 Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praise their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Authority where we actually come today to one of the greatest authorities in all of literature, arguably the greatest poet ever. I will talk about the great Dante from Italy and the author of course of The Divine Comedy. So Dante was born in 1265 in the latter half of the 13th century and died in 1321. So he coincides with the High Middle Ages and what some people might consider to be the golden age of the church and of Catholicism. Certainly he was a golden age of philosophy. He was basically around at the same time as shortly after Thomas Aquinas, this great angelic doctor as he's known. This golden age of Christian philosophy of scholasticism and Christian theology is the age of Gothic architecture. There were also problems. I'm sometimes reminded when people say that the 13th or the 14th century is the time of Dante was the golden age or sometimes it's called the best of centuries. There was an historian called Father Walsh who wrote a book and it's called The Best of Centuries. I'm sometimes tempted to respond with the opening sentence of Charles Dickens's novel, A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times because there were bad things going on as well as always in the whole of human history. Augustine tells us it's a struggle between the city of God and the city of man in every generation. There's not a golden age in that sense, but certainly it was a great age with great things happening. One of the greatest was this great poem. Dante was exiled from Florence. He was involved, embroiled in the internecine politics of Florence, his hometown, his home city was, if you like, on the losing side of what you might call a political civil war there. He was forced into exile and spent the remainder of his life in exile, so from 1301 for the last 20 years of his life. Although he was already had a great reputation as a poet, especially for a series of poems called Vitan Nuova, The New Life, where he introduces us to his love, Beatrice, this great love of his life. And we'll obviously be saying more about her as we discuss the divine comedy. But it's really his masterpiece is the divine comedy. And he writes that in exile. He writes that as an exile. And indeed some of the politics of the poem, which we won't be concerning ourselves with primarily today, is connected, if you like, to the bitterness of the contemporary situation, the loneliness of the exile, the melancholy that goes with that, the anger that goes with that. So that's a backdrop, but it's the political backdrop and it's not the most important part of the poem. So we are going to look at the divine comedy now. And we have to understand that Dante is, in many respects, a disciple, obviously of Christ, he's a devout Catholic, but also a disciple of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor, this premier, the most important theologian and philosophy in the Church's history. And if Saint Thomas Aquinas is quite rightly called the angelic doctor, I think we can write quite rightly called Dante the angelic poet. So what do we see? We talked in our in our episode on the authority of the Holy Bible about the three faces of man shown to us by scripture and Fropos, homo viator and homo superbus. We see this in the divine comedy. So we see and Fropos, he who looks up in wonder. It's while Dante, the character in the story is in the dark wood of sin, he looks up and sees Mount purgatory and desires to escape from the darkness of sin in which he's trapped. So and of course, the look up. So if you look up from hell to purgatory, we look up from purgatory to heaven, we ascend to heaven, we continue to look up until we go through this hierarchy of saints. And then we and then we come and we see the mother of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and then she in turn points to the beatific vision of the Trinitarian God, the triune God with the figure of the incarnate God within it, this mystical moment of the climax of the poem. So it's all about looking up ultimately to God himself and Fropos, he who looks up, one aspect of who we are from the Greek word and Fropos from man as in anthropology, homo viator, man on a journey, because this is very much man on a quest. Dante, we have Dante the poet. We also have Dante, the character who the poet puts into his poem. So Dante is first of all, there's an element of you like autobiography, self reflection. Dante is looking at himself when he puts himself into the story. But there's also another sense in which Dante the character in the poem is an every man figure. He represents all of us. So homo viator man on a journey. And of course, the journey, the Odyssey, the quest that Dante is on is from the dark would have sinned descending through hell, ascending Mount Purgatory and then ascending into paradise into heaven. That's the journey. So this is man as man on a journey, man on a quest, the quest for heaven, man on a pilgrimage, following Christ, aiming for heaven. And then you have homo superbus, the proud man who refuses the journey. And of course, we see these the mirror to that held up to us. First of all, with Dante at the beginning of the dark would have sin, but also with souls in hell, who have chosen pride and selfishness over the quest. They've chosen themselves and they have nothing now but themselves for eternity, exiled by themselves from the presence of God. So homo superbus and thropos, homo viator, homo superbus. The Divine Comedy shows us who we are. We also have to be aware. And again, this goes back to our episode on the authority of the Bible, that Dante insisted that his own work should be read allegorically in the same way that Thomas Aquinas teaches that the Bible should be read allegorically with four levels of meaning, the literal meaning, the allegorical meaning, how the Old Testament relates to the new, the moral meaning, how what's in Scripture relates to us as individuals and what we should do. And then the anagogical meaning how all of it relates to eternity. Dante states specifically in a letter that his poem should be read in the same way that Thomas Aquinas says the Scripture should be read. So this should be a spiritual experience, which is going to teach us a great deal morally about ourselves and about our neighbor, and keep us in mind of the four last things death, judgment, heaven and hell, eternity. Now, one of the things I want to say about the way that Dante is often misread and mistort so often in an academic environment, whether it's high school or college, when Dante is taught or read, it's only the inferno that's read, it's only hell that's read. And this is scandalous. And there's some sort of myth, some sort of misunderstanding that it's because it's superior to the other two books of the divine comedy. That is absolute nonsense. It emphatically is not superior. It's part of the whole. The analogy I sometimes use is to only read the inferno to the exclusion of the purgatorio and the Paradiso is to only read the fellowship of the ring, and not the two towers or the return of the king as regards to Lord of the Rings. It's not a trilogy. The Lord of the Rings is called a trilogy. It's not a trilogy. It's one work with different parts. The divine comedy is exactly the same thing. The whole purpose of the divine comedy is to get Dante to the presence of God in the beatific vision in heaven, to cut him off when he gets down to the bottom of hell in the presence of Satan is obviously to miss the whole point in a very deep way. So if we're going to read the divine comedy, read all of it. If we're going to teach the divine comedy, teach all of it. If the objection might be, well, we don't have time to teach all of it. If that's the case, don't just read the inferno either read one of the others instead, the purgatorio or the Paradiso, not the inferno or do what I do, you know, each, the inferno has 34 sections to get Dante to it. The purgatorio and Paradiso have 33. So there's 100 in total. If you've only got time to teach one, what I do is I teach about 10 of the cantos from each part. So 10 from the inferno, 10 from the purgatorio, 10 from the Paradiso. So obviously you're missing bits out, but at least you've got the structure of the whole poem in mind. And you got it in balance and you've got the direction of the poems going, which is basically you only go descending the head in order to ascend out of hell towards heaven. So that's a very, very important lesson we need, we need to know. Another very, very interesting thing is about Dante's Italian. You know, we often think that, at least I often thought until I learned better, that Dante's Italian is going to be very difficult and very different from modern Italian. The parallel would be Chaucer's Middle English from modern English. And if you think Shakespeare is a little bit difficult, Chaucer's more difficult. So you think, well, Dante's Italian is even earlier than Chaucer's English, therefore it's going to be very difficult to understand. In actual fact, the Italian language has changed much less during that period of, what is it, that 800 years now, from the 700 years now, my math isn't very good, that's why I do literature, that the language has changed so much in that time, the English language compared with the Italian. And an Italian scholar told me that the better analogy is that Dante's Italian is a bit like Shakespeare's English. So it hasn't changed anywhere near as much as the English language at the same time. So one of the motives for us to learn Italian, I would suggest, is not merely so we can be good tourists or good pilgrims when we go to Italy or Rome, but that we can read Dante's Divine Comedy in the original language. Of course, if we can't do that, then we have no choice but to read it in translation. And then we have difficulties because T.S. Eliot said in his poem The Hollow Men, between the potency and the existence falls the shadow. In other words, between the potential and the power and the existence, a shadow falls. And that's certainly true of translation between the potency and the power of the original language and the translation of it, a shadow falls. It's never going to be as good as the original. But obviously, you want it to be as good as possible. One of the difficulties that translators have is that Dante invented a rhyme scheme for the Divine Comedy called Tetsa Rima, means third rhyme, which requires that not just having, you know, rhyming two words, two lines, you have to rely on three all the time and interconnecting. So it makes like a chain link fence in the form because it's very robust, very strong, almost say very masculine feel to the form of it. Most translators of the primary English don't even try to translate the Tetsa Rima because it's easier to rhyme in Italian than it is in English. So they don't try because the rhymes would be forced. This is however one of the reasons my favorite translation of the Divine Comedy is that what Dorothea Sayers and she does keep to the Tetsa Rima and it does mean occasionally the rhymes are forced or bad. But it does also give us gives us the feel for the form of the poem, what they actual structure, the feel, the architecture of it, we're seeing it formally in that way and I think that's important because Tetsa Rima is a very robust poetic form. So the other thing about it is because Dante doesn't write about fictional characters but about real historical people, many of whom would have been well known in his own day but not very well known at all today. To understand the poem in its depth, at its deepest, we need to have an addition which has very good notes, a very good annotation. So we got the context as to who these people were, why Dante put this particular person in the hell and this particular person in purgatory and this particular person in heaven. Of course, those in heaven are almost universally those that are canonized, that's an easy choice, there are a few exceptions. We could question and perhaps should question up to a point the extent to which Dante is being judgmental in placing fitness students people in hell, it's not for us to make that judgment. I think we do need to give him poetic license even when he gets it wrong and we know he's got it wrong at least one example because he puts a pope in hell for what he calls the great refusal and that was almost universally believed that he's referring to his contemporary Celestine the Fifth who resigned from the papacy, very holy, very holy man but was very unsuited for the responsibility of being pope and was being manipulated and used by cynical secular rulers with disastrous consequences so he resigns from the papacy and in consequence the person who's elected in his place is someone who Dante considers an enemy so in his anger or disgust at this resignation he places Celestine the Fifth in hell. The problem with that is that the Catholic Church has subsequently canonized Celestine the Fifth so Celestine the Fifth is actually a saint so we know that that Dante placed at least one saint in hell. This is all, this is really mentioned mostly apart from the fact that hope is interesting because it's funny what it shouldn't do is deter us from wanting to read the poem or to detract us from its merits. It's brilliant and the fact that Dante uses real people rather than imaginary characters gives realism to it particularly a pertinency especially to his own time that would not be there otherwise but I'm going to go through some of the characters in the poem who are also of course historical figures but they're characters in the poem the most important is Dante himself who puts himself in the poem and as I've said already he is both himself in other words this is self reflection it's quasi autobiographical but it's also he's our representative right he represents all of us he's an everyman figure so his journey is our journey we are all homo viato together we're all homo superbus together right the battle between good and evil fought out each individual human heart between the homo viato we call to be the homo superbus we're tempted to be and we're all meant to be keeping our eyes on heaven looking up and phopos so Dante it's doing what he's doing is doing what all of us should be doing okay and are doing all right so Virgil who's Dante's guide through hell and purgatory is really a symbol first of all he's Dante's mentor we discussed Virgil in the earlier episode clearly the ineared by Virgil is a major inspiration it's particularly the vision of the afterlife and the judgment of the dead that we see in in in the ineared by Virgil is a source of inspiration for Dante in his divine poem in divine comedy and clearly Dante reveres Virgil as the greatest poet so Virgil is a symbol not just of poetry not just of brilliance in that sense but he's also a symbol of human reason the furthest that human reason that can can can can get us without the additional help help of divine revelation how far can the human mind go towards God without God himself revealing himself to us so obviously when Christ reveals himself to us we we that we overnight with the gospel understand who God is the sort of God who God is and our relationship with that God much much better than would be possible if Christ did not reveal himself to us in the gospel but without that we can still come to a pretty good understanding that there must be a God there must be some sort of order the the pagan philosophers Plato and Aristotle came up with the triune splendor of the good the true and the beautiful it was a manifestation of the trinity in some sense so we can go so far so Virgil does that he understands sin so he can descend into hell and show us the levels of our own sin our own pride he can then ascend mount purgatory because it's still dealing with sin but now the repentance of sin and the forgiveness of sin but Dante cannot take uh sorry Virgil cannot take Dante up into heaven because human reason does not have access to the glory and mystery of heaven without it being revealed to us by Christ and we have Beatrice as the in some sense the god bearer symbolically she she she's one who who brings God her true Dante so she's been compared with the Eucharist with the church with grace and perhaps with a blessed virgin um uh but as there's an aspect I think of the poem which is part of Dante's ascent to and and and the divine comedy is an ascent in both senses of the word an ascent as in A S S E N T saying yes to grace and goodness and truth and beauty but also an ascent A S C E N T uh climbing towards God uh through his grace and with our cooperation with that grace um part of Dante's ascent to the will of God uh and his ascent towards God is the purification of his love for Beatrice so at the beginning of the story his love for Beatrice is perhaps as much as she's been a good influence on him uh as nonetheless it's solid shall we say by an element of eroticism by impurity and perhaps he has to have his love for her purified purged and and this and this journey is is how that happens but she's something you know an image of the divine feminine of the eternal feminine she's one of the most powerful female figures in all of literature in all of culture and then we have that there are characters we now have the places so the the story begins in the dark wood the dark wood of sin uh in in the middle of Dante's life Dante to use modern parlance modern terminology he's having a mid-life crisis he's lost the plot he's not um focused on on the things that matter um he's lost his bearings he's lost his orientation he's lost so he's in the dark wood of sin in this mid-life crisis and he can't escape and the reason he can't escape is every time he tries to to to get out to find his way out of the dark wood of sin he's prevented from leaving by three ravenous beasts uh the leopard the lion and the wolf each of which symbolize different types of sin so he can't escape the dark wood of sin because the beasts of sin that he's now in trapped by he's trapped by his own sinfulness and that prevents him escaping from the dark wood in which he's lost he needs help and we might remind ourselves of a bear wolf the last episode how how bear wolf shows us of the need uh that uh for for god's grace in the fight against evil well that's exactly what's needed here and we have this wonderful hierarchy of grace the hierarchy of the saints the communion of the saints the saints in communion with each other the communion of love with each other so Dante's lost the the uh the process of of uh of rescuing him the rescue mission if you like because that's what it is is set in place by the blessed virgin and the blessed virgin calls upon st lucy another female saint um and st lucy as her name signifies looks being the latin for light lucy is the patron saint of the blind for those who can't see Dante is blinded by sin he can't see clearly he's lost so the patron saint of the blind st lucy is sent by the blessed virgin to Beatrice to the woman whom Dante loves and the woman who loves Dante although her love for him is much more as much holier uh and and more pure than his for her and it's in it's she that takes the trip from heaven uh into uh uh the the highest reaches of hell the ante chamber uh to to to see Virgil and and she that uh asked Virgil to go on the mission to the darkwood and uh rescue uh Dante so we have this hierarchy the blessed virgin st lucy Beatrice Virgil and in order to escape from the darkwood of sin Dante and we have to look ourselves in the eye well how do we do that we have to look sin in the eye we have to understand the what sin is the destructiveness is destructiveness of it both to us and to others so the only way out of the darkwood of sin is to descend into hell uh abandon all hope all year the enter here unless of course you're being rescued to the darkwood of sin on a divine mission uh that was instigated by the blessed virgin in which case you will go through hell and see it without being damned by it so the damned as Dante says uh following some Thomas Aquinas following the great philosophers following reason are uh the damned are those who have lost the good of intellect all right to sin is to abandon reason and that's because the good the true and the beautiful are united as one as a triune splendor the goodness of love is can never be divorced from uh the uh from the uh the truth of reason the two are indissolubly married faith and reason love and reason so uh sinners have basically sin is madness uh the only true sanity is sanctity so the the damned are those who have lost the good of intellect they've abandoned their reason for appetite um or formalis so uh when we descend through hell we get to the very bottom of hell which is at the center of the earth we find satan devouring for eternity um uh the worst of the sinners and satan is the center of gravity this is actually this great humor here GK Chesterton said the angels can fly because they take themselves lightly whereas the devil fell by the force of his own gravity right to be homo superbus to be proud is to take ourselves far too seriously to think that we are god and we can decide what's right and wrong and we can do our own thing so take ourselves much too seriously with very self-destructive consequences so right at the bottom of hell is the is the is the person who takes himself far too seriously the devil who falls by the the weight of his own gravity and then we emerge from hell and one thing we need to say here where does where is where is dante find himself or sorry when is dante find dante find himself in the dark would have seen on the evening of maundy thursday holy thursday he descends into hell on good friday right what what we do when we sin we nail christ to the cross and we nail ourselves to the cross to our own cross and we nail others to the cross so he descends on good friday and then holy holy saturday and then he emerges from climbs out of hell to the foot of mount purgatory he can see the stars again see the the the goodness of god's creation the stars above his head and flowpost looking up and that this happens on easter sunday morning he looks once more at the stars of god's creation he rises from the dead um and then we arrive halfway up mount purgatory at st peter's gate and we normally think of st peter's gate as the gate to heaven and again this is dante being a good theologian because purgatory is heaven right it's the one-way street it's where we get where we take a shower before we before we enter the presence of god and where we where we where we are purged and cleansed of our sins so the the three steps to st peter's gate the first is of white marble that's so shiny it's like a mirror this is the examination of conscience this follows exactly the catholic sacrament of penance confession so we look at ourselves the first step in the mirror this white marble polished an examination of conscience the next step step of the three steps to st peter's gate is black and it's cracked in both directions so the crack forms a cross and this is contrition to see the consequences of our sins in the crucifixion of our lord and then the third one is redder than spurting blood it's the satisfaction the blood of christ the blood of the lamb is enough to purge us of our sins if we have contrition for those sins having examined our conscience so having gone through this process of confession according to the sacraments we enter upper purgatory and then from that moment onwards dante pleas for mercy and beats his breast thrice three times remind us of the mass we do it in the mass three times maya corpa maya corpa maya maxima corpa through my fault through my fault through my most grievous fault or dominate nonsumdinius in the in the traditional mass three times dominate nonsumdinius dominate nonsumdinius dominate nonsumdinius lord i am not worthy lord i am not worthy lord i am not worthy maya corpa and dominate nonsumdinius is what's on the lips of dante as he then ascends mount purgatory he seven peas are put on his forward pee for Picarta, for sin in Latin, and as they reach new levels, each of those seven sins, those seven deadly sins is erased. And at the top of Mount Purgatory is the earthly paradise, that place of primal innocence, where we get back to our unsullied, unstained Edenic, you know, the Adam and Eve, unfallen Adam and Eve state. And it's only when we reach that state of purity, we can then ascend into heaven into the presence of Christ and His saints. It's interesting, in the earthly paradise, Dante is presented over the pageant of the church, salvation history, and the blessed sacrament, which is based upon the Corpus Christi procession. So it's very sacramental, very Eucharistic. Then when Dante sends into heaven, the spokesman for the wise, spokesman of wisdom of the wise is not surprisingly and appropriately enough, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante's own mentor philosophically and theologically. Aquinas waxes lyrical about St. Francis and his wedding, his marriage to Lady Poverty. And then Bonaventure waxes lyrical about St. Dominic. And this is reconciliation. There were tensions in Dante's time between the two newly founded orders that had only been founded earlier in the century, in the previous century, the Dominican order and the Franciscan order. And the Dominicans and the Franciscans were often, there's a tension between them. So what does Dante do? He has St. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican praising St. Francis, the founder of the Franciscans. And he has St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan praising St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominicans. There are no civil wars in heaven. There is true peace and reconciliation. And then as Dante gets higher and higher in the various circles of heaven, he's examined in faith by St. Peter. He's examined in hope by St. James. And he's examined in love by St. John. And then we see right at the end, Dante's love for Beatrice is purified and perfected. And then Dante beholds the Blessed Virgin and the Blessed Virgin herself turns as they all turn towards the Beatific Vision to the vision of Christ within the Trinity. And Dante's greater poet as he is has to confess at this point that words fail him. Even the greatest poet cannot show the Beatific Vision. It can just suggest it. The great Catholic novelist Convert Morris Behring said that if great art is defined by how it is finished, how it is ended, then the Divine Comedy is the greatest work of art ever because of the way that it ends with the Beatific Vision. The whole of the poem is an ascent to this climactic moment. And then T. S. Eliot, the greatest poet of the 20th century, said of Dante that he's just been reading. He used to carry a copy of Dante in the original Italian round in his pocket. And he said, whenever I've returned to Dante and read Dante, I feel so inferior in his presence that all I feel I can do is to point to him and be silent. And that's what I'm going to do now at this point at the end of this episode of The Authority. I am going to point to the next episode, which is on the Segwayne and the Green Knight Poet. And until then, thank you for joining me in The Authority. Until next time, goodbye and God bless. This has been an episode of The Authority with Joseph Pierce, brought to you by Tan. For updates on new episodes and to support The Authority and other great free content, visit theauthoritypodcast.com to subscribe and use coupon code authority25 to get 25% off your next order, including books, audio books, and video courses by Joseph Pierce, on literary giants such as Tolkien, Chesterton, Lewis, Shakespeare, and Belloc, as well as Tan's extensive catalog of content from the saints and great spiritual masters to strengthen your faith and interior life. To follow Joseph and support his work, check out his blog and sign up for email updates and exclusive content at jpearse.co. And thanks for listening.