Key to All Mythologies

Why does the discourse on love begin with the words of a minor character, Marco of Lombardy, rather than Virgil? Are Virgil’s discourses on love and free will more Augustinian or Aristotelian? Is love the only thing in the cosmos that does not diminish as it is shared? Light? What does it mean to say God is Love? Is God love? Is Virgil’s schematic approach to these questions an example of the limi...

Some questions discussed in this episode: Can love undo the damage inflicted – to the self and the the community – by envy? Is there a Golden Mean between vice and virtue? Just how Aristotelian was Dante anyway? How does the kind of person you are change the things you can (and cannot) see? What is the distinction between truth and fact? What does Dante means when he speaks of art as an “error” th...

Some questions discussed in this episode: What role does art have to play in the transformation of vice into virtue? What is the connection, if there is one, between the soul of the artist and the beauty of what they create? If virtue is properly presented by the artist, will it always be attractive, and vice always disgusting, to the audience? Why is this the where Dante worries the reader might...

We are now through Cato’s gate, and into the antechamber, the incorporeal coat-room, the final stage before Purgatory proper. Dante moves among the penitents as they receive their just punishments, and serve their allotted waiting times, before they can slowly make their way up the mountain, and eventually to Heaven. We discuss the delicate interplay of light and darkness, of faith in the unseen a...

We continue our climb up the mountain of Purgatory. Canto Four begins with a consideration of the meaning of prayer for the process of purgation. God, we are told, cannot hear the prayers of those passing through Purgatory, but their time on the mountain can be shortened by the prayers of the living. We discuss this rather strange piece of doctrine. Given what we learned in Hell about the very pre...

We join Dante and Virgil as they begin their climb up the mountain of Purgatory. Why is Cato, a pagan who lived before Christ and died by suicide, the honored guardian of that mountain? Does he have access to Heaven? If so, why only him and no other “virtuous pagans” (including Virgil)? We also reflect on the tragedy and meaning of Virgil’s fate, and what this fate might say about his supposed sta...

We arrive at the end of the Inferno, where Satan is frozen in a lake of ice. Dante’s Satan is a mechanistic creature, seemingly without agency, personality, or voice. His main function is to sit at the center of Hell, the lowest point in Dante’s hierarchical universe, where the flapping of his six wings freezes the landscape around him, and to allow Dante and Virgil to use his body as a ladder to...

We are now deep in Hell. Two of the sinners we encounter in canto 29 introduce a new wrinkle to the poem’s psychology. They seem to have some degree of self-knowledge about the justice of their punishment, or at least they refer to their own punishment as fitting. What does it mean to have self-knowledge post-damnation? It can’t be that sinner’s learn once condemned to Hell, can it? Is total self-...

Today we discuss Dante and Virgil’s encounter with Ulysses. The Greek hero gives a cavalier and almost rousing account of himself, spit from the flames eternally consuming him deep in the pits of Hell. Dante’s Ulysses recounts himself extending his famous wanderings beyond Ithaca, and out to the edge of the world, where God sends a whirlwind to destroy him and his ships. Of his wanderlust he says...

Today we take up a set of thorny questions surrounding the punishment of hypocrites in the 8th circle of the Inferno. What forms of corruption pollute the human spirit and the human community in especially damaging ways? What are the implications of the ease with which the demons in this circle trick Virgil, supposedly the embodiment of human reason? We also consider the meaning of a strange episo...

Simoniacs, sorcerers , barrators, and their just and fiery punishments. Are their punishments just? And should we rejoice in the punishments of those who are being justly punished? Does it seem that sorcerers are having a worse time of it than the other two categories? Why? Because they aspired to god-like powers? Ah, but who is more impious than one who thinks God shows partiality in His judgemen...

Cantos 16, 17, and 18 revolve around interactions with violent sinners from the recent political conflicts in Florence, Dante’s home city, and the city from which he was permanently exiled, shortly before he began work on the Comedy. What is the purpose of a poem aspiring to universality being laced with references to particular, local people – people who would have been long forgotten had they no...

[Special note: The Episode covering Cantos 10, 11, and 12 was lost to history and the fires of Hell/Zoom]. Friends, a periodic warning. This podcast is not about summary, nor content, nor entertainment, nor facts. This podcast aims for aporia. That is, we aim to begin in uncertainty, and to end in paradox, silence, and doubt. And, if nothing else, these aims at least we achieve…. Today we are disc...

In these Cantos Dante continues his journey deeper into Hell, guided by Virgil. They cross the river Styx, where the shades of the wrathful are boiling, and descend into the city of Dis, within which much of the rest of the Inferno will take place. What kind of character is Dante the pilgrim? Is he a hero? A Christian hero? Can a hero need a guide who babies, protects, and reassures him the way Vi...

Today we continue our journey into Hell, discussing cantos 4-6 of Dante’s Inferno. Canto 5 contains one of the most famous monologues in the Inferno, where the Italian countess Francesca da Rimini relates the tale of lust, woe, Romance literature, and murder that ends with her eternal punishment. Her story raises a host of interesting questions about love, free will, passion, reason, and rhetorica...

We begin our epic journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven, accompanied by Dante the poet, Dante the character created by the poet Dante, with Virgil our guide, and Beatrice our semi-divine benefactor. We spend most of our conversation today trying to orient ourselves in our strange new world. Why was Dante chosen by divine grace to be the one living soul to pass through Hell – and why is Virgi...

We finish Aristotle’s On the Soul , where, near the end of Book III, Aristotle claims, possibly, that there is, maybe, something of the soul, perhaps, which persists beyond death, in theory, and what persists of the soul might be thinking, potentially, or have something to do with thinking, or so they say. Can you think a thing in its being without recourse to any symbols? What kind of thought wou...

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, is it being at work sounding, despite the absence of one who is being at work hearing? The answer, obviously, is yes. And the answer is also no. This is Aristotle, after all. Join us as we discuss the Master of Those Who Know on the two-fold nature of hearing and seeing, the perils of explaining how you know that you know without getting...

Another over-stuffed, stimulating conversation on this very captivating, very ancient, shockingly modern text. We first discuss how Aristotle thinks about the relationship between teaching and learning, in light of his claim that the thinking soul is not properly altered (that is, moved) while being taught how to think. It’s quite a puzzle! About half-way through we transition to a fascinating con...

This is, no doubt, a dense and difficult text, where a lot of deep insights are packed into Aristotle’s short arguments. Our conversation is correspondingly slow and careful, but stick with us and you’ll be rewarded with a sense of Aristotle’s surprisingly fresh way of looking at motion, life, and the world of the senses, which is neither materialist nor spiritual, but something of a third way tha...

Here are the opening lines of today’s reading, which we parse in great detail: “Since we consider knowledge to be something beautiful and honored, and one sort more so than another, either on account of its precision or because it is about better and more wondrous things, on both these accounts we should with good reason rank the inquiry about the soul among the primary studies. And it seems that...

The novel concludes with a shocking act of sexual violence against young Tarwater, which propels him back to his home at Powderhead, and back to the grave of old Tarwater. Here, at last, he hears the voice of God speak within him, and he accepts his destiny as prophet of the Lord. The last we see of Tarwater is as he makes his way once again toward the dark city, “where the children of God lay sle...

This week we are discussing the end of part two, in which the novel confronts us, yet again, with the problem of freedom. Specifically the problem of freedom within the context of a Christian cosmology. Can anyone be said to be free and responsible for their actions, and if so where does that freedom lie? After all, we all have subconscious desires acting in us, we all have dispositions we didn’t...

Sometimes, perhaps, it feels to us as if there is meaning in human life, as if our suffering can be redeemed, as if God and the Devil are locked in an eternal struggle for our souls. Other times, it feels to us as if there is no meaning, as if nature and fate are indifferent to our suffering and nothing about it can be redeemed, as if God and the Devil are childish images leftover from our ignoran...

What is the place of true silence in human life? Not merely quiet, or even deafness, but the silence which strands you alone with the inner voice, that still, small voice we so often want to ignore, overwhelm, and obliterate. What is the meaning of that voice? And why do we seem so afraid to confront it? We take up these questions on our second of five episodes discussing Flannery O’Connor’s novel...