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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Purgatorio: Acedia and Avarice (Cantos 18-22) with Dr. Sarah Berry
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- [00:00]
A
Today on Ascend, the Great Books Podcast, we have a wonderful conversation as we continue our journey through Dante's Purgatorio. We are covering Cantos 18 through 22 with Dr. Sarah Berry of the English Department at the University of Dallas. She does a fantastic job. First time on the podcast. I really appreciated all of her comments and insights because we cover a lot. We have Slothfulness or Acedia, we have avarice and then we have gluttony as we continue up Mount Purgatory. So a lot of good conversations today on the podcast. Acedia or Slothfulness is one of my favorite conversations because it's not always what you think it is this deep cooling of love that can actually bring a deep spiritual sorrow into the soul. I just want to say I appreciate all of your all's feedback, all your commentary, all the positive notes that you give as we read through Dante's Purgatorio together this Lent. I'm reading it in a small group as well. I've really appreciated it, all the comments from the men that are in that group. Iron sharpens iron. It's always wonderful to read these texts together. So please leave a comment on x, Facebook and YouTube if you're reading along with us. We always appreciate hearing from you. But today join us for a wonderful conversation on Cantos 18 through 22 with Dr. Sarah Berry. 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. Recording on a beautiful afternoon here at the Chancery. If you're new to Ascend, our weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books we've read the Iliad, the Odyssey, many of the Greek plays, several of the Platonic dialogues, with a reread of Homer's Odyssey this summer and then Plato's Republic on the docket later in 2026. Go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. Appreciate all of our supporters very much. Appreciate all of you guys. You guys are awesome people who support us, have access to our library of written guides on the great books and also we have community chats where you kind of talk to us as we're reading these books together. Go visit thegreatbookspodcast.com where you can check out our reading schedule and more information. Also, thank you to the center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College and Dr. Jason Baxter for promoting our read of Dante's Purgatorio, the Slint. I have his translation that I'M working through and go check it out on his website. It's been really good, actually. It's been really excellent to work through and compare to other translations that I've read in the past. Today we have our fifth episode on Dante's Purgatorio, covering Cantos 18 through 22, discussing the fourth terrace purging acedia or sloth, the fifth terrace purging avarice, and starting the sixth terrace purging gluttony. To guide us through these terraces, we are joined by Dr. Sarah Berry, who is the Assistant professor of English at the University of Dallas. She was recommended by Dr. Jason Baxter. He said that she would explain everything about Dante to us. So I am very excited to have her on the podcast today. So welcome.
- [03:08]
B
Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.
- [03:10]
A
So tell us a little bit just about your scholarship in general.
- [03:14]
B
Well, I am in an English department, so I work in English Literature primarily here at the University of Dallas. I know Dantista myself, but I teach Dante every year in the second course in our Literary Tradition sequence. So I'm teaching Dante all the time with my first year students here at ud, but my own research and some of my upper level teaching and is primarily in 20th century literature and English. So I do a lot of modernist poetry, modern and contemporary literature from the United States, England and Ireland. And I work on drama and theater as well. So those are my main interests inside and outside of the classroom. But I have a great love for. For Dante and I think lit trad two, that's what we call it. Literary Tradition two is probably the most fun class to teach here. I'm gonna just go out and say it. It's the best class to teach at the University of Dallas. The best class to take. It's just a tremendous amount of fun and tremendously worthwhile. So that too makes this a pleasure.
- [04:30]
A
Do you guys read the whole comedy or just the Inferno or what do you read of Dante?
- [04:36]
B
Oh, we do, yeah. So we read. We start with Inferno 1 and we read all the way through to the end of Paradiso and it's paired with Milton's Paradise Lost and some lyric poetry at the end of the semester. So we take the time to go canto by canto through all of Dante. We read a little bit. I supplement with a few other pieces of writing that Dante did along the way. But it's primarily focused on the epics, so the comedy and then Paradise Lost together, which is. Which is great and very different from the way that I was introduced To Dante. When I was a college student, we just read. We read the Inferno and the Purgatorio. We at least did that, but we didn't get to Paradiso. And so the first time that I ever read Paradiso was as a graduate student, long after I started. I read it the first time as a freshman.
- [05:42]
A
Yeah, it's a. It's often neglected. I'm really glad that you guys read the whole comedy.
- [05:47]
B
That's.
- [05:47]
A
That's fantastic. When you guys get to the Purgatorio and your students have to read it, why do you tell them that this is a book worth reading?
- [05:55]
B
The Purgatorio in particular, I think. Well, after you've read the Inferno, which has a kind of appeal. It's maybe not. Maybe appeal is the wrong word, but it draws you in. We are drawn in, like Dante, into the suffering and the misery of these characters. And we have to be chastised, like Virgil, that we're getting too. Into the. The. The bickering and the suffering of these sinners. And so we've been warned in the Inferno that this is not all. This is not the whole story, that to focus only on sin, only on hell, only on death, is to. To. To not get a full picture of humanity. And so what Purgatorio shows you is humanity in motion, dynamic humanity. Right. In the Inferno, you have stasis, right? You have human beings that have, through their sin, locked themselves into a pattern or into no movement at all. And in the Paradiso, you have the souls who have. And are reaching their telos, are reaching their purpose. But Purgatorio is the one that shows us human beings in time. And so it is the. In some ways, the. The. The canticle that comes along beside us the closest and shows us what we need to know to be able to make choices in our lives in time when we're in motion. And it lets us kind of see something that is close to what we are experiencing and close enough that we can let it inform our judgments and actually practically apply it in a way that is. It has to be indirect in the Inferno and the parody. So the lessons have to be. Have to. Are taught indirectly. But there's a kind of immediacy to the Purgatorio that is an urgency to it, I think, because of that immediacy that's just immediately and tremendously helpful. Applicable.
- [08:32]
A
Yeah, very well said. Yeah, I. Yeah, I've come to appreciate Purgatorio over time. I think that if you are very much interested in your own Spiritual maturation and like sanctification, theosis, etcetera, Then the value of the Purgatorio just increases tremendously over time because it really is like a spiritual map where we're getting this kind of set pattern, set liturgy on every terrace of things that we can use to help purge the soul of particular vices. And, yeah, as a younger man, I mean, like, I guess everybody, like, we like the Inferno, just crazy and people are being tortured and weird things happening. It just. It captures your imagination. It's hard not to like it. Also, we're all terribly familiar with sin, so it makes a lot of sense to us, right? So that's why I say I even like paradise now. Paradiso. I'm still. It's still probably the most alien to me. It's the one that is probably the greatest struggle to read. And if we keep this up, we'll be reading it for next Lent. And I'm already starting to think about that of, like, who actually knows this text and who actually really knows it? Well, because I still feel very kind of lost in it, if you will. But I appreciate what you said, because I do think that Purgatorio is very much where we are in our own spiritual walk. And Dante's just given us a phenomenal map on how to draw closer to Christ.
- [09:43]
B
But it's hard. It's hard, too. There is a kind of a danger, or I guess I should say a challenge to each one of the Canticles. I think in the Inferno, the danger is that we would be kind of sucked in to the drama in the Purgatorio. One of the things that's hard is it's hermeneutically difficult. It's hard to know how to interpret what the penitents, what the souls that he meets in Purgatory say. Because in the Inferno, you know, these are sinners. They are blinded by their sins. In the eighth circle and the ninth circle, they could be lying to you, right? So they're not trustworthy, worthy. And. And that. That is disturbing, but ultimately not hermeneutically unsettling. And in Paradiso, you have the blessed in Heaven. They know everything now, and they're not trying to deceive you. In Purgatory, you have souls that are on their way to heaven. That they are. They're. They. They're not malicious, but they don't know everything. And that it's hard to gauge to what degree does that sin still have a hold on them and affect what they say or what they can know? And so it's. It's immediately applicable to us. It's so, you know, relatable. But it's sometimes hard to know what Dante's trying to teach us through these characters, because we don't know how much the characters know or how free they are when we meet them.
- [11:32]
A
Yeah, I appreciate you saying that, because sometimes they'll talk to one of the penitent souls and they'll say something. I'm like, that doesn't quite sound like you've made it yet. Like, there's still some. I think we're still struggling a little bit with sin, maybe a little bit with pride. So, yeah, we have to meet them where they are, which, again, like you said, is another analog to this pilgrimage to this life, because we meet people on different levels of formation and. And things of this nature and how much we trust them. So. No, I appreciate that. Okay, let's look at the text. Okay, so we are diving in. We are on Canto 18. So if I remember correctly, right? Where. Where are we? We are moving from lower Purgatory. We just went through Wrath. Correct. And now we are up into. We're moving between terraces, and we're going to come to the terrace of Acadia of the Slothful. But before we kind of see the penitents and get into everything, this is one of those cantos in which we're going to get a little lesson. And so it's really interesting to me because in the last Canto, what we saw is kind of actually similar to the Inferno. About halfway through, we finally get the, like, hey, by the way, this is how this thing is structured. Like, so we're going through these adventures, etc. So we learned that, okay, there's this lower purgatory, and now there's this middle purgatory, and then there's this upper. And it's all organized according to love. This is what Virgil has told us. And so now, at the Beginning of Canto 18, Virgil the Pilgrim has questions about love. And I really like how he sets this up. I think it's amazing. So we see down at, like. I'm looking at Baxter's translation. This is line, you know, 14 or so. And so he says, and so I pray, my dear and loving Father, explain to me what love is, from which derives every work of good in its contrary. So where should we start with this? Like, what do we learn from this lesson that Virgil teaches us about love?
- [13:27]
B
Well, if you'll permit me to back up a little bit, I think it's very helpful the way that you've laid out where we are. And coming on the heels of Virgil's discourse that explains the structure of purgatory, he's. He's about to offer this discourse on love and free will, the relationship between love and free will in this canto. But we've. We've seen a pattern now. Over the last five cantos, you get four big speeches. I call them sermons here at the heart of the Purgatorio in 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, most of them by Virgil. That one big, long. Maybe you want to call it a sermon, maybe you want to call it a rant by Marco the Lombard. But each one of these sermons is wrestling with the same question that Dante keeps posing over and over again in a different way, which is basically, where does sin come from? Right? Like, where does. Is it. Is it from scarcity? That's his first idea, right? Like, can a person really be blamed if they want something that they don't have and they do the wrong thing to get it? If it's food or if it's shelter, right? If it's something that they need? And that introduces. Is a kind of segue to Virgil's sermon on different kinds of goods. And then Marco the Lombard is going to say, misrule, right? Bad government. That's what makes people do the wrong thing. So bad education is where sin comes from. Now, Virgil has just explained how all of the vices being purged in purgatory are related to love. And so when Dante asks him what love is, the anxiety behind that question is, is love the cause of sin? Right? Can love be it? Can love really be the. The thing that leads people into sin? So he's gonna ask first, right, what is love? And that's gonna introduce an another question pretty quick, right? Virgil is gonna explain first the apprehensive powers, right? So knowing or seeing or perceiving receiving something, and then an inclination toward the thing. And so this inclination is love, says Virgil. The Mandelbaum translation, instead of the soul inclines, says, the soul tends steadfastly. So it's like this pursuit of something that the. That the soul, upon seeing the thing or apprehending the thing, wants, and it's bound by some kind of pleasure or attachment. And so this is good enough as an answer to the question. It's kind of hard to understand, but he's giving an answer to. To Dante's question, what is love? Immediately, right? Dante says that your words have helped me discover love, but this has made me pregnant with more doubts. Right. So he had the. The real question that was behind the definitional question is, okay, if it comes from without, how can a person be blamed for what they love? Right. If it's just a matter of apprehending something and being drawn to it, that sounds like. That sounds natural. Right. That sounds like something that. That could happen to anyone. And so is it just a matter of what you happen to apprehend that turns into what you love, that turns into a disordered or ordered attachment? And so finally, Virgil has to offer an answer to that question, which I think is the question behind the question.
- [17:40]
A
Yeah, really well said. I appreciate you kind of mapping that out. I was more sensitive on this read through of him moving from the political down to the individual. And one thing last week that Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson stressed with us is that these are the cantos right in the middle of the entire comedy. So this is a pivot. And so it makes sense to me now that we're getting these kind of definitional questions of, like, what is love? There's a few things here that really stood out to me. So you talked about the inclination. The inclination is love, which is how Baxter translates it. That's at, like, line 26 or so. That next Turset is what's always really captured my imagination. And later, just as fire is born to rise and on high according to its form to where its nature lasts the longest. So that's really fascinating to me because you have this whole motif of ascent in the spiritual life in the West. And so here he's comparing that your love is like a fire and that you're just like, fire has an upward movement, its nature actually has an upward movement to it, so, too, does your love. And we'll see this, like, very. And obviously, I think that that's a analog, a microcosm of foreshadowing, whatever you would say of Dante himself. Dante himself is on this journey of ascent, moving up as a pilgrim, motivated by a love that probably is going to have to be purified. Right. Beatrice has motivated him. We'll meet Beatrice at the end of the Purgatorio. It did not go the way I thought it was going to go the first time I read the Purgatorio. It's an interesting meeting when they finally come together. No spoilers there. But that's one thing that really caught my attention, is that the nature of love is to ascend. It has the same kind of upward movement as fire. And we see that. I think we'll see that not only in Dante's, journey. But what he's drawing from in the broader Western culture of spirituality is pretty much ever since Plato's Symposium, this journey of the soul is an upward journey. And you get this in, say, I think of, like, St. John Climachus and the. The ladder of divine ascent. You get this in St. Gregory of Nyssa, who talked about, like, Moses climbing Mount Sinai was an act of Eros. It was. And here Dante is also talking about a natural love. There's a natural desire in us to move upward towards these, like, greater beauties. But then I love. What you've pointed out here is that in Dante, the pilgrim. I love it because he. He gives, like, a very raw, real question, which is like, well, wait, if this is love that just moves us and inclines us, where's culpability? Like, how does. You know. You framed it as, like, you know, where. Where is evil come from? But how. But also, like, how can we even be held accountable for any of these things? This is the second stage of the question, correct?
- [20:31]
B
Yeah, that's right. I mean, so that what the flame figure captures is that ascent. And. And Virgil really wants to link it to the form, right? It's that it's. According to its form is the. That is what dictates the soul's ascent. And Dante very quickly points out, well, if that's just how the thing is made, then why do we. How. How are we culpable for doing the thing that we're made to do? Love, Right. If we're just like flames, you can't. You don't say that a flame is right or wrong for its movements. So why do you. Why do we say that a human being is right or wrong for doing the thing that it's naturally inclined toward? And you even see Virgil, right? He's having to summon an array of different figures to try to do this, because he has the flame figure, but he also has the wax, the seal, right? The last thing he says is not every seal is good just because the wax is excellent. So the. The wax there, that is the. The natural human faculty, and then the seal is the thing that gets stamped on it. But so then Virgil's question about that, I mean, Dante's question about that is that if what stops something evil from being stamped in my wax, right? What if it's something coming from the outside that I am perceiving and then inclining towards? How do I control what I'm inclined toward or what stamps the wax? And Virgil kind of backs up then starting in, I guess that would be line 46 or so. First he says, I'll tell you as far as reason goes, right? I can't tell you everything. You'll have to wait for Beatrice. This is the first. This is not the first. This is. He's. He's done this a lot of times. He's kind of Beatrice disclaimers like, I'll give you my answer, but you should follow up with Beatrice about this. And it's a nice reminder that Virgil is learning as he goes here, too. When he describes the structure of purgatory, he's guessing, right? He's making an educated guess about what they're going to see and what the organizing principle is here. Based on Aristotle and based on what he knows from his experience and based on what he's seen in hell when he's in the Inferno, he is able to. He knows these things, right? They're things that he knows from having experienced them. But when he's in purgatory, he's guessing. So this is his best guess as to an answer to Dante's question about where culpability comes in. And so what he. His. His reason, reasonable answer. His best guess is basically he starts by saying no one knows where thought or cognition comes from or where affection or desire comes from. From that these faculties come like we're given them. We can't actually know where they came from, but we can observe that human beings do have this unique capacity which he calls the threshold of ascent, right? That we. There's a gatekeeping mechanism that offers its ascent to some apprehensions and not others, to some seals but not others. And so it. So we have the ability to let in certain sensory perceptions or let in, you know, allow for the impression of certain seals and not others. We have some kind of governor, governing mechanism here, which he says Beatrice calls freedom of the will. I don't know why Virgil won't call it freedom of the will himself, why Dante's. Virgil inserts this distance between the terminology that Beatrice would use and the terminology that he would use. But this is this noble power, he says, that human beings do seem to have where they can know something, they can perceive something, and choose whether or not to let it in, you know, whether or not to incline their soul to tend steadfastly toward that thing or not. It's sometimes hard to see that power at work because the more you let something in, the harder it is to check it. But there is, at some point, experientially, right, we can say it's true. Virgil sees it. Dante Sees it. There is a point where you make a choice where you open up the gate and let the thing in or not. Even if the choice, it gets harder and harder to make the more times you let something in.
- [26:01]
A
Yeah, well said. Yeah, that's really interesting. I had not really given enough weight to the fact that he kind of defers to Beatrice when he then names it. That's kind of fascinating. I wonder if that's. I mean, like, on a shallow read, he's just referring back to her because she's the one that's gonna have to finish explaining it. This might be reading too much into it, but, you know, the. The idea of the will itself, just philosophically speaking, is actually a deeply Christian concept. Like, it's not. You don't really get the will as we know it in, like, Plato and Aristotle. It's really. To Augustine. So that's really interesting that if you read into that, that the pagan actually has to defer ultimately to grace, to Christian understanding, to really ferret out the will. That's something I'd like to think about more. That's interesting. Yeah, I really loved this because I thought it was just a really raw conversation. It's just a basic conversation that I think everyone wants to understand. And the way that I would re. Articulate it is the first thing he really points out is the fact that we're rational animals. So that's down at. He doesn't use that phrase. He talks about the role of reason. It's line 67. But I think people. What he's getting there because he actually says this is the beginning of. They gave the world ethics. And so what does that mean? So I think what people. Sometimes we don't appreciate enough is as a rational animal is that we're able to actually reflect on our actions as actions. So while the other animals have, like, instincts that move them towards a particular end, we can actually reflect on our acts as acts. And that's actually the beginning of ethics, because you can't be held accountable if you can't actually understand what you're doing. It's such a uniquely human trait. And so he gives us. He says, look, we have reason. And then. I like that terset next. The next one that's like line 70, I think. And so although it's true that every type of love will rise within you once enkindled, the power to suppress it yet remains within you. Which. Yeah, Baxter translates here as suppress. Which I think is interesting. You know, I think more not. This isn't a translation note, but Just like as an image, there's a bridling here because Christianity walks like an interesting line. Correct. So we're not Stoics. So that the. These things, these passions aren't agitations that are evil, but rather they have their goods. Like anger is a good. Like we just got out of the terrorists that punishes wrath, not anger. Anger is a good. Wrath is a perversion of it. And so even if you have all of these inclinations, even towards something, they still have to be bridled according to reason. But they're good in of themselves, but they have to be guided correctly. It's just a really wonderful. I like what you said about the sermons because it is a wonderful and beautiful little sermon here on the love and the will.
- [28:44]
B
Yeah. And on the subject of it being a deeply Christian. That's idea of the freedom of the will being a deeply Christian idea. I think there's something deeply Christian in the way that Virgil talks about the will as being built on knowledge or apprehension that the. You see those two different words being used in different translations there. So knowledge and apprehension on the one hand, and then like disposition or inclination depending on the translation on the other. And that is a concession to our embodied, physical. If you want to say animal side that classical philosophy is not always willing to make. The Greeks are not always willing to acknowledge the degree to which our. Our will, our desires are kind of dependent on both of those things, Right? To do good, you have to know the good. Right? You have to. You have to know what the good is and you have to will it, Right. You have to want it, you have to be disposed to do it. It's not enough for most people just to know the right thing. We have to habituate ourselves to the good, to make ourselves want it, to bind ourselves to the things that we should be bound to. And so it's. It. The way that he's talking about the will here is to allow for both the kind of rational side and the. I don't know if it's above or below reason, but that other side of us that has to be involved when we make choices. And it's a really beautiful, I guess, kind of marriage of this. And I think it tells us something about the commedia, like something about the way that Dante is trying to teach us here is that he want. It's a. He's writing a poem, right. He wants to tell us something. He wants us to be. Be able to apprehend the truth. But he's also. He's habituating us to Something he's trying to. He's trying to train our desires to want the good, too. And so there's this, like, experiential quality, especially to the Purgatorio, where I think we're watching penitents learn the good, right? They see the examples, they see the pictures, or here are the examples of Mary and the. The other exemplars of these virtues. And there's an activity for them to do on every terrace, right? They're. They're turning their soul, they're. They're shaping the animal side of them, right? Habituating themselves to. To the virtue rather than the vice. So we're watching that happen. Dante's undergoing both of those things, right? He's apprehending the good and he's. He's. He's being inclined toward the good by climbing up this mountain and even undergoing some of the. The penances with the penitents. And then I think there's also an experiential quality for the reader, too. I mean, maybe not in the literal way that there is for the characters in this story, but there's so much about this that is not just like an information transfer, right, where he's just telling us facts here and we're reading them and we're apprehending them and motivated to be good. Since we're in the terrace of sloth, I think about the fact that where most of the other sins have been getting 2, 3, 4 Kantos, sloth gets half of a kanto. And it makes some sense because these people are running like crazy toward the thing that they're supposed to be zealous for. They're moving quickly, we're moving quickly, and so we're kind of feeling a little bit of that penance, or it's a kind of approximation of the experience that Dante and the penitents are having as a way of working on our. Working on that animal side of us and not just on our brains in a vat, like, you know, the knowledge kind of knowledge. Apprehension alone, as a model would suggest.
- [33:12]
A
I really, really liked what you said about, obviously we have the formation of the intellect and the formation of the will here, Virgil's telling us, but Dante the poet has been showing us throughout the terraces. I really like tethering those two together, that there hasn't been a formation of the intellect and of the will as we've kind of moved through these terraces. Yeah, at the end here, maybe not the end, but line. What is this, like, 88. We're introduced to the Group of people whom, from behind our backs, came running around in circles. So this, this contrapasso, this penance seems, you know, straightforward. So we've moved from the lower purgatory of misdirected love, and we have this middle purgatory, which is actually just this terrace. This is what, the fourth terrace, right? And so of acadia, of slothfulness. And this is really interesting because I think maybe one thing to step back and say, why here? Why is here where we get the lecture on love? And it seems to me, setting aside that we're also in the middle of the comedy. And so I think that brings some value to this text as well. I think one thing that helped me understand slothfulness better is that a lot of times when we think about slothfulness, we think about like, well, I'm just. I'm just gonna sit on the couch and watch Netflix all day. Right? That's me being slothful. And that's true. I mean, there's certainly a truth to that. But the marathon runner can have a very sadia filled life. The CEO of a big company can be very slothful because I think Thomas Aquinas talks about it more as being a certain sorrowfulness or sadness or laziness about spiritual things, about what actually matters most in life. So you can be a marathon runner and you're like, oh, they're not slothful at all. But actually, if you look at your life, you are very lazy when it comes to these higher beauties, these higher goods. And so one of the ways that there's a wonderful book called the Noonday Devil. I don't know if you're familiar with that text. That text is fantastic. I love that text. So that's one of the best. If anyone's listening, go check out the Noonday Devil. It's a whole text on a sadia, kind of a historical overview in the church. It's phenomenal. But one of the things I took away from that, one of the definitions was, is that what slothfulness really is. This Azadia is a cooling of love, that the love is cooled and I love. And so there you can couple it. There's a juxtaposition between why Dante the poet tells us that love is like a fire that has this upward movement of ascent right before he meets all of these souls with a sadia, because their love, their fire has been cool, and because it's been cooled, it has not sufficiently risen. Right? There wasn't a sufficient ascent up to the higher things that they should have loved. So this is middle purgatory, this deficient love. And so that's the best framing I can think of at the moment of why? Because love is incredibly important. I mean, the whole Inferno was structured on love, the whole purgatory structure on love. Why do we get it, particularly on this terrace? And I think that it's a wonderful juxtaposition to what a sadia actually truly is.
- [36:17]
B
I think there's also a subtle point about Virgil here and therefore about, I think, an Aristotelian or a classical understanding of virtue and vice. And you mentioned this earlier, the moment in Canto 11 of the Inferno when Virgil and Dante have to stop. And so then Virgil explains the structure of hell to Dante. And so we. We got 10 Cantos in before we understood what. Where we were going. We got oriented. And he. When he does that, he's in the circle of heresy in Hell. And that's a sin that Virgil doesn't really understand, right? He doesn't understand why it's a sin. And he can understand the problems with the. The sins represented in upper Hell, right? The sins of incontinence, because his understanding of human nature admits of, you know, the idea of incontinence. And then he can understand how malice is bad, so he can understand how violence is bad and fraud, but he's standing in this circle. That doesn't fit the explanation that he's giving Dante on, in very Aristotelian terms for this, how this whole place is structured. And so what it allows Dante as the poet to do to kind of like, sidestep the question of how that sin heresy fits in. Because it doesn't really, in the Inferno, right? It's not really. It's not a sin of malice. You're not trying to hurt someone. You're not even trying to hurt God in heresy, right? The way that, like, the blasphemers are trying to do violence to God somehow. So it's. It's. But it is volitional, right? So it's not like the sins of incontinence either. It's not, you know, a failure. It's not a disordered attachment. And so it's this kind of weird transitional sin that doesn't quite fit the categories that Virgil lays out. So too, I think, with sloth, that Virgil is only just starting to figure out alongside Dante what sloth is like, what that would be, right? And what it. What that would look like and how that. Why that would be a sin at all. And so he has this idea that, okay, you can love the wrong thing, or you can love things that are okay to love, but you love them too much. And then, okay, what about this thing in between? It's. It's deficient. Right. It's not enough love. And so Virgil, I think, sees the possibility, but he's still learning. And it makes sense to me that sloth, out of all the. Out of the seven deadly sins represented by the terraces, sloth is the one that. That is uniquely. Is a uniquely Christian problem. Right. Virgil is not necessarily going to think that this is. This is, you know, a kind of spiritual despair is a sin. And so I think we're kind. The reason that it happens here, the reason that we have all of these sermons is Virgil's working it out as he's standing there with Dante. He's thinking, this is challenging the way that he thought about virtue and vice, and he's having to come up with a new taxonomy on the fly based on this new information that he's experiencing for the first time.
- [39:52]
A
Yeah, I appreciate you parsing that out because I will say I'm still wrestling with Virgil as the guide for Purgatory. You just think that there would have been one guide per section. And so, like you've mentioned several times, Virgil also seems to be learning. Or Virgil is going through this journey. Like, sometimes he has to ask, where do we go? Like, he has to find someone. Like, wait, where do we go? Because, you know, with hell, he had been there, particularly in Dante's understanding, he had gone through there all before. Right. This is. He's done this journey. So no, I appreciate you parsing it out. Okay, let's get a little bit into like, then these souls. Right. So the running around that penance seems to be pretty straightforward. Right. The contrapasso of why it's tail tailored to Acadia. Then we get our two good examples. So Mary ran with haste into the mountains. So beautiful story. After the Annunciation, she runs with haste to Elizabeth. And that's a. For those who know, it's a. I love that passage because it's one of the clearest passages of a New Testament passage, being a reflection and an image of something in the Old Testament. So if you go back and read when David received the Ark and the joy that he had, Mary running out to Elizabeth and how Elizabeth greets her, and then that's when John the Baptist sleeps in the womb, it all. And I think they stay three months in the hill country. All those details mimic David finding the Ark with Mary being the new Ark. So it's a beautiful story. I'm also really impressed with Dante, the poet always able to find a Marian example for the virtue. Like he has some great creativity here. And what are we seeing here? This is zeal. This is the contrary virtue that's going to help purge the soul of Acadia. And then we have a story from Caesar. So we get our. We get our Marian example and we get an imperial or pagan example of here where Caesar is fighting, wins the battle, and then has to, you know, march with great zeal and haste to go and get where he needs to be done.
- [41:47]
B
Yeah. So it, what emerges from, I think, from the positive examples and the, the, the negative. The examples that we get is that it's not just laziness and it's not even something that you can necessarily see. Right. It is an. It is the inclination. Right. Of the will. It has nothing to do with how. It doesn't really have to do with how many miles per hour Caesar is moving or Mary's moving. It's. That's a. That. Those are cases where you can see this, you can see the zeal. But usually zeal is something that's hard to detect because it has to do with the attitude like the, the, the, the. The. The inclination of the heart, whether it's tending steadfastly or not toward the thing that it loves. Right. You could be, in other words, doing all the right things like some of the, the. Like the priests that he meets here, right. Doing the right things, but having a kind of sense of despair for yourself or that or for. Or for society. Right. That anything is going to change because of what you have done or not done. And so sloth can sometimes look the same on the outside as zeal. It's. It, it. It's hard. It's not something that is always obvious in the way that other sins and virtues are. And so he's, I think, pressing us a little bit to think of it not as something that is a matter of outward demonstration, but as something that you have to ask yourself, you have to reflect on and to, to see. You know, are you kind of. Is this done despite a sense of despair, or are you doing this in zeal for whatever the object or goal of that love is?
- [43:54]
A
Yeah, that's an interesting point because you typically think of a sadia as sometimes being difficult to discern. It doesn't always even the title. Right. Devil. It. It shows up when there are no shadows in the middle of the day. Something that can creep in when you don't really expect it. That's interesting. That zeal, then would kind of maybe have the same characteristics. That's not always immediately apparent on the outside. You mentioned the contrary examples. Those are given around 135. And so we basically get two stories of people traveling. So you get one of those, you know, going to the promised land, the Israelites in the wilderness that lose that zeal and then wander around. And then you have a very similar story with Aeneas coming from the Aeneid in which his compatriots decide not to continue with him and go found Rome. So, yeah, you get. It's interesting because, yeah, all the examples that we get have that movement. And the penance here is a movement, but it's a much more subtle sin than that.
- [44:58]
B
Yeah, that's a great point. Right. These people. It's not that these people are sitting on the couch, right? It's that they don't, in the case of the Israelites, they don't trust God, right? And so they, they're still wandering, right? They're. They may be in fact walking faster than Caesar's troops or, you know, Mary at however many months pregnant, right? But they, they're still moving. They're still exerting effort. It's just not directed toward the thing that they should love. It's not directed toward the end that they, that they, they should be moving toward the. With the Trojans and at Sicily. They are. They're willing to do plenty of work, right, to settle and create a new civilization here. But it's not where they were supposed to go, right? It's not where they were meant to settle. That's not where that effort was directed. So it's really not a. It's. Both of those examples show a kind of a lack of. A lack of faith or a lack of hope rather than a lack of effort. They're. They're. They're still exerting plenty of effort. It's that they don't trust their leader or their God enough to exert the effort for something that they can't see, right? Whether that's Rome or whether that's the promised land. They'd rather put their work into results that they can see things that are immediate, that don't require faith in something unseen. And so there's a kind of subtlety to those examples that draws out a subtle aspect of sloth that it's very often a kind of quickness to despair or a quickness to. To relinquish any kind, like a faith in something you can't see or A hope in something you don't. You don't know exists.
- [47:05]
A
Yeah, I like tethering Acadia to teleology, to a telos, to purpose. I like that a lot because that kind of goes back to that, like, CEO example. Like, you could have a CEO of a major company who actually is suffering terribly from slothfulness. So there's a willingness to engage deeply and be very energetic and, you know, exert a lot of effort on lower goods, but not actually continue to ascend towards the higher goods that you're actually called towards. And so that's a very subtle form of acadia that kicks in. I like you pointing out that the Trojan example is probably a good. A good push for that. Okay, so. But we got to move on. So speaking of people who have to go in haste and go through the comedy. So 19. So this is interesting. Okay, so. So canto 19. He. By the way, if you go back and look at 18, there's all kinds of, like, little terms where he's, like, drowsy and sleepy and whatever, which is, you know, it's a sadia, et cetera. So he's. He's got. I mean, we could talk about 18 all day long. That's the beauty and the problem of trying to cover the comedy. But in 19, we're moving upward now. We're moving up into upper purgatory, into excessive love. But before we get there, he falls into a dream. We're kind of used to him having these. Right. He's got these particular dreams that have occurred, but this one's kind of interesting. There's, like, this woman that appears, and then another woman appears. And then Virgil comes. And then at some point, I was wondering, wait, when it. Is this still a dream and now is it a vision? Because how does Virgil just step in and do something like, what are we doing here? How do we. How can we start to kind of unravel what he's doing with this dream?
- [48:42]
B
Well, okay, a couple things. First of all, you mentioned that we've seen him dream before. He dreams in purgatory because there's day and night in purgatory, right? We're back in time. And so now he's a human being in a sense again. And so now concessions are being made to the human body and to its end. Time ness. That it's nighttime, so he sleeps. And the dreams correspond to the transitions between categories. The way in Inferno, there are kind of obstacles. Obstacles between each of the major groupings of different types of sin. Here there are kind of dreams that punctuate those different groupings or categories of. Of vices. And so this is the transition from kind of middle purgatory to upper purgatory, between sloth and avarice and prodigality. So we're about. We know we're about to move into a different class of sin, a different kind of terrace here. But as to the content of the dream itself, it really is playing out, I think, the drama of the sermon in 18. The. The explanation that Virgil has just given him of how the will works. So you've got intellection, right, or perception of the thing. The. The. The babbling woman starts out like he can't tell what she's saying. He can't really tell what she looks like. And then he locks in on her and slowly is able to understand what she's saying and realizes this is. Figures out that this is the siren, the same siren that Ulysses heard. And so it's like giving himself over to this vision in order to understand it, like, sucks him in. So this is maybe a case where apprehension could lead to sin. And he's. He's. He's inclining himself toward the thing that he's apprehended and. And. And developing an attachment, sort of like that, what, you know, happens with Ulysses. And I think we're meant to read it as a kind of temptation because it's the siren that he likens her to there. So if we're gonna keep going with this kind of allegorical reading of the dream, then the governor, or the threshold of ascent steps in, right? The righteous woman comes in and stops it. That is that power that Beatrice calls freedom of the will, right? To say no to certain. Certain things that the soul has apprehended. And so she steps in to stop it. And then. And then Virgil's able to come in and, you know, wake him up. And we find out that Virgil's been yelling like Dante, Dante, like trying to wake him up while this dream is going on. But I think what that tells us, right, we see intellection moving into affection, and then the threshold of ascent being kind of like the gate being triggered and that regulating agents stopping it. But I think the other point of having dawn, having Virgil in the mix there, is that it shows us that reason can't do it alone, right? Virgil can't just step in and say, that's the siren. That's bad. There's this other side of the will that has to be activated. Knowledge alone or reason alone is not enough to keep those disordered affections from forming you need some. You need this other kind of intervention. I think that's what the righteous woman there represents.
- [52:32]
A
Yeah, very well said.
- [52:33]
B
Yeah.
- [52:33]
A
Because then she comes in, this righteous woman, because this hideous creature, this female creature, the more Dante looked at her, the better looking she became. And then she became a siren, something that's attractive. I'm assuming that's an analogy for the excessive love of the goods that we're all about to see on the upper level of purgatory. Right. So he's looking at her. It becomes great Virgil. Reason is yelling. The woman comes in and she rips off the clothes of this now beautiful one. And this is kind of a, you know, heinous description here. Right. She then has. She has this, like, paunch where she thinks belly that's unveiled, that lets off a terrible stench. So she's been revealed that there's just something disgusting about this. And I like what you say there, that you see a nature and grace distinction occurring as well. The righteous woman. I mean, it's grace. We've also seen the feminine plays a huge role inside the comedy. So you think of Beatrice, you think of St. Lucy. We've already seen her show up once. We also think of Mary. Right. There's this kind of chain of femininity that came to actually help Dante in his role. I'm assuming all those could be seen kind of in this particular analog for grace.
- [53:46]
B
Yeah. And this is one of those moments where it's so clearly allegorical. In all the other moments that we might be tempted to read allegorically, the character is always both. Right. Beatrice is a real person, and she's a representative of grace or revelation or however we want to read the allegory. There's same with Virgil. He's a re. Sometimes he is a representative of reason or of human nature, the best that humanity can be of Aristotle, of classical thought. But he's also Publius, Virgilius. Mera, like always has a Mantuan accent and is a real person. And here we get the kind of. The most boldly allegorical. In the dreams, I think you get the most baldly allegorical moments that show, like, help guide the allegorical interpretation of these other sides. And I think the thing that's kind of disorienting about this one is you have a mixture of pure allegory with characters like Virgil who are both allegorical and real historical persons at the same time.
- [55:05]
A
What do we make of her being a siren? And maybe this on its face like this? Of course she's a siren. What else Would she be right? So she sings, she draws people in. It's a danger. It seems to work out really well there. But all of my flags go up when Ulysses is mentioned. I become very suspicious in the text that I'm missing something. Because when we read the Inferno, Dr. Donald Prudlow from TU walked us through that section and really showed us how Dante the pilgrim really is a new and perfected Odysseus or Ulysses here speaking in the. From the Roman side. Right. Because Odysseus, what's he do in Dante's story? He goes back to Ithaca, he's restless, he can't do it. He leaves and he's going to go, basically he sees Mount Purgatory, he's going to go find wisdom, he's going to go find human knowledge, and he's basically struck down by the divine. And then you see, like, okay, well, who else is brilliant and on a journey? Well, Dante the pilgrim is, but he's actually going to make it to Purgatory. He's actually going to ascend the mountain. So here we have Odysseus or Ulysses mentioned again. I mean, is there, is there a deeper read here? Is there a parallel going on?
- [56:17]
B
That's interesting. Yeah. I think you have to go back to those that canto with Ulysses and Inferno. This invites that kind of comparison. I am thinking about Dante. I wasn't thinking as much about the analogy between them, although I think that's a good point. I'm thinking about the fact that this is a way of rewriting the story of Ulysses tied to the master listening to the siren singing. I think Dante thinks you can't actually do that. You can't actually know something without it affecting your. Your, Your will. Right. You can't actually get knowledge without it shaping who you are and shaping your disposition, shaping your affections for things. And so that image of the person who restrains his. His will so that he can get knowledge. Maybe, maybe Homer believes that that's possible, but Dante doesn't. Right. And so that, that is a kind of. That's a kind of Gnosticism. Right. To think that you can have something that just penetrates the intellect without affecting the body. And so what we're about to see now is all of these. We're going to see all of these sins that have something to do with the body or the passions. Right. Disorder, dis, excessive love of things that are good. And I think Dante thinks you can't. That's just not how human nature works. We are both. We have a reasonable Faculty. But we also have this will that is based on knowledge and disposition.
- [58:13]
A
And
- [58:17]
B
Ulysses thinks that he got past the siren, but she says, I turned Ulysses, right? Even if his ship sailed past, I turned his will, right? And so she knows this. This siren knows how it works. And in a realer way, I think we can infer from her song here. Ulysses is stuck there, right? His belief that he could have knowledge without suffering the change to his will trapped him, right? So that he's, you know, mentally, spiritually, he's still there with the siren, even if he's off on some other kind of quest for knowledge that's forbidden to him. And so that's why you can't do it the way that Ulysses does it, because knowledge and disposition work together and mutually inform one another, and they affect the operation of the will. You lose your threshold of ascent if you tend steadfastly toward something that you apprehend. That's bad.
- [59:37]
A
Yeah, I think it's fascinating because with that kind of read, then you see, tether that to Dante's story of Odysseus's death, and you see the seeds of the unrestlessness, right, that's in him, that he still desires. That knowledge, which is what the siren member was actually singing to him in the Odyssey, was that you could come and have all the knowledge, you know, of the gods and et cetera. I think it's fascinating. Well, let's look at the kind of how they end the terrace on Acedia. So you're right. I mean, this is really fascinating. We. We move very quickly through it, and obviously that's kind of fascinating in of itself that we move quickly through the terrace on Acadia, but it's also one of the only ones that doesn't have a prayer. So that's really fascinating. And I'm not really sure what to make of that. Obviously, that's intentional on Dante's part, but if you just look at Acedia, Right. So they're contrapasso the running. We had the examples of Mary and Caesar, then we had the contrary examples of the Israelites and also the companions of Aeneas. We're going to have an angel of zeal. Blessed are those who mourn is our beatitude, because we're always getting beatitude, but there's no prayer in this one. Any thoughts on that?
- [60:47]
B
Well, they pray. I think the idea is that they pray by acting. Right? That that's an act of faith. That's what Mary does. Right. And I loved your connection between the visitation and David. His prayer is his Dancing, Right. Like, is the action. And so, too, with the exemplars of zeal, their prayers or their action. And I think the penitence, too, that rather than sitting, saying the thing, they are doing the thing as a way of offering up some kind of prayer to God.
- [61:28]
A
Yeah, no, that's a good read. Yeah. When he sees something missing like that in the overall pattern, right. It's an invitation to stop and try and contemplate. It's definitely not that Dante, the poet forgot to put it in there. It's, you know, what. What is he actually trying. What's the pedagogy there? Right? What's he actually trying to teach us? Okay, so the fifth terrace. This is introduced on line 70. So coming out upon the fifth terrace, I saw a people spread about and weeping while lying on the ground and facing down. So who. Who is punished here in the fifth terrace?
- [61:58]
B
So these are the. Those who had a disordered love of money. So the. Those who are too attached to. Either they hoarded or they profligately spent money. Although I think there's something interesting here that Dante is doing that it doesn't seem always like it was specifically attachment to money itself, but to earthly goods, goods that can't be shared. To take Virgil's language from earlier in the Purgatorio, a lot of it's about power, period. Now, money, right, is a kind of physical. Like. It's like a physical manifestation or a token of power, right? And that's what draws people to money, is the idea or the sense that you could do anything with it, right. That it. That it is power in its most kind of flexible, fungible form. But the. So you get these characters, the penitents, who are really, it seems like more attached to power or status or these other things that kind of go along with money and not necessarily just gold coins or something like that. He's really broadening, I think, in Purgatorio our awareness of this constellation of problems than what we saw in the Inferno, where it's straightforwardly like people who hoard their money or people who spend it all. Here we're starting to think of other things as a kind of avarice for the. And really being forced to think about all the different ways this could look in a human life, this kind of excessive love of money and what it brings.
- [64:06]
A
Yeah, I agree. It seems to be like temporal goods, just like, broadly speaking, like even almost too much of a focus on the temporal in general. So, again, so, you know, play off the contrapasso here. The Penance is what they're all lying down, facing the ground. Right? And this is what they did in life as they treated their souls in life. Now they are being treated. And what's that mean? Well, look, their eyes are focused down. What they did in life is they focused too much on the material, on the temporal, et cetera. And now they're weeping. Right. In this capacity. I find it interesting. And we should have done this with acedia, too. There's a lot of, like, pedagogical benefit of trying to understand why the punishments in Purgatory are distinct from the punishments in the Inferno. And in general, my understanding is, like, in the Inferno, the souls are handed over to their sin. They're handed over to the disorder. And so they kind of become little analogues of the problem itself. Whereas in the Purgatorio, the punishment is actually designed to purge the soul of that sin. And so it's contrary to it. It tries to teach the soul about what can actually be done. Because I think that, you know, one thing, not to take too much of a step backwards, but it's always been interesting that in the Inferno, Dante doesn't just run it by the seven deadly sins, right? You could have seven deadly sins in the Inferno and then seven deadly sins being purged in Mount Purgatory. And he doesn't do that. He has a very unique structure to that. And one of the questions is, where is acedia in the Inferno? And I think that, you know, one of the answers there is, you know, acedia can be seen as the flip side to wrath. So wrath has this excessiveness to it. Sadia has, you know, a deficiency to it. And if you remember the wrathful, they're fighting there in the river and et cetera, and there's like, one tercet, I think, maybe two, maybe, or these guys that are, like, bubbling under the surface. Like, they're just kind of just laying there bubbling in the river and then. But here we get a whole terrace to purge it. And I like your comparison, too, that in a similar fashion, in the Inferno, we saw them when you struggle from this, right, being prodigality and these types of things, they're crashing these giant boulders against each other, right? So they take this material wealth, the material, the stuff, and they're constantly crashing against one another here. Here we have a very different type of punishment to try and free them. And I like what you said, too. It also seems to be much broader in scope.
- [66:43]
B
Yeah. Well, to respond first to what you're saying about the asymmetry of hell and purgatory, there, it's the same mountain, right? Because we learn, right, that the. That purgatory is the mass of earth that's been displaced by Satan falling from heaven. Like, you know, like this forming this crater. So hell is the crater, and then all the mass that's been displaced becomes the mountain. So in that way, they are the same. It is the same mountain in a sense. Or, you know, there is a kind of parallel between them, but the shape is different. The shape of these two things is not symmetrical or parallel. And I think that that is primarily because in the Inferno, Dante is interested in the fruit of sin. So what happens when you let your will be habituated to vice, to a love that it shouldn't love, or that it shouldn't love in the way that it loves? It is inclined to love. And so it's always the manifestation, the effect, the implication, the working out of the sin. I mean, even that term, besetting sin, right? The sin that got its claws into you and, like, deformed your soul. It's about the shape that a human being ends up in after a lifetime of habituating oneself to choosing that sin over and over and over again. Or even if it's something that happens once, right? The sin that, you know, I turned Ulysses, right, It could happen one time, but it's. It's now you're turned forever. And so he's interested in the, like, the manifestations of those sins or like, what they look like or lead to. And so all of the quote, unquote, punishments in hell are. There's a way of reading each one of them as a kind of reenactment or like compulsive ex. Re performance or extension or continuation of this. Whatever sin it is that they're just still kind of stuck in that groove, whatever it was in the Purgatorio. He's interested in the roots of the sin, so not the acts at all, but that, like that moment when the soul let that good in or didn't, when the threshold of ascent was crossed. He's trying to get back to that threshold of ascent. And so everything is a matter of, like, excavating the cause or correcting something that was covered over by layer after layer of habitual actions. And so that requires something different, right? It requires a different measure, and it requires, again, like I was saying, both knowledge and habituation, like an activity. So the repetition there is about undoing all of the times that you did that and the effects that they had on you. Something, I think is really interesting that maybe we'll talk about in a little while, because it comes up in the conversation in the next, in two Cantos in 21, is that the length of time that different souls spend in different terraces is different. So if something is particularly a problem for you, you might spend 500 years there. We see, you know, so, so it, it has to do with how many layers of habituation are there, how turned or, you know, involuted you are because of the, the, the, you know, ways in which you failed to check that apprehension that is inclining towards something that it shouldn't. And, and I think with the, the, the penitence on the terrace of avarice, there's also way, a way of reading that not as a continuation of the scent, not just like they're looking at the earth because they were too attached to earthly goods. I mean, there's also a way in which the sin of avarice as the, at least in the way that it's exemplified in the Purgatorio, is about looking up in the wrong way, right? Like upward mobility, power, influence, trying to rise in the wrong way through money or through, you know, status or something like that.
- [71:46]
A
And
- [71:49]
B
so being forced to look down at the ground is a kind of check there, right. Or it's forcing them to realize that what they thought was looking up was actually looking down. And so in that way, it, it might not just be a rehashing of the sin like the things that we see in the Inferno, but rather a kind of countermeasure or check on that tendency to try to grasp, to reach up, to pull yourself up via money or power or status.
- [72:24]
A
Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate that a lot. Any other thoughts on Canto 19? And there's a lot that we could unearth here, but I want to make sure we get to 20 and 21.
- [72:39]
B
Well, I did want to point out there's something interesting about. There's like these little comments throughout the. Some in Inferno, but certainly in the Purgatorio where Dante makes it clear which sins he struggles with and which he doesn't, it in canto 19 he is allowed to act right and free to do as I had wanted to. His will is not affected by greed. Right. This is not a sin that Dante is afraid of. There are other sins that Dante is very much afraid of, but this is one with this. There's no kind of power over Dante here. And when he's mourning, he's careful to say he's mourning for the people who are here or in Sympathy with the people who are here. He doesn't have to undergo the penance in the way that he does for, say, pride or envy, right? Those are the ones that. Where he has to kind of do the penance with people. Here he skates through it. I mean, not as if he doesn't take it seriously, but I think the implication is that, like the souls who can pass through some of the terraces very easily, like there are some terraces that people can pass through easily and others they can't. And Dante's unique, the shape of his soul is such that something like avarice is not a threat to his soul the way that some of the other sins were. And I also think it's just getting easier as he goes. I mean, if there's a kind of experiential quality to this climb, this journey, it gets easier for him to climb. It's less and less steep as you get closer to the top. So once you've conquered pride, once you've conquered envy, right? Once you. Once you have knocked out these big difficult struggles that everyone faces, some of
- [74:42]
A
these
- [74:44]
B
sins of incontinence or dis. Excessive loves are a little bit easier to knock out once you've killed, right? What, what does avarice really have on top of pride? Like, if you've already lost, if you've already conquered pride, avarice is a lot easier to handle. And so I think Dante's kind of showing us that in his own example of himself as a character, but also for ourselves, that it's getting easier to follow and understand and progress through this poem. The, The. The closer that we get to the top.
- [75:15]
A
What's interesting about that too, is that here, towards upper Purgatory, right, And you even mentioned it, it mirrors the beginning of the Inferno, of the sins of incontinence, where we have, you know, these particular sins, and then they're kind of somewhat mirrored here, even though the order is slightly different. But here we're going to have an upper purgatory. We're going to have avarice and then gluttony and then lust as he kind of moves, you know, through these things. One thing, though, that really. So in that connection, one thing that really caught my attention at the beginning of Canto 20 is the wolf imagery comes back. And so that's at line 10. Accursed are you, O ancient wolf, who have more prey than all the other beasts, because your bottomless hunger has no end. So, and we read the Inferno last year for Lent and for those who can recall, at the beginning of the Inferno, we had the three beasts. And so you had the lion, you had the leopard, and then you had the she wolf. And we saw these as basically analogs to the entire structure of hell. And so the she wolf was going to be sense of incontinence, this hunger. And he, I can't remember. But in that canto as well, he also talks about the she wolf kind of being dominant amongst them. Even though in the structure of hell, severity, she's at the top, right. She's technically the lesser sense, but seems to be the most dominative over people's lives. And then the lion being violence, and then the leopard being violence, fraud. So here just flagging again that the wolf comes back, as we're entering back into a lot of these now, purging a lot of these sins of incontinence.
- [77:04]
B
Yeah, that's great. It helps give kind of a guide for how to read Canto 1 of the Inferno. Or it kind of reinforces that allegorical reading of the beasts as different classes of sin. I think it. Something that's interesting to me. You, you, you brought this up, the difference between severity of the sin and dominance or prevalence of the sin. Um, and that it might seem on its face counterintuitive, but I think there it, it, it makes sense that. Do you think about which sins have their teeth in the most people? Right. And that is sins of incontinence. Those are the easiest ones to fall into. You have to have gone through a lot of the other sins to get to the point where you will. Where you will lie. Right. Where you will betray someone, where you will kill someone. Right. And so what I think this is something I talk with my students about a lot because there is a way in which the progression of the Inferno goes from like, least bad to most bads sin. But it's m. It's. You can't quite make it work. Because I don't think any of my students would walk into class and say that forging a coin is worse than murdering someone. Right. They just. That run. That goes against not just modern sensibilities, but I think Dante too knows that he's doing something counterintuitive there. And so another way that you can really read the structure of the Inferno is as a progression. Progression is the wrong word. Downward spiral of a soul in the grip of sin. Right. So it starts with incontinence. It starts with a failure to police that threshold of ascent and giving oneself over to excessive love of good things like food or drink or other people or money. Right. Loving them in the wrong, these things in the wrong way. And then that leads you to the point where you're willing to be violent or be deceitful or be treacherous against another person, the more times you choose yourself over love. Right. And so it, it, it's. You can read it as severity, but you can also read it as, like, the trajectory, the, like, roller coaster that sin takes you on if you step over that line. And so in that way of thinking, everyone goes through incontinence first on their way to any worse sins. Right. So if we want to say pride is at the root of all the sins, it's at the bottom of the mountain. The sins of incontinence are always the gate. Right. And those are two different things. Right. The root of the problem and the entry point into the sin usually happen different ways.
- [80:15]
A
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I'd like to go back and look at the Inferno with that in mind, because you're correct. There are some categorizations there that are really hard. Like, you know, you mentioned forgery. Yeah, that's one of them. Flattery is the one that always got me. It's like, really like Attila the Hun, the tyrant is being punished in a less section of hell than, like, flattery. And so, yeah, I mean, there's things that you can do to explain. We did on the podcast last year, we explored a lot of those, you know, particularly like fraud being contrary to the intellect. I think the whole structure of the Inferno very much is actually based off the Augustinian soul of you have the appetitive and then the spirited and then the intellect, and that sins against the intellect are always going to be worse. One other theory that I. I've enjoyed playing out is that Dante also seems to subtly categorize them according to whether or not they harm the common good. And so there's a distinction between whether or not the sin harms you or harms, like, the common good in general. So you can have sins sometimes that I actually think are more severe just per sin, like, just what it is. Be punished less because the other sin harms the common good more. And sometimes that gets, like, really complicated. Like, for instance, he states that somehow simony is a lesser sin than selling temporal offices. And you're like, wait, what? Because what you're playing in your head is. And what we're all playing is, is that grace perfects nature. And so grace is a higher. So obviously sin against a higher right, the corruption of the best is the worst. And so he Seems to play off that, though, in certain ways, because, you know, even, like, just as an example, even if you corrupt a spiritual office, like the priesthood or the diaconate or a bishop, there's grace that can still endure and make that better, as opposed to if you sell, like, a temporal office, it's just completely corrupt. So he had. Yeah, he's. It really. The Inferno really challenges you. I don't find the Purgatorio to be as challenging. Like, it seems to make sense to me as we kind of like, move up as. As you and I have reflected here. I'd like to go back and think about how he's now handling wrath. Because he put wrath in the sins of incontinence in the Inferno. Correct. Because it's a disproportionate use of a good anger, which is positive here. Wrath was actually put down with the misdirected love along with pride and envy, which is In. Which is intriguing. And pride is a whole nother question, because where's pride purged in the Inferno? So the fact that he has, like you mentioned earlier, there's an asymmetry between the depths of the depths of the Inferno and then the terraces of the Purgatory, I think really does invite us to understand how he views sin and also how we're, like, purging these things.
- [83:03]
B
Yeah. To your point about wrath. So if the Purgatorio is about excavating the roots of sin, sinful actions, getting back to the root cause, its treatment of wrath is as a root cause. Right. Rather than as a. As an act or a. As it's manifest in a human life, the acts of wrath or sullenness. And I really think there's something kind of interesting about wrath and then sloth, because they. The sloth, I think, as you were indicating earlier, could be read as something like sullenness. Right. Turning to despair based on your anger at things that you think will never change. And so rather than maintaining that anger giving way to despair. And so I think you really have to think about wrath here as a disposition or an orientation as it informs other sinful acts in the context of the Purgatorio. So what does wrath make you do rather than what does wrath look like, which is sort of what's at stake in the Inferno, that. That's how I would sort of start to give an answer here. So how does wrath lead a person into. You know, how is wrath at the root of sloth? Or how is wrath at the root of incontinence? Right. A sense of Incontinence or sense of violence. Right. That it's kind of. It, it. It is both. The weird thing is actually that it is both a kind of act and a root cause that we use the same word for both of those things. When I think Dante is really trying to get at two different phenomena on kind of two different orders actually, in the Inferno versus the Purgatorio.
- [85:23]
A
Yeah, I appreciate that. That's a good invitation to contemplate those in a deeper way because. Yeah, those comparisons, I think, are really fascinating. Okay, so pushing on a little bit. Canto 20. Okay, so our first example that we have is Mary, right. We have another Marian example here. And so this is the fact that she didn't even have an inn, that they actually had to go to the stable. I think that's again, Dante's creativity here. And to have the contrary vice, or excuse me, contrary virtue, I think is really interesting. Then we have a consul of Rome who chose poverty, who chose a life of poverty. And then we have. We have Santa Claus. Then we have St Nicholas, right? St Nicholas pops up down there. That's line 31. He then went on to speak about Bounty of St Nicholas bestowed upon the girls to guide their youthful lives to honor, referencing the story that St. Nicholas who came from wealth, used his wealth to serve the poor, gave gifts, hence the legends that came around him, but probably most famously, you know, bought these girls out of slavery and freed them. So these are our contrary examples to avarice, which is, I would assume, a type of detachment from worldly goods, from the temporal. So Mary is able to detach. I don't even get an inn. I have to give birth in a cave. I get a manger, etc. This consul of Rome, who should be owed all the glory and honor thereof, is living a life of poverty. St. Nicholas not only has detachment there, but then is actually giving it away. There's a liberality there that he's actually doing this to the benefit of others. Any thoughts on the positive examples?
- [87:05]
B
Yeah, well, they show, right, that what the. That the check on avarice, the first of the kind of excessive loves is love, right. A different kind of love. Right. So whereas, well, in the. The earlier, the lower terraces of Purgatory, the. The opposite. The virtues that oppose the. The deadly sin are showing a. Like the. The kind of opposite virtue here we're saying, right, that this other kind of love. I'm thinking especially of the St. Nicholas example, right? He. What he does kind of looks like what we're going to see. Statius admitting or acknowledging confessing in this, the next canto. Right? He gave it away, but he gave his money away in the right way. Right. He gave it to save people's souls, Right. To guide their youthful lives, to honor instead of something else. Right? And so it's. It's giving money. It's showing us, right? It's. It's admitting that looking a disordered attachment to money and power and status can look a lot of different ways, but so, too, can the opposite virtue of, like, true liberality and loving money the right way. Having the right relationship or right kind of attachment to money looks like a lot of different things, too. It looks like poverty. It looks like having a fortune and giving it away to live like your people. It looks like using your money to save other people from sin. And we kind of get all three of those examples. So it's not just one vision of what the opposite of avarice is. It's this kind of range of the ways that that virtue is manifest in different lives, different stories.
- [89:30]
A
Yeah, well said. Then we. We kind of push into. Then this kind of gets into, like, Dante's inside baseball, right? So we get into his somewhat rant against the impact that this French dynasty has had. So he's talking to the soul, who at least made it the purgatory. So that's positive. But then we have this whole history of how this French lineage, this dynasty has done all of this harm, which. There are a few things here that really stood out to me. One is, I don't know how I missed this the first read, but I was very unaware of this legend that St. Thomas Aquinas had been poisoned. I didn't know that. That's interesting because obviously, if people don't know, St. Thomas Aquinas actually died somewhat young, like in his 40s, if I remember correctly. And so you're saying something.
- [90:18]
B
Oh, yeah, I just. I did. I didn't recognize. I didn't clock any of that until reading Jason's notes, like Jason's translation of the Purgatorio. So I was like you. I missed that part of this conversation the first 20 or 30 times I read the Purgatory.
- [90:35]
A
Yeah. He says, Jason says in his note there, he says, Dante seems to believe that Charles poisoned St. Thomas Aquinas. Yeah. Had no idea. I had not heard that. So obviously that's not, I think, a legitimate modern theory, but I didn't know that. So that was fascinating. The other one, too, and I did know about this one because I think it's important to understand is that Also then, Boniface VIII was then taken captive. So this gets around line 87, he says, with Christ a captive and his vicar, I watched as he again is mocked. He's offered gall and vinegar a second time between two living thieves he's killed. So Jason in a note, right, says, speaking allegorically, this is referring to Philip the Fair's three day imprisonment of Boniface in his hometown. The soldiers humiliated the Pope and plundered his palace. The townsfolk helped him escape, but he died a month later in Rome in 1303. Philip the Fair is thus the new pilot. Philip later led a crusade to destroy the Knights Templar, which is a whole nother tragedy. But what I find really fascinating about this is Dante clearly talks about this as a negative. Like this is something that you have done, you know, X, Y and Z. But Dante does not like Boniface VIII at all. Actually, Boniface VIII is suffering down in hell. So what's really fascinating here, I think, is that you see Dante, the poet's respect for the office of the papacy. So even if we have someone as pope whom he vehemently disagrees with and actually counts amongst the damned, he still then counts this irreverent act towards the office as a damnable offense. And I think that's important to note because sometimes it's hard to track, particularly maybe for non Catholics, it's hard to track sometimes a distinction between a disagreement with the person versus a respect for the office. And I think this is a sign that Dante's doing that.
- [92:37]
B
Yeah. And it's, it's. We, we didn't talk about this in 19, but we've just, he's just met Adrian V. Right. And the Pope corrects him. Right. He says, just like there's no marriage and giving in marriage in heaven, there's also no Pope. And you know, reverencing the Pope in, in, in purgatory or in heaven. And so, and that's not because the office doesn't matter, it's because he's not the Pope anymore. Right. That, that is, that's a, that's a temporal authority. So his soul is real, his soul is in, is in purgatory, but the office is no longer attached to the person. And so when Dante is thinking about how the kind of ethics or the pol. I mean, like the sort of like politics of his day and the generations leading up to it, he is evaluating it not according to personal or tribal alliances, he's evaluating it according to right and wrong. Right. It's not who was a Guelph, who was a Ghibelline. That is. That's choosing. Dictating his choice of where people go. At this point. He's thinking about. He's thinking about their own souls when he's placing them. But he's also inviting us, as you were saying earlier, to think about the effect of those sins on the common good in those lectures. So the condemnation is nestled, as in. Into this speech rather than presented to us directly by encountering these people in hell. Right. He could have chosen to. To put all of these French kings and soldiers in hell, and we could have talked to all of them. But instead, what he does is kind of nestle their. His evaluation, the judgment of them, into the story that their ancestor tells as a way of offering a judgment of their action without condemning the person. You know, not directly condemning the person. I think that's kind of interesting move that he makes in. He's starting to do this more and more at the end of Purgatorio. It comes up a lot in Paradiso too, where you get the blessed, the saints in heaven who are talking about things that are happening on earth or things that will happen among the living, and offering not a final judgment of the individual person, so soul, but a judgment of the actions. And in the kind of tradition of the Old Testament prophet, kind of calling out individuals, not damning them, but calling them out in a kind of judgment of their actions before God.
- [95:57]
A
Yeah, two thoughts there. One, I'd like to know Dante's theology more or have a better remembrance of paradise, because that episode with the Pope that you referenced, where he starts to reverence him and the Pope says, no, no, no, don't do that. It's interesting because the Pope then cites the verse in Matthew that basically says that, you know, men and women will not be married in heaven. Well, that's really fascinating because Church teaching is that, yeah, marriage doesn't endure past death, so it doesn't endure into eternity. But holy orders, you do have an indelible mark on your soul, which marriage does not. And so that does endure into death. So that was actually a passage that really struck me as I was trying to figure out exactly what he was doing. I like how you said maybe it's focused more particularly on the office of the papacy, because the papacy doesn't actually grant you any particular mark. It's actually the priesthood. Right. That gives an indelible mark on your soul. There's not like a special one for becoming Pope. But that was just. It was just an interesting. And also, I have to take A step back and understand where sacramental theology is at this time. But it was an interesting passage, as I wasn't quite settled with. And I was interested, as we go into paradise, if there's examples to try and clarify that. The other thing, too, is just the end of this canto. When you get the examples of the vices, this is like 103. I'm not sure I have any, like, particular comments about any of them, but something I was kind of curious about is, you know, Dante's not monolithic in the amount of examples that he gives. So it only just struck me here that there's so many of them. I think there's like seven, I believe. I think there's seven examples of this avarice. Any thoughts on just, like, maybe any of the examples? If you want to point them out, great. If not, that's okay. But I just. What struck me was this, the sheer amount of.
- [97:52]
B
Well, it. It's. Yeah, it's interesting because there's also a kind of like, compulsive return to them on the part of the penitents, that they're all kind of at different stages, meditating on different figures or stories. The negative examples of the vice. Some are loud and others soft according to the affection that spurs them on. At times a greater. At times lesser. Right. They're. They're. They're thinking about these sins, and it's, like, unique to every individual, right? And so it's the sense that they're. They are moving through them more quickly or focusing on one particular example for longer or shorter periods of time as their soul is inclined or as is required by the. The process of purgation that's unique to that person. And so the array of opportunities gives them the. The opportunity to do that. The array of options there. They can kind of. They have a. They have a panel plea of examples of this sin to think about. But, yeah, you're right, there are some sins where you get way more negative exemplars and some where you get fewer. And I haven't tracked that systematically, but that might be something interesting to go through and note in each of the terraces and see if Dante. There's a pattern to what Dante's doing there.
- [99:38]
A
Well, he's just so intentional about everything, right? So when you see something like, oh, here's a whole widespread. There's gotta be some pedagogical reason to it either, like, hey, this is a sin that is very common. You saw this with pride, right? He gave us a lot of examples of pride, which you Know, carved into the floor of Purgatory. Just a wonderful, wonderful scene. So let's do this. This is really fascinating how this canto ends. So at end of Canto 20, around 127, he feels the mountain trembling. And this takes us then into canto 21, when we're trying to figure out what was. And he asks what is the cause of the earthquake? So what are we to make of. Or what do we learn about this trembling of the mountain?
- [100:22]
B
Yeah, so you get this earthquake, and then in Encanto 21, we find out that the earthquake signals the progress of a soul, right, that somebody is, is graduating, right? Somebody is, is. Has gotten to level up in Purgatory. And so you get, and then Canto 21, a kind of explanation of like, the mechanics or the, the, the procedure here. And in fact, we get to kind of walk through, through it with the soul that is graduating Statius. So Dante just happens to be in Purgatory on the day when Statius is going to graduate from the Terrace of Avarice to the Terrace of Gluttony. And we learn a lot of things about how Purgatory actually works in Dante's imagination from this episode. So we learn, you know, that about the earthquake and, and about the, the pray, you know, the song that they're all going to sing to celebrate the, the soul that is moving up. And we learn that everyone, or we're reminded that everyone visits every terrace, right? Everyone go climbs the whole mountain. And you just spend more time with the sins that really got their hooks in you, Right? So Statius, we're going to find out, spent a long time on the Terrace of Sloth because he was slow in admitting his conversion, right. And a lot of time in the Terrace of Avarice because of his kind of tendency to prophyly in his life. But he gets to move through the, the remaining terraces, Gluttony and lust, very quickly. He just walks through them like Dante. And so he, he. He doesn't spend 500 years there in either of those terraces. And so we learn a little bit about how the experience of Purgatory is different for each person. We're reminded that they're always in motion, they're not stuck, they're not asleep. Assigned to this terrace the way that they're assigned to the circles in Hell. We're catching a snapshot of where they are now on a spiritual journey that is in. In motion, is moving. And we also learn how you move up, right, in 21, or in this is actually in 22. When Statius explains how he got to move up to the next terrace, the line is 61. He says he's been saying in about, you know, 58. The trimmers come whenever a soul will feel itself as pure, and thus they rise to journey higher up. The shouts then follow. This was the line I was thinking of. 61. To want alone is sufficient proof of purity. Suddenly free to change its convent, the soul is startled, which helps the soul and willing. It surely wanted this before, but instincts wouldn't let it. God's justice makes it want, against its will, to suffer, just as one is set itself on sinning. And I. So this is stacious talking, who lay among this sorrow, more than 500 years have felt just now a free and voluntary longing for a better threshold. So at this moment, all of a sudden, instead of wanting to be here on this terrace, purging this sin, he feels his free will for. For a better threshold. And it's a beautiful grammatical construction there, feeling your free will for a better threshold. And all the translations of Dante I've seen do it the same way, with the same preposition, where the free feeling your free will is this verbal construction that takes the threshold as its indirect object. Right? So. So that's the point of free will, is to get to a better threshold. Right? That's the point of freedom, is to move up, is to ascend. And that's. That's what he does here. But they're just kind of walking around until suddenly one day their will is free. They're free of that sin. And then they want to go on, and they can go on. And that's what we watch Statius do in Canto 21 and through, really through the end, through to the top of Purgatory, he walks with them the rest of the way.
- [105:14]
A
And for Those unfamiliar, Cestatius, Dr. Baxter has a footnote. Statius is born AD 45 to 96, so right after our Lord. He was a Roman poet, and so he wrote of the war after the death of Oedipus and also wrote an incomplete poem on Achilles. And you referenced, because it's all kind of one story. So looking@canto22, you referenced too, that the reason he had to spend so long there is because of his lukewarmness that he kept himself, quote unquote, like a secret Christian. He mentions this the way that Dr. Baxter translates at around 90 of 22. I kept myself a secret Christian long pretending to be a pagan. Yet for this lukewarmness, I spent more than four centuries in the circling of terrace four. I guess. One question I have as we kind of come here to the end, is like, what is the role of Statius in the narrative? Okay, so we already have a pagan poet, Virgil, who represents human reason, broadly speaking. We have Dante the pilgrim, represents humanity now coming alongside them. Statius is a Roman poet who accepted Christ. So unlike Virgil, he will be able to ascend Mount Purgatory and go up into heaven. But what is like the. Why is Dante the poet introducing a new character? What are we supposed to learn here?
- [106:44]
B
Well, I think there's a couple of things he is taking. One thing is that he shows the kind of mechanics it allows Dante the poet to bring in this other pagan poet figure who can show us how purgatory works. So he has the kind of guide and then he has the. The analog in Purgatory that's like that. That. That we can imagine ourselves as at Dante, can imagine himself as. So they're kind of serving as two different kinds of guides for him. I think the other thing here is that it adds a kind of poignancy to Virgil's situation. And as we're coming up to the end of Purgatory, we are, like, approaching the point at which Virgil's journey is going to end. And, you know, and so Dante maybe doesn't know it or isn't thinking about it at this point, but Statius is going to say, through you I was a poet, and through you, I was a Christian, right? He's going to attribute not only his poetic skill, his poetic achievements, to Virgil's influence. He's going to say, look, I. I read your warning about prodigality. And that made me realize for the first time that being a spendthrift was a bad thing. And that that changed my life forever. And I read what you wrote in the fourth eclogue about the baby boy, the child of the gods, who's going to be born and is going to be scorned, right? Born in poverty and without recognition. And that sounded like what all of these Christians were saying at the time. And I thought Virgil predicted it. And now these people are talking about it. Maybe I should try to figure out if this is true or not. And so that image that Statius presents, you acted like a man who goes along at night, no help to himself. He carries the light behind him. Is this beautiful but really kind of sad moment for. For Virgil and for Dante. And it says afterward, right, that they all just kind of stand there quietly after Statius finishes his speech. I think that you hear In Virgil's questions even. I'm looking at 58, 59, 60, that Tercet there. In 20. In 22, Virgil asks him, okay, but I read your poems and it doesn't seem like you were faithful to the faith. Without it, good is not enough. There's a kind of defensiveness in that question, right? I was good. Good is not enough, right? You needed something else. You needed faith. I know that now. And it doesn't seem like you had it. Right? And so this is Virgil really asking, I think, for personal reasons, not just for information. How is it that you're here and I'm not? And I think Dante is going to be working through that set of questions too. So it's. The Statious and Virgil pairing really sets us up, I think, to. I mean, we're only now here at the end really starting to understand what, what Virgil was and what's been happening inside of Virgil all this time there. CS Lewis has a great essay. I don't know if you've read his essay on Statius, but it's. He. Lewis is a medievalist and a student of Dante, a scholar of Dante, and he has a kind of. I think it's a great essay on what Dante's doing with Statius in this, these Cantos here vis a vis Virgil. But, but I think it is a kind of way to bring out the, the, the poignancy of Virgil's predicament here, because he's now, he's seen, he's. He has had divine revelation, right? He's seen these angels come down to hell. He's gone through purgatory. He's almost done with purgatory with Dante. He's seen Beatrice, right? She came to him and talked to him. So all these things that no one else in hell has ever seen, he's seen them now. He knows them. Now he gets it and he's on the outside of it. And Statius is, I think, the one that really brings it home for us. The degree to which Virgil now finally knows what he has given up or what he, what he doesn't have.
- [111:56]
A
I think Virgil's story is a tragic one. And maybe that's my own malformation. Maybe I don't, maybe I just, you know, it's like, it's like pitting the damned in the Inferno. Your, Your own, your own soul is not well formed, right? I'm, I'm fainting over Francesca. But maybe, you know, there's. I still think that I don't want to give everything away, but the Narrative around Virgil has never settled well with me. Maybe that's one reason I keep kind of pricking on. Why is he still the guide? Why does he still get to do this? It didn't end the first time I read this. I thought I knew where the story was going and it did not go that way. So, yeah. Statius's introduction here, I think, is fascinating. Anything else, though? Like, just on this canto or any of the other cantos, as we kind of bring this to a close. Any other kind of final thoughts?
- [112:38]
B
Well, I've just one more thought about Virgil before we get too far from him. I don't think. I don't think you're mistaken. I think Dante sets us up to be dissatisfied with the end of Virgil's stories. While I'm recommending essays, I think Dorothy Sayers essay on Dante's Virgil is a great one. There's even one. Mowbray Allen is the name of the scholar. And the essay is do we dare hope for Virgil's salvation? Or something like that? Do we dare hope for something like that? It's this. It. Like there's a debate in the Dante criticism about what Dante wants us to think about Virgil at the end, but it's. But Dante doesn't let it go. Almost every conversation he has in Paradiso, the background of that question is, what about Virgil? Right. He's looking for a loophole. He's looking for something that is going to, like, give, like, a reason to, you know, have some hope for. For Virgil's salvation. And so I don't think you're like Dante fainting at Francesca's speech. I think that Dante's inviting. You're like Dante in heaven, right? Hoping that there is some special providence for. For Virgil at the end of his journey through purgatory.
- [114:00]
A
Yeah, that's good to know. Because it can't just be simply black and white, like, oh, you're born before Christ, X, Y and Z. We've got Cato. A suicide made it. That's the one. If I was, Virgil would bother me. Like, really, the pagan suicide made it here and I didn't. And then we also have, if I recall correctly, it's already been referenced, Emperor Trajan, who actually was so adored and thought that he was. Yeah, because he's the example. That's right. He's the example of humility. He's one of the positive examples down on pride because he stops his whole military procession to help the widow. That one. The saints prayed for him. God rose him from the dead. They baptized him, then he just died again. And so he made it into heaven. Like, come on, there's got to be a loophole to get Virgil into heaven, right? That's what I kept thinking about. But okay. This has been fantastic. Dr. Barry, thank you so much for guiding us through these texts. It's been wonderful to meet you. Where can people find out more about you and your work?
- [114:50]
B
Well, I feel sort of like the American poet Marianne Moore, who, when this is 100 years ago, Ezra Pound asked her, where do you appear? She said, I do not appear. I don't have a website, which is the 21st century equivalent. But I do write a lot of books and articles. I have a book out very recently on verse drama. It's called Staging the Lyric, so you can check that out. And I have articles on a whole number of other things, but nothing on Dante yet. So maybe. Maybe this will be the spur that I need to do some writing about Dante later on.
- [115:28]
A
Wonderful. Well, thank you again for being here today. We appreciate it.
- [115:31]
B
Thank you so much. It was a delight.
- [115:33]
A
All right, everyone, next week we will continue in the Purgatorio on our journey. Pretty sure next week we're going to be joined by Father Patrick Briscoe, Dominican. I think he's going to be in Rome, so we're figuring out those details, but it's going to be a wonderful conversation. In the meantime, join us on X, Facebook, YouTube and Patreon, and we will see you next week. Thank you so much.