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Today on the sand, the Great Books podcast, we have a fantastic conversation. Very much looking forward to it. We are going to ask ourselves whether lying is worse than violence. Is lying worse than blasphemy. Why are we asking these questions? Well, we're asking them because, as you know, if you've read Dante's Inferno, he structures his hell according to severity. And in Dante's Inferno, he puts the liars, the fraudulent, particularly the treacherous, in a lower, worse part of hell than he does those who engage in, say, murder or blasphemy. How can he make this claim? So, in other words, we are going to look at the spiritual harm of lying. Do we really understand the spiritual harm of lying? Do we really understand how contrary it is to both us and the reality of Jesus Christ? So we're going to do a deep dive into Dante, a deep dive into the philosophy of speech, and then we're going to look at the reality of Jesus Christ. It's going to be a deep dive into beautiful, complex, but introductory for those who are new conversation, looking into these subjects and seeing what we can learn to become more Christlike ourselves. And just one little reminder before we jump in, we are reading Homer's Odyssey this summer. We're going to do a new 12 week study of Homer's Odyssey with some fantastic thinkers. We're going to read it before the new movie comes out. If you've already read it and you're like, oh, I've already read the Odyssey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, reading it again, you will find more truth, more layers, more beauty. It's fantastic. It's actually incredibly refreshing to go back and visit a text that you've read deeply before. You think that's like, oh, I've got this, it's flat. It's not that at all. You will discover whole new treasure troves of truth, goodness and beauty. So please join us, but in the meantime, join us today for an excellent conversation on the spiritual harm of lying. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I live in rural Oklahoma with my wife and five children. I also serve as a Chancellor and General counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. In my free time, I like to help people read the great books. And so that's what we're doing here on Ascend the Great Books Podcast. We can be like a small group to you. We can help you read the great books. We've read the Iliad, the Odyssey, many of the Greek plays, Hesiod's Theogony, many of the Platonic dialogue, some really fantastic, fantastic conversations on the apology the Gorgias first Alcibiades. If you haven't read first Alcibiades, please go do so. It's a historic first dialogue that students of Plato would read. Some really fantastic conversations there. And we are gearing up for a new 12 week study on Homer's Odyssey. So we're going to do a 12 week study leading up to the new Christopher Nolan movie, which I now have to go see. And just really fantastic guests, fantastic LineUp. We start April 28th for that. So read book one of the Odyssey. We kick us off with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos of Wyoming Catholic. We also have Dr. Gregory Breyer has signed up. Dr. Alex Preu has signed up. Also Dr. Justin Jackson from Hillsdale is going to come back, has signed up as well. Just an all star cast to help us read the Odyssey. So that starts April 28th. Read book one. We'll go from there 12 weeks into the new Christopher Nolan movie. It's going to be fantastic. Then we've got some little things that we're going to do and then we launch into Plato's Republic. We've already recorded in the first four books. We're trying to record all of it before we start the beginning. So we have a fantastic guide. As many of you know, we have written guides to the great books to help you or your small group. So if any of that sounds great, please go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. Also we now have Instagram, so someone's running our Instagram account now, so go check that out. Our Facebook is also much more active, so if you know someone on Facebook, please tell them to go and check out that page so more people can find out about our good work here. And also I just want to say thank you to everyone who supports the podcast. This is a labor of love. It's supported by me and also by our support. So I very much appreciate everyone who supports us on Patreon. They have access to community chats and also to our written guides. We have a whole library of written guides on the great books and I appreciate them kind of bouncing ideas off them in the community chat as well. Just a good group of people. And so please support the podcast. Come join us in those conversations. And so what are we doing today? Today we're gonna have a good conversation. Today we're taking up a conversation that really struck me the first time that I read Dante's Inferno. So we're taking up the conversations. Is lying worse than murder? Or another way to say it is, what is the spiritual harm of lying? When we lie to one another, what is the spiritual harm that actually occurs? So how this conversation arises is the first time I read the Inferno, one of the things that really caught my attention is that Dante the poet, places people who flatter, who engage in flattery in a lower or worse section of hell than those who engage in murder or tyrants or suicides or blasphemers. And he puts liars way down into hell. And the lower, just, you know, briefly speaking, the lower you are in Dante's Inferno, the more severe the sin, the more it was a violation against love. So this really caught my attention the first time I read the Inferno is how could Dante make this claim that flatterers are in a lower section of hell than murderers? How is lying a worse sin than murder is? And this really led me to explore this subject and something that I've enjoyed contemplating. So a while back, I wrote an article about it called the Spiritual Harm of Lying over on our sister publication, the ascent, a top 100 substack in faith and spirituality. We write two articles per week on Christian spirituality, theosis, sanctification, but also very much entrenched in the great books as well. And it took off. It was a top article. I think it might still be the top article over there on the Ascent. Check out the show notes for a link to the Ascent. We'd love to have you join us over there as well. So I wanted to take that insight and kind of discuss it here on the podcast, because the podcast is always a great way to kind of go deeper and to kind of like, churn the soil, if you will, and see what else we can kind of unearth as we kind of go through these treasures of our Catholic faith of actually trying to understand this Christian spirituality in a deeper, more profound way. So where's our foothold? Where do we actually start this conversation? How are we going to kind of jump into this? Well, the first thing I think that we really need to understand is the Inferno. What's its purpose and what's its architecture? What's the architecture of hell? So, first off, if maybe you're not even familiar with the Inferno at all, you see Catholics quoting from it, like, what do Catholics actually think about the Inferno? Do they think it's, you know, the same level of Scripture does? Is Dante actually making claims of eschatology? Is actually claiming, like, this is what Hell will be like, this is what Purgatory will be like. This is what Heaven will be like. Is he like John on the island of Patmos? This is like a. A vision that he saw, a revelation he received. No, what Dante's trying to do is Dante's trying to save your soul. That's what Dante wants to do. So Dante the poet tells the story of Dante the pilgrim, the character of the story, traversing Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, going on this kind of fantastic journey in the afterlife. As a moral tale. It's there to teach you something about how to become more beautiful as Christ is beautiful. It's there to teach you about how to be virtuous. So the Inferno particularly is there to help you understand sin and the ugliness of sin. Dante the poet is amazing at taking the polite veneer that we put on human desire, disordered desire, and just rips it off. And he shows the ugliness underneath this ugliness of sin. So many things here in the earthly life that we just kind of downplay. We're polite about it. We say, that's not a big deal. And then we show the eternal ramifications of those type of decisions down in the Inferno. So the Inferno is very much there to show you the ugliness of sin and to get you to take sin seriously. And then in the Purgatorio, it will be about how is that sin going to be purged? And then in paradise, it's about ascending to become more godlike. And so what you need to understand is that Dante offers you the Divine Comedy, this overall story of these three parts, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, he offers you to them as a moral tale, because Dante the Pilgrim is an analog to humanity. Another way. Another way to think about it is we are Dante the pilgrim. So as Dante the pilgrim is learning these things about sin as he's being purged of sin, as he's ascending into the high heavens, it's really us with him. He invites you to come on this journey with him. And so there's a lot of things that you can learn in reading the Comedy, particularly because Dante wrote the Comedy to be read the same way you read Scripture. So you might know that we read Scripture according to the four senses. We talked about this last week when we talked about the kind of hidden allegorical meaning behind the endless winter in Narnia and what C.S. lewis was doing there. And so we looked at. We used Dante to kind of help understand that conversation as well. And so there we looked at the four senses of Scripture. We have the literal, the allegorical the moral, and the anagogical. And so these are the ways that we approach Dante's Inferno as well. He explicitly says that he wrote it to be read the same way that we read Scripture. And so Dante's purpose overall in writing the Inferno and the overall comedy is it is a moral tale. It's there to help you save your soul. It's there to help you become more beautiful, as Christ is beautiful. The Inferno particularly there then, is to help you understand the reality, the ugliness of sin. Okay, that's its purpose. So let's look at the structure of hell overall. So our claim is that Dante the poet is trying to save your soul. And so therefore, he's not necessarily making claims of like, here's what hell will actually really be like, but rather, the way he structures hell is supposed to be catechetical. The very structure or architecture of hell is pedagogical. It's there to teach you a lesson. So how can we start to maybe understand this? Well, one way to look at it is hell is characterized in two general large areas. First, you have upper Hell, and upper Hell is characterized by sins of incontinence. This means that an inability to control desires. So these were souls, these are the damned that could not bridle their appetites towards some good, which means they had an irrational connection to this particular good. So what would be sins of incontinence? Here you're going to get lust, gluttony, avarice, but also presented as both prodigality and miserliness. So a wastefulness and a stinginess. Why is that? Well, it's because it's two different disordered dispositions towards the same good. So even though it's the same good, it has two different dispositions that fell into disorder and then wrath, which is kind of interesting, because what Dante does there is he presents anger as a good. Wrath is an excess, an inability to control it. But there's also then on the other side, a deficiency. There's a soulliness, which can be seen also as an acadia, a lack of righteous anger, a lack of zeal itself. So these are the sins of incontinence. Then in the middle, you have the city of Dis, the city of Satan, which is where the heretics are punished. And Dante has a really fascinating take on heresy. It's very unique. He kind of deviates from St. Thomas Aquinas. He even talks about being a heretic according to nature. So you can be heretical according to even natural truths that you should know according to Reason, it's a really fascinating take, but that city of Dis, that ringed city there of the heretics, is kind of like the barrier between Upper Hell and then Lower Hell. Lower Hell, then, is characterized by sins of malice. So obviously, these are people who had an inability to control their desires as well. But the main distinguishing factor between them and Upper Hell is the fact that these were sinners, the damned, who had a benevolent will towards others. They had a malicious will towards others. So the seventh circle is characterized by violence. We see violence against others, violence against self, and even violence against God or nature. These acts that are so disordered, they constitute a violence against God's ordered creation. And then we get a. In the eighth circle, we get a kind of simple fraud. And then the ninth circle, we get treachery. So both eight and nine have to deal with fraud or different variations of lying. And as we've discussed, you have to know that even though you have Upper Hell and Lower Hell, as Hell moves downward, the sins become more severe. And so another way you could look at Hell's structure is that it's structured according to love. So obviously, the sins that are at the top, like lust, are the least offensive to love, when the sins at the bottom, like treachery, are the most offensive. Particularly if you're betraying those who had a special relationship to you, like your guests or your family or your country or your benefactors. These are, you know, things that should have ingrained in you, habituated into you a certain love, and you betray that love in treachery itself. So you can look at Hell as Upper Hell and Lower Hell, sins of incontinence and sins of malice. You can also look at Hell as being structured according to the severity of its violation against love. Another way to look at his Hell is actually, according to the Augustinian soul, according to the Platonic soul, that typically is structured in three major parts. The appetitive that loves pleasure, the spirited that loves glory, and the intellect that loves truth. And so you can actually see in the Inferno a certain inverted man, a man that has been turned upside down, which has always been kind of a sign of the Satanic. Because then it's not the intellect that's at the top, the hierarchy, but rather it's the appetitive. And so you can kind of see this imprinted on the very structure of Hell itself, where sins like lust and gluttony are at the top. Sins of violence, this kind of, like, disordered thematic, this disordered spiritedness that ends up being in tyranny ends up being in murder, etc. Is in the middle with seven, and then down at the bottom with fraud. This is a disordered use of your intellect. Your intellect has an appetite towards truth, and you've engaged in a disordered use of your intellect itself. And so that's another way to look at the structure of hell, is that it looks like an inverted man, a inverted hierarchy of the human soul itself. Okay, so if that is an overall mapping of Dante's Inferno, then let's become a little bit more granular. So again, the first time I read this, one of the juxtapositions that really caught my attention in the Inferno is that, okay, we're moving downward, we're getting more severe sins, and we run into the seventh circle, and we get sins like murder, being tyrants, mass murderers, etc. Then we get sins like suicide, sins like blasphemy, usury, sodomy, etc. We have all these terrible sins in the seventh circle. And then he goes to the eighth circle and you're like, wow, what are these sins going to be? And one of the very first sins he runs into in the eighth circle is flattery. You're like, what? How can that be true? How could flattery be a more severe sin than, say, murder? What is he doing here? And so in the overall context of the structure of hell, this is the question that we have to take up, is why does Dante put flattery in a lower section of hell than murder? Or rather, what is exactly the spiritual harm of lying? If we took seriously the spiritual harm of lying, would that help us understand the catechetical order in which Dante has presented hell to us? Okay, so two preliminary considerations as we start to kind of unravel this truth as we try to understand it. First, if we're going to understand lying, then we probably need to understand what is true and what is our working definition of truth. Again, the mind works from grammar to logic to rhetoric. You have to understand the grammar of things before you can move on to the logic, before you can understand then how to talk about them. The rhetoric as well. So when we say truth, what does that mean? Well, if we adopt St. Thomas Aquinas's definition, then truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. That is what truth is. Truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. And this can be a difficult grammatical point for us, because modern man always wants reality to adhere to his mind. So in our kind of modern sensibilities, truth starts as a perception of the individual. That's how atomized we are. That's how much we've kind of adopted a Luciferian understanding of freedom, is that I create truth. I create my reality in my mind, and dare I say, the minds of others have to adhere to the reality that I have made. But in truth, this is the exact opposite. That's a very Luciferian understanding of what freedom and truth is. When in reality, what we're trying to do is we're trying to conform our minds to reality because we want the order of the mind and the order of the reality to correspond to one another. And this is because we believe that God has created an intelligible reality, that reality is ordered. It's something that can be known. You see this say at the beginning of Romans, where St. Paul talks about people being held accountable according to their capacities to understand that the world is ordered and beautiful. And there's a natural law, there's a rule that man should know about how to act reasonably because he is a rational creature inside a rational cosmos. And because of this, he should understand then how he should act. And so man can conform his mind to reality. He can have truth. Now, why is this important for our conversation? Well, it's not only just what is truth, but I think the other thing we have to ask is, what is speech? Because we're talking about lying. And so we want to make sure that we kind of have our presuppositions taken care of. There's lots of grammar, lots of definitions there that we kind of skip over because everyone knows it, but that's not always the case. So first we really want to make sure we understand what truth is. Now we want to make sure we understand what speech is. And so when we talk about speech, one thing that's very interesting in the Catholic tradition is that speech is not neutral. It's not simply a neutral tool, but rather, speech has the purpose to convey truth. So everything has a telos, a teleology, an end, a purpose in life, because God, the Creator as the author of reality, has given all things a purpose. And so when we understand a thing's purpose, then we can understand whether or not that thing is good or bad. Because I understand its purpose. I also think can understand whether or not something's good or bad for that thing. So it would be a good example here. The proverbial example that we get in Plato's Republic is the knife. So if I understand that the purpose of the knife is to cut, then I can understand that a good knife would have to be sharp because that would adhere to its purpose. It would help it in its purpose. And also that a bad knife would be dull because in understanding its purpose, I would see that, oh no, it has this defect that's going to impede its actual purpose. I also then would understand what is good or bad for the knife. So things that would make the knife more sharp or more strong, more sturdy, so it could cut well, would be good. And we would call those virtues, things that would make the knife dull or brittle, which would impede its purpose. We would say those are vices. And so this is the very same thing that we do then with humanity. We understand that the purpose of humanity is to know, love, and serve God. And so in understanding that purpose, we can then tell what a good or bad person is. We can also then say what is good or bad for that person. So an understanding of things purpose understands and kind of unlocks how you should think about that thing. So this is why teleology, the study of purpose, the study of ends, is incredibly fruitful for your own intellectual journey. So here, what we're asking then is what is the telos of speech? What is its purpose? And we're claiming that speech has a purpose and the purpose is to convey truth. So if we understand the purpose of speech, then is to convey truth. We understand that when I speak to my neighbor, what I'm trying to understand or what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to help my neighbor's mind conform to reality. I want my speech to convey truth to them so their mind can correspond to reality. So this is our kind of two preliminary considerations. What is truth? Truth is a conformity of the mind to reality. What is speech? Well, speech has the purpose of sharing truth. I want to help my neighbor's mind conform to reality in many ways too. I might be seeking truth through my speech with my neighbor, but iron sharpens iron and we're both trying to to conform to reality together. This is the purpose of speech. Okay, so in this, let's revisit then what it means to lie to someone. So if truth is a conformity of the mind to reality, and speech, then has the purpose of trying to share truth with the other, then lying has the direct opposite purpose of what speech is intended for. It is a perverted and disordered type of speech that instead of conforming your neighbor's mind to reality, it actually conforms your neighbor's mind to an unreality, to a falsehood, to something that is artificial and fake. And this is incredibly detrimental to your Neighbor, because, as you know, going back to the soul of having three parts, the intellect that loves truth, the spirited that loves nobility, and the appetitive that loves pleasure, the intellect is the highest in that hierarchy. You have to know things. The soul then is led through its intellect, understanding these things and where it should go. So for the intellect to be hoodwinked, for the intellect to be deceived and conformed to something that is unreal only invites greater depravities and greater errors and greater mistakes into the soul itself, because it's no longer having truth, which is the conformity of the mind to reality, but rather the mind is now conforming to an unreality, a falsehood, which only is going to lead to greater and greater errors. Okay, now this might, you know, present that lying is. Is bad. Obviously it's bad to conform your neighbor's mind to an unreality, to a falsehood. But does it really deserve to be that low in hell? Does it really deserve to be lower in hell than murder? Well, one thing I think to think about here for Dante is a few things. One is that Dante's always going to take seriously that sins against the body are less severe than sins against the soul. What that means is that murdering someone is going to be a lesser sin for Dante than doing something that's actually detrimental to their soul, which could be detrimental to their own salvation. And one thing about lying is that as I mentioned earlier, lying tends to breed in the soul a host of other errors. Because when you step into a soul and you divorce that soul from reality, you actually offer it something that's artificial and fake, and you say, hey, adhere to this. This is reality. Then everything the soul does in adhering to that only leads to greater errors. And so that's one thing to think about, is that sins against the soul are always going to be more severe than sins against the body. Second, another way to look at it, just broadly speaking, is go back to the understanding that the structure of Hell itself reflects the inverted hierarchy of the soul. So the soul, again, is supposed to be intellect, the thematic and the appetitive. But in Hell, we broadly see the appetitive, the spirited, orthogonic, and the intellect. And so what we see then is that the hierarchy of man's soul, who he is, is inverted. And the reason for this is because the corruption of the best is the worst. The corruption of the highest is the lowest. Think of Lucifer. He moves from the highest creature in all of creation to the absolute worst when he's corrupted. And so the highest faculty your soul has is the intellectual. So when you pervert it, when you disorder it, through lying, through fraudulence, through this treachery, then what you create then is the absolute worst way that you could have a sin inside your soul. One of the worst ways that you could have a sin is to pervert your own intellect. And so this is another way simply to look at why Dante believes that sins like lying are worse than murder. Because the violence, the physicality of violence is not necessarily something that is unique amongst man. But man has the unique capacity to have an intellect, to have reason, to have speech and language. And for him to take those glorious divine, God given gifts and pervert them and disorder them, to hurt his neighbor, to have a malicious, benevolent will towards his neighbor, is a perversion of what is highest in him. And therefore it becomes the lowest. The corruption of the intellect into fraud becomes the greater sin, the greater severity. It's much worse than, say, violence or just general incontinence, which is devoid of a malice. All right, my friends, one second. Okay, let's jump back into the conversation. So here's the thing. I live in Oklahoma and I was recording the last episode and the tornado sirens went off, so I had to quit. So now I'm jumping back into this. So let's talk about lying and let's talk about why it is such an anti Christ act. Again, kind of exploring why is lying, fraudulent acts, treachery at the bottom of hell, Dante's Inferno. Okay, so here's one thing we need to know. We need to understand who Christ is if we're going to kind of unravel this mystery. So remember that at the beginning of the Gospel of St. John, it opens up that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This is a clear allusion to Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. John, the gospel writer, wants us to connect these two. What's really important though, particularly for our studies here, is that the word that John uses there is actually Logos, that in the beginning was the Logos. And this is an incredibly rich but multivalent term that we receive from the Greeks, that we receive from the Hellenized tradition. So what does this term actually mean? Because it must be important, because St. John has chosen this term to represent the second person of the Blessed Trinity, who later in John 1:14, becomes flesh, where he tells us that the Logos becomes flesh. So one of the questions we can ask here is, who is the second person of the Blessed Trinity? This Logos. And so we can start to kind of maybe work at the edges to understand a good definition of this term. So, like in the Republic, Socrates is seeking the logos of justice. He wants to understand the logos of things. And this is what's its rational order, its rational meaning? What is its definition? Do we understand its structure, its ordering principle? Aristotle will speak of the Logos and his rhetoric as a reasoned argument. You make a logos, you give a logos about something. You're not making argument from emotions. You're not appealing to character. You are simply making, like a syllogism. You are appealing to logic, a reasoned argument about something. And this really starts, I think, to form a working definition in our heads that logos really is the ordering principle of a thing. It's its definition, its structure. What is this thing? And what is it that gives it this particular meaning? It's the ordering principle of a thing. We see definitions of the Logos also in Heraclitus, and also it's not just the Greeks. So this focus on the Logos and its importance had already come in from the Greeks to Judaism to Jewish thought prior and actually during the time of Jesus Christ. Probably the best example of this is Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish philosopher who saw the Logos as this intermediary between man and God, that we come to understand that the creation has a structure, that the cosmos has an ordering principle to it. And so John really borrowed. Borrows all of this and uses it, I think, in a very unique way to say the second person of the Blessed Trinity is the ordering principle of all creation. The second person of the Blessed Trinity is the rational structure of reality itself. It is reason itself. And how do we know this? Well, notice again, John is very subtle. He is connecting this introduction of the Logos, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, as the Logos with Genesis, that phrase in the beginning. And recall, how does God the Father create in Genesis? He speaks this Logos, this word that gives structure to things. So the Father speaks, He says light, and light simply is. And so the Logos would be that which actually is giving structure to things. And even more than that, what's really interesting is that we see in Colossians that St. Paul draws on this theory as well, where obviously the Logos incarnate in flesh is Jesus Christ. And so St. Paul will tell us that it's not only through Jesus Christ the Logos, that all things are made, but are actually still held in being, meaning that it's not. How do you. How do we phrase this? Think of it this way. When the carpenter makes like a chair, the Carpenter and the chair are separate. Even though the carpenter is the efficient cause of turning the wood into a chair, the chair is actually separate from the carpenter. And this is particularly clear when, say, the chair is done. Carpenter over here. Chair over here. Even though where did the chair actually begin? It actually began in the mind of the carpenter. That's the first movement. The carpenter knows where he wants to take the wood. And so the final cause, the final end is the last in execution. We have a chair, but it's actually the first to make a movement because it actually first in cause, because it is in the mind of the carpenter. But here's what's interesting about God, is that God makes you, but you're not actually something apart from him. God plus creation doesn't equal anything more than what God already was. God makes you and holds you in being. So Christ, the Logos, both is that which all things were made and are still held in being. What does this even mean? Well, think of it this way. As the Blessed Virgin Mary was giving birth to Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ was also holding the Blessed Virgin Mary in existence. When the Roman centurions were mocking Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ was actually holding them in existence. He not only is the Creator, he still sustains them. Is there any kind of analogy that we can use? Well, St. Augustine will tell us that the Logos, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, is actually the divine mind. It is the mind of God in that all of creation are thoughts of God held inside the divine mind. And this gets very complex and very beautiful, actually. But I think for our purposes here, what we realize is that it's that same divine mind who became flesh in Jesus Christ. And so another way to look at the Incarnation is that the mind came to dwell amongst its thoughts. It's such a beautiful concept that the mind came to dwell amongst its thoughts, that God is dwelling amongst his thoughts, but also holding them together. And even if we think of something like Good Friday, all Christ would have had to do to end all of his suffering was simply to think otherwise. He didn't even need to call down the angels. He would simply have to think otherwise because he's holding the Romans, the nails, the wood of the cross. He's holding all of this in existence as the Logos. Okay, now what does any of that have to do. And that's a very quick sketch of a very beautiful but very complex concept which we've written on actually several times on the Ascent. So if you're interested in that, we have several articles that reference the Logos. But why is this germane to our current conversation on Dante and lying. Well, think of it this way. If Socrates wants to understand the Logos of justice, it's because he wants to understand its rational structure. And if you understand the rational structure of justice, you understand the truth of justice, because truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. So if I understand the actual, reasonable, ordered, structured reality of a thing, I understand the truth of it. My mind has conformed correctly to that thing. Okay, well, if you can come to understand the Logos of being itself, the Logos of all creation, if you could come to understand that, then you would understand the truth of all things. You would come to understand the truth about everything. And this is why in the Gospel we see that Christ doesn't say, I came to share a truth with you, or I have truths you need to know. He says, what? I am the truth. And he means that quite literally, because he is the ordering principle, the rational structure. Reason itself, of all creation incarnate in the man. Jesus Christ, in coming to know him, will introduce you to the truth of all things. The most basic, core, primal truth of our reality is found in the face of Jesus Christ. And so now tether this to our lesson on Dante. What do we learn here? Well, then, if you lie, this is then an act that is particularly an antichrist act. You are acting contrary to who Jesus Christ is as the truth, the Logos of all things. Every lie that you tell is actually moving people farther away from Jesus Christ because you're divorcing the mind from reality. And every time a mind moves further away from reality, it moves further away from Jesus Christ. And so Dante knows very deeply that when we abuse our intellects, when we engage in treachery, when we use our minds and our speech to engage in a lie, to engage in fraud, we are perverting the very image of God in us. Because remember, Christ is the image of the invisible God, and we are made in the image of God, therefore, we are made in the image of Christ. We too have a Logos. Pope Benedict XVI will use it in this way. He says, we too have a Logos. We have an intellect, a reason, something that we can use to help in our intellects, our minds, our souls, that our intellect can correspond to an ordered reality. We can come to know these things. But when we lie to ourselves, to God, to our neighbor, we then are divorcing these things not only just from simple truth, but also from the very reality of Jesus Christ and God himself. So here you can see, maybe even just scratching the surface, maybe just in a preliminary way, how lying is so contrary to Jesus Christ and the image of God in you. It's contrary to the Logos. It's an antichrist anti Logos act. And Dante thinks it's worse than murder. He thinks it's worse than being a tyrant. He thinks it's even worse than blasphemy. It is the very pit of hell, those who engaged in treachery. And this is a truth that Dante doesn't tell you. He shows you in his Divine Comedy, particularly in the Inferno. All right, my friends, I've enjoyed our conversation today. 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