are actually convertible with one another. And to the degree that you embrace evil, you embrace unreality, you cease to exist. That creature of light becomes a creature of shadow. You start to corrupt, like having a hole in the ground. You start to enter into a certain unreality, an absence, because you're not embracing what is truly real, what is true, good and beautiful. And so these are the lessons that I think we have to learn from CS Lewis and Dante, and these are the lessons that we take up on the Ascent, the Substack twice a week. So if you enjoyed this conversation, then go check us out on the Ascent on Substack and we'll see our two articles on Christian spirituality per week here on Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. If you're new to this podcast, you're actually coming to this over from the ascent side. Welcome. We read the Great Books together. We're a weekly podcast. Sometimes we do topical things like this. Next week we're actually going to be looking at another article on the Ascent. We're going to look at the spiritual harm of lying. So we're actually going to return to Dante the Master. We're going to return to the very structure of Hell and look at one of, I think, the most difficult questions about Dante's hell, the order in which he structures it. Why does he place certain sins lower than other ones? And if we can kind of start to scratch the surface in answering that question, we'll start to really understand the spiritual harm of lying. So we're going to take that up next week. And again, we're preparing to read Homer's Odyssey together before the movie comes out. So we'll have a 12 week study of Homer's Odyssey. So if you want to join us for that, go check out thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule. You can check us out on X, Facebook, Patreon and now we're on Instagram as well, so go check out our new Instagram page. I appreciate all of you. I'm humbled by your support and your feedback. If this is helpful for you, your intellectual life, your spiritual life, please leave a comment. Share Etc I love hearing back from you guys and I will see you next week. Thank you.