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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Purgatorio: Ante-Purgatory and the Terrace on Pride (Cantos 6-12) with Mr. Luke Heintschel
02:28:27
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- [00:00]
A
Today on a Sand in the Great Books podcast, we continue our wonderful journey through Dante's Purgatorio by discussing Cantos 6 through 12. Still dealing with the mysterious anti purgatory that's kind of like foot of the mountain, but then moving into our first terrace, purging the sin of pride. I really love this section. It's one of my favorite favorite passages in all the Purgatorio. We'll see that there is one terrace on the mountain for each of the seven deadly sins. So we have seven terraces, but each one will offer us this beautiful liturgy, this incredible resource library, if you will, of how we take this kind of tarnished and warped image of God in us and kind of beat it back into shape, beat it back into something that is beautiful, like Christ is beautiful. And there really is no better master of the soul than Dante the poet. And so it's a wonderful conversation. And to guide us through Cantos 6 through 12, we have Luke Heinshall, who serves as a headmaster of a wonderful classical school. He does a fantastic job. Lots of biblical lessons, lots of moral insights. I really appreciate him coming on the podcast. First time on the podcast, definitely going to have to have him back. Also, if you haven't seen it already, we have published a 51 question and answer guide to Dante's Purgatorio. It opens up with a letter just kind of introducing the text. And then it has reading comprehension questions, preliminary questions, if you will, for each canto, just like one to three questions per canto that help you kind of test your read of are you hitting the high points, pulling out what you really need to from this text. It's really wonderful, particularly for first time readers. It also helps group discussions if you're meeting a small group to use these kind of questions to help the conversation, if you will. And then we move into 51 questions and answers on the Purgatorio itself, which basically has two goals. One is a summary of every single canto. What should I have learned in this particular canto? And secondly, we look at some of the larger architectonic questions that really give structure to the entire text themselves that sometimes are subtle and overlooked and can be kind of missed if you're focused on a lot of the granular things. And so this is a wonderful resource. Go check it out on our Patreon page along with all the guides that we have on the great books. But today, join us for a wonderful conversation on Cantos 6 through 12 of Dante's Purgatorio with Luke Heinshall. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast My name is Deacon Harrison Garlic. I'm a husband, father of five, and serve as Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We're recording on a beautiful afternoon here at the Chancery. If you're new to Ascend, we're A weekly podcast 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 coming up here for the movie and then also Plato's Republic later on the docket in 2026. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all our supporters who have access to our whole library of written guides and also some community chats discussing the great books. You can visit thegreatbookspodcast.com where we also have a reader's guide to Dante's Purgatorio. 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 this Lent. And go check out Dr. Baxter, Baxter's new translation, which is the one I am actually going through. I'll hold it up right now. It's phenomenal. I've read Esalen, I've read Musa, so I really appreciate reading Baxter on this Read through. Today we continue our journey through Dante's Purgatorio. We are covering Cantos 6 through 12, which discuss we're going to move out of anti purgatory, the antechamber and move into our first terrace on Mount Purgatory, which is fantastic. I look forward to discussing it. Okay, so we have a great guest today who's going to unfurl all the mysteries of Dante for us. That's what I was promised. And so we have Luke Heinshall, who serves as the headmaster of Corps de Christ Classical School. Luke, welcome to the podcast.
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B
Thank you so much for having me, Deacon. I'm particularly excited to be here because the exact ethos of ascend is very much kind of my life experience as an adult, having not had the greatest education as a kid, but then, you know, realizing as an adult, as a someone who wants to focus on evangelization and the formation of Catholics and serve the Church. I have become convicted that the what most people call a classical or great books or liberal arts education, that's actually the key to making Catholicism relevant to young people and the contemporary society. And so I'm really grateful to be here. I'm on the journey with you And I, I did the Inferno with you guys last Lent and excited to do Purgatorio this year.
- [05:14]
A
Yeah, no, I'm very happy to have you on. We've been friends on X for a while, so it's always nice to actually discuss the great books together. Okay, so just real quick though, tell me then, like, what was that, like, moment? What was that spark like? How did you get introduced to the great books in classical education then?
- [05:30]
B
Yeah, well, my training is in evangelization and biblical theology. I have an undergraduate degree in mass media communications with a triple emphasis in philosophy, theology and business. So basically, how do you bring the philosophy and theology into business and media then? My master's degree is in biblical theology. And so I really wanted to specialize in reading sacred Scripture from the heart of the Church, which I know is something that Ascend is hoping to do as well. So my, my training was in evangelization and theology. I started working for. For Catholic diocese and schools and parishes, and I found myself in a classical school where I was. I received a new kind of good news that is that the contemporary world and modern man isn't entirely lost. You know, we have problems. There are barriers to faith today, but that those things are. Were capable of overcoming them. God has given us both the grace and the human means to do so. And those human means lie in the tradition that Catholicism took up 2,000 years ago and throughout her history, as she basically invented education. And the education that the Church crafted and formed over centuries is what most people today call classical or liberal arts education. So what's amazing is that my focus is on Catholic education, Catholic formation. My school quarter, Christ Academy, focuses on the formation of saints, scholars and servants. And the whole point is just going back to the way the Church has prescribed for us to educate our young.
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A
Yeah, very well said. Yeah. I think that two things you said that really stood out to me. One is just simply that, yeah, classical education, what we call classical, is really just how the Church has educated children for centuries. We're just kind of going back to, I think what the Church did very, very well, and also just the introduction to the Great Books. And I think being able to see the faith in a holistic way. So that was my experience as well, is that my introduction to the Great Books was concomitant with really my introduction to the Catholic faith. And so when I went to Ave Maria, I was reading Aquinas's Summa Theologica while also reading Plato's Republic for the first time. And what that did was it really Showed me, I guess, in a certain way, that the God that gave you an intellect is the same God that died upon the cross. That these two things are supposed to go together. There is actually a harmony between faith and reason, between theology and philosophy. And these things are very beneficial. It's very beneficial to read Homer. It's very beneficial to read Plato alongside the Christian faith. The pagans are not particularly, the classical pagans are not a threat to Christianity actually. They're really an invitation to ascend. Right. To actually lift Christianity up. You also have a substack though. Do you want to talk about that?
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B
Yes. So I write@co crucified.substack.com and my point there is to really share what I have learned and am constantly learning in this space. Classical education, great books education is in many ways new to me. In fact, I don't, I don't come here as an expert in Dante in particular, but a lover of the Catholic tradition, of everything that Dante loved and of the goal of Dante's Purgatorio, which is ultimately to ascend into paradise.
- [09:03]
A
Yeah, really well said. Yeah, Dante. One thing I really like about Dante's Purgatorio, particularly those like, particularly for first time readers, etc. And we're moving out of the Inferno is the Inferno, you know, it really, it just rips this kind of veneer off human desire and shows you how ugly sin actually is. So as we move into Purgatorio, what's happening is, is that, okay, well, this is now a map, this is now a guidepost of how you actually conform your soul to Christ to become beautiful as Christ is beautiful. And as I've matured in my own faith, you know, the Inferno is just great, right? It just, it captures you, it brings you in. You're like, oh, what horrific thing am I going to read about now? It's great, etc. However, I have come to mature hopefully along with Dante the pilgrim, to really actually appreciate Purgatorio and what it is and its mapping. I'm really excited to talk about the first terrace today because that's where you start to really see just the amazing amount of spiritual resources he gives you to try and combat the sin in your own life and then how you can actually ascend, how you can actually configure yourself to Christ and, and his purgatorial man is just a map. And particularly as a cleric giving homilies, doing these types of things, it's an excellent, excellent resource.
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B
Yeah. And I think it's also for the same Reason a great resource for the average layperson because I use Dante's Purgatorio as one of the primary textbooks in my moral theology class. And my whole rationale and point behind that is what moral theology is supposed to do is it's the study of human action and how to direct human action to our divine end. And so if. If that's what we're doing, then moral theology can't be just about laws, rules, the purely rationalistic analysis of action. We need to figure out exactly what is the goal. And from knowing the goal, from knowing the end, from knowing God, we can work backwards, like I think Dante does, to analyze, okay, well, what's the road? What is the path? C.S. lewis, in his Abolition of Man, talks about how a. A boy studying his English textbook doesn't realize that philosophy, theology, and politics are all at stake. And the particular English textbook that C.S. lewis is critiquing in the Abolition of Man is undoing Christianity in the soul of the boy. Similarly, I like to use great literature, like the Purgatorio for theology, because when we do. When we do study great literature, well, we actually end up doing theology at the end of the day anyway, because the whole point is to direct our hearts and our actions, our interior and exterior dispositions, toward their final end.
- [12:09]
A
Yeah, really well said. I just want to remind everyone that Abolition of Man is a fantastic book. Very short book, but fantastic. Probably one of the best mappings of modernity and the problems that we face. Yeah, that example of the waterfall at the beginning, and he takes, like, a little seemingly innocent line from a children's book, and it's like, hey, by the way, this is destroying the soul of the West. It's a fantastic text. I also want to say thank you for having a high school that reads the Purgatorio. Everyone reads the Inferno. Well, maybe I should say great book schools read the Inferno, classical schools read the Inferno. Not a whole lot of people read the Purgatorio. So kudos to you guys for incorporating that into your curriculum. And then just lastly, I really appreciated what you said about moral theology because I think that in a lot of ways, ethics, particularly like Catholicism, Right. Like religious ethics are presented as a rule of things not to do. Right. It's a negative list. So it's like, okay, well, if you want to be like Christ, just don't do these things. And that's such a flat and really vapid way to look at moral theology. As I've already said multiple times on this podcast, the actual point of moral theology is to become beautiful, like Christ is beautiful. To configure yourself to God, to ascend, to move upward. And we always think about theology is something not to do, which really truncates what we're actually supposed to be doing, that we're actually supposed to be configuring ourselves to Christ, which is this lifelong journey of becoming more beautiful, more virtuous, more godlike. And it's a. It's theosis, it's sanctification, these types of things. And that's such a deeper and more rich understanding of the Christian life than simply, like, I'm good because I don't do stuff. And I think that's one of the reasons I really like the Purgatorio. Because that whole, like. Well, I didn't. I wasn't that bad. Right? Just. I didn't really. Just, you know, I didn't do anything. I followed the, like, negative side doesn't really get you that far, actually.
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B
Yeah. So the. The reason that what you're saying is. Is exactly right. The reason that it's true is because moral theology, like you said, is not supposed to be about, like, what are the really terrible things I didn't do? Or even what are the really terrible things I need to stop doing? It is about conforming my own heart to Christ. And the Purgatorio is the best example in the literary tradition of the west, the literary tradition of Catholicism, even, that puts on display what it looks like for the soul to transform. Because it's not about ticking off a box. It's not about a list of rules. What it's about is the interior change of the heart. And throughout the whole Purgatorio, you know, we'll see the very. The very first terrace today. But throughout the whole thing, what you have is a rich, vivid analysis of the way the heart loves and the way that those things can go wrong, the different ways that the heart can love wrongly. And that's going to give us a beautiful picture of how we can remedy that, how we can more conform to the heart of Christ.
- [15:17]
A
Well said. Very well said. Okay, two things. One, I'm just going to apologize, everyone, right now that I am a little under the weather, so I'm being held up by cough drops and coffee at the moment. So I think my brain can. Can function. So we'll see. Two, let's dive into the text. So we're starting on Canto 6. I mentioned, everyone, that this year I'm reading the Dr. Baxter translation. Dr. Baxter came on actually already and kind of expressed like how he translated the Purgatorio. If you haven't seen that episode, go watch it, everyone. Because Dr. Baxter is very expressive and explains all the different ways and atmosphere of why he did what he did. It's great. Okay, so Canto six. Where are we? So we're still in anti purgatory ante as an A, N, T, E, like an antechamber. It's the beginning. It's the. It's the foot of the mountain, if you will. One thing I don't know if I really appreciated until I read it this time and I was trying to map it out for the podcast, is that, you know, we're used to, like, if you go to Inferno, there's like the vestibule of hell and the lukewarm are there. And it's like very structured of who is in what category. It's interesting here at the foot of the mountain that they're more just like groups of souls. They're all wandering around kind of in the same area, but there's like groups of souls. And I think we're going to see that because we get introduced to one group, but then the interlocutor they talk to is not actually part of that group. They're just kind of like moving around, if you will. And these are, broadly speaking, right? We're looking at the late. Repentance is a broad category. We'll get into some specific categories that are also here. And so he's still dealing with. We're still around the general group that suffered violent deaths with some. Some really beautiful narratives last time of people who repented. Right. Their last breath is Maria. It's Mary. And they. She had one tear. And, you know, the demons are like, upset. Like, that can't count. Like, you can't. You can't have mercy at the end of your life for a terrible life. And, you know, God's grace endures. But here in six, we start off with a scene he has. It's this really funny. It's a really funny picture that he gives us, which he's like, hey, you know, like when you're gambling and you win and everyone's around you and it's like, hey, I'm your friend. And like, you know, et cetera, I need something from you. He's like, that's what I'm like around these souls. And I think that's something I didn't quite appreciate until this read through is what a living person represents to the souls in Purgatory because he can actually affect their suffering. And their own purgation, because he can intercede for them, he can pray for them. We pray for the dead. And so they actually have this, like, longing to get his attention because he can actually offer something to them which is not a dynamic that we really saw in the Inferno.
- [17:57]
B
I think that's exactly right. The souls in the Inferno had no hope, as the gates told them to abandon. But here in the Purgatorio, as these souls reach out to Dante and ask for his assistance, and he is thereby benefited by assisting them. And so part of his purgation, I think, is to get a little bit out of himself and out of his own vision of his life. You know, at the beginning of Inferno, he was lost. Now is his time to get out of his own interests. There's so much politics in the Inferno, and politics is still very present, but it's. It's reordered here in the Purgatorio. So he's getting out of himself. He's getting out of the mundane earthly concerns, and he's more focused on the true goal of heaven.
- [18:57]
A
Yeah, well said. He says around, there's a beautiful Little Terset. Around 27, he says, when I was free from all those shades whose only prayer was. Was for more prayers so that their holy transformation could hasten. And then he gives, like, it's interesting, he gives a little catechesis here on intercessory prayer, which is catechetical, I think, to the pagan mind, maybe not to, like, the Protestant mind. So we might have to actually make some adjustments here. But basically, you know, his. His guide is Virgil, the Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid and the Aeneid, there's like this thing of, like, yeah, praying for the dead doesn't do a whole lot for them. So here, though, purgatory, the souls very much covet, they very much desire these prayers. So, of course, Dante the Pilgrim's like, hey, what's. What's going on? And even Virgil the Pagan, which I'm still. You know, one of the questions I have, the comedy overall is that Virgil, still the guide through purgatory, is something that's always kind of. I'm still not settled on it. And Virgil's whole kind of narrative arc still makes me sad. And we'll see why at the end of the purgatory. But here, Virgil is actually able to explain why intercessory prayer works. It's like, oh, it's because of the resurrected Lord, right? It's through Jesus Christ. So do you want to. Or maybe I can. Or you can. Can we give, like a brief, just a little catechesis on praying for the dead?
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B
Yeah, well, so praying for the dead is important here in the Purgatorio because as the human soul dies most. I mean, maybe we shouldn't be quantitative about it, but many souls at the end of their lives are not yet perfected. And the Book of Revelation tells us that only the pure will enter heaven, only the spotless. And so the Catholic Church's doctrine of purgatory and Dante's imaginative vision of this place is that purgatory. Purgatory is a mercy of God. It is a place where God allows souls that are not actually fit for heaven, but also not dying in enmity with God. Those souls can still take advantage of God's mercy. And this is the richness and the beauty of the Catholic position, is that purgatory allows those of us who are not perfected at the end of this life. For example, if I were to get hit by a car today, those of us who are not perfected, we can still avail ourselves of the merits of Christ on the cross and be perfected in purgatory in heaven. And so the prayers and penances of people on earth are able to contribute to that treasury of Merit. St. Paul says that he rejoices in his sufferings in Colossians 1. He rejoices in his sufferings because he in himself, in his body is filling up what was lacking in the sacrifice of Christ. And I think the Protestant and the Catholic alike can look at that passage with great wonder and say, what could have been lacking in Jesus's sacrifice? Jesus is perfect. His sacrifice is perfect. What could have possibly been lacking? And I think that the. The answer from St. Paul and the answer that each of us should give to that question is, well, it was me. It was. It was my participation in Jesus's sacrifice. And that is not to say that, you know, many critiques of Catholicism include that we think that we earn salvation. That's. That's not what's being said here, but rather that we unite ourselves to the cross of Christ. We are co. Crucified with him, as St. Paul says in Galatians 2. And so the point of our praying for the dead is our unity with Jesus as well as our helping these souls to be united to him by our prayers. What's fascinating to me here is, is that Virgil kind of punts the question at a certain line 46, just before 46, at 43, he says, I'm reading the Esalen translation this time around. And he says, but for so deep a question, never rest, continue to wonder unless she gives the answer. Who will be a light of truth to shine on your mind and throughout the Purgatorio. What's fascinating is the way that light works, the way the sun works. We're going to see Lucy later on today, whose name means light, and Beatrice is who's going to replace Virgil as the guide. Beatrice it is that gives Dante a greater vision, a greater light than Virgil is capable of. Virgil knows that he's inadequate to the task. And so he says, don't stop asking this question once you meet Beatrice.
- [24:14]
A
Yeah, really well said. Yeah. It's going to take someone who's graced, right. Someone who actually has the grace. So Virgil is describing something from the outside in. And so Beatrice is going to come in and be the inside guide, the guide that actually has grace. But still I still in somewhat bewildered that Virgil actually does such an excellent job at actually describing these things. So, yeah, piggybacking on things you said. I think intercessory prayers. Yeah. Often misunderstood. I agree. With everything that you set forward. I think of a few things. One is this intercessory prayer in general, whether we're asking the saints to pray for us or we're praying for the dead, or we're asking each other to pray for us. I think a lot of times this is misunderstood, that it's somehow a lack of confidence in Christ as the mediator, or that we believe that there are multiple mediators. But really I would particularly people that are coming from a broadly Christian background. It's the dynamic of it is actually the same as asking your friend to pray for you. So if I, you know, if I have a friend in the hospital, I'm like, hey, Bob, please pray for so and so because they're in the hospital. I don't ask you to pray because I have a lack of faith in Jesus Christ to be the mediator between me and God. But rather Christ tells us about coming together, right. Those of us who are Christian, those of us who are little Christs that have grace, coming together to actually before the Father, in the name of Jesus Christ to ask for something. And so that same dynamic is what then plays out with either asking the saints to intercede for us or praying for the church, suffering the church penitent in purgatory. Because what Catholicism tends to hold to is a very deep and real understanding of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, that death really has been conquered, and that the church actually exists in Multiple states. So we have the Church here on earth, the Church militant that's fighting a good fight. We have the Church in heaven, because those are all part of the body of Christ. We're part of the same body of Christ. There's not multiple bodies of Jesus Christ. This is the Church Triumphant. They've fought the good fight, they're in heaven. And then we have the Church penitent. And so we have the Church that are suffering in purgatory as they continue their purgation, as you mentioned very, very well, that no unclean thing can enter into heaven. And so I think one thing to note is like how the Church actually views the Church itself. And this is a whole new dynamic because the Church doesn't exist in the inferno, but the Church does exist then in Purgatorio. And so now you see this relationship that we can pray for one another and why that's so important. And lastly, still going on something you said. I always think of John 15. So a lot of this, a lot of these debates about intercessory prayer come back to how you actually view grace. And I always go back to John 15 in which he talks about the vine and the branches. And we connect ourselves to the vine through God's grace. We can't actually do it ourselves. There's no work. So Catholics don't believe in a works based salvation because you can't actually do anything to merit grace. You have to rely on the grace of Jesus Christ and through his sacrifice. But once you connect to the vine, you have to take of that nourishment and you have to grow, and you grow in that Jesus Christ. You actually take of him and configure yourself to become something more Godlike, something more Christlike. Or you can elect to not do that and be very stagnant, as we'll see some of the souls here are. Or you can actually cut yourself off from the vine. You can create what we call a mortal sin. It kills the life of God in you and you actually remove yourself from the vine. And then if you don't get the picture, you know, Christ tells us that then the Father comes and gathers all those branches together and burns them. And so there is, I think, a real understanding in Catholicism that holds a few things together that sometimes seem counterintuitive of, like. No, salvation is something you can't earn. It has to be freely given, but once received, it has to be something that is participated in. Which then means when you die, most of us do not die perfectly configuring ourselves to Christ. And so then this purgation is that final kind of purity, if you will. And so the souls, then. One, we see Virgil giving this lesson on intercessory prayer. Two, we see the souls then are desirous of these types of prayers, which is a good. Now, some of these souls in the anti purgatory still haven't been purged of pride. And so some of their state, you have to kind of take some of their statements with a grain of salt. And then we get Beatrice. I liked what you said about Beatrice a lot. The only thing that I would add in there is, you know, Beatrice is interesting. So it's not Dante's wife. Beatrice is a girl that he first saw when he was quite young, I think nine. And, you know, his whole amount of time in his whole life that he was probably about Beatrice probably doesn't even constitute a full day. I mean, he doesn't. It's. She is. So what she ends up being for him is really an icon. She's a muse of God's grace and beauty. He saw in her God's grace. And what's interesting and then is for Dante the pilgrim, what we're going to see is that he's desirous of Beatrice. And what's going to have to happen with him is that he has this, in the best sense of the word, this eros, this erotic appetite for beauty, which is good and healthy and natural, but it's going to have to transcend from Beatrice per Beatrice to Beatrice as an icon of God. And this is not something that Dante the pilgrim quite has worked out. So you read that line. And I think the line after that is hilarious. So Virgil's like, hey, by the way, Beatrice is probably up on the top of this mountain. And Dante the pilgrim is like, oh, and I, my Lord, let's move with greater haste. This is like the first time that Dante the pilgrim has ever decided to go quickly, right? He's like, oh, yeah, Beatrice is up there. I need to get up there. And so, you know, she's. And she's. We are going to meet her at the end of Purgatory. Their meeting is very fantastic and very interesting. And it's going to have to. We're going to have to unpack a lot to understand it. But here I think we can see Beatrice really as an icon of God's beauty. And really, I think Dante is making a larger critique here that the west has made several times that the feminine beauty is actually an icon of God's beauty. And this is why, over and over time, it's actually the feminine beauty is used as an analog for, say, wisdom for God, etc. Showing particularly young men that that erotic appetite has to ascend from, say, the more baser pleasures of, say, like the body and sex to the higher, like, the thematic, the spirited of, like, you know, nobility and honor and glory to then the intellect of, like, wisdom. And that this is a journey that we see oftentimes in young men. It's also a journey we're going to see mimicked out in Dante the Pilgrim as well.
- [30:40]
B
And I think that that journey you're talking about is exactly the reason that I think it was Dostoevsky who said that beauty would save the world. You know, people like Bishop Barron repeat this truth very, very often. It's also something that the west has kind of always known to various degrees. There's. There's lots of examples in. I guess this isn't the west, this is the ancient Near East. But in the Epic of Gilgamesh, there's a sense of the female civilizing the male, and it's the male's desire for the female that makes him a better man. I saw this in my own personal life because one of the primary points of religious conversion in my life was the very moment I met my wife. And it was like it was her beauty that. That pointed me toward something higher than even her. And so that. That point about Eros as providing maybe a step on the ladder to ascend to Caritas is. That's a dynamic that is classic in the west, but also fascinatingly important for religious conversion, for theological conversion.
- [32:09]
A
Yeah, well said. Yeah. We see it in the Old Testament as it talks about, like, wisdom as feminine. Right. As something to be pursued. You see it in the Platonic tradition very heavily with the Symposium in Diotima and explaining then how the body of the beloved actually is an invitation to ascend, even in a pagan sense, ascend up this ladder of love through your erotic appetites.
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B
And.
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A
And yeah, and then I think that the. Not to labor on this too long, but, you know, Pope Benedict XVI tried in a lot of ways to get the Church to understand Eros as a good. That your natural love, your erotic appetite is actually a good. And so the beginning of his encyclical, what is that? Deus Caritas est. Actually gives a short defense of Eros. And he actually does point out that, yeah, Eros is a love of ascent. It's a love, it's a need love. It has to be satiated, but it can call you, particularly through the. For young men, through the female form, up into higher loves, and then it's perfected through caritas. And I think that, you know, Dante here, he's not writing in Greek, he's writing in Italian. But his understanding of, we're going to see this later in the purgatory, particularly when he gets to the terrace that purges of sloth, he gives a little catechesis on the natural love amor for him, and it dovetails very well into the Eros tradition we see in the west and also with the Greek fathers and et cetera. So it's just Beatrice plays a very particular role. And I think that there's a lot of layers here, psychological layers, in the best sense of that word, to dive into, of why is it that he pursues Beatrice? And why is it the beauty of Beatrice that can literally lead him through hell and then up through the mountain of purgatory?
- [33:50]
B
I love that you pointed out the line of Beatrice's beauty being the motivating factor for his movement. That's so good. I missed it. That's really great.
- [33:58]
A
This is funny because Dante the pill. I mean, this is the thing, too. I mean, we got to move on because we have a lot of Cantos. But the. The funny thing is, is that I always think it's interesting when a brilliant and virtuous man like Dante the poet puts himself in the poem as a person who needs formation. And it's. It plays with our mind because you see Dante the pilgrim, and you're like, man, he's weak, and et cetera. But it's from. All this is coming from the imagination of Dante the poet. You know, a few weeks ago on the podcast, we had an episode on Plato and Saint Boethius, and you see this exact same dynamic with Boethius is that he writes a constellation of philosophy, and he's doubting and he's kind of weak, and he asks all these questions, and you have to take a step back and be like, well, no, wait. Boethius the poet. All this is coming from his imagination. And so it kind of plays with us a little bit about how we see Dante, if you will. But, okay, so pushing forward, we get introduced to Sordello, who is also from the same hometown as Virgil. And so I think the one thing I want to say here on the back half of Canto 6 is Dante then goes on, which we're very accustomed to because of the Inferno, a rant about Italy and then about Florence and about, you know, if you remember, from the Inferno, every other circle of hell. It's like, oh, yeah, here's another Florentine. Here's another Florentine. Like Florence is just pumping out dam souls left and right. And he has all these critiques that he gives about Italy in Florence. And so I want to, I want to make a few comments here down about line 90. He has this, these interesting. His two tersets here, I think are really fascinating. He says, what does it matter that Justinian refit you with a bridle if now the saddle's empty? Had he not, your shame would be diminished. So that's Emperor Justinian, right? Then also, O you who should be focused on devotion, allowing Caesar to sit upon the saddle, if you could know what God intends for you. So I just want to give like a little short thing here about the politics of Dante. And I am not a scholar and I guarantee I've sat through conversations on this. This is a blood on the floor conversation. People argue about Dante's politics and his true meaning left and right. So I want to give just kind of a cursory rough sketch of this. So first off, what is the tradition that he's receiving? Because I think it's really important because it's incredibly alien to our own mind, because our minds are completely colonized by liberalism left and right. Right. We are liberal through and through. You talk about what's important in politics. We're going to start talking about the individual, we're going to talk about freedom, we're going to talk about all these social contracts. Like our default political language is liberal. Even if you view yourself as conservative, you're probably a liberal at heart. Because if you are the river, or excuse me, you're the stone in the river. And this just washes over you left and right. So what does the Church think? So one thing that's really interesting is that in the 400s, we had a pope, Pope Glacius, who wrote a letter to the emperor explaining how God had basically structured the world. And one of the things that he, the famous phrase that he gives in there is duo sunt. There are two. There are two powers. And his basic argument is, listen, Christ is king and he's also priest. But it's far too tempting towards pride that one man would hold both these roles. So what our Lord has done is that he has broken up two distinct powers, right? Duo sunt. There are two and there's two different powers. There's a temporal power and the spiritual power. In the Caesar, you are the temporal power and the Pope is the Spiritual power. And these are. There's many analogues for this, but these are like the two lights upon which man is actually guided in his journey. So we should have a temporal power, a Caesar who is helping to guide us through all the temporal needs that we have. You know, think about the state, think about laws, think of these types of things. And then we have a spiritual power, particularly the clerics and the sacraments that are guiding us through this. And so the spiritual power is the sun, the temporal power is the moon. Boniface viii, who Dante famously hates with an abandonment, he put him in hell, wrote a whole encyclical on this, talking about the two swords. There's multiple different analogies. One thing, though, I really want to stress here, though that doesn't make sense to us from a liberal mindset, is that both of these powers are held by the Church. There is no church and state. Church and state is a modern thing. We're not going to get that until really you get into John Locke and the liberals and also the rise of the modern nation state, which really comes concomitantly with Protestantism. That's a whole new concept. Both of these powers. Notice I didn't say church and state. I said the temporal power and the spiritual power, because they're both seem to be held by the church. Even the Caesar is part of the Church because it's part of the baptized laity. So what Dante is lamenting here when he talks about, listen, the emperor saddled you and now the saddle's empty. In your humility, you should accept the Caesar. Italy at this time is again just an absolute fractured state of little kingdoms and thieves and all these things that republics that are fighting against each other and just really slaughtering each other. And the whole thing of Italy is as a constant political tension and nightmare. And you compare that then to their history of like, oh, well, we were Roman, we had the empire, we brought the Pax Romana. So he has this constant theme in which he's. He's yearning for an empire, he's yearning for an emperor, because the emperor brings peace, all these little factions, etc. And we'll see as we kind of go through these characters that he gives us that he. He has heavy critiques of rulers who fail to bring this type of peace. Now it gets really complicated because he also critiques the Church a lot. And so there's a few things that I think should be noted here. One, like Boniface viii, he really doesn't like the Church stepping into the temporal gap. And this is what you see in the medieval age, over and over again, is that the temporal side is not unified, it's fractured, et cetera. So one thing the spiritual side tends to do, particularly through the papacy, is it starts to absorb and fill the gap that the temporal side is missing. And so what you see is like the papal states come up, you see the papal power, the popes commanding armies, they're trying to bring this, in the best sense of the word, they're trying to bring this peace. And Dante is like, well, no, this. We're conflating things now. Now the powers are conflated. Like the church tradition is that this person should not have both temporal and spiritual. Obviously, you can defend Boniface VIII and others and say, well, if no one's doing it, who's going to do it? So this is the tension there. And then the other thing with Dante that's kind of confusing is that even though he desires an emperor, and I think he desires a pope too, that is within his lane, he also has a very strong sense of subsidiarity. And so he wants Florence to be. Have the benefit of an emperor and the benefit of the pope, but he doesn't really want the emperor or the pope to micromanage what Florence is doing, if that makes sense. So he has this. So then he pushes back. So it's very easy. And I'm not saying this is like, perfect, I'm just kind of giving a rough sketch. It's very easy to misunderstand Dante because on one hand he's yearning for an emperor, on the other hand, he's critiquing the pope for having too much temporal power, even though he's yearning for temporal power to come in. And then at the end of the day, even if he got his emperor and the pope where he wants it, he's like, by the way, just, we enjoy you, but don't get too involved in the politics of Florence because of subsidiarity. So he has, like, this very interesting kind of political landscape that informs a lot of both the Inferno. We have a lot of it in the Purgatorio.
- [41:40]
B
So I want to submit this to you as a kind of a provisional thought. And I have. I don't know that I've thought all the way through it, but it seems to me that in the Inferno, Dante's critiques of politics, church or state, are tethered to the world. Whereas here, here in the Purgatorio, especially in Canto 6, he does level critiques of politicians and churchmen. But if we look at his critique here of Albert round line 98. Oh, German Albert, Emperor of Rome, who should have sat astride the saddle boughs of her you left abandoned to become untamed and savage. He's critiquing Albert's worldly ambitions of going out and conquering and grabbing that German territory. And then in line 112, he says, come see your widowed Rome that night and day calls out to you alone, and in her tears, my Caesar, why will you not dwell with me? And Dante offers us a vision of politics where real patriotism and love of your. Your home, your patria, your. Your city, your country, that real patriotism is going to call our. Our home city, our home country, higher. And so he's. He's calling Caesar higher in his critique. He's calling Albert higher in his critique. And then in line 133, he says, you know, many decline the burden of the state, like Albert does, but your officious people come uncalled and they cry out, here am I, I'll shoulder it. Well, then, be glad you have good cause you do. So I. I think that the. He's also asking the question of, has God abandoned Italy, except Florence, maybe. But has God abandoned Italy? And he's. He's there taking this political question, and instead of keeping it grounded, instead of keeping it tethered to the earth and the practical and the particular people that he's talking to and about, he's allowing this question and this desire for the greatness of his city to elevate his own soul. Has God abandoned Italy? He starts to question. He starts to bring up the question of the problem of evil, which is a beautiful movement of politics. It's. Politics is not meant to stay down here. It's meant to help us to rise up.
- [44:31]
A
Yeah, very well said. A few thoughts. Yeah, it's interesting because, like, in his critique of, say, Albert, he could have taken the throne, he's the emperor, but he stays in the north fighting and never comes back to Italy to actually, like, harmonize Italy together. I think that your intuition is correct insofar as. And this is, again, something that's very alien to our modern mind, is that the politics here is not actually really separate from religion. And it's also not separate from the walk of virtue or our walk with Christ, because this is a Christian society. And so, I mean, even, like, practically speaking, what is your capacity to live a virtuous life if your city is actually embroiled in chaos, murder, conspiracy, treachery, et cetera? I mean, if you took his Florence, as he describes it, what's your capacity to be a virtuous man inside of that city? This is like, oh, I'm going to be a virtuous man. I'm going to go live in Sodom and Gomorrah. So one thing that we just don't really appreciate is that politics does actually help us to live a Christian life. And you want that true leisure. You want that capacity to raise a family, you to want. You want the capacity to have a good job, so then you can have true leisure in your life, that you can work on virtue, you can read good books. All these things come from political stability and peace. And a true peace. Not again. One of the problems with modernity is that we take words that actually had really deep meanings and we flatten them and we make them vapid. So when we talk about peace, we typically just mean the absence of war. But for Dante, peace is in the heart of the Church, is the tranquility of order. It's. Everything is actually working according to its proper telos. It's, you know, its end, its purpose. And so I think for him, I think your intuitions are completely correct, that for him, like politics is not something separable. Again, there's no church and state. It's temporal power and spiritual power. But notice both of those have correlating ends, final ends, where the temporal is supposed to help you then lead a proportionately good life according to nature, but it's a baptized nature. So it's in service then to the Christian life. And the spiritual power is supposed to be then helping you to elevate through the sacraments, to become more Christlike. These two things go together. And so, and which, by the way, we're seeing what's going to happen when Machiavelli comes on the scene, because Machiavelli is going to see the exact same things, but he's going to come in and crush this concept of duo sunt, this idea that these things go together and politics then is reduced to what we know it to be today, which is really just kind of like these machinations of power and et cetera. So, no, I think that's absolutely right. And I think this is why he laments politics in a spiritual text, because that peace that politics brings has to be there really to live a good life.
- [47:16]
B
No, I was thinking we should probably move on to seven.
- [47:20]
A
I know this is. We're on the path for a five hour podcast, so this is good. There's just, there's a lot of Wisdom here. This is why we have to reread the books. So let's go to Canto 7. So K7 enters a few really interesting things. One is that now Virgil's actually introduced. So Sordello doesn't actually know who Virgil is. And so Virgil gets introduced again. I just. I am still trying to navigate why Virgil is either the guide of purgatory or why he actually, like, even Cato. Cato made it. Cato's a pagan suicide. And we talked about that last time and all the reasons why I think Dante does that. But Virgil, like, he actually gives a self critique here, right, about why he is not actually in Purgatory. And he says, this is a round line 27. Not for what I've done, but what I didn't do. I lost the sight of that high sun which you desire, which was known to me too late. And he says a little further down at line 36, I dwell with those who didn't clothe themselves within the three holy virtues, and yet who knew no vice and followed the other four. So we could have a big debate here about why Virgil isn't, you know, quote unquote saved. I think what's more interesting here as we kind of maybe look at Canto 7 as like an architecture, like just a large mapping is we get then a dichotomy between dawn or, excuse me, Virgil saying. He talks about the sun. I lost sight of that high sun which you desire, which was known to me too late. And then we're immediately coupled with this really intriguing rule of the mountain that, by the way, since we're not in a hole in the ground anymore, the inferno we have night and day again. And by the way, at nighttime, no one can ascend the mountain. What do you think's going on with this rule that no one can ascend the mountain during the night?
- [49:13]
B
Well, I love it because here we have a hint towards a recurring theme throughout the entire Purgatorio that light the sun. These are representatives of God's grace. And so you can't go up during the nighttime, you can't go up when you don't have and enjoy the light of the sun, when you don't have God's grace. But you can wander around wherever you're at, you can go down a little bit, we'll see in a little while, but you can't go up. You cannot ascend without grace. The other thing too is that when Virgil is explaining his inability to enjoy paradise, when he's giving his justification for not being in Purgatory. The reason he's in hell, limbo, it's because he did not do what we talked about earlier when you brought up John 15. He was not attached to the vine. And so Virgil is incapable of the complete perfect union with the divine essence. And so it recalibrates our sense of what the goal of life is, what. What the goal of purgatory is in the imaginative vision. Virgil can't get there because he didn't have faith. And for us, we often are tempted to think, if I'm just a good enough person, I'll be able to go to heaven. Well, first of all, there's plenty of really terrible people in purgatory being purified, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing. It's a grace for me. I know, woeful as I am, I still have a chance because of God's mercy. And the reason Virgil didn't have his chance is because he didn't have faith. He didn't have the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. He wasn't united to the vine.
- [51:18]
A
Well said. Yeah. I want to keep going with what you just said, which is looking at this statement about virtue. So for those who are not familiar, Right. So he talks about the four that he has. So there he's referring to natural virtue. He's talking about prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. These are our four natural virtues. We get them listed in Players Republic. We also get to list them in the Old Testament and the Book of Wisdom. These are the four. They're called natural because they are available to all men by nature of being a rational animal. Right. So it's because you are a human being, you can have these four virtues, which are really four ways of living rationally according to reason. And each one does something different. Right. Prudence is the elective habit, how we actually make right decisions. Justice is giving each other their due. It's about, well, ordering things, a certain harmony we see. Also, temperance is holding the soul to reason in the face of something that is pleasurable, that would usually pull us away from reason. And then fortitude holds us to reason in the face of something that would scare us away. Right. Like fear. Right. So you think of the classic, you know, Braveheart, holding the line with the calvary charge that's coming. So these four virtues are available to all people, and that's why Virgil can participate in them, and the souls in limbo participated in them. The three theological virtues, as you mentioned, faith, hope, and charity, these have to be infused in you by God, because here charity is not like I love my dog. And hope is not like I hope my team wins on Saturday. These are theological virtues that actually only come by knowing God, by participating in the life of God. Which is probably the best definition of what grace is, is that it's actually the life of God. Going back to that John 15 analogy of vine in the branches, we participate in this. So these have to be infused into you, and then once they're given to you, then they participate like a virtue, like a habit. You can actually participate in them and be charitable, have hope and have faith. And this is what Virgil is lacking, even though that's not a complete, you know, impediment to being saved, because we've seen that Cato is here and will actually get a pagan in heaven as well, because God's mercy endures. But just. I just want to lay that out quickly. Of those seven virtues, the four natural ones, three theological ones, because we're going to see that they structure some things in Purgatory. We've actually already seen that, if you remember, right as he came out of hell, he looks up and the stars are a huge motif in Dante, but he sees the four stars which are the four natural virtues. And then we're going to see here in a little bit, and he sees the three stars which are the three theological virtues. So we kind of have to know how these virtues interrelate, particularly to the path of virtue, of living a good life, to understand how Dante's using them in the text.
- [53:56]
B
The other. The other thing to consider. And as you read the great books, as people follow this podcast and read through many different great books, there are different emphases that reveal different kinds of complementary truths. And as you read Homer, the virtue of courage is emphasized a great deal, to the point where maybe courage is the sum of virtue. When you read Plato, particularly in the Republic, you find that it's justice, that once you have all the virtues, that's what justice is. When you read Aristotle, especially in the Nicopachean ethics, he presents prudence as this sum of all virtues. He talks about temperance as safeguarding prudence. But then when we get to Dante, especially here in the Purgatorio, which is very. It's drawing on the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, we find that the real sum of all virtues is not even one of the human virtues. It's charity. And St. Thomas talks about charity as the form, form of virtues. It's the motivator, and it's the director of all the virtues for the. The. For the Perfect for those who are on their way to heaven, those in heaven. It's charity that orders our humility, our obedience, and every other virtue that we might find, prudence and justice. And that's. That's a beautiful thing, that is the impact of the Christian religion on the classical Western tradition is that charity ties the entire picture together. And I think Dante sees this. He even structures the entire mountain of Purgatory based on love. Not love considered as charity, necessarily, but it's charity that moves him up. It's charity that is the sun that shines during the day. And the other thing that I wanted to mention too, just about the sun and night and day, is that here in purgatory, we have time. This is a dramatic change from what we experienced in Hell. There was no passage of time. It was endless burden, and we were suffering under the weight of. Of a lack of time. But here in Purgatory, we have time. We have the passage of days. We have day and night. We will also see the various ways that are important that Dante changes throughout time. So I think that's something that's important to bear out as well.
- [56:46]
A
Yeah, that's a good thing to track. I think the dovetail on that. One thing we'll see is when we talk to the souls, remember when we talked in souls in the Inferno, their minds are completely truncated. They're always thinking about what's happening on Earth. They're always thinking about, like, what's my reputation, my memory? That's the only thing that they have there. When we kind of talk to some of these souls in the antechamber, some of them still kind of sound like that. But then once we get past pride and onto the mountain, they're not focused on this anymore. Their minds have been purified. And so, yeah, the theme of time, I think, is really good to pull out there. And I also, I want to say, just confirming what you mentioned about the sun and why they can't ascend up the mountain is yet, because it's God's grace. And that's our hint. It's because Virgil had just talked about and given us the analog that I lost sight of the high sun, which you desire. And just then we're partnered immediately. That's that close reading, that attentive reading to, oh, yeah, by the way, you can't go up during the night, which is not really explained by Dante the poet. But we see the understanding, this picture here, of what that actually means. Your will is basically impotent. Like, you can't do this Without God. And I want to. I don't. I kind of. I'm tempted to push it further. Maybe not further, but it's a different aspect of. You don't see the three theological virtues, if I understood the story correctly, push back if I'm wrong. You don't see the three stars for the theological virtue until night comes. The four were during the day. So they're sitting there then, not being able to move up. And the stars are always a sign of contemplation. It seems to me that's also a moment then of reflection, of contemplation. They look up, they see the three stars, they see faith, hope and charity, and understand this is by which I can ascend. And then the day comes, and then they can keep moving up the mountain. Okay, the back half though, of Canto 7. So this is something I find really fascinating. So we're getting into these souls that for some reason have to wait to go up the mountain. And for the most part, if memory serves, the souls we've all run into so far are late repentants for one reason or another. Here, however, it shifts a bit to these are the failed kings and princes. These are failed earthly rulers. So it's not necessarily. I mean, my reading here was, is that it's not that there are rulers who also were late repentance. These are rulers who did not play out their vocation in life. And we get this kind of valley of the princes. They're all down here, which a valley should really stand out to us because the mountain is. We're ascending up to God. So these guys are in a valley. They're negative. They've gone downward. And I think this really kind of tethering to my earlier rant about duo suntan politics. I think this really shows us how Dante sees the political as a Christian vocation, that because you mess up as a Christian king, a Christian ruler, this has a profound effect according to the common good. And because you harmed the common good, we saw lots of examples in the Inferno that merited hell. Well, here you merit having to wait. You don't get to ascend the Mount of Purgatory. You have to sit here and contemplate how you failed in your vocation as a ruler. And he gives multiple examples of this as. As he goes through in this kind of valley of the kings. And again, I think Dante the poet is inviting us to a very different understanding of politics than as we see it today.
- [60:10]
B
And just to kind of double click on that very quickly right at the end of seven around lines 121 and following. It's rare enough that man's nobility will rise up through his branches as is willed by him who gives it that from him alone we claim the gift. That nobility, that, that princely office that I think you rightly identify as a Christian vocation, it comes from God, the vocation, the call comes from God. And you know, God called someone else to, to realize the nobility of regal office. And that was his own mother. And so we find the spirits in this stage around line 81 or 82, we find them singing Salve Regina, Hail Holy Queen. And so while they were failed in their political role in life, now they submit to the true heavenly queen and they sing her praises. And I just think that's such a beautiful reflection. The true role of nobility is to submit to heaven's queen and to recognize that your nobility, your office, your power comes from on high.
- [61:37]
A
Yeah, very well said. Yeah. Because again, thinking of that duo sunt, the temporal power is actually a configuration to Christ the King and it's actually a Christian vocation to be a good ruler. What we've done today is we've made this a very vapid, like secular concept. Like we actually believe there's a neutral, which I don't believe there's a neutral, but we believe there's a neutral. And that playing out the politics, you know, is this, it's democratic, it's the will of the people, etc. Dante the poet is inviting us to a very, very different understanding of politics. And we have to be careful because even though he critiques heavily politics and he critiques the church, what he wants to do through that critique is elevate both to what they should be doing. And I love what you mentioned about Sally Regina. It's something for first time readers. You've got a flag. As we particularly as we move into the terraces, people are singing, they're praying, they're doing all things, all of these things are tailored basically to spiritual direction of how does this prayer or this song help then to be a remedy to the sins that these souls are having to actually purge themselves of. I loved what you said about Salve Regina. I think there's also a deeper, no pun intended meaning here. Not deeper, but just another one which is. And Baxter makes this note in his. Where the Salve Regina, right. Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy. Our life, our sweetness and our hope, we cry, poor banished of children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. So there, you know, here we pray that that valley of tears Is this life, this shadow of a real life. But they, the Valley of the Kings, they're actually in an actual valley, geographically weeping. And I love what you did. You tethered that to the queenship of Mary and that there's a true ruling capacity. Because we just really misunderstand authority as moderns. Authority for us is almost always a pejorative. It's like, well, it's this necessary evil we have to have because we can't all live together. So someone has to be in charge. But it's like always something that's grating on us. Like, I don't want to submit. Where in reality, for Dante and for the ancients, authority is you're charged with the perfection of something. You're supposed to actually be the shepherd. You're supposed to shepherd this according to its natural function, its purpose. So the ruler is actually supposed to help man on his end. Right? His purpose is telos in life. And that gets Christianized through baptism, in which then the temporal ruler is supposed to be shepherding these souls towards their spiritual good, and then the spiritual good of the church is then shepherding us towards that beatific vision and final end of Jesus Christ. And this whole harmony is supposed to be working together. So you can see very clearly when Dante has these, these kings and princes and rulers that fail in their duty, this is not just you were a bad politician. This is that you literally were a stumbling block to people's salvation. You created a culture, a political landscape that was antagonistic towards a life of virtue and configuring yourself to Jesus Christ. And you've really failed and failed tremendously in this.
- [64:39]
B
I think that's right. And the only other thing that I would want to add is that this, this injunction to rule well and to wield authority prudently is not just for the visibly political rulers, but like you mentioned, baptism makes each of us a king. We share in Jesus's kingly office. In all my classes, I begin class with an elaborate catechetical recitation where I ask a question, student's answered, and it's the the same one every class period throughout the whole year. And so they, they memorize group great works, excerpts from great works of literature or truths about the discipline or whatever. But I begin each catechism with, gentlemen, what are you? And the young men in my classroom answer, I am a son of the king of kings, a knight of the mystic rose, and by God's grace, I rule myself. And the ladies answer similarly. But each Christian, each reader of Dante should see themselves as of royal nobility. And your political rule is over your life, over yourself. And it's because you're a son or daughter of the king of kings and you have an inheritance and it's at the top of the mountain.
- [66:10]
A
Excellent. Yeah, I love that. I would also mention too, that not only that self discipline, that self authority that we then imitate through that kind of mimetic power that we see in Christ, but also like husbands, fathers over their families. This is a misunderstanding we have too. Like the. The headship of the husband of the father of the family is not one of domination, but rather of an authority that's supposed to be helping his entire family to configure the Jesus Christ. He is charged, right. With actually tending them towards their actual vocation. Again, kind of whether it's. Whether it's. Concept of peace or freedom or authority, One of the dangers of being in the west is all of our terms kind of got gutted around modernity. And we receive them now in this kind of vapid, empty way, which makes it difficult then to have the correct logic about how they're going to play out. So. No. Very well said. Okay. All right, let's look at Canto 8. So Canto 8 gives a really interesting picture, which kind of surprised me. So my understanding here is that, okay, it's nighttime, and then two angels come down. And it's notable to me that everyone knows what's happening, which means this is a repetitive event. This is something that they've seen before. Like, oh, yeah, the angels are coming. And then the serpent is coming in and trying to like, infiltrate the mountain. And the angels drive it off. And this is like this kind of. I struggled with this in the beginning when I first read the Purgatory, because I was like, well, clearly the serpent is sin and the angels are driving it away. But what is sin doing on the mountain of purgatory? Like, what is this? Please push back. But my basic understanding here is that, well, no, this play, I guess, if you will, that they've seen over and over again. This is like catechetical to the souls there. And so they're seeing again God through his angels come down. Then the snake is temptation. It's sin. It's this falling short that tries to then slither in and kind of, you know, penetrate into the mountain. And no, through God's grace, it gets driven away, which is really what's going to happen. It's an analog to what's going to happen to each one of their souls. Right. They're going to Come to the mountain. The angels are going to purify them and they'll be able to ascend. So I think this is like a brief moment of catechesis that Dante the poet is giving us.
- [68:29]
B
I think that's right. I would also point out that there's a sense of. At line 42, let's go down to speak with the great shadows. That's. That's just after our encounter with the serpent. And they're going down. They can't go up because it is nighttime. They're going down to descend to kings, to great, great shadows, great souls. And in that battle, the angels swords are blunted, they're cropped. It's not the angels themselves who can finish the fight. In fact, it's going to be God's grace, even. Even if aided by these angels. We see in this canto that there's more discussion of the theological and moral virtues around lines 88 through 94. And then right after that, we have another vision of the snake. We have the adversary Satan. But the canto ends with a hope to climb in127. So as I hope to climb, you have my word. Your honored folk have never lost fame's prize for the generous purse and gallant sword.
- [69:56]
A
Yeah, well said. The only thing I would add is they, as night is coming, they sing Te luchas. And if. Which it means basically, you know, to you, right. They're giving the close of the day to God. They're entrusting the clothes of the day to God. Just as a side note, you know, fathers, mothers, etc. If you're looking for. What kind of hymn could I sing with my kids for like Nighttime Prayer? Ted, Luchas is beautiful. It's not that long. It's attributed to. Actually, St. Ambrose is who it's attributed to. It's a beautiful, beautiful prayer. And again, Dante's comedy is written in layers. So there's a literal what's happening. There's the allegorical, which we're obviously discussing left and right. Don't neglect the moral. Read. How does this apply to my life? That's where Dante becomes life changing is you start to apply those things and he's going to give you lots of different prayers for lots of different situations. Te lucis. Beautiful prayer to close the day.
- [70:56]
B
Yeah, that's beautiful. And there's a reference to light there in that prayer. If I'm not mistaken, it's the light of God's grace. Again, I'm really excited to move on to Canto 9. This. This is one of My favorites in the whole Purgatorio.
- [71:11]
A
Okay, we'll kick us off then. So we'll move to canto nine. Kick us off.
- [71:15]
B
Absolutely. So starting in line 10, he's saying, when I, whose Adam dwelt with me alive, he is still in his body to me. What I gather from that is that he is speaking to us. He's writing this vision, this. This journey for us, not for those who are in purgatory, but for those who are still traveling this life, because this life is a purgatory. We are meant to purge ourselves of sin and thereby ascend to union with God. At the beginning, he falls asleep. He has this dream about an eagle taking him up. And we find out after he wakes up that during that dream, St. Lucy camp comes down from heaven. Lucy, whose name means light. Again, Lucy comes down from heaven, and she picks him up and she carries him up. And so even here in Purgatory, even with his mortal body, it is the grace of God. It's heaven's power that enables and allows ascent. He just got done with the kings. He just got done with the people who were powerful in life. We saw that they sang Te luchas. They also sang Salve Regina. Those were the people who, if anybody can, those are the people who can bootstrap themselves, right? The powerful. But it's not the powerful that ascended. It's not the waking Dante that ascends. First and foremost, it is Dante, while he's asleep, who's lifted up by God's grace, by St. Lucy, by the eagle, in his dream to begin ascending the mountain of Purgatory.
- [73:12]
A
So what do you make of this allusion to Achilles? So I found that to be fascinating. So down at. So this talk about the dream around line is probably 34 or so he says. Achilles, too, was shaken awake once his eyes were opened, now looking around, not knowing where he was. So my understanding of this is that, you know, there's all kinds of ancillary stories to Homer, and one of them is, is that Achilles did not actually want to go to the Trojan War. And so at one point, he falls asleep, and his mother, Thetis, the sea nymph, picks him up and then takes him somewhere she thinks he will be safe. And eventually he's not. He still ends up going and choosing to go to the Trojan War. And so here, Dante's playing off this in a way that I'm not. I'm not even going to state that I fully understand the depth of the analog that he's giving. But he, too, then is picked up. Right. So St. Lucy, as you mentioned, meaning light, she also, she, as part of her torture, her eyes were gouged out. So she's always connected with sight, with light, et cetera, and sight being an analog for the intellect. And so she picks him up and she puts him where he needs to be, just like Thetis picked up Achilles and put him. But then they both have to go through these trials. And it's interesting because we've actually seen in the Inferno where Dante was an analog or compared to Odysseus, because remember Odysseus, he gives that interesting narrative where Odysseus dies trying to make it to Mount Purgatory and Dante then becomes the new Odysseus, the better, the perfected Odysseus, because not only does he make it to Mount Purgatory, but he's able to ascend. Here we have him compared to Achilles. Any thoughts on this? Because I found this comparison to be fascinating.
- [74:54]
B
Am I misremembering that Thetis was a goddess?
- [74:59]
A
So his mother. Yeah, she was a. She was a. She's a goddess. Right.
- [75:05]
B
I think that there is very much where the analogy really helps to understand Dante's journey, because again, it's heaven's power that puts Achilles in the place where he can become heroic. And our vision here in Dante of heroism is a little bit different than Homer's, perhaps its union with God, its holiness, its the purification of our vices and sins. And just as Achilles is brought to that heroism by his mother, the goddess, St. Lucy brings Virgil or Dante to the place where he can be a hero, and that is not by his own power, but by the light of the sun, by God's grace, and by not just valiant demonstration of prowess in war, but by the cultivation of real holy virtue, not merely human virtue, but theological virtue and even the human virtues as informed by charity.
- [76:23]
A
Yeah, very well said. I appreciate you parsing that out. It's just when he makes those allusions, it just makes me want to really slow down and try and understand what is it that he's doing. And then sometimes it's hard because also he doesn't have Homer. He doesn't have a Greek copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He's also receiving. So remember, one of the things I remember being very jarring when I read the Inferno is. You know where the Inferno is? And you're like, oh, I know entirely where Achilles is going to be. He's going to be down in the seventh circle with violence. I mean, the whole book Starts off with rage, and he's slaughtering people, and he's throwing them in the river, and he's laughing as their livers get split open. And. And then Dante puts him in the circle for lust. Because Dante has a story that he is tricked. That's how Achilles actually dies. He's tricked into come to a marriage. He lets his lust overtake him, and then he's. That's how he eventually dies, is in this, like, false marriage, which was a trap. So it's just interesting sometimes when he uses these classical analogies to really kind of slow down and parse out what is actually happening here. Because this one, again, we have these, like, two touch points. So I appreciate you guiding us through that. The gate of. Oh, you want to say.
- [77:28]
B
Well, I was going to say that. Line 49. This is where we find the. The notification. You have arrived at Purgatory now. And so here, after our vision of the battle with the serpent, after he has been brought by heaven's power to the gates, now you have arrived at purgatory. And there's no. There's no admonition of abandon all hope, like we saw at Inferno and the gates of Inferno. There's something much more beautiful in his encounter with this guard at Purgatory.
- [78:11]
A
Yeah, really well said. That's a good segue into. The next thing we get is the gate. We finally made it to the gate of Purgatory. And just like in good Dante fashion, this has some very interesting details which we all know are analogs for something. So let's try and figure this out. Okay, so he's sitting there. He sees the gate, and there sitting is an angel. And the angel has these keys. And then what really stood out to me. Let's see what line this is. Around 96. There's three stairs that lead up to this gate, and each of the stairs are described in great detail. So let me. Again, using Baxter. Let me just read this out loud. He says, we came. This is line 94. We came. The first of the steps was made of marble, so white and polished and smooth. I looked upon myself just as I was. The second hue was dark as purse, made from a rough cut stone and burned from fire cracks. What is going on with these steps?
- [79:15]
B
The first step, he sees himself. I'm reading Esalen, but I really liked Baxter's translation. Would you mind just one more time? Line 96.
- [79:27]
A
Of course. So he says, yeah, it's a huge line I underlined. It has lots of notes next to it. It's a good line so 95 is of marble, so white and polished and smooth. 96. I looked upon myself just as I was.
- [79:42]
B
So Esalen says I saw myself in it as in a glass. But my thought originally, and I hadn't heard Baxter's translation, that's so beautiful. I really appreciate the way that he translated that. My thought was the first step to sanctification, the first step to rising the mountain is being honest with yourself, especially how ugly sin and vice has made me. And so that's the first step is I see myself as in a glass. But Baxter's translation is so beautiful because it brings out I saw myself as I truly was. Wow. What a terrible thing to see ourselves as we truly are. And all the dirt and muck and grime which he probably still carries from the inferno, that has to be washed off. Seeing yourself clearly as in a glass, as you truly are, that's the first step to purgation, to see what your issues are, your problems. The second step, a scorched and rough cut stone, was veined with cracks. I don't know about you, but when I do an examination of conscience, and if I do a good one, and if I see myself as I really am, it breaks me. The cracks to me seem to say, if you see yourself as you truly are, if you start on that first step, it will break you, because actually, you're so much uglier and dirtier than you think. It's not simply true that you could just have to be a quote, unquote, good person in a flat earthly sense to get to heaven. It's that we actually need so much more than that. And then the third step, with its massive weight, looked like a block of fiery porphyry. Red as the blood that spurts out of a vein. It's red like blood, fresh blood, blood that spurts out of a vein. There's. There's a sense of movement and action to the spurting. There's a sense of passion to the redness. To me, this seems like carrying the weight of penance with your whole heart, with a sense of veracity and passion there. Fiery porphyry.
- [82:14]
A
Yeah, I appreciate you parsing it out. I. Yeah. Typically, just like you said, these three steps are seen as knowing thyself and then contrition and then penance, just as you kind of laid it out there. I think what's really fascinating to me, though, is the first step, because on the podcast, we've taken a break to read Purgatorio for Lent, but we have been reading Plato and We started our journey with Plato with First Alcibiades, which, by the way, has become one of my favorite Platonic writings. And it's one of the writings, as you probably know, that students of Plato would read first in these Platonic schools. And the whole principle, First Alcibiades, is know thyself. That's the beginning of wisdom. You have to know thyself. Right? It's written on the oracle of Delphi. You have to know thyself. And so it's been interesting on the podcast because we've had this kind of back and forth about is. Is that true for the Christian as well? Because you also have. On the Christian side, you have that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And really what we've seen is these two are coming at the same thing from two different angles. Even First Alcibiades kind of answers this question for us, because in First Alcibiades, it's know thyself. Okay, well, if I want to know the body, I look in a mirror, just like Dante does, right? He looks in the step and he sees himself. But if I want to know my soul, where do I look? There's no mirror for the soul. Where do I look? And Plato tells us in First Alcibiades, well, it's in the eyes of the one who loves you. That's actually where you see yourself in that context. It's the eyes of the teacher to the student. The teacher actually loves the student. Again, this is not a vapid education as the conveyance of data, but rather the formation of virtue. The teacher actually loves the student and wants the student to ascend, to become who the student truly is, right? To live a life of virtue, to have a beautiful soul. And there's an interesting. Because there's a Neoplatonic gloss then on First Alcibiades that says that, yes, but the true mirror of the soul is ultimately God, that that's the one who loves you, that you see and you see yourself. So this first step, this kind of white, polished step, is really a deeply Platonic principle that we see then being incorporated into the Christian walk. Because I think it's. It's. It doesn't really need much help being incorporated because I think it's there implicitly where you have to know thyself. That's the beginning of wisdom. That's the beginning of purgation. Even if you're going to go to confession, you have to know thyself. You have to know what sins to confess, that you can be contrite. For, and then you can do your penance. So what we're seeing here, I think, in these kind of beautiful steps is a. Is a short little microcosm of what does it mean to actually be sorry for your sin? What are the three steps that you actually have to know? And it starts with know thyself.
- [84:49]
B
Yeah, it starts with know thyself. Again, going back to Plato, the unexamined life is not worth living. And if you don't know yourself, that's. That's no way to live life. Proceeding from self knowledge, then, is the brokenness of when you truly do know yourself. The cracks in this next step all over and across. And darker than the darkest violet brown, the cracks in the second step not only display your brokenness, but they have an affective sort of sense as well. As this is the reaction of contrition. This is the reaction, the passionate reaction that we should have when we see our own sinfulness darker than the darkest violet brown. It's so poetic. Dante's language is. Is vivid, beautiful imagery.
- [85:47]
A
Well, I like what you said, that know thyself can be a very dangerous and horrifying thing. To actually see ourselves as we actually are is maybe not something that we always want to run towards, if that makes sense. So, yeah, the next step being that contrition, that black, it's cracked, it's dirty, and then comes the purgative fire. This is a beautiful imagery. He really carries this on too, because Virgil then tells him, this is like line 108, go up to the angel and you have to ask to be admitted, but you have to ask with humility. You have to ask with humility, which he's. He's going to have because he just saw himself as he actually is. And so there's no pride that can come in here, right? You have to ask with humility to be let in. And then this really interesting scene happens where the angel is going to admit him, but he carves, for lack of a better word, seven peas into his forehead. And these are the wounds he has to wash away as he ascends up the mountain, right? So the. Like peccatoribus when we pray in Latin, right? Peka, meaning the sin. And so there are seven P's in English, I guess this would be seven S's right, for sin that he's going to have to wash away. And so we're going to see then that we're moving from the antechamber of the antipurgatory, if you will, the foot of the mountain into the proper structure of Purgatory, which is basically going to be these seven terraces, these seven edges going along the side of the mountain, that kind of spiral upwards that are going to purge the soul of the seven deadly sins until you reach then the kind of third stage of Purgatory, which is this earthly paradise, this Garden of Eden at the top, which will have all kinds of imagery. It becomes very, very Dantian when we get up to there, at each terrace, then Dante will have one of these wounds, this carving of the pea in his forehead removed as he's purged of these sins.
- [87:41]
B
When my students read this canto, as well as the. The next three, they read it side by side with St. Francis de Sales. And St. Francis de Sales says that the virtue of humility is a true knowledge and voluntary acknowledgment of our objection going back to that. That clear mirror image. And then the other thing I wanted to point out here, too, is that there's liturgical imagery. Humbly, on your knees, beg him that he may free the bolt and lock. And then at line 109, before the Holy feat, devotedly I cast myself and beat my breast three times, then begged his mercy opening for me. It's like in the Mass, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. That's when he then inscribes, now that Dante has acknowledged his fault, he's seen, been contrite, has acknowledged his fault. That's when he gets the sin written on his forehead, but not without promise, in line 113. See that you wash these wounds away when you're within the angel tells Dante. And then we find out that the angel has keys. And I love this because purgatory is such a Catholic thing. There aren't other Christians, really, that have a pronounced doctrine of purgatory. And here we have the keys of Peter, another very Catholic sort of image straight out of Sacred scripture, where Matthew 16, Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Here the angel says in line 127, these keys are Peter's, who said that I should err rather in opening than in keeping shut, so long as men should kneel before my feet. What incredible mercy our Lord shows us in giving Peter the keys, and in Peter giving these keys to the angel. The gate of heaven doesn't begin at the end of Purgatory. It begins here, at the beginning of Purgatory. The gate of heaven is open to us who are on the way, and the gates of heaven are open to us liberally. The angel is told by Peter, who asked Jesus, you know, how many times should I forgive my brother? The angel is told. I was told by Peter to err rather in oath opening than in keeping shut. If you're going to make a mistake about who you're letting in or keeping out, make mistakes about letting people in. Don't make mistakes about keeping people out. Err rather in opening than in keeping shut.
- [90:36]
A
Yeah, it's a beautiful image. I love, too, that. This idea that the gate, as it's groaning open on its hinges somehow also Dante the pilgrim is hearing Te Deum Ladamas, this hymn of thanksgiving to God, that even as his gate groans open, there's this prayer of thanksgiving that that sound seems to emulate. I thought it was really, really beautiful. And you're correct. I think that's shocking to people. This is actually the gate of Heaven because. And again, for those who are unfamiliar, purgatory. Purgatory is not a middle state between hell and heaven. And if you go to Purgatory, you go to heaven. This is the. This is the purgation of those who died in friendship with Christ. And that even. That's held very broadly because apparently Cato is going to be the last soul to enter into Heaven, but he'll get there as he has to go through the mountain. So this is really that beginning step. And everyone who goes through this is going then to ascend to the top of the mountain and then on to Paradise. Yeah, very good. Any other thoughts on Canto 9?
- [91:44]
B
I'm very. I don't want to necessarily spend too much time on it, but I'm very attracted by the liturgical imagery. There's the beating of the breast, there's the three steps. And I think you see a lot more of that in the per. The Purgatorio as a whole as well. And even the Te Deum is a liturgical piece of music. It's a liturgical prayer prayed in the Liturgy of the Hours, which, again, here we are in Purgatory with time, and we're praying the Hours with these souls.
- [92:15]
A
Very good. Okay, let's push to Canto 10, because we get the first terrace. The terraces are beautiful. I love them. So let's look into this. Okay, so maybe let me just set this up a little bit. So they push in. It's interesting me that they come through this, like, very winding, narrow path, which also is, you know, narrow as the gate. There's lots of imagery there. I think that. That Dante is pulling from lots of illusions, and they come to this. This is terrace is one of my favorites. Just like the imagery of it, right. So they come and it opens up into this kind of terrace on the side of the mountain. This is going to be the theme of ascent. And what do they see? This is in line 31 or so they look up, and on the sides was made of glistening marble, decorated with such engravings as could have put to shame even like this great sculptor. So these are these fantastic reliefs that are carved into the side of the mountain. And what are they? The first one we get is the Annunciation, where Gabriel came to Mary and said, hail Mary, full of grace. You're going to be the mother of the Messiah, of God, of the Son, of David. The Messiah has come. You will name him Emmanuel. So he gets down there in 40. You could, you would have sworn he said, ave, hail. Since there is also a picture of the woman who turned the key to open love Sublime. So our first image we get is the Annunciation. The second image that's carved up there, which I thought was really interesting, is the story. This is line 55. And carved into the marble was the cart, an oxen hauling the Holy Ark. So this is the Ark of the Covenant, Indiana Jones, gold box, angels on top, etc. It makes us fear to take on duties uncommissioned. There was a crowd in front, divided in seven choirs. They made up one of my senses. Yes, they're singing. And others, no. So what's he see here? Down at like 64 or so, he sees then the psalmist Humboldt dancing in front of the ark. And we see then obviously, the psalmist's wife kind of scorning this. What is this story? They lost the ark and now the ark is coming back and David is welcoming the Ark back into the city of Jerusalem. And what's he doing? He's dancing. The King is dancing. He has this kind of like, joy. He's letting himself go, he's dancing. His wife is scorning him for this. What is Dante trying to teach us by having these, like, two pictures up on the wall as we enter into the first terrace, that there's the Annunciation and there's David dancing before the ark?
- [95:01]
B
Well, the Annunciation to start off with is in this kind of canto. We're being purged. And I say we, along with Dante, we're being purged of the vice of pride. So we're given images of holy humility. The Annunciation to start off with, starts with the humility of Mary, most obviously, because in line 45 she is quoted as saying, behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. And so Mary lowers herself to the position of a servant, a handmaid to God. And that is her. Yes, it's her fiat. Let it be done to me. Let God's will be done and not my own will, which is the epitome of humility, to not get what I want, but to do what somebody else wants. But then underneath this, there's a sense of the humility of God, who at the Annunciation, not at Christmas, at the Annunciation, became flesh. This is when the great creator of the universe lowered himself to become a creature. And not just any creature, but a tiny infant, and at this stage, just a single celled zygote. And so here we have the humility of Mary subjecting herself to God's will, the humility of God himself, the great High King, subjecting him, subjecting himself to one of his creatures, he becomes the son of Mary. And so here we have the paradigmatic image of humility as our entrance into the cornice of pride. Moving on to David dancing, so he says, the humble psalmist came at once appearing more and less than a king. St. Francis de Sales says that when David danced and leaped before the Ark of the Covenant, he had no intention of promoting himself. What he's doing here is David is establishing Jerusalem, which he has just conquered. He's establishing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. And in so doing, his formal establishment of the capital city, he brings God in. And God is his presence, follows the Ark of the Covenant. And so in the Old Testament, the Ark of the Covenant is given to. Moses, is commissioned to build the Ark of the Covenant at Sinai. And the purpose was to perpetuate the Sinai experience of being able to encounter God by going up a mountain, which is interesting, to perpetuate this experience by bringing an artificial mountain with Israel. As they travel through the desert on their way to the Promised Land. Again we have these motifs of journeying. David brings Moses what the effort that Moses inaugurated, David brings to its initial fulfillment. By having conquered the Holy Land, the Promised Land, David now brings God's presence into the capital city. Here we have again that melding of politics and faith, the temporal and the spiritual powers. Because David, the temporal power also in 2nd Samuel 6, he exercises some spiritual power as well. But he's the temporal power, and he brings the spiritual power. He invites it in to the capital city as if to say, this is my king, even if I am your king, O nation of Israel. And he dances with joy, he blesses the people, he offers sacrifice. It's David's submission to God. But then, right before David, right before David's dancing, Dante brings up this terribly obscure story of, he says, the Holy Ark, whose fall should make men not assigned a duty fear to take it up. And so just before or just in the transition of David bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, they're transporting the ark and they're doing so not in the way that God asked them to do. God wanted the ark to be a symbol of his presence. And so he, he gave very specific rubrics. And here's how the ark is supposed to travel, because I want you human beings, nation of Israel to know the difference between me and you, between you and your Creator. But Israel did not heed this warning. Instead, instead of having a bunch of priests carrying the ark with a majestic ceremony, they said, let's just throw it on a cart and just drag it into the the capital city. God rebukes them for this because the cart hits a rock, the ark starts to fall, and a man named Uzzah goes to catch the ark, and as he touches it, he is struck dead from heaven. It's this terribly obscure story that confuses many, many readers. But what's, what's happening here is it was not Uzzah's role to touch the Ark. He was not a priest. And it was not Israel's role to just put the ark wherever they want, willy nilly and transfer it as they please. It was Israel's role to submit to God. Israel should have said, I am the handmaid of the Lord, but instead they said, throw God's mercy seat on an ark on a cart and let's just drag it into the city. After Uzzah is struck dead, there's a big transition. They change the plan. They bring the Ark into Jerusalem correctly the way that they're supposed to. And this is when we find David dancing. So it's this beautiful image of, you know, humility is beginning with knowing yourself. As St. Francis de Sales says, as that first step into purgatory made clear, it's knowing what is your role. Are you the Creator that is able to determine how the Ark is to be transported, or are you the handmaid that says, why don't we let God's will be done? And I'll just accept that and do it as best I can.
- [102:01]
A
Yeah, very well said. I appreciate what you said about Uzzah and the touching of the ark, because I remember, I actually very much remember as a young man, when I say young, I mean maybe 12 or so reading that story and being like, what is this? This poor guy is like just trying to make sure the ark doesn't fall off the cart and God strikes him dead. And I really liked you. Read Esalen's. Let me read Baxter's Tercet here. Because I thought he did a really good job. He says, and carved into the marble was the cart an oxen hauling the holy ark. It makes us fear to take on duties uncommissioned. I really like how that's phrased. I think what we're seeing here, two thoughts. One is humility, I think is also misunderstood. Humility is not just being like, I'm a terrible person, I never think high of myself, like, you know, I throw myself in the mud and roll around, etc. But rather I think humility is truly understanding who you are and particularly understanding yourself in God. And he might call you to do really wonderful, amazing things like David defeating Goliath, things that are incredibly thematic and strong and glorious. But you have to understand who you are in him first. I think that's what we're seeing here. 2 Dante has to be playing with Mary as the ark. We have these two very specific things about God's dwelling place on earth. And so in the Old Testament, God's dwelling place on earth, his physical presence was with the ark. And this, this, the. The mercy seat with these angels wings on top of. Well, Mary then, or the early church fathers. Mary talked. The early church fathers talk about Mary as the new ark. So just general principle in reading scripture, the Old Testament always foreshadows the New and the New Testament perfects the old. The Old Testament had the old ark made of wood and gold. We get a glorified ark, we get a woman, we get an ark of flesh made by God himself, not made by man, made by God himself. And through her fiat, as you said, she then becomes the dwelling place of God on earth. So I think Dante is really tethering these two of not only just stories of humility, but the ark plays a very specific role of God's presence on earth and how do we react to that? And that is what true humility is. And him throwing in. I think the story of Uzzah at the beginning really just kind of twists the knife a bit to remember who you actually are before God.
- [104:25]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. And it's important to remember, especially for anybody who hasn't heard of this Mary as the new Ark motif, it's important to remember what was inside the ark of the covenant. And so when the early church fathers say that Mary is the new ark, they're not doing something inappropriate here because the old ark of the covenant contained the word of God in the Ten Commandments, the an urn with the manna from the desert wanderings that sustained Israel on their journey to the promised land, as well as the High Priest Aaron's priestly staff. And in the New Testament we find out that the incarnate word is Jesus Christ. We find Jesus to be our great high priest. And Jesus calls himself the bread of life. He, he likens himself to the manna of the Old Testament in John 6. So when Catholics and early church fathers etc call Mary the new ark of the Covenant, what we're doing is we are honoring what is contained within Mary's womb. And we're saying that God deigned to make his presence known in both the Old and New Testament in various, many and various ways. And one of those ways that he made himself known was by a handmaid who is far more dignified than a golden box could be. The only other thing I wanted to just double click on something you said. You said that humility is seeing ourselves in the light of God and what he's given us. And again, St. Francis of Desales says the lively consideration of favors received makes us humble because a knowledge of them begets gratitude. And so the, the cornerstone of humility is seeing ourselves truly, which includes seeing our goods, the good things about us, but seeing those goods as gifts from God.
- [106:34]
A
Yeah, very well said. So here's a fun thing is that then there's a third image, so we get two in the ark. So this is, this is going to create a pattern that we're going to start seeing on these terraces. We're going to get images of what is the virtue. So what's happening? Maybe just play this out a little bit. This terrace is going to purge pride. So the first thing we're getting is what good examples of humility? A contrary virtue. So how are we going to take on pride? Well, we've got to be habituated to the contrary virtue. What is it the virtue that actually erodes this type of vice? Well, here it's humility. So we get then two very Christian images, starting one with Mary and then one from Scripture. Then we're going to get a pagan example. And this is going to start setting a template for every terrace. So what is going on here? So this is line 76. I speak of Emperor Trajan, but next to him a little widow was standing at his horse's Bridle her posture expressing her tears and sorrow. Around the Emperor, you saw those crowds of cavaliers who swarmed about him, golden eagles fluttering above them in the wind, the poor and tiny creature among these things, the widow then seemed to say, my lord, avenge my son who died and over whom my heart still hurts. And he to her replying, wait until I have returned. Then she, my lord, just like a person whom sorrow quickens, and if you don't, then he, the one who will be where I am now will do it. And she what is another's goodness if you neglect your own? And he take comfort? It's fitting to pay our debts before we move. Justice asks for this. Compassion grips me. So, just to be clear, this is a little old woman, a widow, who stops the Roman Emperor in the middle of his procession and asks him for justice, and he eventually relents and helps her to seek justice for her issue.
- [108:35]
B
Yes. And here we have an example of a great king subjecting himself to the request of a woman. And that's, that's probably the greatest pagan image of what the Christian God did as the great king of the universe. He subjected himself to obedience to Mary and Joseph. And it's hard to imagine a more dramatic image of humility than that.
- [109:07]
A
What's interesting too here as a, as a side note, is that there's a medieval legend that St. Gregory the Great was so moved by the story about Emperor Trajan that it was very ill fitting that this trait, that this pagan who would show this amount of humility would die and go to hell. And so there's a medieval legend that, that Gregory prays, and Gregory prays for God to fix this injustice. And so God raises Emperor Trajan from the dead, Gregory can baptize him, and then he dies again. Because I, we're going to be really surprised where we actually find the soul of Emperor Trajan in the Divine Comedy. So, but in our journey now, what we should see is Dante starting to set up a template. We have a contrary virtue, that virtue is humility. We're purging the sin of pride, and we're going to get a Christian example, or examples, and then we're going to get a pagan example, which, again, going back to this dichotomy between grace and nature, God is the author of both. He gives us both grace, his divine life, but also he's the one that gives us our nature as rational animals. And so we're going to see good examples from both of these.
- [110:14]
B
So before we get to the real purging of pride. In Kanto 11, there's this beautiful tirsit at 109 where Dante is breaking the fourth wall, which I don't have any good theories about this, but I think it's. I think it probably signals something significant when he breaks the fourth wall and talks to the reader. Actually, starting at 106, reader, I want you not to lose the power of your good resolution and intent hearing how God demands we pay the debt. So don't worry about how difficult this purification is. At 109, don't dwell upon the form of punishment, but on what follows. Think that at the worst it cannot last beyond the day of doom. And so he. He takes a break for a second to tell us something very specific. Don't focus on the pain of the purgation. And I think there's a good analog to this life insofar as we're purified in this life. Don't focus on the pain of the suffering of the purification, but rather on what follows. Why are we being purified? For what end? What do the virtues look like? The souls here are going to be peering upon these images of humility, and Dante wants us to look very deeply at them too.
- [111:46]
A
Yeah, very well said. I appreciate too you flagging those breakings of the fourth wall, because I think what comes to my mind is a lot of times when he says that, I think they're really tethered to the moral read. He wants his reader to understand the moral implications of this. Right? Don't get lost. Understand what I'm doing. Because he does this at very key junctures. So I appreciate you flagging that. So ending Canto 10, we start to see the shades, but they don't really look like humans. Something's wrong with them. And what we finally get is, is that, oh, it's because they're stooped over, their faces bent to the earth, and they're carrying these massive boulders on their back. And so this is pride. And so what are they doing? Well, pride, if you're prideful, you. You stand erect, right? We actually, we saw this with one of the souls in the Inferno. Remember, he's burning in the. The tomb with the fire, and he's, he's still very erect and thinking about his family and his lineage and all these things, right? Pride makes you stand that way. So what? How is pride going to be purged? Well, now you get to have to be stooped over. You will actually bow, and this boulder on your back is going to make you do that. And so, and at the moment too, depending on how big your boulder is, which is probably proportionate to your sin. You can't even quite see. Can you even get your head to see the reliefs on the side? This is something that you're. You're kind of aiming towards to be able to be able to see these reliefs on the side as you're walking with these boulders. And tethering back to a conversation that we had earlier about what is the moral life? What is it actually supposed to do? I actually think this is one of the phrases where he says this the best. Starting around line 124, he says, don't you see? We're worms, but born to be transformed into angelic butterflies toward justice will soar without our shells. Although you now soar upward, in your minds you're more like malformed insects or caterpillars who failed in their development. I love this because it shows you that there's supposed to be some type of transformation of the soul, that theosis, sanctification, this becoming holy, becoming godlike, is absolutely transformative to the soul. And you're supposed to have these wings to soar. And so one of the things, like sometimes on X, when I talk about this, I'll talk about the fact that, like a lot of the early church fathers, particularly in the Greek tradition, following that, actually the Eros, that erotic tradition, will talk about the. The life of God as like the soul having wings. And the soul is supposed to ascend to God, and sin is like this muck. It's heavy, et cetera, and it's. It's covering your wings and you can't fly. But too many times, people think the moral life is just having clean wings. They forget about the soaring part. They forget about the part where you're actually supposed to go up and become more Christ. Like, they think that the point is just to avoid the muck. And that's not it. I think Dante and I'd be interested what Esalen says here, but Baxter's translation, I think, is just so funny. Right? They're caterpillars who failed in their development. That's line 129.
- [114:57]
B
Yeah. In Esalen's, he says, well, I'll start with 124. Have you not learned that we are only worms born to form the angelic butterfly which flies to justice, shorn of its cocoon? About what do your spirits crow so high? Defective insects, all of you. Like grubs falling short of their form's maturity.
- [115:23]
A
Yeah, it's just. It's a wonderful snapshot. I Think of the actual purpose of the moral life. Okay, good. Any other comments on.
- [115:30]
B
Yeah, I love the pedagogy of Dante in giving us a purifying punishment, not a torturing punishment, but a purifying punishment, in that the prideful are bent low, they're bowing, they're doing what is happening in the images. They're subjecting themselves willingly and joyfully and cheerfully to the purity to which God calls them. At the start of Canto 11, if it's all right if I move forward here, what is heard among these souls is an elongated version of the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father or the Pater Noster. And a lot of it is taken nearly word for word from St. Matthew's gospel. But it's all embellished. These souls are going above and beyond to imitate the prayer of Jesus. They're embellishing the Our Father, Our Father, you who dwell in heaven above, not circumscribed by what you fashioned first, but dwelling there to show your greater love. They're embellishing every line of the Our Father. Notably, they're going to change it a little bit at the end, but they're embellishing every line of the Our Father. They're asking for our daily bread, the manna, which is a. An allusion to the Holy Eucharist, the miraculous bread that sustains us on our journey to the promised land at the top of Mount Purgatory. And this prayer is the prayer that Christ taught. So they're not praying their own petitions, they're praying Jesus's prayer in all humility, which is beautiful.
- [117:24]
A
So something that's really fascinating about that at the end is. I agree. So it's. It's an elongated comment upon Our Father. Again, we're starting to see a template. So we saw examples of the virtue that we need, this contrary virtue against pride. Now we're seeing a prayer. What prayer do I say to help? But what's really interesting is their statement at the very end of it. This is line 22. This final prayer, O dearest Lord, is not for us. There is no need. We pray for those who stay behind. So what's really fascinating about this is, is that, you know, they're desirous of intercessory prayer for the Church militant us to pray for the Church penitent. One thing that's in the Church tradition that's very rare, and sometimes every once in a while, it pops up on Catholic Twitter and gets debated. Then it pops back down for a few years is whether or not the church penitent can pray for the Church militant. Can the souls in purgatory pray for those on earth? And what's interesting here, even like Aquinas, Aquinas, I think, has a few different answers as he develops, but one of his answers that I recall is that he says, well, can they? Yes. Are they. Well, they're very focused on their own, you know, purgation, penance, etc. But if you look at a church tradition, there actually are prayers asking for the intercession of the souls in purgatory because they have a very particular view of the Christian life which is, say, very akin to what we're suffering here in Militant. And so it's interesting to me that Dante picks that up here and has the souls praying for the Church militant, which then dovetails really well into pride, right? And so they're even in the midst of their purgation, they are praying for others. And I think it's a wonderful sign not only of the Our Father and the spirituality behind it as being contrary to pride, but then intercessory prayer. To pray for someone else is also an act contrary to pride.
- [119:25]
B
It's an act contrary to pride, and thereby it is a purifying act. And so we find the souls on this terrace purified by the rock on their backs, purified by their meditative and imitative prayer life and by their lack of self absorption. They're, they're, like you said, praying for the souls on earth.
- [119:51]
A
The other thing here I appreciate just to echo is down at 31, again, the moral read. So he's not just explaining that there is a theological reality of intercessory prayer, but he's also then extorting the reader to then engage in it that we should be praying for the dead. This is one of the things that we can do both for our own good and for the good of those that are going through their purgation. He then starts to talk. So this is, again, we're going to solve the same pattern we saw in the Inferno. He's going to go to an area, he's going to observe what we should call, okay, so we should mention this, the contrapasso. So you can still actually refer to these punishments in purgatory as a contrappasso. And when we saw. But just as a side note, as we saw in the Inferno, the contrappasso was punishments that are tailored for the particular sins. And so for instance, in the lustful, they're blown around by a big storm. You're like, what's that have to do with lust? Well, the way that their bodies are being treated now is the way they treated their souls on Earth. They allowed their souls to be blown about by their passions, etc. So all the punishments in Hell are tailored to the particular sin. Great. All the punishments in purgation, in Purgatory are also tailored to the sins. Just like the carrying of the boulder for pride makes you actually bow low. And that's contrary to the sin of pride. This can also be talked about as a contrappasso. I think the big difference is, if I could summarize, is that in Hell, the souls are given over to the sin. The punishment is that they're given into the sin itself. So just like the lustful, their punishment is that they're treated like they treated their souls. The punishment in Purgatory, however, is aimed towards purging the sin. And I actually think one of the things that's really fascinating as we move through Purgatory is when we get sins that are purged, both in Purgatory and in the Inferno, to take a step back and say, okay, why are these two different? And how is one giving me over to the sin? And how is one purging the sin from me? And so we'll see that pattern. We'll also see, as we see in the back half here of Canto 11, is that then he'll talk to certain souls and he'll get this kind of experiential knowledge as he's talking to the souls that are being purged here of pride. We're going to see this exact same pattern as we kind of go up the mountain.
- [122:12]
B
I think that you're right to point out that the contrapasso is distinct in Purgatory as compared with Inferno, because in that purging, the contrapasso is making the souls, it's habituating them to be more conformed to the opposing virtue. And so for the prideful, you mentioned earlier, you want to stand erect. And so the contrappasso is, well, we'll put a big boulder on your back so you're bowed low, but bowing low. That's what the humble person does. And so the contrapasso is contorting the soul to imitate the virtue until such time as they have the virtue. And earlier you also spoke about, you know, not being in. Not being focused on the cleanliness of your wings, but using clean wings to soar. Here too, it's not so much about getting rid of pride as it is about making the soul humble. And I think that we See that in each of the purgatorial contrapassos is the. The punishment isn't justly proportioned to the crime, but it habituates to the opposing virtue. I think there's an important thing to be learned there in that when we in this life are trying to get rid of a vice, if our focus is on, oh, I just. I really need to not be prideful. If our focus is on avoidance, we're often going to fail. But if our focus is more positive, I want to positively be humble. We can be much more successful because there's tangible ways of doing that. We can habituate ourselves to virtuous actions and not just avoiding the bad things, but doing the good.
- [124:16]
A
Yeah, very well said. Okay, if you don't mind, I actually want to jump to Canto 12, because I want to. This is one of my favorite images in the whole Purgatory, actually. The whole terrace on Pride, I think, is excellent. So what ends up happening? And I kind of already alluded to this, so they have these boulders on their back. And I agree with you that it's interesting. Your distinction you made, I think, is well met. So different souls have different punishments proportionate to the sin of this. So, for instance, like, some people are just gonna be able to go right through the terrorists on Pride, because in their life, that's not what they suffered from. Probably not a whole lot of people, but some people, and we'll see this even with Dante, the pilgrim, some terrorists he goes right through, some of them are very difficult for him as he goes through this. And this is because you have to be purged of all seven deadly sins, but probably you hopefully did not participate in all the seven deadly sins equally. And so it's, etc. However, you mentioned a good point, which is even in that, though, the punishments are not proportionate to your sin, purely speaking, because the sin that you did against God is infinite. And we saw this even in. Even in hell, their punishments are actually tempered by mercy, because the creature can't even endure a punishment that would actually be proportionate to the sin that they did against the Creator, because it's infinite. So even in all of this, even the guy who's carrying the biggest boulder of them all, his punishment is still tempered by mercy because it's not actually proportionate to his sin. And I think that it's a wonderful point that you've made. I just wanted to kind of flesh that out a little bit more because I think it's a good understanding of the spiritual reality there. So, okay. But in that they're bent over. So it's only when they. You know, theoretically, I think how this is supposed to work is that they carry these boulders. The boulders represent their pride. The boulder is going to get lighter as they go through, hopefully because it's being purged. And so they're gonna be able to look up at some point. They'll be able to actually move their neck, and then they'll see the reliefs. They see the Annunciation, they see the Ark, they see Emperor Trajan. And this is good examples. Okay. I love Dante's imagery here, because where is their face facing now? Well, it's facing towards the ground. So what do they see here? So he actually has. His imagery here is really beautiful. He mentions, just like you see these tombs in the old cathedrals, where the tombs are actually carved, the reliefs into the floor itself. So too, does the terrace of Purgatory actually have examples of pride. So now we're going to get examples of the sin carved into the floor of Purgatory. And so there's a lot of them. Let me maybe just mention a couple of them and we can discuss them or however you want to move forward. So first and foremost, obviously, the first example is Satan. Satan falling like lightning. This is line 24. Then immediately after that, we get an example of a giant that rebelled against Zeus. Now then you might be thinking, like, what the heck is that? Like, what does it have anything to do with this? Okay, so those of you who journeyed through the Inferno, you might remember right before they actually go down into the, like, kind of pit of hell, there were the giants that were chained there. So one of the giants has to take them and actually help them down into it. Well, we studied there that while the giants are actually the pagan analogues to the demons, so the demons rebel against God, and they're the rebellious creatures inside creation. Well, in Greek mythology, the rebellious creatures against Zeus are the giants, right, The Titans. So here we see. And so as a side point, the. That's why Satan then is shown as a giant demon. So he's the combination of these two traditions, the both the nature and the supernatural, the pagan and the Christian. He's the worst of all of them. So he's a giant demon. So here too, we then see Satan, and immediately after that, we're followed up with the rebellion in Greek mythology of the giants against Zeus. It's an interesting example that a lot of people maybe coming from a Protestant example, are not going to be familiar with. But it's actually the main analog because one of the things to think about Dr. Prudlo when he comes on the podcast is very good about helping us navigate this, is that in the medieval mind, all the Christian stories have a pagan analog. So, like the fall of man in the Garden of Eden is similar to the fall of Troy. Odysseus is like the Satan figure. Like, they just keep playing this out. And so in that mindset, the giants, the Titans, are the analog to the demons. Okay. Then you get Tower of Babel. That seems pretty straightforward. So don't do this. That brings up Nimrod, who, again, we saw in the Inferno. The next one, the fourth one, I believe, is Niobe. Okay, so again, we're alternating a little bit between a Christian story and now we have a Greek story. So those who aren't familiar, Niobe basically started. She had, I think, seven sons and seven daughters. They're the most beautiful seven sons and seven daughters ever. And look, one of the goddesses. All you have is two children. You just have Artemis and Apollo. My. I'm greater than you, and my children are greater than you. I have so much more, et cetera. So anyone who knows anything about Greek mythology is. Anytime anyone is like, I'm better than the gods, something horrific is about to happen to you, because they will not suffer. It's funny. The Greek gods are also very prideful, and so. But they won't suffer anyone being prideful against them, if that makes sense. So, of course, Artemis and Apollo come in and kill all of her children. And Niobe weeping is like this deep theme in Greek mythology. Okay. Then we move on to Saul's suicide. So you remember King Saul, who then kind of rebelled against God? Tried, actually. He's very. I find him very analogous to the Uzzah narrative earlier of stepping into roles that you were not commissioned for. Right. That's. That's one of Saul's faults. So here he actually falls on his sword, if you remember, his servant boy will not actually kill him. He asked. I think, if I remember correctly, in the biblical narrative, he asked first for his servant to run him through. The servant won't do it, and so Saul has to fall on his own sword, which I'm assuming is a terrible type of death, but it's him as a figure of pride and falling into this terrible death, just like Niobe and her children died as well. The sixth one we get is actually Arachne, another Greek mythology. So people might not be familiar with that if that. You're like, hey, that sounds like Arachnid. Well, good job, because what happens to Arachne? So she is a master weaver. You might not know that the readers that the master weaver amongst the gods is actually Athena. So Athena is not just the goddess of wisdom, it's really kind of a practical wisdom. Think about strategy and war and things like this. That's why she can overcome Ares, even though he's the God of war, but she's also the goddess of crafts. So then there's this competition. Who actually is the better weaver, Arachne or Athena, which again, is a terrible idea, if you know anything about Greek mythology, to get into a contest against the gods. But not only does Arachne do this, then she weaves something that is humiliating to the gods, mocking the gods. And so as her punishment from Athena, she is turned into a spider. Hence the reason they're called arachnids. And they. So her weaving then is done in the webs. Rehoboam is the next one that is seven. So Rehoboam, he is Solomon's son who takes over and has. So this goes back to the Valley of Kings being a good leader. This is. Anyone who's read the Old Testament, this is terrible advice. And so the people are restless and they say, hey, your father, you know, taxed us too much. The yoke is too heavy. And his response to this, following the advice of the young, which is typically not good, is to tell the people, like, well, by the way, my father's yoke was heavy, mine will be heavier, and he might have bothered. There's a funny line here where he says. He says, my father chastised you with whips and I will chastise you with scorpions. So clearly this doesn't work out. He's very prideful and the people run him off and rebel and etc. So he's a good biblical example of a king who did not do what he was supposed to. So 8 was one of the examples that I wasn't actually most familiar with of this character who, Baxter has a footnote here, was the son of the prophet of a prophet, and he avenged his father by slaying his treacherous mother, which probably reminds us somewhat of Orestes, who was proud enough to wish to wear a necklace made by Hephaestus for the goddess Harmonia. So apparently there's this character and she wears this necklace that's made for the divinity and he slays her because of this. And so she is an example of this pride that's very analogous to what we saw with Niobe. 10 is another biblical example, right? In which we see the king of Assyria who besieged Jerusalem, was assassinated by his own two sons. So we get another kingly example. And then Tin is a somewhat gruesome example in which King Sirius, no, Cyrus, excuse me, is defeated. And apparently he had really wanted a satiation for blood, had made this kind of statement. So apparently when he's defeated, he's decapitated, and then his head is put inside a jar of blood, in which then the victorious queen tells him, you thirsted for blood, you've had your fill. 11 goes back to a biblical example. This is Holofernes. This is the wonderful story of Judith. For those who aren't familiar, Judith is a. We pull the book of Judith from the Septuagint. It's in the Catholic Bible, the Jerusalem or not Jerusalem, I can't remember if it's Jerusalem or not. But the Israelites are besieged and the general Holofernes has them surrounded. Judith is a beautiful Israelite woman. And so she goes into the tent to basically seduce Holofernes. He falls for it. Hook, line, sinker. He's asleep and she decapitates him. There's wonderful sacred art on this. And by the way, it's part of an Old Testament theme in which women will either crush or decapitate men. And so there's a crushing of the head, which actually goes into a lot of imagery going back all the way to Genesis and then leading into Mary. Judith is in that lineage as well. So Holofernes here and his pride being seduced and then killed by the beautiful Israelite woman Judith. And then the last one, which I found to be a little bit surprising, is Troy. And this is line 61 or so. Now, how long and wretched you seemed within that image, it's on display there still. This is really fascinating to me because, you know, Troy is not just simply some city. For Dante, Troy is the mother city. Troy is the cradle of civilization because Aeneas leaves after the destruction of Troy, goes on his voyage that we see in the Aeneid. And he's the mythical founder of Rome. His descendants Romulus and Remus found Rome, and then it's from Rome, which is the imperial and apostolic city, the eternal city that then basically all of Europe draws its lineage from. So even if we. We just read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for our Christmas read, and it opens up with the siege of Troy and traces its lineage all the way, right. King Arthur can trace his lineage all the way back to Troy. That was a Very important thing for them. The Greeks are the bad guys. So here I think it's really interesting that we do see then not an overly romantic view of Troy, but that Troy and the Trojans also had a pride to them. Right. That violation of, I would assume the violation of guest friendship of Paris taking in Helen and that there are these sins that are committed and we'll be safe behind our walls. And then they, obviously they take in the Trojan horse and then they are slaughtered by the Achaians. So anyway, I appreciate you letting me just like parse that out, but these examples of pride carved into the floor of Purgatory, it's. It's one of my favorite things. Another thing too is like the moral read. You can contemplate many of these and pull these lessons out from. I mean, these must be wonderful to go through with your students.
- [136:26]
B
Yeah, I'm really grateful that you parse out each individual one because like you said, there's a lot of gold and then them there are hills. But when I look at these, what stands out to me are some of the biblical themes. You have Satan, which the line there at 25 and 26 and 27 are evocative of what Jesus says in Luke 10, seeing Satan fall like lightning from the sky. And then the Tower of Babel. A lot of people when they read the narrative about Babel in Genesis, they think, well, these people were just building a skyscraper. What's the problem with that? But the peak of human pride that we have to understand if we're going to develop humility is that the problem with Babel was the attempt to reach the heavens without heaven's power on our own power. It was the attempt to scale into the heights without grace. And here we have, you know, previously, when we're seeing humility, we see this lowly woman who is elevated to become the ark of the New Covenant. Her famous Magnificat is certainly not quoted there. But it's this song of humility, how God has raised up the lowly. Whereas at the Tower of Babel they're trying to do the exact opposite. They're trying to ascend on man's power and they're trying to ascend on their own self sufficiency with the explicit claim that they don't need God. And then you see that in the kings of Israel, whether it's Saul or Rehoboam, what you see is the kings thinking, I've got this, I don't need the divine help. Saul famously, as you mentioned, takes on the role of a priest when that role was not given to him. And that is counteracting what we saw in the image of David, who does take on the role of the priest, but not until he's done things the way that God wants them to be done. Similarly, we see the enemies of Israel, the Assyrians, especially in the story of Judith, mocking the God of Israel and asserting themselves to be higher than him. Like, they can look down upon him, they can spit on him. And so Judith, as you mentioned, decapitates Holofernes and shows that even a lowly woman can defeat this great warlord. It's an incredible way of identifying in my own soul where the pride is, because I can look with a great deal of precision. Where in my life do I think that I can make it without God? At the beginning of our time today, you brought up John 15, where Jesus tells us, without me, you can do nothing. Not you can do a little. Not you can do okay. Without me, you can do nothing. And so it's not until after we've solved the problem of pride here, when Virgil tells Dante in line 77, lift up your head. Once we have united with our Lord, once we have depended on grace, once we have ridden ourselves of this tendency to think we can do it without God, that's when we can lift up our head. That's when we can start to pursue the sun. That's when we can start to elevate and ascend the mountain. But it's not without doing that first. The other thing I wanted to point out in this translation of Purgatorio, I'm using Esselins. In the original Italian, the tercets starting with line 25 and ending on line 37. In the original Italian, they all start with V, and in Esalen's translation, they all start with M. And then from 37 on to 48, each tercet starts with A, and in the Italian, each terset starts with o. At line 49 until 58, we see each terset beginning with N. And in the Italian, it's M. And in both Italian and Esalen preserve this. In the English, there's. If you put all those letters together, it's M a N. That's who's doing the driving for the prideful. That's whose strength is being relied upon for the prideful. Then you see at line 61 through 63, then it's each line begins with M a N. Man. That is the foundation of pride is trusting in man rather than God.
- [141:55]
A
Yeah, that's a good catch. Yeah. Baxter's translation preserves that as well. The man that these examples basically are coming from man, that man is synonymous with pride.
- [142:08]
B
At the very end of the Canto, we see another song at line 109. Turning there, we heard blessed are the poor in spirit, sung so sweetly it cannot be described by any word. Here, Dante's poetry fails to communicate the Beauty of Jesus's First Beatitude from Matthew 5. And I really love this because we're going to see a lot of Beatitudes, just like we see a lot of songs in Dante's Purgatorio. And it's really helpful to track where those Beatitudes come up, what vices and virtues they're related to or opposed to, and the way in which they're. They're sung. So Blessed are the poor in spirit is sung sweetly. So sweetly it cannot be described by any word. And this idea of being blessed as being poor in spirit. Jesus's Beatitudes paint for us the countenance of Jesus himself. And as we traverse the mountain of Purgatory, and as we conform ourselves to the Beatitude, we are conforming ourselves to the person, to the face and to the heart of Jesus himself, who was meek and humble of heart. And so blessed are the poor in spirit, true happiness, the top of the mountain, the end of our ascent is in humility. And we cannot trust in our own power, but only in the divine power that guides us there.
- [143:48]
A
Very well said. I also like towards the very end, around 123, going to 126, you know, so what ends up happening is that he's gone through this terrace now, and so the angel at the end again, this is a pattern that's going to be repeated over and over again. We're going to have a Beatitude, there's an angel at the end, etc. Dante's giving us a map of how to purge these things, removes one of the peas from his forehead, and so he has been purged now of pride. And what's really interesting is the effect of this. And so this is a 1 24. Your feet will then be overcome by good desire, and then they won't be sluggish at all, but rather stimulated by delight. So we've already seen this, but so I think this is a change by degree, which is now that pride has been purged from the soul, it wants to be purified, it wants to be purged. And so now it goes from a hesitancy to climb the mountain to an eagerness to climb the mountain. Because now I have that humility of God, and I want to be configured. And it goes back to. Which I think ultimately is a poetic statement of Cardinal Ratzinger saying that the distinction between the fires of hell and the fires of purgatory are actually just the fact that the souls in purgatory embrace them and want to be purged like gold of impurities. And so, yeah, it's just. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous end. And the thing that really caught my attention, too, last line of the entire Canto, is that there's laughter, that Virgil laughs. My leader laughed, which is a very different response than we've seen so far in the Divine Comedy.
- [145:20]
B
Yeah. And the last thing I would say, just to button that up, first of all, the affective desire and eagerness is crucial. You cannot ascend the mountain. You cannot purify yourself, you cannot unite with the Lord. You cannot be sanctified without that eagerness to endure penance and elevate your soul. But likewise, not only are the souls that ascend past pride, not only are they more eager, it's easier if you get out of your own way. And if we let go of the pride and if we let God take us, sanctification becomes easy. You know, we think of the moral life as such a drudgery. You know, I've got to avoid all the things I really like to do in order to be moral and ethical, but that's not what it's supposed to be. The moral life is not meant to be a drudgery. It's not meant to be difficult. We are meant to get out of ourselves, to get out of the way of our own progression. And it's only the humble soul that can climb the mountain easily. So it's not only eagerness, it's also ease of ascent, which is so beautiful.
- [146:41]
A
Very well said, Luke. I appreciate you being on today and guiding us through this. We've done a deep dive, but somehow only scratched the surface. I'm not sure how that works with Dante, but as you can tell, and as I know you know well, is that this really is a map of the soul. And he offers you all these examples and prayers and hymns and etc. Not only just to understand on an academic level, but to invite you into a deep and moral read. And I think you've done a wonderful job today of helping us to understand how we can actually journey with Dante, the pilgrim, up the mountain, Purgatory. So I just want to say thank you.
- [147:15]
B
No, thank you for having me on. I'm so grateful for all the work that you're doing. I've been following Ascend very, very closely. I consider myself having not had that education when I should have, and so thank you for helping me to supply for the rest.
- [147:30]
A
No, thank you. It's a beautiful journey. And again, I'm actually just a student as well. The authors of the great books here, Dante, are the teachers, and it's wonderful to learn alongside them. Remind us where we can find out more about you and your work.
- [147:42]
B
I do. I do the Court of Christ Academy in North Idaho, and I write online at Co Crucified Substack.
- [147:49]
A
All right. Wonderful. Okay, everyone. Next week, we are continuing our journey through Dante's Purgatorio. And so we will be reading Cantos 13 through 17, looking at envy and wrath. And we'll be joined by Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson at Pepperdine University. She will be our guide. And in the meantime, go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook, when I remember that it exists. And also our website, thegreatbookspodcast.com and. And we'll see you guys next week. Thank you.