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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Purgatorio: Ante-Purgatory Cantos 1-5 with Dr. Donald Prudlo
02:09:31
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- [00:01]
A
Today on Standing the Great Books podcast, we are starting Dante's Purgatorio for Lent. This is a wonderful, wonderful text. It's a wonderful spiritual guide. It's one of the best mappings of the soul's ascent to God that you could possibly read. If you're reading it for Lent with us, you have really chosen well. It really is an invitation for the soul to become more beautiful as Christ is beautiful. And this week we are discussing Cantos 1 through 5, the anti purgatory, the antechamber of Mount Purgatory, the foot of the mountain where all the late repentants have to wait until they can ascend the mountain. We have the excommunicants, we have the lazy, we have those who died violent deaths. And so we're going to read Cantos 1 through 5 with the always enjoyable Dr. Donald Prudlow, who joined us last year to discuss Dante's Inferno, also to discuss the euthyphro dilemma and St. Thomas Aquinas, and most recently to discuss Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas. Fantastic thinker. He does a wonderful job leading us through these Cantos and also gives us a marvelous defense of why Cato the Younger, a pagan suicide, is the first person that Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil meet when they crawl out of hell. In other words, this means that a pagan suicide is going to be the last person to enter heaven. What did Dante the Poet mean by this? Dr. Prudlow does a fantastic job of guiding us through this difficult but beautiful passage. If you haven't done so already, please go check out jasonmbaxter.com and put in Ascend into the promo code for his audiobook of the Purgatorio and you'll get 20% off so you can listen to it as you read as we work through the text together this Lent. It's a phenomenal read and it's read by Dr. Baxter himself. But today join us for a wonderful conversation on Cantos 1 through 5 of the Purgatorio by Dante. And I hope you all have a blessed Lynn. 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 are a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. We've read the Iliad, the Odyssey, many of the Replays, several of the Platonic dialogues with a reread of Homer's Odyssey and then Plato's Republic on the docket for 2026. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. Appreciate all of our supporters who have access to our written guides, including a guide on Dante's purgatorio, and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for a reading schedule and more information.
- [02:49]
B
Okay.
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A
Oh, and also thank you to the center of 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's new translation, which is the one that I am reading this go through. So today we have our second episode on Dante's Purgatorio covering Cantos 1 through 5, which discusses the climate of hell, the shores of Mount Purgatory and the souls who dwell in anti purgatory waiting area at the foot of the mountain. To help us get started right, we are joined by Z Dr. Donald Pueblo, who serves as the chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa and he holds the Warren Chair in Catholic Studies. He has previously been on the podcast to discuss Aquinas and the Euthyphro Dilemma, which was a fantastic conversation. Very much appreciated it. And just a couple weeks ago to discuss Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas. Dr. Prudlow, welcome back to the podcast.
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B
Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to be here with you today. I do have to say I'm no longer chair of Philosophy and Religion, but I still have the warrant here, so. That's right.
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A
Okay, so before we get started, I actually just, I was posting on X and I was just asking people if they had any comments or questions or anything they wanted to ask. You know, as we're kind of going through Purgatorio and I just want to shout, I just want to give a shout out here. So JF Sebastian commented and said reading Dante's Inferno last year totally changed my life. It took me eight months. Anthony Esslin's translation with Mark Musa as a backup. I started January 1st, but by August 1st I was a Christian and I'm getting baptized next month. Canto 3 did it. Divine justice and the message of the cross. Ever grateful to you. So that's probably the best feedback I've ever gotten on us reading Dante for Lent.
- [04:40]
B
That's good feedback. Wow. Congratulations.
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A
Yeah, so just a shout out to him because I was posting that today and I just thought that would be tremendous and shared it, so wanted to share it here. Okay, so before we begin and before we look at, like, Canto one, maybe just starting. Like, why. Why read the Purgatorio? I mean, so many great books programs stop at the Inferno. You just. You read the Inferno. That pretty much gives you the gist of it. No one really talks about Purgatory or Paradiso. Like, why should we spend the time to read the Purgatorio?
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B
It's like reading the Heptateuch, right? The first seven books of the Bible. And stopping there, it just doesn't really give you an idea of the whole story. And while Inferno is exciting and it's lurid in places, and people get excited about that, when you stop reading there, you get such a distorted view not only of Dante's plan, but of the whole of the Christian story that Dante's encapsulating. And so it's absolutely. Because it gets better. And I don't just mean it gets better in that, you know, there's less, you know, eternal punishment. I mean, it gets better in that you get the wholeness of the vision and you get the glory of Dante's straightening of the will and then the absolute heights of intellectual poetry in Paradiso. So I encourage anyone out there who may have had experience and stopped at the Inferno, keep going. Because that baptism that you're about to undergo is just the beginning. There's a whole nother journey waiting for you, starting here at the base of the mountain.
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A
Yeah, there's a certain misdirection that can happen where just simply because it happens to be in three volumes, we view it as three separate works, but really it's the same work. It'd be like if someone came up to you and be like, hey, I read, like, the first third of Moby Dick. I'm pretty sure I get the gist of it. That wouldn't make sense to us at all. But we do it with Dante's Divine Comedy. The other thing, too, I would say, from someone who's read the whole Comedy, is that you also kind of have to mature alongside Dante the pilgrim. And so the first time I read the Comedy, love the Inferno, kind of liked Purgatory and then Paradiso. Paradise still is kind of lost on me. I don't think I still have an appreciation for it in a certain way. What I've come to understand is that you kind of mature alongside Dante the pilgrim. So, like, yeah, everyone likes the Inferno. It's like, there's tortures and weird things happening. It's also kind of a chaotic read. You're never quite sure what's going to happen. One thing that really hit me the first time I read Purgatory is how structured it is that every single time, you know what's going to happen, you know what he's going to see, and you're just like, checking the boxes. And as I've grown older, I've been able to see the Purgatory really as a spiritual map of the soul's ascent to God. And I've been very happy that it's so structured because it gives you such a wonderful guidepost of like, okay, well, I'm dealing with this. What psalm do I need to look at? What prayer do I look at? What stories can I look at? What can I meditate on? Is an entire library of basically spiritual direction and spiritual guidance waiting for you? And so I think that, you know, as people take on the Purgatory, it is a very different read in a lot of ways. Like, we still kind of have the contrapassos. People are kind of suffering certain things. There's still a lot for the imagination to take in. But it really is, I think, a wonderful spiritual read that invites you to mature alongside it.
- [08:02]
B
Absolutely. Our. Our passions are being purified along with Dante the pilgrim, as we climb the mountain, as we go up with this. This arduous journey with him. And if you just stop with the Inferno, I mean, how can you get that idea of the Divine Comedy right? That idea that you seem to think, well, no, this seems like tragedy to me. And we're going to see there's no tragedy here at all. We can't see any tragedy in Purgatory. We can't see any tragedy at all in Heaven. And once we complete the whole of the Divine Comedy, all hundred Cantos, we get to see the sometimes hard truth that there's no tragedy in Hell either. But you need the whole of the story in order to do that. In terms of the structure, you're absolutely right. We're starting to see the blossoming of Dante the Theologian as well Dante the Scholastic, who is inheriting not only the work of Thomas Aquinas. And we'll talk about that more because it really starts to come out here. It certainly comes out in the Paradiso, but we start to see his inheritance from people like the great Summas and virtues and vices, from people like William Peraltus and how the Middle Ages has taken the life of a human and analyze in all the different ways in which a human can go to the right or the left, the mean versus the two vicious extremes, and he elevates it and Purifies it not just from the din and clamor of hell. And he's separating that out here. And all of a sudden we come into a place of light and refreshment while there's still labor to be done.
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A
Yeah, no, very good. Before we jump into the Cantos, last week we had a good introduction with Dr. Jason Baxter and talked about his new translation, which is the one that I'm reading. But kind of before we get into the Cantos, maybe there's a few people who, like, really are still on the fence about whether or not they want to actually go on this journey. Like, what kind of advice would you have for first time readers of the Purgatorio?
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B
There are some themes that are going to be really perennially applicable to any person. The first is sort of this repression, the obscured image and likeness of God that we've caused in our souls. Through sin and through vice, it becomes cleansed and purified. The tears are wiped away, the color is returning to our cheeks. And so we all need, after this harrowing trip through hell, we have this place of peace where the crooked is being made straight here. I mean, he makes that very clear in the opening of the first Canto, where we see grace finally being able to work and build upon, upon nature to renew us, to conform us to God, to straighten that which we constricted. I mean, we go up in this spiral in order to get to the earthly paradise at the top, and scales are falling from our eyes and we're being cleansed and we're having our wills aligned with God, something that's going to be so clear in the beginning of Paradiso, and that once we're there, we're restored to the Vita Nuova. I think it's important also, I know I shouldn't be adding more reading assignments, but unless you've read the Vita Nuova of Dante and the Convivio that he writes about what this life looks like, it comes to poetic fruition in this great work. The second one is themes of emancipation, of liberty, of freedom, that we find repeatedly. It's like. It runs like a subtext through the entire poem. Freedom, liberty, emancipation. Because we're in slavery, we're in slavery to sin, and we need an external aid to free us. And Christ has provided the doorway, the gate for that liberation. But what we see is God wants children, not slaves, and he gives us the opportunity to be that. But in order to be human, in order to be what God made us, we need to be free. We need to be free. And masters of ourselves. And you here see that elision of Greek and Roman thought with Judeo Christian thought. And that's. That's the great thing. What did the Greeks want? What did the Romans want? They wanted liberty. They saw how precious and valuable it was. And now here, the Judeo Christian tradition, and you can see the biblical texts that constantly get brought in here in the songs of the Exodus and the songs of the Psalms, and how all of that is brought in and woven together in this great Western story of liberty that comes to tell us in Virgil's last words. I'm going to be of freedom and sovereignty. One of my favorite I crown and miter you master of yourself. We finally see what it means that the very confusing phrase of Augustine's love and do what you will. Well, now my passions are purified, they're elevated. My emotions, my will is straightened. Now I'm actually ready to be free. I'm actually ready to follow the good spontaneously, not because I'm forced to it. And also, finally, the reintegration that we experience, the reintegration of the community. At times, Dante seems so alone. The whole poem begins with him in the dark wood, lost his way, he's pursued by animals, and there's no one to help him unless someone confers mercy on him and grace from on high. And so all of a sudden, we start to see that in these first five Cantos, we start to see the color returning to his cheeks. We see songs, we see smiles for the first time in a long time. And we see that it's friendship. Dante finds friends, and the friends talk. And these goods are meant to be enjoyed in common. And it's going to be very important that the individual good and the political good are inseparable for Dante in this book, and that will lead us into Cato very certainly. But the souls, now, they're gregarious, they're happy, they're bashful, they're ashamed, in a good way. But this human friendship is always pointing up to heaven, to God, and to rightly ordered goods. And so there's so much. There's so much for someone to want to dive into this, especially after that difficult journey that we've all just been on.
- [14:46]
A
Yeah, very well said. Two things that occur to me. One is just the general principle that, you know, our grammar very much affects our logic. I think one thing, particularly as moderns, we're downstream from a lot of our terms being really gutted of their original meaning, or at least their meaning under Christianity. And so two things that you said I thought were really interesting is one, the Christian idea that the closer you draw to God, the more human you become, the more. And actually not even more human you become in a generalized way, but the more you become, the more you become you. And so I think you see this as Dante ascends to God on Mount Purgatory, is that he's actually going to become more Dante, not less. Right. It's not there is an abandoning of the will in Christianity, but you actually become more of yourself in doing that. You don't kind of bleed out into some kind of ambiguous divine essence, if you will. So I think that's really interesting because I think a lot of people think they lose their identity if they pursue Christ as humanity. There has to be better understood. The other one you said, which I think we're going to get into pretty heavily here, is freedom. Like, what actually is freedom? What's liberty? What is choice? I mean, just broadly speaking, right? There's a big difference between viewing, I think, in an ancient and Christian way that your liberty, your freedom, is to choose the good. It's really choosing amongst goods. That's why we have a freedom that's very different than like a plurality of choice. You know, plurality of options. Associate my desire, right? I'm more free. The more options I have, good or bad, it's just kind of a neutral that we have. Those two things are very different. But I'm glad you brought that up because we'll see. As you jump into Canto 1, there's immediately some themes of freedom there. We have to really understand what is it that Dante's trying to teach us.
- [16:32]
B
That's absolutely right. That distinction between freedom for. And freedom from. For moderns, we can get this debased notion of freedom, and it's just the ability to go to the grocery store and find 18 different kinds of juice. And this is an uninteresting kind of freedom. The freedom is that which liberates me from imprisonment to lesser goods, which limits me by imprisoning me in disorder, and the purification and liberation that comes from being able to live the life of virtue. And when I was working on Thomas Aquinas, you know, it struck me that, you know, he submitted himself to this life of this rigid religious rule right of poverty and chastity and obedience and modern say, oh, my gosh, I couldn't possibly handle that, right. My choices are being limited. And the more I worked on Thomas, I sort of ventured the idea that, wow, this may be the freest man I've ever met. In my life. And he lives within the walls of a convent, and he works in a classroom, and he does what he's supposed to do by ordering his goods rightly. And that constantly strikes me, that concept of freedom that we've lost. But, yes, you will become more you the closer you come to God. That's absolutely right.
- [17:57]
A
All right, very good. Let's look at the text. So let's look at Canto 1 in the Purgatorio. So where are we? Right, so what's happened at the end of the Inferno? They crawled through, basically, the center of the earth. So they crawl through this hole that basically Satan is in. And so there's this really interesting part, right, where they're crawling down, and then all of a sudden they're crawling up because they've shifted. And so they crawl out where his legs are sticking out, which, again, reminds us of simony and all kinds of things that we saw in the Inferno. And the last thing that we see from Dante, the pilgrim, which is very important, is that it ends with the stars. He walks out and he sees the stars for the first time in the Inferno, because clearly you can't see the stars when you're in the pit of hell. So this is where we have, you know, this is where that we join him now, is that he has stepped out into kind of the freshness. You talked about a lot of these themes that we get that color returns, freshness returns. They're not in this kind of like, crusty pit of hell anymore. Last. Last week, Dr. Baxter talked about the atmosphere of Purgatorio, like just in Dante's grammar, et cetera, is very different, right? He writes in a very pedagogical way that shows that this is different. So we come out and this. Where this is the kind of the atmosphere that we're in. And we get a few things right? So we get an analogy at the beginning of gentler waters, his intellect, boat, etc. And then we again get a invocation to the Muses. So just as a reminder there, maybe just as a rudimentary statement, is that if you read. Go back and read Homer, you go back and read the Aeneid, right? You read these epics. They have these invocations to the muses. Muses, there's nine of them. They inspire the poet. There might even be a taking over, right? Almost an erotic experience, a ecstasy of the Muses speaking through this person. So they invoke the Muses to speak through the poet. And Dante now adopts that classical understanding of invoking the muses there and muse there. And we think of music, you think of museum, you think the bee amused. These types of things. When we read Dante, or, excuse me, when we read Plato's Republic, we'll see that music, broadly speaking, is central to the education of the soul music. They're being broadly understood of basically all the arts of the Muses, which includes rhetoric and poetry and all these things. And so he's really kind of. Again, this is just a touch point at the beginning of him adopting, I think, the best out of Greco Roman thought into his Christian imagination.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. The. And so. But. But notice there's. There's also been a change right there in the first tercet, he talks about the little boat of my skill. All of a sudden, we saw it back where he placed himself among the greatest poets of all time after he had written five cantos. He kind of knew something that we didn't at that point. But now it's the little bark. The little bark of my ingenuity is propelling him forward. And he knows he's dependent on this inspiration. And he's beginning to realize, and this is something that will develop into the paradiso too, that the inspiration is God and the things that point him to God. But also, notice there's no dissonance with the classical world for him. I mean, it's absolutely natural for Dante the poet to adopt these classical models, but then he will do really interesting things with them. And we'll see that at the end of the first Canto when we talk, when we compare about the reeds and look at the classical illusions there. But right here, he's invoking Calliope, who's the muse of epic poetry. That's critical. He's writing the Christian epic. He's writing the greatest epic that possibly could be conceived of in a Christian framework. And that's the epic of eternity. But we're in a strange place here in purgatory. Purgatory is the only place that it stands between time and eternity. Purgatory, unlike hell and unlike paradise, will cease. At some point. Poor Cato is going to close up shop. He'll be the last one. He'll be the last one. At least that's what we're led to believe here. And so he's got to have this. He's taking the deep breath right after he's breathing the free air again. He's seeing the stars. He's on the edge of the seashore. And the geography is important, but also the time. Time is really important in purgatory. Time continues to exist in purgatory because it is temporal, because it is durational, it has a time limit. And so he's taking this breath after hell, and he's looking around him and he's steeling himself for this new experience. And he's orienting himself at the beginning here. He's orienting himself in time, he's orienting himself in space. He's orienting himself literarily and theologically as well. So lots and lots of things are happening right, in these first tersets to recalibrate our expectations from what came before.
- [23:10]
A
Can we. Can we push into that just a bit? Because I've realized as you talk that I really do not have a good appreciation for his opening terset here. And obviously, I think then that that means that, you know, I'm suffering some type of lack. Because if you think of like, the opening of the Iliad, talk about the rage, well, we could talk about that for a long time. Why is that the first word? What does that mean about the poem? You talk about the opening of the Odyssey, man. What does that have to do. What's the man of twists and turns and how that colors the entire text? We saw the opening of the Inferno where he's lost midway in his life, right. Our life actually in the dark woods, and how that colors the entire text here. I don't know if I have a great appreciation for this opening tercet and why I'm assuming it sets some type of template. You talked about his genius. That made me think of. When you joined us to read Dante's Inferno for Lent last year. One of the things that you helped us understand was the comparison actually between Odysseus and Dante, the pilgrim. That Odysseus, if I can kind of poorly summarize that Dante, excuse me, that Odysseus then represented a sort of unbridled genius, right? And we see then that Dante gives him a very particular death in which he actually is restless. He leaves Ithaca and he goes and sails towards Mount Purgatory actually, for the sake of knowledge. And of course, then the divine strikes him down and he. He dies at sea. It's interesting then, as you helped guide us, that then you can read Dante the pilgrim there, as then a new Odysseus or a better Odysseus, because he obviously clearly is also a genius. He's seeing the warning signs of an unbridled genius. A genius that doesn't. Isn't tempered by virtue. And however, where are we now? He's here. He's made it to Mount Purgatory. He's made it to the location that Odysseus failed to make it to. So how do we, I mean, can you tether those at the beginning of tirsit or like, how should the beginning terset help color the text? Because I'm sure I'm missing something there.
- [25:08]
B
Well, I mean, there's, it's just to unpack it, there's so much. Because Ulysses goes by sea and fails. Dante has come through the center of the earth, through land. There's something there to talk about, I think, but he still is using the, the imagery of the sea and he's contrasting himself with Ulysses. He's also recognizing his need for assistance at the beginning with his invocation of the Muses and, and later knowing that he needed a guide. Ulysses had no need of anyone to show him the way. And so that was, was problematic. He's got a guide. But as we're going to see, his guide becomes problematic soon because his buddy Virgil has, has not been here before. They're both going on this journey together. And so he had a guy before. Virgil had been there before. Now there's two pilgrims that. That word comes up again and again. All right, they're pilgrims. Pilgrims have a telos beyond themselves. All right, Ulysses, his telos was himself. He wanted to know about men's vices and their worth and so sort of just self satisfaction. Dante is going towards a good that's outside himself. He went through the land, Odysseus went through the sea. And, but, and the sea was cruel, right? It was a rough sea. And now he's going to see the only way that one can get there through the sea is when in Canto too, when he sees the souls being ferried by the angel. Only through this angelic administration, only through the heavenly intelligences can one come in that direction. So he's being given a singular privilege here by going through the sea. But now he and Virgil are turned into pilgrims making their way up the arduous path. So just there's, I mean, a lot to see.
- [26:58]
A
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Yeah. Because that's what my intuition was, is that this opening analog that he gives has a lot of meaning to it, particularly in, like, the lessons that he's learned in the Inferno. One thing that we see in the Inferno too, that we've been tracking is Dante's soteriology, right. The study of salvation. How does he, how does he actually decide who's saved, who's not? You know, we had popes in the Inferno. We arguably had a canonized saint in the Inferno as well. I mean, Dante has some hot takes, right, about these things. And it's pedagogical. He's trying to teach us certain things. So keep that in mind, because the first time I read Purgatory and you turned the page here and who's he run into? He runs into Cato the Younger, and you're like, who's that? And you look him up and he's a pagan suicide. So I want to get this right. So we have a pagan suicide is the first person that Dante meets in purgatory. And this is under the premise then, that everyone who goes to purgatory goes to heaven. So maybe those who aren't Catholic or, you know, orthodox or someone like who, like, you know, how does this actually work? Well, when you are, everyone who goes to Purgatory ends up going to heaven. Purgatory is not an in between of hell and heaven. It's not like a midway point. It's not the so. So lukewarm place, right? Purgatory is that initial cleansing of the soul. It's a purgation. No unclean thing can enter heaven. And so the souls have to be configured to Christ before then they can engage in the beatific vision. And so purgatory is, you know, sometimes Cardinal Ratzinger would talk about it as really the first level of heaven. Right? It's just this cleansing place in which we will actually embrace Jesus Christ inside, say, like a fire, a refining fire, like gold and the impurities being taken out. And then we can go into heaven. So on that premise, you know, something like, it's not like Cato's going back to hell. It's not like if you don't do well enough in Purgatory, you fall back into Hell. Everyone's making it so it seems like we have a pagan suicide, who for some reason is both the guardian. There's a lot of possessive language used here, I noticed, right, where he talks about the area as his. And two, he's going to be the last person to enter heaven, presumably, right, because everyone else is showing up and he's the last person over by the shore. What is going on in this passage?
- [29:16]
B
Dante the poet doesn't make it easy for us. And that's one of the great joys of the Divine Comedy. We're meant to be not for a loop, because Dante the pilgrim is being knocked for a loop here. He's disoriented. And so the thing that he encounters for the first time is this, as you said, Cato the Younger, who was extremely well respected throughout. Throughout all of history. Now, what can we say? How. Well, how are we introduced to him? Right. First he sees the four stars. Right. And this is just as an aside, this is so shocking that some commentators in the past have tried to go around the problem by saying, oh, Cato is this is just a symbolic presence. He's not talking about a historical character. That is a coward's way out, to read it that way. This is Cato. Cato the pagan. The suicide is going to heaven. And we have got to confront that or we're going to miss so much of what Dante has to tell us here. And so the four stars. Well, certainly there's a symbolic valence to the four stars. And most commentators will say these are the four cardinal virtues. The cardinal virtues that are recognized by the ancient Greek philosophers. Prudence, justice, temperance and fortune. They shine in his continents. Right. He is the incarnation of the virtues that were recognized by pagans without the benefit of revelation. And he is the. He is the standard bearer. And there's also a possible reference to the Southern Cross. I think it's kind of interesting that for Dante, no one and for the ancients, no one could cross the torrid zone, the Sahara, that was the limit. There's nothing that can exist in the. In the southern hemisphere. And so how would he have seen the Southern Cross? If you've ever been south of the equator, you see a constellation in the form of a cross that is invisible to those in the northern hemisphere. Some speculate that he may have had information about this from Marco Polo, from his. From his journeys. That's an intriguing possibility. But clearly it is the four virtues, and they stand for that. But to dig into Cato a little bit, Cato is the standard bearer of republican virtue. He is the great defender, one of the last defenders, along with Cicero, of the goodness of the Roman Republic. Now, okay, let's set aside the soteriological problem for just a second, and let's just look at the political problem that Dante presents us with.
- [31:52]
A
And just one side note. So what time period, for those who aren't familiar, like, what time period are we looking at?
- [31:57]
B
So, so Cato is. Cato the Younger is on the side that is fighting Julius Caesar in the civil wars. Julius Caesar has seized power. He's defeated the senatorial armies. And. And Cato has gone to Africa to make a last stand for the. For. For the. And just, just. I mean, it's. It's funny how much Cato has echoed in Western civilization. Joseph Addison wrote a play that was called Cato that was the most popular play in pre revolutionary America. It was George Washington's favorite play. And so this fellow Cato casts a long shadow, but he's fighting a losing cause. We know it's a losing cause. We know that even though Caesar gets murdered, that the Roman Empire is going to be founded and that it's going to last for a long time and that it's going to be a symbol for Dante of what the earth should look like. That there should be eventually a Christian Roman Empire and there should be this one. Who would be the secular analog of the Pope. The Pope will have all spiritual authority. The Emperor will have all temporal authority. One Canto before we've seen the murderers of Caesar, Brutus and Cassius in the mouth of Satan, considered to be almost the worst sinner. It's really almost on a par with Judas Iscariot and they were his buddies. Cato would have been all in favor of Brutus and Cassius. So what's going on there? And then we know that Caesar himself is placed in limbo, the limbo of the just, and that he serves as this archetype of the good empire. So this is really weird. What does Dante mean to tell us politically, much less so theologically, by this? Two defenders of the Republic are being chewed in the mouth of Satan. The other defender of the Republic is the gatekeeper to heaven, basically, if we want to extend it all the way, like you said. And then Caesar is this ambiguous character. So you've got that. That's shocking Dante's readers. And then you have the problem of salvation. Not only did he die before Christ, right? So think of all the great thinkers, our heroes that are. That are in limbo. And we're going to have some very affecting passages about Virgil and Virgil, knowing what he is missing. And Aristotle and Plato and Cicero, all of the people that we admire so much, they did not. We're not able to do this. But then it's worse because Cato's suicide, right? We've seen a special place for suicides, a brutal place in Inferno. And not only is he not there, he's not in limbo, he's on the way to heaven. Even if he will be the least in the kingdom of heaven, which I think puts an interesting parallel with John the Baptist, right, Precursor, the one who comes before. We know that Cato, in Dante's mind is going to be the least in the kingdom of heaven. And so that's. But he's a precursor. And so in some way, Dante wants us to think of Cato as a precursor to Christ. John the Baptist is the religious precursor. Cato, in some sense is the secular precursor. Always remember, there's a secular and a sacred as examples of these things throughout Dante. He doesn't. He doesn't. There always has to be a classical exemplar, but this is the exemplar of exemplars. Cato. What do we know about him historically? We know that he, besides his politics, besides his being a great defender of the Republic, he was rigid in morality and in following the laws. And at the same time, he was compassionate. He was compassionate with his wife. We'll talk about his wife, Marcia, a little bit. He was fair. He was just upright, incorruptible. Everything that you can imagine, a pagan sage should be, that was Cato. But Dante, just as we know, that's not enough to save you. All right? There's no other name given under heaven whereby we might be saved but the name of Jesus. And so his hair is interesting. He's depicted as an old man, even though he died when he was 46, which. And this is very affecting to me, for Dante, 46 is the beginning of old age. So he's depicted as this old man even though he died really in the prime of life, and he didn't worry about dying too. There's also an interesting. Some commentators have picked up on this. When Aeneas has his vision of the future of Rome in the Aeneid in book eight, and he sees Cato, Virgil writes his Dantem Jura Catonem. All right, the vision of Cato giving the laws. But you hear that second word, Dantem. It is possible that Dante saw his own name connected with Cato Dantem Katonem, which is another interesting possibility. And so Dante feels this very close relationship. He also knows of Cato as the great defender of liberty and freedom. He dies for freedom. He will not live a slave to a tyrant. But then we learn some more from the tradition that Dante would have been familiar with. Particularly, we know from history that when he died, he died by opening his veins and surrounded by his friends, right? The theme of friendship again. And he dies reading the Phaedo, which is Plato's great work on the immortality of the soul. This is not a death of despair. Cato has no expectation that life is going to end. Life is going to continue to exist. And now he will be free. He will be more free than he is now than he can ever live on Earth. But then it gets even cooler because Dante's source, main source for Cato is Lucan the Pharsalia, which is Lucan's epic poem about the. About the Roman civil war. So a pagan poet writing about the pagan. So there's nothing Christian in here. But then you start to read Lucan's Parsalia, where he talks about Cato, and there's a couple passages that are particularly important. The first one is Cato saying, would it were possible for me to lay my head down, condemned by the gods of heaven and hell, and take upon myself all punishments? Oh, wow, that's interesting. And then, near the very moment of his death, Cato says, through Lucan the poet, let my blood redeem the peoples. Let my blood redeem the nations. All right, so we're dealing with, of course, Dante the Christian is reading these texts and it's just screaming loud, like Virgil's fourth eclogue. Some inspiration is pointing Virgil and Cato here to Christ. Some inspiration. So leading Dante to speculate that some special grace had been conferred upon Cato at the end of his life to have faith in Christ who was to come. Now, usually, that was the way that the Jewish fathers were saved, right? They had faith in the redeemer to come. Somehow Cato presents to us this secular analog of the man who lays down his life for freedom, which, for Dante especially, that's his image of Christ. Christ came to make us free. Now, in the model, the secular is at the bottom. It's important, it's good, it's necessary, it's who we are as humans. But Cato is at the very bottom of the stair of salvation, and we're not going to see Christ until the very top of Paradiso. So Dante's ordering things, right? He's ordering them unexpectedly. He's ordering them in a way that is going to challenge every reader from the day that they first read it to today, like us here. But he's giving us this image of Cato the Cato the Younger as being saved in anticipation that God's mercy can be extended in these extraordinary ways.
- [40:27]
A
Yeah, beautiful. Yeah. So, you know, in short, so it's. There's. It's basically a pagan antecedent. It's an image of a christological reality, even if the pagan did not intend it. And so I really like the parallel that you brought forth there between this image and Virgil's Eclogue 4. So for those who are not familiar, Eclog 4 is. It's a pagan text. It's written by Virgil prior to Christ, but he talks about the coming golden age that will be ushered in by a child. And so obviously he does not.
- [40:57]
B
Born to a virgin.
- [40:58]
A
Yeah, born to a virgin. So obviously Virgil does not have Christ in mind. But a lot of the early church fathers saw the Holy Spirit working through Virgil, a pagan, to prophesy about something that he doesn't actually understand. And one of the things I tend to point people to that are uncomfortable with that or unsettled, is that we actually see that same mode of operation in the Old Testament. So if you think of a lot of the psalms, say, like Psalm 22, Psalm 22 is the Psalm that Christ referenced when he's on the cross. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That's the first line of Psalm 22. And if you go back and read Psalm 22, it's a prophetic statement of what Christ is thinking on the cross. It talks about his bones not being broken. It talks about them gambling for his clothes. It talks about all these things. And it ends on a note of hope and resurrection, right? So in that mindset, you see the psalmist writing that in no way, shape or form is intending his writing to be a statement about Christ on the cross. And so a lot of the early church fathers thought, well, if the Holy Spirit can do it with the Jews, they can also do it with the pagans. And so therefore Virgil can write these things and it can be a inadvertent pagan prophecy of the coming of the Messiah. So here, what we have, which is really fascinating, if I understand correctly, is Cato himself becomes an image, a prophetic image of Christ willing to shed his blood, his blood to not live, then under tyranny, that he would give his blood out, you know, for them and take, not only take on their sins, their faults, and then shed his blood, you know, for them. It's a really beautiful image. But I think what's so jarring about it is not only that he's a pagan suicide, but then trying to map on the politics of that, that he's actually dying for the sake of the republic, when in reality, you know, Dante, seeing the emperor is going to be, you know, like you said, a secular analog to the papacy, that there's duo sunt, right? There's two powers. There's the temporal power and there is the spiritual power. And eventually both these powers will be held by the Church because the emperor will be baptized. And so you have the baptized laity that hold the temporal power and the hierarchy of the Church that holds a spiritual power and the Church has both of them guiding man on his journey.
- [43:13]
B
Right.
- [43:14]
A
This is the pilgrimage of man. These two lights, the son of the moon, the two swords. There's many different analogies that are given. So that's what's so fascinating, as you pointed out, is that he doesn't seem to have like this prophetic image of Cato seems to trump all of that, or is there a way to mix it in? Or is there it just trumps it all because it's such a fascinating reading of itself.
- [43:35]
B
I think there is. So there's a couple. There's two things. And this is where I'm getting more into speculation. All right. Because I have struggled to figure out Dante's political vision for years. And here's what I've come up with. This is a provisional hypothesis. This. Dante believes in the empire. He wants there to be a universal Christian emperor who is sovereign within his own realm, right? Secular. The secular belongs to the lay. The secular belongs to. And so. But what does this emperor look like? Does he look like a tyrant? He can't possibly look like a tyrant. And so his. His idea, because on the other side, he valorizes the defender of republican liberty. Dante wants to be. He loves Florence for all of its warts and imperfections. He loves Florence, he loves the Republic of Florence, he loves the city state, he loves civic liberty. And yet he also loves the empire. What he wants is an emperor who is symbolic of unity so that everyone can together look to the emperor. But that emperor is not a tyrant, a bureaucrat, somebody who imposes his will. But within that empire you have civic politics like Florence that are able to run their own affairs in the kind of subsidiary where virtue and freedom can be exercised civically. And so there's this two tiered model. And I think a lot of people get lost in. Oh, Dante wants a one world government or something like that. That's not what it looks like. You have the emperor, the emperor is overall. But you respect subordinate authorities. So I think that's the political vision. That's where I'm going. Now there's another. And now we're getting out on a limb here. This is where I've had some serious disagreements with people that I like a lot. There's a couple scholars who have proposed and the more I think of it, the more it makes sense to me is that Cato is a suicide, like Christ is a suicide. And now this. This gets people a little weird. Well, how dare you? How dare you say Christ suicide. This is. This is sounding skirting on the edge of blasphemy here. How is it that. Well, let's look at just the generic etymology of the word suicide. It means, it means one who is one who causes one's own death. And clearly that's the case in Cato. But that's just a generic reading in this case of Christ. It's true too. Christ lays down his life. No one can take Christ's life from him unless he permits it, right? So John 10:18, I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord in a generic, non moral sense. This is suicide. Now suicide, when it becomes specified morally, comes from the concept of final impenitence and desperation and lack of hope, right? And that is not present in Cato. Cato's death is hopeful, if you keep in mind the things that I was just saying. And Christ's death points to life. Cato's death points to life of the polity. Christ's death points to the life of the soul, Cato. And if you look at lines 61 to 75, Cato is like Christ brings liberty. He's a liberty bringer. And so Cato is the like Christ. And liberty connects Cato to Dante to Christ. And so this is clear. And it gets even more clear once we get to the end of the cantum. We talk about the reeds, right? If you look at the reed that is going to be able to cleanse, purify Dante, reeds are symbolic of humility. They're able to bend. They're the only thing that can survive in the sea there, not beautiful plants or anything like that. It's the humble reed. Now, if you think back to the wood of the suicides, they look like reeds too, but they broke, they bled, they wouldn't grow back. These reeds grow back. They're symbolic of the reed that was placed as a scepter to mock Christ. It's placed like we see the reeds growing in the water when Moses is found among the rushes, right? And soon we're going to hear the great song of deliverance from Exodus. And so it's, it's, it's, it's. I've come to be more convinced of this, of this concept. As long as suicide is understood correctly, Dante is doing something extremely provocative. But when you think about it, it really makes sense. Christ is the one laying down his life, just as Cato was the one laying down his life. No one has the power to take it from.
- [48:36]
A
Yeah, it's one thing that occurs me. There is, you know, just the grammatical difference. So you could talk about Christ's death as a suicide because he sets it down himself. But typically then, when we have suicides use that term that are not out of despair, but actually for a greater purpose, then we just call them sacrifice.
- [48:57]
B
Right?
- [48:58]
A
So, for instance, the soldier that jumps on the grenade to save his comrades, we typically don't refer to him as a suicide.
- [49:04]
B
Right.
- [49:05]
A
We talk about his sacrifice. So to me, it seems like you. Grammatically, it's just, which one do you want to focus on? Right. So you could say, how is Christ's death like Cato's suicide? Or you can say, how is Cato's suicide like Christ's sacrifice?
- [49:19]
B
Right.
- [49:19]
A
So is there a. Is there an. How does Christ. Excuse me, how does Cato's suicide image the sacrifice of Christ? That even though when we first look at Cato, we say, oh, yeah, this is a suicide. He killed himself, X, Y and Z. But rather, what we're being invited to is to see this as a deeper imaging of an actual sacrificial death, which is not entirely clear on its face. But through the poetry, through the tradition, and how Dante takes it up, we say, no, this suicide is actually a sacrifice. And in being a sacrifice, it models then or serves as an analog to Jesus Christ. But again, I mean, you know, it's funny that, because I want to maybe justify this to the reader, that getting Cato correct at the beginning of the Purgatorio is incredibly important for understanding the Purgatorio as a whole. It's funny because it actually just occurs to me because you think about man, Dante's coming out swinging here with a huge picture right at the beginning. But he actually does something very similar in the Inferno, where he has the unnamed individual right there in the vestibule of hell, because a lot of people read that individual as, oh, his name's going to escape me. Who is that?
- [50:30]
B
It's Celestine.
- [50:32]
A
Yes, thank you. Yeah. Who is it who was a canonized saint?
- [50:38]
B
He doesn't put him in hell. He's in the vestibule of hell.
- [50:41]
A
Well, he also doesn't name him. Yeah, he doesn't name him, and he puts him in the vestibule. But right off the bat, we have Dante being, like, just coming out swinging and saying, here's this thought, which then I think, actually understanding why he puts that canaanized saint in that colors a lot of the commentary, particularly the political commentary throughout the Entire inferno. So Cato is worth spending time with here. And so I very much appreciate you guiding us through that. I think it gives us a lot to discuss. Can we, before we jump away from Cato, can we talk about his wife? Because there's an imagery here with his wife as well that I'm not entirely sure I grasp.
- [51:18]
B
So Virgil makes a captatio benevalencia. He. When you meet someone, you give them a compliment, right? When you're addressing a crowd, you address, you know, something good that the crowd shares or the crowd possesses. You know, if you're in. If you're in a town, you mentioned the sports team and how much. How great their sports team is. It's a captazio. And so Virgil does a classical thing. He tries to appeal, you know, in the name of Marcia, whom I'm with in limbo, whom you loved, who pleased you so well in life. And they did. It was. It was. She was entirely devoted to Cato, and Cato would grant her whatever she wanted because he knew she was virtuous too. And so whatever she asked couldn't be bad. So he did whatever he could for. And Cato kind of shocks us. He's like, I. I mean, like I don't care or I can't. When he says, really, I can't care anymore. The law fixed at my. The law fixed at my liberation prevents me from. From thinking on her. So you don't have to do. Now I will listen to what you said about the lady from heaven. That's interesting. And Mary and Beatrice are in the background of this canto too, right? The oriental sapphire that's coming in the color. But it's so sad. This is gonna be moments of real pathos in this, where he says, marcia, please me. But now she dwells beyond the evil stream. She cannot move me any longer. And so there's two things happening here. One of them is religious and one of them is secular. The first is secular. He's the anti. Orpheus, right? Orpheus goes down to hell. But he looks back, Cato. I'm not looking back. I can't look back. I'm not going to be like Orpheus and then lose her forever again. I've already lost her forever. It's heartbreaking. But he also recognizes that a hard gospel saying, right? In heaven, they are neither married nor given in marriage, that marriage endures to death, and that he's pointing away to the life, to the angelic life lived by the souls in heaven. Not that affection or love cease, but that this particular thing ordained by God for humans on earth, it ends. And so it's a moment that there are hard teachings like that. I mean, people. People are married for a long time in the Catholic tradition. That's hard. That's hard to stomach. But it's the truth. When you look at it deeply, I mean, that's what it has to be. In that sense.
- [53:45]
A
I appreciate you parsing that out. This is something that I noticed in particularly the Baxter's translation that I don't know if I noticed in Esalen or Musa, because he makes it very clear, because it talks about. This is line, I don't know, 90 or so, where he says that Marcia cannot. She cannot move me any longer according to that law laid down where I escaped from there. But if a lady from heaven guides and moves you, so there is really clear, then in Baxter's translation of that, where's the movement coming from? That feminine Marcia's down in hell. She can't move me anymore. But the lady from heaven, which here I think is Beatrice, can then precipitate some type of movement. That's really fascinating. And again, right off the bat, Dante gives us something that's incredibly complicated, but also incredibly beautiful. But also what I love about it is reading the Divine Comedy is like being introduced to an entire library of ancient texts. Like, it invites you deeply into the tradition, which is why, you know, a lot of people talk about the Divine Comedy being Aquinas's summa in poetic form, because it just introduces you to the entire tradition up to that point, and then weaves it together in a really beautiful tapestry. Okay, so anything else to add, though, about the ritual of the reeds, I really liked. I don't think I mentioned this earlier. I really liked the juxtaposition or the tethering there between the reeds and the forest of suicides in the Inferno. I really appreciated that. But anything else on this kind of ritual of the reeds that takes up the back half of the Canto?
- [55:18]
B
I love. I'm glad you said ritual, because it is very liturgical in its format. And yet who is the one that is performing the ritual? Virgil is acting as the minister here of the. Of Dante's purification, right.
- [55:32]
A
Of his.
- [55:32]
B
Of his turn towards the grace of conversion and the purity and humility that Dante is now to possess as the beginning. And notice we have, the Christian has to begin with humility, but it is the pagan who prepares us to do this. It's often the pagan has done this in order to proceed, in order to proceed further so he performs the rite. And this is also. Once again, we've talked about the religious significance here, but it also echoes back to the Aeneid when Dante. Sorry, when Aeneas goes into hell, he is to pluck the golden bow right from, from the tree in order to give it to Proserpina in the, in the afterlife. And so Dante. And it grows right back, right, Just like the reed does. And so when you have that, this glorious thing in the classical tradition is transmuted to this very humble thing in the Christian tradition with a clear classical illusion. Dante is about to go on this journey. And so he. But his journey is better because he's now on the way to heaven. Aeneas had this beautiful golden bow, but he was only descending into the underworld. And so once again, Dante, in a magisterial performance, connecting both the Christian and the classical worlds.
- [56:53]
A
Yeah, he does that so well, which is sometimes very alien to our modern imagination, even like a modern Christian imagination that often sees the pagan and the Christian as so distinct and corruptive almost of each other. And so the way he weaves this together, I think is really impressive. I will say that you've really helped me understand and give me a lot to contemplate about Cato because particularly when I first read it, if I was going to meet like an old man, that is right there at the beginning, that's gonna be the last one to come in. Like I thought it would be Socrates or Plato or Aristotle. Right. The fact that Cato's here and those guys are actually gonna remain in limbo. But sure, it's, it's an earthly paradise, but it's one that has this like, pall of grief over it because they're denied the beatific vision. I thought it'd be one of those guys here. It being Cato, though, I think is again, it's a Dantian choice that's not entirely apparent to us at first, but invites us, I think, into an incredibly deep understanding of the relationship between paganism and Christianity.
- [57:55]
B
Well, remember, I mean, we have a lot of sympathy with the Greeks. Dante didn't have as much direct contact with the Greeks. And I myself, I mean, I, I love Rome like Dante loves Rome. I think Greece was a precursor to Rome. That's how Dante sees it, that Rome took what Greece did and made it effective. And so it's as much as, you know, I think, modern day people, we'd love to see Socrates or Aristotle there. I'd love to see Aristotle, but really it is the Romans practiced what the Greeks preached. And so they were the ones that put it together. They were the ones that. Where the rubber met the road. And so for Dante, as for much of the Western tradition, I think maybe up to the 19th and 20th centuries, they idealized Rome. Our founding fathers idealized Rome, The Renaissance idealized Rome. It wasn't Greece so much, but Dante will give a nod to that position in Canto 3 when he does the great chiasm of Mary and Plato there. And he will give us a reason why. It's Cato, I think, and not Plato or Aristotle. But that's in Canto 3. We'll get to that.
- [59:01]
A
Yeah, that's a good. That's a good distinction about the relationship and how he sees Rome as both the imperial and apostolic city, and which is, you know, then the mother city of that is Troy, which is obviously very much against the Greeks. So, yeah, there's a tradition there. We just read Sir Gallen and the Green Knight for our Christmas and New Year's read, which then starts, obviously with Troy and then traces that lineage all the way to England. So, yeah, that's a lineage that we very much have to keep in mind.
- [59:31]
B
Nobody wants to be descended from Achilles or Agamemnon or even Ulysses in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, or in the early American period. Everyone wants Troy, everyone wants Rome. And we have to sort of enter into that in order to grasp what Dante's talking about.
- [59:47]
A
Yeah, and I'll say this and move on, but I did appreciate your comment about. This is actually a recent shift. So if you look at Americans and what was popular, they were reading Plutarch, they were reading Cicero. It's actually very recently that we're now, oh, yeah, Plato, Aristotle. Those are the great books that you read, actually. The Romans, in a lot of ways now are seen as cheap copies of the Greeks. A lot of times they're skipped over.
- [60:08]
B
In great books programs. That's just. Yeah, no, I'm. I'm a Cicero. I'm a Cato guy through and through. I mean, that's. These. These are the guys that build our. Build our civilization. They make Greece effective.
- [60:19]
A
Okay, good. All right, so we're on the path for the. The five hour podcast, so we're gonna. We're gonna move forward. So, Canto 2. So I thought this was. I mean, just like, at a high level. I thought this was really fascinating. So what ends up happening in Canto 2? So the boat comes in, which is a beautiful scene, just a beautiful scene of this angel. And it's the pilot. I have. I have some Questions about that. He makes a big issue of the fact that the. The angel needs no technology, right? The boat moves under the power of the angel, which I thought was a very interesting image. And then. Who are these souls? Okay, well, these are all the souls that are saved. These are all the souls that died in the grace of Jesus Christ, and they are coming to purgatory. So now we kind of get this the normal way. So we get the Dante and Virgil, who are new to purgatory, are now meeting up with the souls that are new to purgatory as well. And we're seeing how they normally come over these ships. We get this really interesting thing that he knows someone and they start singing a song, and it's beautiful. And then here comes the curmudgeon Cato, yelling at all these people like, what are you doing? Get up the mountain. Like. It's a really. It's a really somewhat comical scene, but a very beautiful way to start the purgatory.
- [61:32]
B
Absolutely. The ship coming in, and they're singing in ex to Israel de Egypto, which is the great song of liberation of the chosen people from the Holy Land or to the Holy Land from Egypt. And it's got, once again, multiple meanings. It's got the crossing of the Red Sea, crossing the Jordan later, but in particular, it's got echoes of. Notice how they're being saved. They're being saved through water. They're being saved over the water. So it's an allusion back to baptism, to Noah's Ark. All of these. All of these classical illusions or these biblical illusions are coming. And it's also something that in the Middle Ages was sung on the burial service as the. As the body was being taken to be buried, they would sing this song. So all of the Old Testament is seen as pointing to this future liberation and that they, too, like Dante and Virgil, they're all on a pilgrimage together. So now Dante's merging in with more people. Remember, we talked about the reintegration of the community that's being happening. All those individual vices are being purified away. What does it produce? It produces solidarity, produces what's eventually the song with Giselle at the end of the canto. But we're seeing. We're getting. We're getting footholds here. All right? We're seeing. We're seeing songs. We see color. We see smiling, we see peace. Right? The visio package, the vision of peace. The color comes from the embarrassments that. The good embarrassments. All right? That the souls have good shame. And that's something a lot of people don't really want to think about today. Like all the therapists and psychologists, all shame is bad. There's some shame that's good. There's a bashfulness, and it comes from. And it's. The good kind of shame is rooted in humility, right? It's not rooted in sinfulness, which some shame can be rooted in. But it's also significant, I love. Because I always take students to. To Ostia, which is one of my favorite places, which is outside of the old port city of Rome. And even by Dante's time, it had been abandoned for 700 years. And so it was even then a city of the dead. And so he uses this as the place where the souls begin their final journey across the sea to the. To the mountain of purgatory. And the problem is some of them are still very attached to things. Some of them tarry. They're. They're homesick. They're sick for their bodies, they're sick for the ways that their life used to be. And so they're like the. The. The. The titiest court, right? The. The timid of heart, the pusillanimous. You know, they don't want to take this next step into a broader life. But we get the first smile since limbo, right? There was. There was smiling in limbo, and then there was nothing. There was color. There was no color. There was noise. There was disruption. There was anger. But now the peace is being restored. And then the casella. He meets his friend. Dante seeing his friends in purgatory is extremely affecting. And notice the things that they talk about. They talk about the good that we can experience on earth and the things that we should seek out. Poetry and song and fellowship. And what do they sing? They sing. Now, maybe this is a little bit of Dante's sort of pride coming out. Again, they sing a poem that he wrote. And if you. Amorquine lamente mira jona the love which counsels me in my mind. And he's talking about his beloved. Maybe. Maybe Beatrice, it's not just to a lady, but it's how she is virtuous. And that virtue shines through her. Her beauty. And we see him turning on the way that he's gonna. He's gonna see this erotic desire, this wings of desire in a new way, right? That this earthly beauty is drawing him to the beauty of. Of virtue. But then you're right. Then. Then Cato comes, and it's interesting how there's all of this language of pastoral, right? Virgil is also A great poet of the pastoral life. And Cato comes and he's like a shepherd, and he's using his goad to goad them up the mountain. Start. And so I think that's another parallel between Cato and Christ. Cato here is acting as a good shepherd too, even though he looks a little curmudgeonly. He's doing the right thing. He's doing the good thing here. But what I love and say, and it's important to remember time too, right? When Dante arrives, it is the break of Easter Sunday in the year 1300. And so Hollander has a beautiful line at the end of this, of his commentary on Canto ii. He says, this is a song that they're singing, that as old as the Exodus and as new as the dawn which brings it this Easter Sunday morning on the shore of the mountain. And so Canto II once again is drawing us into this renewed pilgrimage and starts on Easter Sunday.
- [66:34]
A
Beautiful. I really liked what you said about the water and tying in that to the imagery of water typically throughout, say, the Old Testament, representing that chaos, that disorder, that death. So we think of even the creation of the world. The water was there, those primordial waters that the Spirit flooded above. And then, yeah, you have Noah, you have the crossing of the Jordan, you have Jonah, and then you all that is an analog then for Christ's baptism. Then we then cross through the water to become a new creature. So every baptism is an image, a microcosm of the creation of the world itself, since St. Paul tells us we're a new creature. So I appreciate you tethering that. I also want to tether it back to Odysseus. Here's a ship that does make it to Mount Purgatory. This is the right way to do this, through this humility. I also like what you said about they're singing a song that Dante wrote. I think we'll see this several times, that we'll see that pride is not purged until you actually start climbing the mountain properly. So typically, sometimes you can see Mount Purgatory in three general areas. You have the ante purgatory. Ante is an a N T E purgatory, like an antechamber. And so these are the people that haven't even started climbing yet. And we'll see who these people are. It's kind of interesting. And then there are the terraces that will go up and will purge you of these sins. And then at the top we'll see. Then there's this, you know, almost earthly paradise, this Garden of Eden. And these are like the three major areas of the mountain. So it is interesting here that you're going to see a few souls be spoken to who make comments. You're like, really? That's what we're saying in Purgatory. It's like, oh, yeah, Pride has not been purged. It's the first terrace you're going to get on your journey here. I do want to ask a question. Even though we spent a lot of time ferreting out Cato, I have another very particular question about a character. This surprised me the first time I read it. And it still kind of surprises me as we move through this. Why is Virgil still his guide? So it makes sense to me that the guy in limbo shows you all through hell. But why is the pagan that has to go back to hell the guide through purgatory? You think it. It could be someone like Cato? It could be another penitent sinner that they're going to go up. It would be a soul that. You know, one of the reasons that he picked Virgil is because there's this understanding that Virgil knew the road. He knew how to go through the Inferno. Virgil does not know how to go through Mount Purgatory. We'll see that in several of the cantos coming up where Virgil needs a guide. Virgil's like, wait, I don't know where to go. We gotta figure this out. Like, this is too steep. We gotta ask somebody. Why is Virgil still the guide? Moving through? What is everyone else who has grace?
- [69:15]
B
The only trace of tragedy that I still see in the Divine Comedy. And I don't see hell as tragic once you see the whole plan, maybe Virgil. And I think that. And I've confronted that question too, and I have some thoughts. I'm not sure whether they're correct, but Virgil is being given a gift here that no other unsaved person will ever experience, that he will get all the way to the top and not quite to the earthly paradise. Right? He'll get to see all of this and he'll be able to retell it in limbo, Right? That he can continue to be the poet in limbo in the Elysian Fields, as it were.
- [70:08]
A
Maybe.
- [70:09]
B
I mean, that's a position that could be challenged because it is confusing. That's why I keep stressing that Virgil and Dante are pilgrims together, that Dante the poet is increasing his closeness to Virgil. And indeed, Dante has to do something delicate because maestro mio, right? He's constantly referring to Virgil as his master. And that Language begins to be replaced by language of companionship and maybe equality. We could be talking about pride a little bit here, because then Dante is eventually going to surpass Virgil because he'll be able to sing of the three kingdoms and not just the one kingdom that Virgil was able to do so. It's a difficult question, the character of Virgil. I've had students in class shed tears about Virgil and Virgil's faith before, and I eyes have been a little watery myself about it. But Dante is sticking to the overall plan of salvation, the plan that's revealed through Christianity. But I also do want to stress that this middle part of the Comedy is where Dante's able to be the most creative. The doctrine of Purgatory during Dante's time is still in theological development. Not mean that they're inventing it in Dante's time. All right, there's some silly people that say, oh, they invented the 11th century, 12th century. That goes all the way back to early Christianity before, as I'm sure you talked about with Dr. Baxter. But Dante can let his imagination run here. But in the midst of that, still being rigidly scholastic about his presentation of the sins and the vices, but when he starts talking about anti purgatory and the earthly paradise being here at the top of the mountain in the southern hemisphere, this is just a poetic genius and we're able to just sit back and enjoy it. One of the greatest works of literature. Greatest, in my opinion. Sorry, I played my cards there. Sorry.
- [72:10]
A
No, very good. I agree 100%. It was surprising to me that Virgil was the guide. And then I was like, oh, I bet I know where this is going. It's going to be really interesting. And then the fate of Virgil at the end of Purgatorio, in my opinion, is gut wrenching. And maybe that's because I'm not formed. Because, you know, when we read the Inferno, we criticized those that have pity for the damned and X, Y and Z. But it's just. It's also so lackluster. I mean, I don't want to give everything away, but it's just, you read it, you're like, wait, that was it, that was it. And then it just kind of, you know, just drifts away. The only other thing I want to say about maybe Canto too is I thought it was really interesting talking about the issue of time, that Dante's friend here has been dead for a while and he's like, wait, how are you just getting here? So what, What's. Is this just a poetic thing? He has to do. Or what's happening here? Because he seems to have a waiting period. Like he. It's almost. It's very Greek. It's almost like Greek. And crossing to river, you know, to the land of the dead, where you have to wait for a while until the boatman carries you across. So that's probably another pagan foreshadowing antecedent that we haven't maybe made explicit that, you know, the crossing of the river and the boat into the Greek underworld seems to have an imaging in this scene as well, but was really fascinating to me is that here in the Christian sense, he also has a waiting where the souls wait for a while before they're ferried over to purgatory. I thought that was kind of fascinating. The.
- [73:38]
B
Well, I mean, it's not. In a certain sense, it's. The angel will take you when he's ready to take you, because it's not any of your effort anymore. That's. That's doing this. But then your. Your lack of desire is also holding it back. And we're going to see that again with Belaqua in a little while, too. Is this. They're. They're the laggard spirits that. They're not. They're just not. They're not. They're not ready to go yet. They're not ready to. To make the climb. And so that's part of their purification, too, is they have to finally come to the realization that, oh, I. It's time to climb, that I. I have to want to do this. And eventually they're all going to. But this. This state. I mean, you don't want to hang out in the city of the dead forever. You want the angel to take the cross, and then you don't want to wait like Belaqua just waiting at the gate. Because I just don't feel like it yet. And that's. That's Cato. Cato says, look, I hastened to my end, and you're not hastening to your end. And so you get the goad. You get the go to send you up the. Up the mountain. And so that's. Yeah. And Dante's, you know, playing with poetic license here a little bit. There's no doctrine that says we have to wait at Ostia until we need to get on the boat, but so we need to let him have his poetic license as well.
- [74:54]
A
Yeah. It's just interesting note that Purgatory begins on a different shore, and then you have to be ready to be brought over. And so these souls have kind of Already undergone a certain level, right, that they're now ready to do this. Okay, so that gets us into canto 3. So the anti purgatory, right? This kind of like chamber, this, this area before the mountain. So the mountain is kind of the purgation par excellence. That's, that's proper purgatory. But we have this foothills, if you will, of the mountain where certain souls dwell. So who are we introduced to here in Canto 3?
- [75:31]
B
Well, first we have, we have to.
- [75:34]
A
Virgil.
- [75:34]
B
We have to come back to Virgil because Virgil is starting to realize sort of the gravity of his position here, that he is not knowledgeable about this and that he is. He said, I drew closer to my true companion. How would I have come this far without him? Who would have led me up the mountain? But Virgil is beside himself with, with self reproach. And he praises Virgil, Virgil's class. Remember, Virgil didn't, at least in Dante, the poet's mind, Virgil didn't do anything positive wrong, right? He didn't have a sinner. And yet he's just encountered someone that he knew, likely personally, Cato, who is saved. And so just try to imagine the emotions that Dante is trying to communicate are going on in Virgil's heart right now. Oh, pure and noble conscience, how bitter is the sting of your least fault or the least fault? And so Virgil is. Virgil's having a moment here by himself. Virgil, you know, like the kids say, he can't even at this period. But then how does Virgil start to help Dante understand this? Why is it not Aristotle and Plato? And it gets to this very famous chiasm, right, that goes in this, that puts Mary and Plato on opposite sides. What a weird thing to do. And this is in, in lines 36, 42, 45. Why would you oppose Mary and Plato? I mean, because we, we, you know, us today, we love them both, right? We love Mary a lot more than Plato, but we love Plato a lot. But what did, what did they try to do? He says, and, and if you look at the, the ends of the lines here, so via quia maria and then quetato Plato turbato. So the likeness of the evocation of Mary. Why is Mary able to bring the way? It's because she didn't ask the why. She just accepted that it was the revelation of God. And so we rise with Mary in that way of humility. But Plato and Aristotle, they, like Odysseus, through their own unaided power, sought to understand the prop. Der. Quid, the why of things. And so they were. They Were unquiet, they were disturbed. Plato turbato, Plato is disturbed. They can't get there through that, through that way. And so as hard. Right. This is a hard saying who can listen to it is that when you are confronted with divine revelation, such as the one substance in three persons, you cannot ask the well, why is it the way? Why is it constituted the way it is? How can I comprehend God? Because Mary simply accepted, I am the handmaiden of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to your word. And that humility is the way to heaven. Just as Christ was humble and so as disquieting. We're disquieted because we. Like Plato. Plato was disquieted too, because he couldn't get there at the end of the day. And then he also is in these passages betraying his. This is a sort of a side note, his Dominican, his Thomistic predilections, right. He clearly accepts, you don't know that there was no need for Mary to give birth. And this is a theological controversy between the Franciscans and the Dominicans. The Franciscans think that, well, because God loved the world so much, even if we hadn't sinned, Christ would have become incarnate anyway. And Thomas Aquinas says, no, I don't think that's right. The purpose Christ came was to save us from that sin. And so he betrays his Dominican sensibilities here. But very, very important, very sad, very powerful set of tercets there. Contrasting Mary and Plato. Again, an unexpected comparison.
- [79:24]
A
It is an unexpected comparison. I mean, obviously the simplicity of Mary's yes is beautiful. But it's also interesting to me that a few things that occur to me, One, there's also a comparison of the hearts, which I find fascinating because Mary several times. So she has a simple yes to God, but Mary herself is not simple. And so she contemplates these things in her heart. We hear these things, you know, she hides them in her heart. She contemplates them in her heart. That's an interesting juxtaposition to the fact that then Plato has a disturbed heart. Like, I'd like to think about that more.
- [79:58]
B
Well, remember, Mary is the great theologian. Why, it's because she accepts as given the truths of divine revelation and then contemplates them. Plato, Aristotle tried to do it even though they didn't really know another way. They tried to do it on their own. They tried to mount up to heaven by themselves, which is in the end, Babel. Right? They try to do it on their Own without grace. Now it hurts us when we hear that because, well, how could they know? How could they do any other way? But he then points to. Look, there were images that were given to them in paganism that could have pointed them to this. As indeed we start to see with Cato that maybe it was possible that Cato was harrowed from hell too. It's interesting. So you've got Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Cato being harrowed from hell. Right. Because they did have that faith. So Virgil got so close, but he couldn't make that. What's necessary to please God is the act of faith which Dante is making. Perhaps, whether you believe it or not, he's making the claim that Cato had this act of faith somehow. He had an act of faith in a provident God that would come and. And save us.
- [81:11]
A
Yeah, it's just, it's. It creates a few things. It creates one such a high bar. Right. If Aristotle and Plato, in my mind particularly Plato, can't make it, because particularly, I think with Plato you see a desire to also live that which you teach.
- [81:28]
B
Right.
- [81:28]
A
Also particularly with Socrates, there's no way to divorce these two. If those two can't make it as pagans, then like, who else is going to make it?
- [81:37]
B
But it's rooted in our inability. Right. I can't do it by myself. We're not Pelagians. I can't make it happen. I can't pull myself up by my bootstraps and show God how good I am and then he's got to save me. And so this is the hard sayings. I mean, we're forced to confront this, not what we feel. I want Aristotle to go to heaven. Actually, there's an Eastern Orthodox legend that Plato was saved, that Plato did come to heaven. Okay. I'm going to say if Dante can have a poetic license in that too, we can hope that people like this may be saved because. And I think Dante invites that. Look, divine mercy can work in unexpected situations, but what are we given to work with? We're given the revelation of the Old and New Testaments and. And the teaching of the Church. And we have to work within that God may save whom he wills to save outside of the sacraments, outside of the Church. And we're going to see that in an interesting way with Manfred in a minute. But we can't ever. And we can't blame. Because Dante's giving us the possibility. Right. We don't have to accept that Cato is. And Aristotle isn't, but he's he's making a point about the mercy of God here. That's, that's extremely, that's extremely powerful and that it is Christ that saves us in the selves.
- [82:59]
A
Yeah, his soteriology is just fascinating to me. It's, it's just fascinating who he seems to extend grace to and who he does not. Because we'll see here actually very quickly. Like there's a few souls here who barely squeak in and I think his, the grace he extends to them is quite notable. Again, remember we had Muslims in limbo. We had all these things. I mean he, he has, he's not very rigid. I think that's one thing that people think like, oh, it's a, it's a medieval text. He's just going to be very black and white. But he just keeps surprising you like with Cato. And I think again, Cato being at the beginning of the Purgatory should be then an icon and image of what this scene is going to be like. I just, yeah, he just seems to be a bit hard on the Greeks and maybe that's my own modern sensibilities that, you know. I like that. No, we talked about that when we did the Gorgias. I had a few guys on from the Circe Institute who were orthodox and they talked about that. Like now we like this thing where, you know, the guy was being using Plato as a pejorative in the monastery and Plato came to him in a dream and said, why are you doing this? I was actually the first one. When Christ came in herald hell, I was the first one to run to him and accept him. I very much like that vision. I'm going to hold to it.
- [84:13]
B
I mean, there also is a real Saint Plato and a real saint Aristotle. And so these are our legitimate baptismal baby names. So I'd like to encourage all Catholic parents out there to use them.
- [84:25]
A
We need a play. D'oh. Garlic. I'm going to talk to my wife about that. Okay, so you mentioned several things here I thought were really fascinating. Again, like we've mentioned that Virgil needs a guide. So I think we just, it's one thing to track. So if you're a first time reader of the Purgatory, like, let's track Virgil. Something's happening with him. What do we learn from him as he kind of goes through this journey? Okay. But we then get kind of our first introduction to a group of souls. So we're kind of used to this. In the Inferno, he's going to go to an area he meets the souls he sees if he recognizes anyone, and he's like, oh, yeah, here's this soul, right? What's interesting here is the soul actually asks him, do you recognize me? Which I thought, again, that was. I'm not sure how to read that. That was one of those things. I'm like, okay, we haven't made it to the Terrace of Pride yet, so maybe this is something you can say. But who's this soul that he recognizes? Because I think it probably won't be scandalous for us, but I have a feeling it was very scandalous for his audience.
- [85:18]
B
Yes. Manfred. Manfred is the king of Sicily. Was the regent of Sicily, actually. And he is the son of Frederick ii, who's the great enemy of the Church in the first half of the 13th century and constantly fought against the Church, was excommunicated by the Church. Did some pretty bad stuff in his life. Now a lot of bad stuff was done to him, too. But no one in the Middle Ages would have expected Manfred to be saved. So Dante picked the one that would say, okay, think of your worst secular enemy today and say, Dante is putting him in purgatory on the way to heaven. And you're like, no way could that person ever be saved. That's how this hit. Like this is like a bomb falling onto a medieval Christian saying, a pious Christian saying that this guy is saved. And so he is. He's the last symbol of opposition to the. The line of Frederick that the Church eventually, eventually succeeds in 1266 in finishing the line of Frederick II. Brutal warfare that was. That went on. And so what does Dante want to emphasize here? He wants to emphasize the concept of late repentance, the possibility that you may repent of your sins at the last moment and that God is willing to save you as long as you are in the wayfaring state, body and soul are together. Dum spiro spero. You know, while I breathe, there is hope. And he wants to shock us into saying, oh, even Manfred could have been saved if he made this at the end. Now Manfred is. We get a couple interesting things. So. Well, he was excommunicated by the Church. I think a lot of people have this conception that if you're excommunicated, it's game over, right? There's no possibility for salvation forever. And this is a great people missing. Excommunication is one of the most misunderstood teachings and teachings in canon law. Teachings and theological excommunication is a very serious sentence by the Church that you've been cut off from the sacraments, that you've been cut off from concourse with other Christians because you've done something really bad. I think one of the ways that we've seen it recently is Mafiosi mafia bosses have been excommunicated by the Church. And I think there's a popular misconception. This means you're damned. The Church is saying, you're damned and going to hell. That is not what the Church is saying. Excommunication is meant to be medicinal. It's meant to be a last resort used to recall the person to their senses and saying that you are in danger of eternal damnation if you continue down this path with the idea that you need to repent as soon as possible. It is also possible because it is a juridical sentence of the Church. It's not infallible. Right. It's not something that says, well, there's an absolute. Because the Church has excommunicated people unjustly in the past. Several saints have been excommunicated and later achieved canonization. Just recently, St. Mary MacKillop was excommunicated by her bishop in Australia in the 19th century. And I was present at her canonization. And so. And this is recognized by the Church. There's a famous decreedal by Innocent III that says that the sentence of excommunication can be wrong because it's a juridical sentence, because it relies on human witnesses, because the Church can make an error in this. And so it wasn't shocking to say that somebody who was excommunicated could be saved. The shocking bit was that this person, Manfred, could be saved. So such a great sinner, or a byword for a great sinner, could be saved. But because of that, he's. Because of the authority of the Church, God is going to honor that. So he's going to have to wait 30 years extra before he can begin his journey up the hill once again. This is an invention of Dante. But he's trying to say the Church, the sentence of the Church, is very, very serious, even though in some cases it can be in error. And so Dante is once again, the hits just keep coming. All right. Purgatory is not going to be easy. Purgatory is going to challenge us the whole way up. And that's what I think he's doing with Manfred.
- [89:38]
A
I appreciate you parsing that out. I actually really liked. There's three tercets here, starting a little after. I guess this is 133 that I really thought was very catechetical. I thought was beautiful. He says, even under a curse like mine. No one's ever so lost that eternal love cannot come back as long as hope has any sprouts of green. It's true. The one who dies at war against the Holy Church without repenting until the end, must stay outside upon this slope as many years as he maintained his proud presumption times 30, unless the sentence is shortened through holy prayers. So a few things. Last time we talked about green, like regreening sprouts of green, there's a green theme, vitality, regrowth, etc. That comes into the purgatory. The. Also, my understanding here is that then it's every. For every year that you're excommunicated, you wait 30 years to climb.
- [90:41]
B
That's right. Yeah, I misspelled.
- [90:44]
A
That was my understanding of this. And then third, this brings in, I think, for the first time, or maybe not, the role of intercessory prayer, which is really fascinating.
- [90:54]
B
Right.
- [90:55]
A
Shortened through holy prayer. So maybe for those who aren't familiar, like one of the teachings of the Church is that we pray for the dead. So the Church, one of the things that the Catholic Church takes incredibly seriously is Christ's resurrection, that Christ defeated death. And so the Church, if you will, actually exists in three states. So we have the Church Militant, which is us. So we're fighting a good fight. We're running the race. Everything that St. Paul told us, like we're still in our pilgrimage, which is what Dante, the pilgrim's in. He's actually part of the Church Militant. There's also then the Church Triumphant. This is the part of the Church that's actually in heaven. They're enjoying the beatific vision, right? They're part of the Church. They're part of the body of Christ. But then there's the Church suffering or the Church penitent. These are those souls that are going through their purgation. They are configuring themselves to Christ as they ascend to God and preparing their souls for heaven. Right? No unclean thing can enter into heaven. And so one of the teachings of the Church is, is that particularly those of us here, the Church Militant should pray for the dead. We pray for those going through purgatory. They're in a state that we will be in, God willing, later in our life. And so we pray for them. And so I thought it was just really interesting, really beautiful here that you start seeing the role of intercessory prayer, of how it helps these pilgrims. The other thing that I don't think I appreciated until I was rereading this Passage is then why it's so fascinating and important to the penitent souls here that Dante is alive. And so we'll see this over and over again. They saw my body. We've already seen this a few times, actually. Where they see his body, they marvel at him. He casts a shadow. These types of things I didn't really appreciate the first time I read it. I read it much like the Inferno, which is like, okay, everyone's just like, bro, what are you doing? Like, how are you here and alive and have a body? But there's a. Which is there. I think that's. I think it's very much in this text as well. But there's a second shoe to drop here in which that means that Dante the pilgrim still has the capacity to pray for all the souls that he meets. And that's a very different dynamic that we didn't see in the Inferno in which people are asking him to remember them, to pray for them, to do these things when he goes back to living his life as a church militant because they covet those prayers because it can help them on their journey. It's a completely new dynamic that we see here in the Purgatory.
- [93:18]
B
It's that reconstitution of solidarity too. Right. The faithful departed are not gone. Right. There is the very special dead, as the early church called them. They're always there. And this is one of the ways the church discerned Purgatory too, because ever since the beginning of Christianity, we've been praying for the dead. And so practice precedes doctrine in that sense. Well, we're like, why would you pray for the dead? We don't pray for the people in hell. That's not going to help them. We don't pray for the people in heaven. So we must be praying for somebody. And if you look at, I mean, the first, we know that Christ prayed for the dead because he was a first century Jew as part of the synagogue liturgy. And so this is absolutely critical in reconstituting that proper community, the three levels of the church together.
- [94:01]
A
Yeah. And actually, even the Jews pray for the dead.
- [94:05]
B
Yeah. That's why we started the synagogue liturgy in the first century. We know Christ had prayed for the dead. Yeah.
- [94:09]
A
Even. Even prior to Christ. We see that in Maccabees, the Jews are already praying for the dead even prior to Christ. It's a Jewish practice.
- [94:15]
B
Okay.
- [94:16]
A
So before we get to Purgatory 4, I just want to make a side note because I think it's the only time that I actually follow the Franciscans over the Dominicans, or at least I'm very sympathetic to them, is the fact whether or not Christ's Incarnation would have happened without the Fall. So you mentioned that earlier. I think it's fascinating because I don't think I picked up on that. That shows his Thomistic thought process. The reason I want to mention it is because Canto 4 starts off, I think, with another deeply Thomistic concept that probably a lot of people. Ms. Baxter has a footnote which helped me catch it. But I just want to point out that I think the only time I ever follow the Franciscans on anything is the fact that I'm very partial to that understanding that the Incarnation was going to happen anyway. Probably a side debate that we could have. Actually, I can't even debate it. I actually just like it for poetic reasons.
- [95:03]
B
Please don't tell my Thomistic friends. I kind of inclined to that myself, but I'm gonna revoke my Thomas Cardiff if I say that too loud. So just let's leave that. When the Dominicans come on, make sure you don't say I said that.
- [95:15]
A
Yeah, we'll keep it a secret. It's very. Well, it's also very. If when you read the. I think that when you read a lot of the Eastern Greek Fathers, then it makes a lot of sense, like with the Incarnation as a miracle in of itself and what that was going to do for humanity anyway. So side note. But let's look at Canto 4. There's a very subtle Thomistic teaching here, I think, at the beginning. So if you look at. Well, maybe we'll just start here with the first two tercets. So again, I'm reading the Baxter translation. He says when one of our powers console burns about. I don't like. What does that even mean? And also it's interesting, like we were getting a narrative and then Dante starts off Dante the poet starts off Canto 4 with some psychology, which we're going to get a lot of actually in the Purgatory. What is happening in this terset.
- [96:01]
B
I mean, wait until the Paradiso, right? Whole sections on philosophy and theology are going to be just dropped into the middle of the narrative. So that's. Dante's preparing us for that here. But this doctrine of the unity of the soul was one of the great medieval debates. And in fact it was. Thomas Aquinas was condemned for. For holding this position. The common position was that we had a tripartite soul. There was a. Of course, the rational soul that we all have. Then there's the animal soul, the sensitive soul that governs us in the way that animals are governed. And then there's the third soul, the vegetative soul that controls nutrition, reproduction, involuntary things like that, because they couldn't conceive of how a spiritual power could control bodily functions. But in order for us to be, to be a composite substance, says Thomas, and he's getting this from the Arab commentators and from Aristotle himself, is for us to have one soul. And that soul has rational powers, and it has sensitive powers, and it has vegetative powers. Dante is actually right on the cutting edge of theology right here. And this is. I mean, you might as well wave the Thomistic flag as hard as you can here because he is clearly aligning himself with something that is getting, that was getting people condemned a couple decades before him. And it's, and it seems so strange to us because it's become the normative teaching of the Church that there are not three souls in us, that there are. There is one soul with, with powers. And those powers are differentiated according to the, the part of the, of the composite that they're controlling at that time. But that's, that's how much Thomism has, has come from its original, original days. We, we forget, we forget how outrageous Thomas was in some of his statements that when he was, when he was making these points of scandalizing to people.
- [97:53]
A
Do we want to talk about the actual. I think we've talked about this a little bit, but just the actual position of Mount Purgatory. So he talks a lot about this in four. And again, this is not my, my bailiwick when he kind of starts going into this. But my understanding of Mount Purgatory, correct me if I'm wrong. So you have, you kind of mentioned this earlier. You have the southern hemisphere, which they really don't know a whole lot about. So even when he was talking about the stars, I can see the stars in the southern hemisphere. That's a huge claim, because what stars.
- [98:25]
B
Would be up there?
- [98:25]
A
No one in Europe can actually see those stars.
- [98:27]
B
Right.
- [98:28]
A
So my understanding is that basically how this worked is Satan fell and Satan falls into the earth and that. And that him falling is what then carves out the pit of hell. But then he pushes out Mount Purgatory. And so then Mount Purgatory is then in the southern hemisphere coming out from the earth, then going up into, you know, the heavens, and we'll have the earthly, you know, garden, the earthly paradise, you know, at top. And so he does a lot of work, I think, to Try and explain. Because, like, as you mentioned, this is really his invention. He has a lot of work to try and explain where he thinks Purgatory actually is in the southern hemisphere.
- [99:07]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's supposed to be exactly opposite of Jerusalem. Right. So you got Jerusalem and the mountain. Purgatory is the promontory of the earth outside created by, by Satan's fall. And this is Dante's own creation. All right. This is not, not a lot of people think that, you know, the Garden of Eden was in Australia somewhere. That people usually think, well, I know it's in the Euphrates and Tigris river near there. And so this is Dante the poet just going forward here. But how appropriate, right? In the void left by hell, he creates the way that God will reconstitute us towards heaven. Right. With the earthly paradise at top. That one didn't work for a while. And so the mountain, we've got to climb the mountain back up through the work of grace to get back to the earthly paradise. But then it's going to be better. It's going to be better than the earthly paradise. And the earthly paradise is one of my favorite parts of the whole, of the, of the Divine Comedy. So that'll be something you can explore when you, when you get there. But, but you got, we've got a whole length to get through to get to the earthly paradise. So that's, that's very appropriate.
- [100:15]
A
I do enjoy the irony that Satan tries to have humanity deceived. There's the fall, etc, but then his fall then creates the mechanism by which then humanity will ascend to God. Right. There's a beautiful imagery there.
- [100:30]
B
Yeah. God will use bring good out of evil, out of the greatest evil that's ever been committed, which is the fall of Satan, the rebellion of the angels. It's the means for returning to God. It's, it's beautiful.
- [100:40]
A
Okay, so then we're introduced to someone else, which I found this really funny. So how do you pronounce his name?
- [100:48]
B
Belaqua, the beautiful water.
- [100:51]
A
Baxter has this wonderful footnote in which he states that this individual was a lute player and quote, the laziest man who ever lived. That's what he had the reputation for being, that he was the laziest human who has ever lived. So why are we beating this guy here in Anti Purgatory?
- [101:11]
B
There's a quip attributed to Dante that Dante saw Balacqua on the street one day and said, balacqua, if sitting can make a man wise, there is no one wiser than you. And so, yes, he was known as this, as this symbol of sloth and laziness. And we see him here just sitting there. He's not moving. All the other souls are moving and Balaqua is just sort of sitting there. But something happens, right? I mean, he is smiles, right? There's, there's, there's banter. You can imagine Dante's relief. It's like, Belaqua, you're here. I, I don't have to grieve for you. So it's clearly their friends. And what a friends, especially guy friends do is they, they bust on each other. And so they start, they start busting on each other just like it was, was old times. I mean, this is, this is friendship raised to, to, through, through divinity. Remember, friendship is going to be one of those key, one of those key things. So there's a smile, there's no grief here. Balaqua. It's going to take him a while, but even Balaqua, the laziest man alive, is going to, is going to get there. And why is he there for so long? It's because he was a late repentant. He didn't, he put off penance until the end, and he wants prayers too. And I also think if we talk about the cultural effect of Dante and how it continues to have a cultural effect, the Beckett's play Waiting for Godot is the world seen from the perspective of Belacqua. He says, what would the world like if I viewed it through Belaqua's eyes? And so if you haven't read that play, I mean, it's a very modernistic play, but it is, it is, it shows that Dante continues to cast a shadow over the entirety of the Western tradition, that even a minor character can be productive of one of the great works of dramatic literature in the 20th century. And so Balak was, while we're like, oh, gosh, he's so lazy. But I mean, it's really about, it's about friendship and it's about the late repentance and it's about the relief of a friend who now, because it's so difficult, you know, apart from a special revelation or, or a declaration, formal declaration of the church, we can't know that someone is in heaven for sure. But now he sees even his lazy friend is gonna, is gonna be in heaven. And that adds to his, his joy.
- [103:24]
A
I think just as a, as a reminder that occurs to me as you, as you kind of parse that out for us, is that, you know, Dante wrote a letter to his patron about how to read the Divine Comedy. And we've talked about this when we did the Inferno. But in brief, you know, he says, he has a huge claim, right? He says, well, you actually just read the Divine Comedy the same way you read scripture. And then he gives this like little catechesis on the four ways that you read scripture. So you have the literal, what does the, you know, actual author actually intend? What's the genre, et cetera. And then you have the allegorical, right? Is this thing a type? Does it stand for something else? Is this thing an analog for something else? And then you take both of those, and those really inform then a moral read. How does this apply to my life? And then you have the anagogical, not a word we use very often. But how does this apply to the end of my life, to my final fate, right? Where am I going to go? Is it heaven, hell, et cetera? And so I think that as you kind of mentioned, I think as we kind of read this, particularly during the season of Lent, is as Dante introduces these characters and also these certain faults that we're gonna see then being purged in purgatory. And it's gonna get a lot more structured and it's, it's very beautiful. And he does basically a little map of every vice and how that vice gets purged from the soul. I really invite people to have that moral read of not just laughing at the laziest man alive, but then saying, wait, how am I lazy? How am I a late repentant? Because that's what we're seeing here in anti person purgatory are the late repentance. So first we have the excommunicants, now we have like the lazy, the indolent.
- [104:57]
B
It's.
- [104:57]
A
It's Max, very much of a sadia. And we'll see that purged later on. But how am I like that? How do I have maybe a spiritual laziness that makes me a late repentant on maybe on my life as a whole, but also on like, particular things. So I would just invite people as you're reading this to not just soak up the literal and allegorical, but also have that moral read. How does this apply to me? And how can it make me a better person?
- [105:23]
B
It challenges us, right? Balacqua challenged us because he was a Christian, right? He was a Florentine Christian and he was a friend. Everybody liked him. So if I'm going through the motions of Christianity and I'm a generally good guy and people like me, that's not enough. This is guys at the bottom of Purgatory. He's lucky to be there because he finally repented late in his life. But, yeah, it should be a standing moral challenge to all of us who read these three of these texts. That's exactly how Dante wants us to read it as well, too. You're right.
- [105:56]
A
And still very much in need of his purgation. As he says, go yourself. If you're so spirited, you climb up the mountain. He hasn't really. I guess Cato's still going to be behind him, but it might be him. And then this guy are going to have to make it up. Cato's going to be right behind him. That's in the sequel. Okay, good. Any other thoughts on Canto 4?
- [106:18]
B
No, I think. I think we covered it. That's good.
- [106:22]
A
All right, then, let's go to our final Canto here.
- [106:25]
B
I do want to make one point in 90. He gives us a note about. The mountain is so fashioned. The climb is harder at the outset, and as one ascends, it becomes less toilsome. I think this is very important for us, that those first steps to virtue are hard. Right. That those. That the first climb. But once we start to do it, once we develop those habituations to virtue, it becomes easier. It becomes easier to be good and to do good once we do that. And we'll see that over the whole course of the perfect story. But that's important here at the outset. The beginning is hard. It's going to be hard to start, but it's not going to be hard to continue. And if we continue to reach the top, that's an important one I wanted to include there.
- [107:10]
A
Yeah, no, well said. That's a good call. Out. Okay, so let's look at Canto 5. So here in Canto 5, we are introduced to another group of souls, another group of the late Repentance, a particular type of group which I thought was interesting. These are the people who suffered violent deaths, but in the process of literally having a violent death, they are able to cry out and have mercy. And actually, the first time I read Purgatory, one of the most impactful stories was actually in this Canto, the one that for whatever reason, just like, impressed on my memory, which is this individual who I think is the son of someone that we saw down in the Inferno. But this individual. What's his name again, he's introduced at 88, right. Where basically he's lying. He's bleeding out. He's bleeding out so much. So you talk about late repentance. As I read this, it seems like he's waiting so long. He's bled out so much he's blind, like he can't even see anymore. And all he gets out is Maria, Mary. That's all he can get out with a single tear. And that's it, that's enough. And he's here. That was one of the most impactful stories, I think, for me, about God's grace, that this individual can live a disordered life, be dying as a result of his own sins. Wait, so long as he's bleeding out that he's blind and all he can get out is Maria. And God's grace still scoops him up.
- [108:46]
B
There is. I mean, there's a lot here. If we're going to look at it morally too. I mean, we, even in our age where we have medicine, we have longer lives than they had before. The specter of an immediate violent death is always there. It's always a possibility. And so these are meant to be moral exemplars for us as well. Maybe not put it off until you're bleeding out and you know, and are at your last moment of consciousness. But it also appeals to a very medieval type of that Mary is the last refuge of sinners, that God has a mother. God listens to his mother. Mary cares about believers deeply. And there's a massive genre of literature in the Middle Ages of exempla of people who are saved at the last moment simply by remembering the Blessed Mother. Because Mary is the one, not because of her, not saved through her. This is not Mariology or anything, but it's that. That last request for intercession, that last, please pray to your son on my behalf that I. That I may be saved. And so that's. That's. That's going on here. And notice. And then there's the tier too, the tier of repentance. He's got one tier. And also Dante makes an important point here that it's not just repentance that's needed at the last moment. And 55. It's that you have to repent and forgive at the last moment. That it's not just enough to say, oh darn, I'm going to go to hell. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. There has to be contemporary with that. Remember, forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against us. That's how we're asking for forgiveness. It's a terrifying line from the Our Father, that we're asking God to forgive us in the measure that we forgive. Terrifying. The more the more that you read it. Yeah.
- [110:39]
A
It's interesting, too, that you mentioned Our Father there, because this passage actually brings in both of those primary prayers. It has the Our Father and then also the Hail Mary, right where we. Every Hail Mary ends with asking Mary to intercede for us now and at the hour of our death. So every time you say Hail Mary, you're building up this intercession that at the hour of my death, which I don't know when that is, I'm asking Mary then to intercede for me at that moment. Here we see in the soul, him explicitly, you know, calling out. And I think maybe for those who are unfamiliar with that, I just want to maybe give a brief sketch of this. Of seeing Mary as an intercessor is actually a deeply biblical role. And so again, we read the comedy like we read Scripture, which means in scripture we also have these allegories, these types. And so you'll see then that, you know, Christ, son of David, he is the king. You see this, the Annunciation. He's the son of David. He is the return of the king that has come. And he brings the. He brings a Davidic kingdom. This is something I think that I didn't really have a great appreciation for until I converted. It's not just he's king, but he sits on David's throne. It's a Davidic kingdom. If you go back and look at the covenants that God made with David, it's that one of your descendants will sit on your throne. Your kingdom will shine like the sun. It will be eternal. And so the big question then is, is that in this Davidic kingdom, in this kind of, you know, Israelite kingdom, who is the queen? Well, it's actually the mother. And we see that's a queen mother. We're very, you know, we think of King Arthur and et cetera, but actually ancient near east, it's the mother. It also helps when you have like 400 wives. And so you pick the mom, right, to be the queen. And so we see this very clearly with Bathsheba. The Old Testament talks about this, in which Bathsheba's thrown is next to Solomon's. She sits on his right hand and people come and they have a petition, the king, they have some injustice, they want the king to do something, etc. And they'll often ask the queen to intercede for them. Sometimes they'll talk to the queen before they go to the king and say, can you put in a good word for me? Etc. The Queen Mother is an Intercessor for the people. And so, obviously, one of the easiest ways to read Scripture is that the Old Testament foreshadows the New, and the New Testament perfects the Old. And so do we see this relationship then in the New Testament? We do. And one of the most puzzling passages, actually, I think in the New Testament that John gives us, which is at the wedding of Cana, the people run out of wine, and Mary goes to her son, says, hey, you got to do something about this. And he tells her, my time has not yet come. And she basically ignores him and tells the servants, do whatever he tells you. And then the guy who just said, who also happens to be God, my time has not yet come, does what she asked and turns the water into wine.
- [113:17]
B
The last thing she says in Scripture that's recorded, she's there. She's there at the crucifixion, the resurrection with the young Church. She doesn't speak after that. That's her last recorded word. Do whatever he tells you.
- [113:28]
A
Which is, again, we see Mary then, particularly in the Catholic tradition, as the disciple par excellence because of that configuring. But here we see her playing a very queenly role of that intercessor of the people. And so that plays then into Catholic spirituality of, yes, we can go to Christ, yes, we can pray to Christ directly. He is the one mediator between us and the Father. But Mary, then is also an intercessor. She prays for us. Just like, you know, I would pray for you, you pray for me. Sometimes people, I think, overthink this. They're like, we only have one mediator. Well, you also probably ask people to pray for you. And so you. We come together as a family before God. But Mary plays a very specific role here. And so I think that for those who are unfamiliar, her being seen as this intercessor, particularly at the hour of our death, is a deep Catholic spirituality.
- [114:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's. I mean, it's clear in Luke, right? I mean, the angel comes and asks her to be the Mother of God. And I can't remember. It's in a poem by Carter Lumen. It said, the angel spoke and the universe held its breath. Without Mary, we would not have Christ. No, no Mary, no Christ. And so it's. It's that. It's that allegorical refutation of Adam and Eve, right? Adam and Eve. The Eve comes from the side of the old Adam, and the new Adam comes from the side of the new Eve. And this is the very prominent and early Christian. You don't have to go. But, you know, a couple generations within the church's tradition to find these meditations. So, yeah, it's very, very important for. For Gallex, but it's also important about who this. Who his father was. Guido de Montefeltro. And so this guy lives a horrible life and gets. Gets in right under the wire at the end of time. Because. Because. And this is another hard teaching for Christianity. Right. Why does this person who's bad their whole life get this chance to be saved right at the end? I mean, that's part of the mystery of God's mercy. But Guido de Montefeltro, who we've seen in. What was it? Canto 27. Right, 27 in the Inferno, he has this elaborate plan to be saved. Right. Well, I'm going to do all this bad stuff, but then I'm going to become a Franciscan friar at the end and I'll do all of these things and it'll make up for everything. And all of that careful planning is undone. And we have a reversal of the fight over the body. Right? The fight over the body of Francis and the devil go head to head, and the devil wins that one. And now here again, we have the angel, the devil, the demon. Can't believe that that's all it takes. Come on. To save him. You're going to save him based on that? But, yeah, so it's telling us a message about the mercy of God all the way to the end. It's not how carefully we plan out our own salvation, it's how we habituate ourselves to dispose ourselves for receiving the grace of Christ.
- [116:15]
A
Yeah. One of the. I think it's interesting that we get this reversal because I actually think that passage in the inferno of the Franciscan friar dying, mainly because he's gone back into a sin, right? So he's gone back into his life before being a friar and dies. And St. Francis comes to him, and the demon comes to him, but the demon drags him down to hell is a horrifying passage. Very horrifying. So I actually found it really comforting that here and his son, we get the reverse of that. That then actually hear. Then the. Is it the angel? Yeah, the angel of God took hold of me, but one from hell was shouting, o you from heaven, why deprive me? You take from us his everlasting part. He's carried off because he shed a tiny tear. But I will deal with what remains by other means. So it is interesting that he. Then he defiles the body.
- [117:05]
B
Right?
- [117:05]
A
The body remains unburied. Yeah. I just. I think that one thing that might surprise people as they read the Purgatorio is the mercy of God, particularly from this, like, medieval text. I think the medievals get a wrong reputation of being very rigid, and they didn't really think through these things and et cetera. But here we see with Dante, we saw this in the Inferno, too. He kind of obliterates that very quickly as you get into limbo. But here, then immediately with purgatory, we get Cato, we get these late repentance. There's a deep understanding of God's mercy. And I do want to tether this, though, to what you said, which I think is a common sentiment. How is this fair? And sometimes you see this, like, really dumb meme that's shared online sometimes of, like, Jesus with a child, and it's like, oh, look, Timmy, there's the guy in heaven who murdered your whole family. And that's supposed to be, like, some kind of own against Christianity, right? Well, there's two things there that I think are important. One is, like, we all make mistakes, and this mercy that can reach in and grab us even in the depths of our depravity, I think is something that all of us should hold to and something that we shouldn't be very willing to let go of anytime soon. But two, I want to stress something that I think is very misunderstood about the Christian life, and I did this last episode, too, and I think the Purgatory is going to show us this, is that the point of Christianity is not to avoid sin. That's not the point. The point is actually to configure ourselves to Christ. And so we kind of have this, like, egalitarian understanding of salvation, where it's like, oh, look, he saved. Just like you're saved, and we're all just in heaven together. Well, that's not. We're going to see throughout the comedy, and we'll have to wait till paradise to see it. I think completely played out that, yes, these late repentants make it in, but that doesn't actually mean they're on the same footing. They're going to experience heaven the same way as, like, the saint who dedicated his whole life or the mother of the family who called quietly lived a pious and virtuous life her whole life. That doesn't mean that there's this egalitarianism inside of heaven, and we're going to kind of see it in purgatory. We'll really see it in paradise. But I think that's something that people misunderstand that actually the point of the Christian life is to configure yourself to Christ. And the degree to which you configure yourself to Christ in this life affects your eternal relationship with God in heaven for all time.
- [119:28]
B
Absolutely. That's another thing. My students have a lot of difficulty that everyone who is saved is saved, but not all are equally saved. And this gets to questions of divine predilection. I mean, it's about that concept of fairness, right? The concept of distributive justice, punitive justice, are quite different, that this is not all equal. So yeah, these people are going to be saved. And that God wants all to be saved and to come to acknowledgement truth. But that, you know, that Bonconte would be on the same level as Mother Teresa is strains the imagination a little bit. But it is because I think the Middle Ages had a lot more of a concept of the sovereignty of God that is often lost, in fact among a lot of modern Christians and a lot of modern Catholics who become functional Pelagians at the end of the day. And it's like, you know, it's, you know, I earned this, you owe it to me, God. And that's, that's a really problematic way to approach divine revelation Christianity.
- [120:31]
A
I agree. And maybe just for anyone who's like terribly scandalized, I think the example that is given, that I think is very hopeful is that in heaven everyone's cup is basically filled and runneth over. But not everyone has the same size cup. And the size of the cup, and this is kind of a crude analogy, but the size of the cup is very much predicated upon your charity. You're configuring yourself to Jesus Christ in this life. I think that's important because in one way, we don't want to disparage the mercy of God that can have like these late repentance come in. It's incredibly, incredibly beautiful. But at the same time, that doesn't create a injustice against those who lived their whole life. I think you see this too played out very well in the parable of the talents and the workers, right? So the talent, no matter how much you worked in the field, at the end of the day the Master decides to give them all their same pay. And that's a parable about the fact that then we're all going to be saved. Even the late repentant who comes in, right, gets the same one as the one who then worked all day. But that's a distinct concept from then the fact how your charity can configure your soul to receive the beatific vision for all of eternity. So it's just because sometimes I think people's natural reaction is to feel something that's unjust here in a certain way. We have to push back against that. And another way we say no, actually there is a difference between how people will experience eternity.
- [121:57]
B
Yeah. The modern attitude seems to be, well, I don't know if heaven exists, but if it does exist, I'm owed it. It's just this absurd sort of self centered way of viewing these things is there needs to be pushback on that. And I mentioned that we don't always do a good job in communicating that through catechesis or sermons sometimes. And that's because that's another one of those hard teachings. Christianity has a lot of hard teachings. And one of the hardest to convince the modern world is that it's not all about you. That God is sovereign and that God loves whom he loves and disposes. Great. Puts grace where he wills all people to be saved. He gives everyone sufficient grace. But to some he gives extraordinary graces. And they don't put barriers to the operation of that grace in their lives. And so they become more closely conformed to Him. And so. Which is why one of my. One of my favorite characters, and now we're getting too far ahead in Paradiso is Picardo, the. The one at the very bottom of heaven and very happy to be where she is.
- [123:00]
A
Yeah, this goes. This tethers back to our previous conversation on the fact that you become more you as you pursue God. But you have to be comfortable with who you are and the gifts that he's given you and what those potentialities are that get actualized in your capacities. But as you draw closer to God, you come to know what those are and those will be completely filled and satisfied in Him. But everyone's different.
- [123:22]
B
Right.
- [123:24]
A
All right, very good. Okay. Any other kind of like, final thoughts? This has been fantastic. I appreciate you kind of getting us started on the right path, particularly with that deep dive into Cato. I think that's going to be incredibly efficacious as we have our own little journey up the mountain of purgatory here for this Lent. But any other kind of final thoughts on anything we've discussed or anything that we missed?
- [123:42]
B
Yeah, we've covered so much great territory. I just don't want to leave off without. Without giving a shout out to La pia here, Pia de Ptolemy, right at the end, four lines. And she's one of the most vivid characters in the. In The Divine Comedy produced poems and paintings of her. And it's beautiful that a great artist like Dante can produce a person. Lapia is sometimes more real to me than some of the people I see walking around on the street. And she only gets four lines at the very end. Please remember me who am La pia Siena made me and Maremma I was undone. He knows how the one who to marry me first gave the ring that held his stone. And, and so she's. The idea is that she was killed by her, by her husband, terrible tragedy. And that she, she repented at the end of whatever had caused this. We're left free to speculate what the sin might have been, but she repented at the end. But I do want to make, make a comment because one of the difficulties I have in teaching the Divine Comedy and it's. It really breaks down along gender is that often women, when I'm talking about the Divine Comedy will get very irritated about Dante's seeming adoration of Beatrice and his apparent neglect of his own family. And this really, this is a barrier to, I think particularly for women. And his wife is of the donaties. And so we know that there's some Donatis in the story. And his wife is, is Gemma De Donati. This when he's starting Purgatory, he's in one of the worst periods of his exile from Florence. And he ends here with the, the word con la sua Gemma. And it's some expected this is a message to his wife Gemma to apologizing for his, for his absence. And it's going to be recapitulated right at the end. I think he names his sons Peter, James and John. So at the very height of heaven you have St. Peter, St. James and St. John along with Beatrice. His daughter was Antonia who entered the religious life and became Sister Beatrice. And so I don't see Dante's family here absent from the text. I think in this little tiny. About a husband who is being unfaithful, not that he's being unfaithful in an immoral way. Dante in this case, that maybe this is one quiet reminder that he does remember his wife and that he's thinking about her in this very trying time.
- [126:26]
A
That's beautiful. I was laughing as you were reading that because actually this is one of my wife's biggest hang ups on the Divine Comedy. And when we actually we read the Comedy, excuse me, we read Dante's Inferno together out loud. I wrote it to my wife and to my daughter. And I can't remember somewhere early on like my first couple cantos, it clicked with my wife. She's like, wait, Beatrice isn't his wife? I'm like, no, no. It's like, where's his wife? She's like, well, she's having to take care of all the kids because he's exiled. And she's like, are you kidding me? He wrote this whole poem about some woman while his wife is back there taking care of his kids. And I'm like, well, yes, kinda. And so that's. It's really fascinating because I wonder how much you read that as a critique or as a self reflection on his part. Right. Did he bury something like that about his family in the text? That's fascinating to really think about. Okay, any other kind of final comments or thoughts?
- [127:26]
B
I think you're gonna have a great time going through the rest of the Purgatory. It's one of my favorites. The earthly paradise is great preparation for Easter Sunday. But here we are. The birth of the Vita Nuova, Dante's new life on Easter Sunday. You would maybe expect, oh, we get to heaven on Easter Sunday, but we don't. We're somewhere in the middle of Holy Week. It's Purgatory that we see the rebirth, the resurrection of Dante here. And that's always been very striking to me.
- [127:54]
A
Well, once again, Dr. Perler, we always appreciate you coming on. I think you always invite us to a very deep read of whatever we happen to have in front of us. So I deeply appreciate it. Where can people find out more about you and your work?
- [128:05]
B
They can go on to the University of Tulsa website. They can find links to my books I've just written. I write a lot about medieval studies. I write a lot about Thomas Aquinas. I love teaching about Dante. There's nothing I like than introducing college students to Dante better. You have a book, the Merchant Saint, that I've just co written with my good friend Paul Voss. Showing about what? The relationship between the church and the market. The church and merchants. The church in white collar work. And it's about the canonization of the first non royal lay saint in history. The good merchant Omabono of Cremona. A great saint and certainly not well known enough, particularly in the English speaking world.
- [128:48]
A
Wonderful. All right, everyone, keep joining us week after week as we journey through, through Dante's purgatorio. Next week we are discussing Cantos 6 through 12, the gate of purgatory and the first terrace. So we'll see how that works out. And we'll be joined actually by a friend of mine, headmaster of a classical school who will lead us through that side. So join us next week and check us out in the interim on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. And we appreciate all of our supporters and we will see you guys next week. Thank you.