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Divine Comedy

Media – Divine Comedy reading

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s the first few lines of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, an epic poem widely regarded as one of the most important works of Western literature.

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way
I found myself within a shadowed forest
For I had lost the path that does not stray

It was read there by Italian actor and film director Roberto Benigni who is probably best known for his Oscar-winning role in the film Life is Beautiful – and jumping over the chairs at the Academy Awards to collect his prize. The Divine Comedy is always in the list of books every person should read before they die. Perhaps you’ve tried, and never made it past those first few lines. Perhaps you only know one line – Abandon hope, all ye who enter here (which is from Canto 3). Or perhaps you’ve never read even one line. Still, I’d wager that some of your mental images of the after life take inspiration from The Divine Comedy.  Dante’s vivid, poetic images of hell, purgatory, and heaven, have been endlessly adapted, referenced and used as inspiration since it was first published in 1320, a sneaky 705 years ago! It’s been illustrated in Mickey Mouse comics and X-Men comics. It’s been painted by the masters:  Botticelli and Blake, Delacroix and Dali. It’s been turned into sculpture by Rodin. Scenes from The Divine Comedy have inspired films, novels, poems, and whole television series. Dante gave us plenty to use. The Divine Comedy is 14,233 lines, split into three parts, or ‘canticles’ – The Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso – Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. He wasn’t the first to use the afterlife as inspiration for literature, but his depiction became standard for those who came after. The great 20th-century poet T.S. Eliot said of him: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.” Dante’s vision of the afterlife is speculative and highly pictorial. Dante himself was a Christian believer – extremely well-versed in the scriptures. He knew what was in it … and what wasn’t. He wasn’t claiming to offer us a vision of what hell and heaven are actually like. And, in any case, even though the Divine Comedy is set in the afterlife, it’s really about how we live life here and now. It is an almighty challenge to our world’s glib approaches to greedy, lust, violence, and betrayal and a divine call to love. Get ready, all ye who enter here, to be changed. I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions. 

Undeceptions theme

John Took:
Hmm, well, you are quite right. Uh, Dante does matter and probably that’s the best place to begin by, uh, stressing his permanent presence to us, which will come on to talk about him in a little bit, which is why we spend time with him.

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s John Took, Professor Emeritus of Dante Studies at University College London, and author of Why Dante Matters published by Bloomsbury. John has dedicated his life to the study of Dante’s works. I met John in London and we spoke for well over an hour, and we could have gone on much, much longer. He is our main guide for this episode.

John Dickson:
So let’s, let’s begin with the man. Who was he? 

John Took:
Well, Dante was Florentine Florentine. He was born in 1265 uh, in Florence. If you haven’t been to Florence, go there yourself. My heart is in Florence.

John Dickson:
It’s a wonderful place. It is an amazing city.

John Took:
He was born in Florence of, um,it was, his family was, uh, of the nobility, but the lesser end of, nobility. It was not particularly well to do. And, uh, Dante was, uh, interested in civic affairs, political affairs. Uh, he got engaged in the council’s, uh, um, the, uh corridors of power, uh, for the first part of his life. he was a poetic spirit … He was much influenced by the tradition of, uh, Italian vernacular literature, which goes back as he himself says some 150 years, uh, before his own, uh, his own activity.

John Dickson – Studio:

Dante wrote in the local vernacular of Florence—Tuscan—which he called Lingua volgare, “the common tongue.” It eventually became the basis of modern Italian. At a time when Latin dominated scholarship and literature, his choice to write in the vernacular was revolutionary. How showed that Italian could be eloquent and poetic, while making his spiritual ideas accessible to ordinary people. It’s a bit like Reformers like Martin Luther insisting on translating the Bible into common languages—but that was 200 years later. Dante is often called “The Father of the Italian Language,” and since 2020, Italy has marked March 25 as “Dante Day” to honour his influence.…

John Took:
The first book, which he wrote, was a collection of these, uh, 31 of these lyric poems, and he called it New Life. Vita Nova, New Life. Now then this, uh, as i say, it’s going to resonate all the way throughout uh, here. New Life. The Vita Nova has everything to do with an understanding of love. What is love? I remember when I discussed this with undergraduates. I would say, what is and all the undergraduates would put their hand up because they were in love. But then I’d say, what is love? Oh, I don’t know about that. Uh, what is love?Dante, at the beginning of the Vito Nova, sees love, uh, as something which, uh, as I say, uh, comes to self, uh, from beyond. Um, and it is a, uh,a sort of rather self-regarding passion of the soul. Whereas in his encounter his lady love – Beatrice, Dante’s Beatrice, most people who know anything about Dante know about, uh, have heard the name of Beatrice and the name of the Inferno, Inferno and Beatrice. Mm-hmm. Beatrice the one who brings blessing. That’s what the main name means. His encounter with Beatrice opens up a new understanding of love and it becomes a principle of, uh, an opening out of self a a, a self transfiguration – love as a principle of, of transfiguration, and again, bear this in mind for the Commedia because when we come the Paradiso –  Dante has, uh, a, he makes up his own words. a trans humanization: love as a principle of ulterior becoming.

John Dickson – Studio:

“Love as a principle of ulterior becoming” sounds deep, but it’s really simple. John Took means that Love moves us beyond what we are to what we’re meant to be—ulterior just means ‘beyond.’ It’s the opposite of our modern ideal of “being yourself.” What a low bar! I don’t want to be myself, with all my weaknesses and failings. I want to move beyond myself. That’s the idea in Dante’s Divine Comedy: Love moves us beyond. Dante’s idea of love evolves through his early works. In Vita Nuova, he moves from romantic love to a spiritual one with his muse, Beatrice. It’s no coincidence he chooses Virgil as his guide in The Divine Comedy—Virgil is the first-century BC Roman poet who wrote The Aeneid, the classic epic of Rome’s founding. He also penned the immortal words: Omnia vincit amor; et nos cedamus Amori—“Love conquers all; let us too yield to love.” For Virgil, this all-conquering love was romantic love—driving people to great exploits and deep despair, and to which we are all powerless, he thought. Dante elevates this idea, seeing love as a majestic driving force in life that moves us toward various things: disordered love drives us down to Inferno; divine love draws us to Paradiso. As with so much in Western thinking, the fifth-century theologian Augustine provided the framework.

Reading

But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally. (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28)

John Took:
The Vita Nova was written in 1293 or 1294 thereabouts.The, the, uh, the chronology is slightly uncertain, but that is his first important work. Then to be very brief about this, the next important work, uh, is, uh, in addition to a continuing series of lyric, poems, uh, the Convivio. Convivio – Means Feast. The Convivio was, uh, a post exilic, and I’ll come to Dante’s Exile in a moment. A,It was, it was, it was written after Dante’s exile at the beginning of 1302, And it is a feast laid upon, uh, laid out for his compatriots. I’m going to place before you what it means, uh, to be, to know classical authors uh, to rejoice in them, to assimilate them to oneself.

John Dickson:
The setting itself is classical, isn’t it? The symposium, yes.

John Took:
Yes. Yes. A symposium that is exactly right. It is a symposium. It’s incomplete.It’s in,uh,it intended by Dante to be in 15 book, but he completed only four of them. But those four books pulsate with this Dante, and commitment to the importance of the classical text Um, and a thoughtfulness, a thoughtful response to the classical text in the interest of a revised humanity – a new life. All Dante’s work. I can’t stress this strongly enough – All Dante’s work has to do with new life, with an ulterior becoming, with a resurrection of the spirit.

John Dickson:
Mm-hmm. I want to, before, before we, um, talk about the exile, can, can we just wind back and tell me something about his education? What do we, what can we tell about his education? ’cause some people maybe listening, thinking 13th century, that’s before people knew anything, isn’t it? So they’re thinking dark ages. Um, tell us how, how a man like Dante was so widely educated.

John Took:
Do away momentarily with expression, dark ages, um, that, that won’t do. Uh, Dante lived in Florence and in Florence, uh, there were three centers, a Dominican, center, a Franciscan Center, and an Augustinian Center of Learning, which were very rich. Santa Maria Maggiore, which is over near where Florence Station is at the  moment. That was the Dominican Center. Now the, what does that mean? That means that to Dante there studied, heard relished. um, uh, those texts, that tradition of medieval thinking, which set out to bring home Aristotle particularly, but not only Aristotle.

John Dickson:
So that’s Albert the Great and Aquinas – that track?

John Took:
Yes. Albert the Great Thomas Aquinas. And then the followers of Thomas Aquinas in Florence, there are a number of them. Um, Dante would’ve heard lectures, and he would’ve heard, um, these lectures and he would’ve simulated and rejoiced in the presence of the classical poets and the way that they are brought  home, um, to Christianity. Now that, that needs a careful statement, doesn’t it? Because Dante’s faith and the faith of a Thomas Aquinas is a Christian faith, but there is an emphasis there on the way in which Christianity for all its grace, it’s givenness by God to man, it’s, uh, it’s opening up by God, uh, to man nonetheless stands to be reasoned. I mean, think about our Christianity, we structure our lives here and now, and that is what is going on in the Neo aristotelians, the Christian Aristotelians. They were those who, who thought it was a bit of a sellout to Aristotle, but, uh, properly understood and certainly in the context of Santa Maria Maggiore and of Tomism, uh, and Albert the Great, and these other, uh, Christian Aristotelians it is a question of the need to think through our Christianity,

John Dickson:
Faith seeking, understanding, that tradition.

John Took:
Faith seeking understanding. that’s, that’s, that’s,right. Um, we are creatures, uh, fashioned in the image of God, uh, and we are made therefore, as, uh, creatures of deliberation, of determination, we are called upon to think through our situation. And that is what is going on. So part the beginning of an answer to your question there, uh, Dante’s education there in the – in Santa Maria major and the Aristotelians, but Dante’s house was over near, uh, the, the, the church of, Florence and, uh, in that church, uh, Dante encountered the Franciscan tradition coming all the way through to Bonaventure. uh, Bonaventure, who, who, who wrote a life of St Francis, And Dante was able, therefore alongside Tomism and the Aristotelianism to imbibe and to make his own. A Franciscan spirituality. A Franciscan spirituality, which was, uh, concerned with understanding of love and charity and grace. Um, a fresh emphasis. And then on the other side of the river in Florence, there was the Church of Santo Spirito. Santo Spirito, which is still there. That was the center of Augustinian learning. And there Dante was able to think through – because Augustine was present to him – to think through the predicament of the one who says “I”, as Augustine does in his confessions. It’s a, a, a rigorous self interrogation, an understanding of self betrayal, of becoming, um, of, uh, of a, of a new life, which the individual by grace, but by way of commitment and a tremendous struggle of the spirit lives out. Dante’s education in Florence was a rich one. He himself says, as I say, that he went along to these places and imbibed, uh,the rich heritage of Tomism in its commitment to argumentation and demonstration. Franciscanism in its understanding, its attempt to understand love and its implications and Augustinian, uh, in the self interrogation, uh, which is so insistent in that.

John Dickson:
What a rich triad.

John Took:
What a rich triad indeed. Now then we come to, we come to the exile and there’s something very important to say here in, in, in response to that question Florence,  uh, my word it, it was the story of Italian history. It’s done in civic history in Italy,  Florence, uh, was divided into parties, allegiances. The, uh, dominant, uh, families there in Dante time were the neri, the blacks, and the, and, and the, uh, the bianchi, the, the whites, the blacks, and the whites.

John Dickson:
Did they dress accordingly or … 

John Took:
Not necessarily, no. But they, their, their attitudes were very different. The blacks, uh, they were – not in a systematic way – but, uh, they looked for their, their authorization for their rights and the privileges to the Roman Empire, uh, to the, to the idea of Rome, uh, and such as it was in its fragmented state in Dante’s time, to a secular Roman authority. Whereas the whites, they looked, again, not systematically because it varied from individual to individual, but they looked to the church, to the Pope for their authorization, and they were at odds, one with another. Towards the end of  1301 when the streets of Florence, oh beautiful Florence, the streets of Florence ran with blood, there was a conflict between the blacks, and the whites, and Dante’s,Dante’s allegiance here was not systematically again, but uh, by way of a certain disposition of temperament to be on the white side. 300 or 400 whites were exiled in an incredibly violent eruption in Florence towards the end of 1301. And Dante went into exile there. His exile was confirmed at the beginning of 1302, and it was reiterated with the proviso that should he be found on Florentine territory, he should be burnt alive. It was very violent. Dante had been a very outspoken speaker in Florence. And he had, um, oh, he’s alienated all sorts of people. He was very much his own man.

John Dickson:
Were both sides confessing Christians, or were the blacks anti-church?  I’m trying to get my head around that.

John Took:
Yes. It is difficult, isn’t it? Um, it’s a question of emphasis within, I suppose, again, it’s impossible to generalize here because it was individual by individual all the time. But, it really was a political motivation rather than a faith motivation. That is to say, as I said that, the authority for what we do here, is it papal or is it imperial? Where are we to look? And these were accommodated within a Christian faith of different kinds of expression and different kinds of intensity.

John Dickson:
Got it. 

John Took:
So Dante went into exile.

John Dickson:
Where?

John Took:
Now you’ve got me there, you’ve got everyone who’s who studies Dante. Yeah. Because we can reconstruct to an extent where Dante was  In his exile. Uh, he spent a lot of time, uh, in Verona. He was, his patrons were there. He traveled a lot, um, from Italian city to, he must have been very lonely man. He says at one point, at the beginning of the Convivio, that I, exiled spirit, that I am, have wandered up and down this peninsula, and seen for what i am and construed as an outcast. He was a lonely man in exile. Dante didn’t enjoy his exile. He went, he never came back to Florence. He yearned to come back to Florence, but he never did. So he spent time in exile. Eventually, he settled in Ravena. The thing about exile in Dante is that it becomes and did, constitute not merely a practical agony. “I’m cast out. I’m a wanderer on the face of the earth. But uh, it is a principle of self interpretation. This is what matters, and it, it ties in with what I said about the Vita Nova. Exile is, uh, a state not only or a practical condition, but a state of the soul. To what extent are we at home with ourselves? All have Dante’s work from the Vita Nva through to the Commedia in the way that we see, has to do with exile as a condition of the spirit. I have lost myself. I know I am lost. I am full of remorse and misgiving, but I struggle purgatorial and lay hold by grace of new life.

John Dickson – Studio:

After the break, we’ll go to hell. 

Break 1

Media – Hozier reading ‘The Inferno’

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s Hozier, an Irish musician perhaps best known for his 2013 hit ‘Take Me to Church’. He’s known for using religious and literary themes in his songs. During the pandemic, Hozier was inspired to pick up Dante’s Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, which served as fodder for his 2023 album Unreal Unearth.   

Media – Hozier speaking

John Dickson – Studio:

The album is a concept album following the journey down into the Inferno’s 9 circles of Hell. Its tracks include ‘Butchered Tongue’ and ‘Eat Your Young’. So, you know, really leaning into the violence that we most certainly are about to come across as we travel through Hell. 

John Dickson:
You wrote a piece back in 2020, listing your most recommended COVID lockdown books and The Divine Comedy was there. Dante got a, got a look in. And why? Was it because we were going through purgatory, uh, metaphorically speaking?

Karen Swallow Prior:
Yeah, well, lockdown is a good time to do a reading of the Inferno for sure. Our, … the journey into hell. Um, but you know, I think what a lot of people don’t realize about, oh. The Divine Comedy is that yes, it’s poetry and yes, it’s long, and yes, it’s filled with a lot of illusions that are rooted in the life of Dante and names that we might not remember or know at all. But if you actually get a good translation The Divine Comedy is a poem that reads rather quickly, um, it’s written in a rhyme scheme that is divine designed to make us keep going and keep reading from one line to the next line.  It has a story that is ….

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s Karen Swallow Prior, who joined us earlier this season for our episode on Jane Austen. She’s quickly becoming our resident literary critic at Undeceptions. When she’s not with us, Karen teaches at Bethel Seminary and writes books like The Evangelical Imagination and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. While we were talking about Jane, I slipped in a few questions about Dante—just to keep her on her toes. You’ll hear from her again through this episode. 

Karen Swallow Prior:
It has a story that is riveting and compelling, and so if you’re reading it in a modern translation, which I highly recommend, and you’re reading an edition that has a few footnotes here and there, so you can kind of figure out the names that you might not be familiar to you and keep track. It’s a, it’s a, a much more delightful and easier read than most of us tend to think of poetry.

John Dickson – Studio:

If you need more convincing to pick up Dante, perhaps you’ll trust one of our Undeceptions patron saints, Dorothy L. Sayers, the English novelist and one of the 20th century’s great Christian undeceivers. She resisted Dante for a while. “Fourteen thousand lines are fourteen thousand lines,” she said, “especially if they are full of Guelfs and Ghibellines and Thomas Aquinas.” But once she began, Sayers said she couldn’t put it down. 

Reading

“The plain fact is that I bolted my meals, neglected my sleep, work and correspondence, drove my friends crazy, and paid only a distracted attention to the doodle-bugs which happened to be infesting the neighbourhood at the time, until I had panted my way through the Three Realms of the dead from top to bottom and from bottom to top. I still don’t know how he does it. After all, even without having read it, one knows what it’s all about, and you wouldn’t think there would be any real suspense about it … In spite of which I found myself panting along with my tongue hanging out, as though it were a serial thriller, careful not to read the argument of each canto beforehand, lest it should spoil what was coming.” 

Dorothy L. Sayers, The Passionate Intellect

John Dickson:
Can we move slowly to the comedy? Let’s assume listeners have no idea what this thing is. Can you tell us, I dunno, in a sentence or two, what we mean by the comedia?

John Took:
In one of his letters, Dante distinguishes between tragedy and comedy. Now, tragedy for Dante is, as he himself says, a narrative which ends in catastrophe, in  disaster, uh, in a complete losing of self and undoing in non-being rather than being. Tragedy. But comedy, it’s not a matter of ha-ha, of, uh, of, of a sort of, of, of a trite to spirit. A humor. It’s not that. It is a narrative which ends in new life. It’s, uh,an upward trajectory as  distinct from a downward trajectory and that precise is what the the term comedia means

John Dickson:
But we can see how you would get comedy joke from that idea, can’t you?’cause it’s, it’s, it’s the, it’s the movement toward joy.

John Took:
Yes. That is, that’s that’s exactly right.

John Dickson:
Which has a trivial form.  And a profound form. 

John Dickson – Studio:

Dante called his greatest work simply Commedia — a narrative with uplift, as Prof Took tells us–it’s the opposite of tragedia. Anyway, it was the later Italian poet Boccaccio who described Dante’s work as ‘divine’, and so the Divine Comedy stuck.

John Took:
If you are new to Dante, then enjoy the story. Yes. Because Dante is a splendid yarn spinner, that is much, much, much more to the text than mere yarn, but he tells a good story. What story does he tell? He says that he was lost in a dark wood. That’s where it begins halfway through my life at 35. Yes… 70 being the scriptural span of, of life. Halfway through this life, I found myself in a dark place.

Reading

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:

So bitter – death is hardly more severe!
But to retell the good discovered there,
I’ll also tell the other things I saw. 

John Took:
In that, uh, dark place. He meets the figure, Virgil in the dark forest there. Oh, shady figure. And Virgil interrogates him. What are you doing here?

Reading

While I retreated down to lower ground,
before my eyes there suddenly appeared
one who seemed faint because of the long silence.

When I saw him in that vast wilderness,
“Have pity on me,” were the words I cried,
“whatever you may be — a shade, a man.”

Inferno, Canto 1

John Took:
And well, to be brief about it, Virgil says, come with me by way of remedying this situation, I will take you down, down, down into the depths of hell.

John Dickson:
I’m gonna pause there and just say, Virgil, of course. Is the great, perhaps the greatest Roman poet.

John Took:
Yeah, absolutely. Virgil and, and Dante. That, that was Dante’s view as well.

John Dickson:
Which is strange to have him there as such a key figure.

John Took:
Now isn’t, isn’t it, isn’t it? And that, that, uh, uh, that is testimony to Dante’s sense of the way in which a poet. Is comes alongside self and can be as embraced and espoused as a prophet. Yes. It is not simply a question of a nice storyteller or maker of rhymes. No, no. He’s a companion. He’s a life’s companion. Virgil had written about, uh, the, the, the coming home, uh, from Troy to Rome and this is a coming home.

John Dickson – Studio:

As I said earlier, Virgil was the first-century BC Roman epic poet who told the story of Aeneas, a legendary survivor of the Trojan War who wandered the world, faced monsters, gods — and one particularly scary love interest — before his descendants went on to found Rome.

John Took:
So Dante’s first guide is not one of the apostles, um, is not a biblical figure. Not one of the priests, not a pope, and not a cleric, but Virgil. 

Media – Jordan Peterson

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s a 2024 TikTok clip from Canadian psychologist and cultural lightning rod Dr. Jordan Peterson talking about Dante’s “architecture of evil.” Dante was working with the old cosmology of Ptolemy, a second-century Alexandrian genius who imagined the Earth at the centre of everything, with the Moon, planets, and stars circling around it in neat, nested spheres. (The idea that the Earth orbits the Sun came about two centuries later with Copernicus and Galileo — we really have to do an episode on all the myths about Galileo.) Dante built his afterlife on that map: nine circles of hell spiralling down to Earth’s red-hot core, then a mountain of purgatory popping out on the far side — you’re picturing this, right? — and nine celestial spheres reaching upward to God in heaven. We’ll pop some pictures in the show notes. His imagination is off the charts. Dante goes well beyond what the Bible gives us about heaven and hell, yet his picture of the inferno has stuck in our heads—for better or worse.

John Took:
Now, Virgil says, we will go down into the pit, and Virgil takes him down and they meet all sorts of characters there. They meet characters who were indifferent. Uh, they couldn’t care less, uh, uh, the, the nonchalant characters at the beginning. Then he comes to the, um, to the characters, uh, who are lustful, uh, the passionate, um, the lecturers, the gluttonous. The angry.

John Dickson:
And these are nine stages. Circle nine circles going down, down, down, down, down.

John Took:
That’s right, it’s circles. It’s arranged in circles going down the first circle or the first major circle after limbo instantly – Dante has a limbo –  for the classical figures that he loved, but who had not been baptized, and Virgil himself belongs in in that he’s come out of that circle to, to be alongside Dante. Then the first circles are to do with the lustful. Those who have given way to the passions of their nature in one way or another. Then the second circle is to do with the violent. Mm-hmm.

John Dickson:
We’re getting worse. And that’s interesting, isn’t it? Yes. He puts the, the passionate lust first.

John Took:
Yes. That’s right. The passionate lust come first because that is built into our nature. And then violence, because that is merely animal-esque. But then at the bottom you’ve got the various species going right down to the bottom of the pit uh, of the fraudulent. That for Dante, is the worst that we can do. The worst that i can do to you is not to be violent to you, but to cheat you. Yeah. Yes.The fraudulent

John Dickson:
Is that because it’s, it’s fully. It’s a fully rational expression of wickedness. It’s conniving and thought through and –

John Took:
Absolutely. You know what you are doing. Mm-hmm. Uh, you are using your reason to think, ah, yes, I know what I should do here.

John Dickson:
And it’s precisely because he has such a high view of reason and its connection to divinity that this makes it the worst.

John Took:
Absolutely. That is, that is exactly right. We are made in the image of God. We are creatures of deliberation. We are creatures of ultimate responsibility, and we can betray that and we know that we are betraying ourselves. 

John Dickson:
I’m fascinated by Dante’s view, which is really, it’s an Augustinian view. Uh, I guess you find it in Aquinas as well, that sin is ultimately, like wrongdoing is ultimately misplaced love. Can you talk us through, how does that play out in the inferno?

John Took:
Perhaps the way, perhaps the way for me to approach that is to say this and then, i mean, you are, you are exactly right. It has everything to do with love, properly understood. But the way i think to set it up and to, for especially even for newcomers to Dante, this is what needs to be thought about. Take the inferno first: Hell, that is the souls in the pit. There, Dante insists, how could he not, in the theological context within which he was working on the anger of God. These souls, they have un they have, they have been given the power of reason. They have been called to an understanding of love, but they have not acted in love: violently, lustfully, fraudulently. They’ve betrayed that love, and God is angry and he has condemned them to this place. And it is in that sense a on the face of it, but only on the face of it, be careful about this. It’s a study in retribution. That’s not what the inferno has to do with. But the, if, if it were a study in mere retribution, you and I will probably say, well, yes, splendid. What a tremendous imagination this guy has got. Uh, what’s next on the television?

John Dickson:
And what a cruel imagination

John Took:
Yeah. What a cruel imagination. No, no, no. And it wouldn’t be tragic in any profound, any, any existentially significant sense of the term. No, no. What is going on in hell is this: that we are indeed creatures of understanding. We have indeed betrayed ourselves. God knows that, but we know that too. The question is, who is punishing whom in hell? It’s not fundamentally a question of God’s retribution. It is a question of man’s delivering himself to what he knows is the demonic. I have delivered myself to my own undoing. I know I have done this. Yes, I have, uh, I have set aside, I have bypassed, I have looked the other way, where the “should be” of my existence, of I have betrayed myself to these forces of annihilation, rather than affirmation. And I know I’ve done that, and that is my agony. And you know, and you can verify this, you don’t have to take my word or anyone’s word for this. You simply look at the great discourses. It’s the first great discourse is that of, uh, Paul and Francesca. Francesca. Francesca, and Dante sees her, oh, she’s among the lustful.

John Dickson:
This is a famous real woman who had committed adultery.

John Took:
Committed adultery.  And she’s tossed in Dante’s imagination.It’s all in Dante’s imagination this, on the wings of the, of the tempest, the infer tempest. I mean, that’s obvious, isn’t it? Uh, the, the interpretation of that, she’s, she’s buoyed up by her own lustfulness. Yes. And Dante says to her: “Tell me, tell me who you were and how, how it is with you?” And she gives a very gracious account, my goodness, some of Dante’s most gracious characters in hell. You have to remember that some of Dante’s most significant characters are in hell. And that makes uh, points towards the adult content of all this. She gives an account of herself. ‘Yes, I was born here at this particular place, banks of the poor, uh, and, uh, but, I was, I, I was a victim to love, am Love conducted us to one Love, which, which, which does not forgive anyone. I’m a victim of love. Love did this. You know, You can she see what she’s doing. She’s doing what I suppose we all do in some, in some degree. “It’s not my fault. You started it. I’m a victim of something else. I’m more sinned against than sinning.” Yes? Dante says, ‘My goodness, I, I weep when I’ve seen this’;. But then he says, “But tell me…” Now when Dante says, but to tell me, you know that something more grave is coming. “How was it with you in the moment of your self-betrayal?” Now, at that point, she’s got nowhere else to look other than into herself. Never mind about the mythologising of love and all the rest of it. She has to look into herself, which she does. This is Canto five of the inferno: exquisite. And she gives an account as she begins by saying, oh, my goodness. There is nothing more dreadful than to contemplate, than to know unhappiness, uh, in the context, uh,uh, of, of what was once a possibility. I’m to no unhappiness in this grief, in this context. My grief was that I met this man. We spoke together. Uh, we looked into each other’s eyes, and as we did so, uh, love took hold of us. I took hold. Our passions. They were reading poetry,

John Dickson:
They were reading poetry, were they not? Now that, that’ll, that’ll do it.

John Took:
Yes, they were indeed reading, um, and … Our lips met. Yes? And that was a moment of delivery, of self-conscious delivery. And her grief informs that whole episode. And Dante himself grieves, absolutely. He, as a pilgrim, he’s not disinterested, he’s not a, a pure passerby. He engages with

John Dickson:
There’s no glee in his watching people under judgment.

John Took:
None. None whatsoever.

John Dickson:
Yeah. It’s such a sympathetic perspective, isn’t it?

John Took:
And that’s, that’s, that’s a good point because there are people who say, oh, being fair no is about Dante clapping his hands and saying, gotcha. Now, Now, you are. It’s not nothing to do with that. That’s a silly reading. A no no. Dante grieves with these people because Dante was a very passionate man himself. Yeah. He loved extramaritally.

 John Dickson:
Well, and he remembered that Christ wept over Jerusalem, weeping as the only Right response

John Took:
That’s right. And he engages intimately here. That’s exactly right.

John Dickson – Studio:

The beautiful story of Paolo and Francesca in Canto 5 shows how different kinds of love sit at the heart of the Divine Comedy. Lust, Dante tells us, is love disordered—the subordination of reason to desire. When you’re swept away by “love,” you’ve lost free will, lost control. That’s not love properly understood, says Dante. Throughout the Inferno and Purgatorio, he uses contrapasso to reveal God’s justice. This is a super important idea: it’s where the punishment fits the sin, a kind of poetic justice.  (If you’ve seen Se7en with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, that’s a modern take on contrapasso —each act of wrongdoing in the film gets its own tailored penalty.) Paolo and Francesca were carried away by passion, so in the second circle of hell—the circle of lust—they’re forever battered by a raging windstorm. 

Reading

I reached a place where every light is muted,
which bellows like the sea beneath a tempest,
when it is battered by opposing winds.

The hellish hurricane, which never rests,
drives on the spirits with its violence:
wheeling and pounding, it harasses them.

When they come up against the ruined slope,
then there are cries and wailing and lament,
and there they curse the force of the divine.

I learned that those who undergo this torment
are damned because they sinned within the flesh,
subjecting reason to the rule of lust.

And as, in the cold season, starlings’ wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:

Now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
There is no hope that ever comforts them—
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain.

Inferno, Canto 5 

John Took:
So this is what I’m saying to you about the Inferno. The Inferno has fundamentally to do, not with divine retribution, but with the agony of self betrayal.

John Dickson:
And we see this, um, in that theme of the punishment fitting the crime, which might not be the best way to put it, but, but people’s agony in the Inferno is somehow a mirror of the wrongdoing. Can you, can you bear that out?

John Took:
Dante’s a poet. A poet is a maker of images. Mm. Now, uh, the, the is very important here because, uh, uh, to emphasize this point because, uh, Dante understood this with perfect precision, as did Shakespeare. Uh, that the image is far more powerful than the proposition. Um, uh, I can, uh, I can, I can say to you all these, uh, that Paula was, uh, uh, a lustful woman. She delivered herself to the, um, the, the forces of disintegration at work in, in herself. But no, Dante doesn’t do that. He has the image of a woman who is tossed on the wings of the storm and then enters into a discourse. The image, the image, this is in, in reply to your question, the image stands there to not, not only to be interpreted, but in the way that the image does to engage the spectator, to engage the reader. ‘I look to the image, I ponder the image, and I interpret the image’. This is so important for the interpretation of Dante, that’s what i think for all great poetry. The reader is called. In some sense, to enter into the creative act. I look at that image of the woman tossed on the wings of the storm. Yes. And, and same with all the other punishments. Punishments.

John Dickson:
And that mirrors her lust.

John Took:
Of course it does.

John Dickson:
Like it’s the, the chasing after things like a wind blowing you around and she experiences wind. Tell me about the, I can’t remember the guy’s name that he meets pretty far down in Hell, who’s carrying his own head. Yes. And, and the reason given for carrying the head. Well, I’ll let you tell us that. Why is he carrying his own head? How does that splitting apart relate to his evil?

John Took:
That is an image of fraudulence. The self separation, uh, the self undoing. and it’s very violent. It’s, uh, there are some violent images in the, in the, in the, in unfair, getting away from that, some of the images are very violent, but, uh, the self-betrayal in the sense that we’re talking about it, uh, treachery, yes. Uh, uh, that, that is a violation of the spirit. And that is IMAGES by Dante. 

Reading

I surely saw, and it still seems I see,
a trunk without a head that walked just like
the others in that melancholy herd;

it carried by the hair its severed head,
which swayed within its hand just like a lantern;
and that head looked at us and said: “Ah me!”

Out of itself it made itself a lamp,
and they were two in one and one in two;
how that can be, He knows who so decrees.

When it was just below the bridge, it lifted
its arm together with its head, so that
its words might be more near us, words that said:

“Now you can see atrocious punishment,
you who, still breathing, go to view the dead:
see if there’s any pain as great as this.

And so that you may carry news of me,
know that I am Bertran de Born, the one
who gave bad counsel to the fledgling king.

I made the son and father enemies:
Achitophel with his malicious urgings
did not do worse with Absalom and David.

Because I severed those so joined, I carry—
alas—my brain dissevered from its source,
which is within my trunk. And thus, in me

one sees the law of counter—penalty.”

Inferno, Canto 28 

John Dickson – Studio:

The man carrying his own severed head is Bertrand de Born, a 12th-century French baron. One account says he helped sow discord between King Henry II and his sons, sparking rebellion. The eighth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno is for fraud, divided into sections for seducers, flatterers, corrupt officials, sorcerers, hypocrites, thieves, liars, counterfeiters, and those who sow division. For people like Bertrand de Born, the punishment fits the sin (contrapasso): they walk in a circle where a demon repeatedly hacks off their heads or limbs, dividing the body, and then each wound heals before the next gruesome round … forever!! Despite the wildly imaginative pictures Dante offers, there’s a strong tie-in with Jesus’ teaching about proportionality in judgement. I talked about this at great length in our episode On Hell, episode number 147 if you want to find that. But, contrary to popular modern Christian belief, Jesus and the apostles taught that God’s judgment was not one-size-fits-all. It will be lesser or greater depending on how we have lived. Good deeds can’t earn our way into Paradise, but bad deeds certainly will shape someone’s experience of punishment in Hell.  Jesus spoke of judgment being “many blows” in one case and “few blows” in another (Luke 12), of some people receiving “greater condemnation” (Luke 20), of the Day of Judgment being “more bearable” for some than others (Matthew 11; Luke 10). Paul said each person will be repaid in accordance with what they’ve done (Romans 2:6). Divine justice isn’t a flat sentence for all but a measured response to each life. Mercy is free and full, but judgment is calibrated — the punishment precisely fitting the sin. It is just. And like Jesus, Dante says that some of those who will experience the worst of God’s judgment are religious leaders!

John Dickson:
Dante reckons there are some high churchmen there in the deepest recesses of hell. Tell us.

John Took:
That’s a very good point because, all Dante’s popes except one are in hell. Um, and that is again a question of, uh, well. at at one level of consciousness, I mean, you, you, you have, you have to proceed in an adult way here at one level of consciousness, a high level of consciousness, Dante was concerned with what he saw as clerical pretension.

John Dickson:

Can you give me a clear example of a important churchman that Dante puts in Hell?

John Took:
Yes. Boniface the 8th um, is, uh, is there.

John Dickson:
What did he do wrong?

John Took:
Ah, well, yes according to Dante, uh, that he had, in order for him to function properly as a pope, uh, boni the course in call, a calls for the, uh, the, the bowing of the knee of every prince to the Pope, because the, the pope is the highest authority and is endowed with authority from, uh, his successor to, as his status of successor to Peter and, Peter as the successor to Christ in a certain sense. That for Dante will not do because …  yes, Bonface VIII uh, is, is there, um, as the, as perhaps the most, uh, what would say, resplendent instance.Um, of papal self-betrayal. 

John Dickson – Studio:

Dante’s critique of the church was sharp. His Hell is populated with a disturbing number of popes, bishops, priests, and monks. Some clerics end up in the fourth circle of hell—for their greed. But others fall to the eighth, condemned for fraud, or more precisely for simony—from Simon the Magician in Acts 8—profiting from spiritual offices, buying and selling church positions and favours. Two centuries later, Martin Luther would challenge a similar abuse: the sale of indulgences, gifts to the church meant to reduce punishment in purgatory. That protest sparked the Reformation. Dante wasn’t a reformer, but he stood in a long line of holy critics of the church, rebuking its leaders for betraying the way of Christ.

John Took:
So there is, uh, this travesty of reason. The cheating, fraudulence, um, and various species of fraudulence so that Dante identifies as he goes down from circle to circle until at last, at the very bottom of the pit, still guided by Virgil and Virgil keeps saying to him, ‘Now, my, my dear, Alligheiri you must be courageous here’ …. there is the figure of Lucifer, and he in the three mouths, done all in his imagination. I mean, what an imagination he had. Yes. the three mouths, uh, of, uh, Lucifer, with the three arch traitors of history. Brutus and Cassius. Difficult for those us those of us brought up on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar … Brutus and Cassius, and above all  Judas. 

Reading

The emperor of the despondent kingdom
so towered from the ice, up from midchest,
that I match better with a giant’s breadth

than giants match the measure of his arms;
now you can gauge the size of all of him
if it is in proportion to such parts.

If he was once as handsome as he now
is ugly and, despite that, raised his brows
against his Maker, one can understand

how every sorrow has its source in him!
I marveled when I saw that, on his head,
he had three faces: one—in front-bloodred;

and then another two that, just above
the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first;
and at the crown, all three were reattached;

the right looked somewhat yellow, somewhat white;
the left in its appearance was like those
who come from where the Nile, descending, flows.

Beneath each face of his, two wings spread out,
as broad as suited so immense a bird:
I’ve never seen a ship with sails so wide.

They had no feathers, but were fashioned like
a bat’s; and he was agitating them,
so that three winds made their way out from him—

and all Cocytus froze before those winds.
He wept out of six eyes; and down three chins,
tears gushed together with a bloody froth.

Within each mouth—he used it like a grinder—
with gnashing teeth he tore to bits a sinner,
so that he brought much pain to three at once.

Inferno, Canto 34

John Took:
Judas there suffering in the mouths, uh, of uh, the, the three threefold mouth jaws, the saliva of Lucifer. Where there is nothing is going on except the beating of lucifer’s, uh, wings. And it is a place of otherwise stillness.

John Dickson:
It’s almost non being, isn’t it?

John Took:
Non being. We’ll come to that. Exactly. That’s exactly what it is. A of non-being. 

John Dickson – Studio:

It’s striking that the centre of Dante’s Hell isn’t fire but ice. Those phrases we use — “a cold day in hell,” “when hell freezes over,” “a snowball’s chance in hell” — all suggest the impossible. Yet Dante’s Inferno, the most influential vision of hell apart from the Bible, ends in the ninth circle where Satan himself is trapped in a frozen lake. It might be called the Inferno, but the deeper you go, the colder it gets — the total absence of God’s love and warmth. It’s a stunning, unexpected image. We actually did a big, difficult episode last year called On Hell, exploring what the Bible does (and doesn’t) say about it — and we mention Dante there too. The Inferno’s images are meant to shock us awake. Dante the pilgrim is being shown the consequences of his own disordered love — and we, the readers, are being shown too. He is accountable for his actions. So are we. And with that, we move to Purgatory — and then to Paradise.

Break

Media – Lonley Planet

John Dickson – Studio:

If you tunnelled straight down from my studio here at Wheaton Illinois through the centre of the Earth and out the other side, you’d surface in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean. The nearest land is Amsterdam Island, a tiny dot about 10 kilometres long.  That’s ‘antipodes’ to Wheaton — the point directly opposite my own. We’ve now arrived in Dante’s Purgatorio, set at the antipodes of Jerusalem: a vast mountain rising on the far side of the world, somewhere in the Southern Pacific — not far from Australia actually. After descending through Hell and confronting Satan at the centre, Dante tunnels out the other side, and as he writes in the final lines of The Inferno:

“Till through a rounded opening I beheld some of the lovely things the sky contains; thence we came out, and saw again the stars.”

Reading

To course across more kindly waters now
my talent’s little vessel lifts her sails,
leaving behind herself a sea so cruel;

and what I sing will be that second kingdom,
in which the human soul is cleansed of sin,
becoming worthy of ascent to Heaven.

…

The gentle hue of oriental sapphire
in which the sky’s serenity was steeped—
its aspect pure as far as the horizon—

brought back my joy in seeing just as soon
as I had left behind the air of death
that had afflicted both my sight and breast.

Purgatorio, Canto 1 

John Took:
The next phase of the journey, they make their way through this tunnel that i mentioned to the antipodes and there rising up with a new, wonderful Skyscape – yes, because everything’s dark and claustrophobic in hell – there’s a wonderful skyscape and seascape and rising up from the southern waters of the, or the Antipodes. 

John Dickson:
I don’t like the Antipodes being associated with purgatory, but you know, uh, but it it,

John Took:
yes but this has a very positive it’s –

John Dickson:
It’s more paradise. But anyway, yeah.

John Took:
Even the Antipodes here is go the, the, the Antide and Mountain is going to have a very, very positive view of which, to which we’ll come to a moment.

John Dickson:
I’ll let you be my guide.

John Took:
To rise is up Out of the, out of the southern seas. And per and again. Virgil is his guide. They proceed from circle to circle to circle, um, and there are the, it’s based now on the seven, the seven sins of the spirit. And so you go through anger and lost and sloth and pride, um, until you reach the top of the mountain where there is a new Eden, a new forest, a a new spaciousness, a new meadow. Purgatory, in the theological understanding of um, is the place where having been remorseful, the soul nonetheless has a debt to pay off, a debt to pay. They’ve been forgiven. But nonetheless, they must settle the score. They must make good. Incidentally, in the Book of Common Prayer at Article 22, you will see that, uh, frantically, forcefully, uh, that, uh, is, is disposed of as so much nonsense, an idea vainly conceived with no scriptural basis, whatever.

John Dickson – Studio:

To be clear, I don’t think purgatory is a thing. In the words of my Anglican Book of Common Prayer: 

The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory … is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.

My apologies to any Catholic listeners — sort of! Purgatory only became fully institutionalised in the 13th century. You can find hints of it in earlier writers, even Augustine, but nothing systematic. As doctrine, it was still new when Dante was playing with the idea. Some scholars see his Purgatorio as the most imaginative part of the Comedy, perhaps precisely because the concept was still taking shape. Given so much of the Comedy is metaphorical, good Protestants can read the Purgatorio not as doctrine but as a picture of the refining process of the Christian life — having our affections, our loves, reordered toward the best things. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it! Actually, Karen Swallow Prior says something similar:

“Dante depicts Purgatorio as the kind of purgation of sins that slightly resembles the Protestant understanding of sanctification.”

We’ll link to her article in the show notes.

John Took:
And Dante acknowledges that he has, uh, some of the characters say that I’m here for a certain period of time, which is predetermined, by the way I was, but the purgatorio hasn’t got anything to do with paying off debts any more than  the Inferno has to do with sheer punishment. Yes? No, the beautiful purgatorio, they’re climbing a mountain. They are struggling. Dante is struggling to reach up into the sky by climbing a mountain, a spiritual mountaineer. It has everything to do, uh, with the struggle, which Dante thought we had. And I think he’s right in this, that every man, every woman, when we, when you consider self, uh, it, it’s not, it’s not easy being a, a, a full and emancipated self. It is a struggle for emancipation. I pitch myself over and against myself in all sorts of ways, and that is exactly what is happening here. By grace, but also by a grace as an imminent operate, a principle of operation. It’s super added, but it is at work within the depths of self. The soul is struggling by grace to free itself from itself and on the various circles. Therefore, the souls are suffering as much as they are in hell. But it is not the agony of self-betrayal. It is the agony of properly human becoming. The difficulty…There’s nothing facile here. What I’m saying to you is that there is nothing facile here. It’s not fairytale. It is a very, very difficult thing being a human being. And Dante knew this because Dante was a very passionate man. The struggle to, so there is a struggle, uh, up the mountain until at last, in the Idenic moment, the neo-Idinioc moment at at the top of the port where Dante encounters Beatrice, There is therefore a moment of emancipation.

John Dickson – Studio:

On Mount Purgatory, Dante and Virgil climb seven terraces representing seven vices: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice/Greed, Gluttony, and Lust. They sound like the sins of the Inferno, but here the souls are being purified of the vices—as they’re fitted out for Paradise. And, again, every sin in Purgatorio is a problem with love. Virgil divides them into two groups: those that twist love inward (Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth), and those that love excessively (Greed, Gluttony, Lust). This is one of the most important features of the philosophy of Dante’s work: most of what’s wrong and right about human nature has to do with love—disordered or rightly ordered love. Each vice has a matching virtue, and each soul is retrained by some physical trial that purges the vice and restores virtue. Some of the disciplines are fantastic! Producer Kaley … You have a favourite?”

Producer Kaley – Studio:
Those in the Circle of Sloth are so busy running around (driven by zeal) that they can’t stop to talk to Dante or Virgil:

“Come on, come on, don’t let time slip away for lukewarm love!” cried out those who ran nearby. “Zeal in well-doing makes grace green again!” Purgatorio Canto 18.

I think it’s a hilarious image.

John Dickson – Studio:

My pick … perhaps predictably!! … is where a series of proud souls, politicians, artists, and so on — Dante actually names them — are forced to carry heavy stones to teach them to bow low to the ground:

They were indeed hunched over more or less,    depending on the burdens on their backs, and even he that showed the greatest patience,   weeping, seemed to say: ‘I can no more.’
Purgatorio X.132-139.

One of them confesses to Dante: ‘

The ancient blood and gallant deeds done by my forebears raised such arrogance in me that, forgetful of our common mother, ‘I held all men in such great scorn … ‘And for this pride, here must I bear this burden—here among the dead, since I did not among the living. Purgatorio X & XI

It’s powerful stuff!! Anyway, eventually, Dante and Virgil reach the top of Mount Purgatory — and there they meet Beatrice.

John Took:
Dante there meets for the first time in the Commedia Beatrice, and the first time since the Vita Nova, right the way back in the 1290s. There he meets Beatrice. And Beatrice uh, my goodness, gives him a good scolding. What on earth are you doing here? Beatrice eventually softens her view towards him. She is, she loves him. And Dante is the world’s great love poet Instantly. And he loves her. They rejoice in the company of each other. She eventually softens a little bit, and she becomes his guide as he ascends in the third part of the poem … 

John Dickson:
Now, just pausing. They’ve had to say goodbye to Virgil.

John Took:
Yes. They say goodbye to Virgil. And Dante is very sorrowful about that. I mean, it’s so beautiful.

John Dickson:
And this is because Virgil was pre Christ was a pagan Yes. And, and couldn’t go any further beyond.

John Took:
That that is right. He couldn’t go any further beyond. And I suppose we should say, and we, in another context, we would have to develop this, uh, uh, Dante’s soteriology Yeah. His, his theology of salvation, uh, which was a real problem for Dante. He puts Virgil back where he belongs.Yes. So that is, uh, it’s a very important question that,

John Dickson:
So Beatrice then takes him on because she is, she’s the blessed one. She’s the one who conveys blessing. So she can take him to paradise.

John Took:
Now she takes him to paradise and circle by circle. She leads him through up through Paradise. Uh, and again, there’s conversation. Oh my goodness. There’s so much say about all these encounters. There conversation with all sorts, uh, uh, with, with, with, uh, scholars and soldiers and lawyers and, and, and poets and, and allsorts, uh, in, in Paradiso- conversations and confessions and testimonies there which illuminates, uh, this notion of transfiguration, which we come to in a minute when, when we come to an interpretation. Still at the literal level And he goes circle by circle guided by Beatrice until at last, uh, he comes into, hmm, the, the immediate presence. He’s been in the presence of God all the time. But now the immediate presence of a light, which, it defies description, it defies the word. And Dante attempts to… Dante attempts to describe it. He sees, uh, a threefold light. He’s trinitarian. Father, Son, and Spirit. And he sees, and again, how do you interpret this? In the center circle, son, he sees our image, our image, and what is to make of that? There on the very face engraved for Dante, of the Godhead is man’s image, man’s God so cherishes man. He’s at the center of God’s, uh, uh, intentions. Dante at the very end of the poem. know we are now at the end of the poem, Canto 33 of the Paradiso. Dante has these three circles, uh, and he says to, me, says ‘This is meant to be perfect simplicity. How can there be three circles here’? And this is where the poem ends. But he says, and, and my mind, I, i i wrestled with this, but all of a sudden i had a, a, a perfect intuition.

Reading

Eternal Light, You only dwell within
Yourself, and only You know You; Self-knowing,
Self-known, You love and smile upon Yourself!

That circle—which, begotten so, appeared
in You as light reflected—when my eyes
had watched it with attention for some time,

within itself and colored like itself,
to me seemed painted with our effigy,
so that my sight was set on it completely.

As the geometer intently seeks
to square the circle, but he cannot reach,
through thought on thought, the principle he needs,

so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see
the way in which our human effigy
suited the circle and found place in it—

and my own wings were far too weak for that.
But then my mind was struck by light that flashed
and, with this light, received what it had asked.

Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already—like
a wheel revolving uniformly—by

the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Paradiso, Canto 33

John Took:
My anxiety was assuaged. How? Because I had an intuition of perfect love. Of the love which moves the sun and the other stars. The father is in the son. The son is in the Father, and they are in the spirit, and the spirit is in, and man is there at the center of it all. Mm-hmm. And what is that? But an expression of the love which stands at the beginning and end. So that, that is the last line of the poem, the love which moves the sun and the other stars. At the end there you have the final utterance of a great poet. So it has been a journey.

John Dickson:
And that end point is, of course, the theological and thematic thread through the entire thing, isn’t it? This is about love and antiv love.

John Took:
And the Paradiso has everything to do with rewards with these souls. Uh, they have, uh, they’ve come home to themselves. They have struggled. They are rewarded.  It has everything to do with what Dante regarded as what we’ve referred to as the trashumana – the opening up the trans humanization of the spirit by which he means, what? He means. That as creatures created in the image of God, we are who are constantly fashioning, afresh the dimensions of our existence. To dimension our lives. In every significant moment there is an opening out of self until the soul opens out of the ultimate truth. The all comprehensive, the a spatial a temporal truth of what is ultimately. And that is what the Paradiso has to be, has to do with.

Karen Swallow Prior:
There is a spoiler here, but it’s not too much of a spoiler. I just think that the end of the divine comedy when he ascends through all of the levels of heaven and he discovers at the end what moves everything and holds everything together is love. Divine love, and that is a revelation in itself, but it’s one, it’s easy for me to just say in a couple of sentences, sentences like this, this, but when you actually go on that journey through the circles of hell, through purgatory, up into all the levels of heaven, and that’s the culmination; it’s very powerful and it’s something that we actually, I think, need to be reminded of all the time, over and over again in every way that we can be reminded of it.

John Dickson:
The, the reputation of Dante, and particularly because of The Inferno, is that it’s, you know, it’s dour and tragic and cruel. So, convince me in a couple of sentences why ultimately it’s about grace and new life and salvation?

John Took:
I can only recapitulate in, in, in a couple of sentences, uh, what I’ve said already.  That, uh, even at every point for Dante, a human being is graced. We are creatures fashioned in the image of God. And what does that mean? It means that in some sense, in some limited sense, but in, nonetheless, in some genuine sense, we are creatures who rather, like God himself, are called to a certain kind of self-determination. We are accountable creatures. By virtue of grace, as that which is indwelling an indwelling principle of righteousness, um, of right doing. Grace and nature belong together within the economy of human nature. Now then, uh, if you bear that in mind, then you’ve got the presence of grace in all those three parts. In The Inferno, these souls were graced. They were, no, they, they, all of them, even, even the worst of them were as graced as anyone else, but they have, uh looked the other way. 

John Dickson – Studio:

Professor Took is assuming Dante’s Catholic theology of grace — not simply God’s favour toward us, but an infused power within us that we cooperate with toward salvation. This lies at the heart of Dante’s vision of redemption. That’s very different from the Reformation view of grace as God’s unearned mercy, received by faith alone. I’m with Augustine and Luther — not Dante — on that. I love Dante’s sense of proportional justice and moral discipline, his vision of rightly ordered loves, and above all, his revelation that pure love stands at the summit of all things, drawing us upward. But I can’t follow him in the idea that we ascend by morally cooperating with grace. To get all biblical for a moment: the criminal crucified next to Jesus in Luke 23 turns to Jesus and asks for mercy … and gets it.

Reading

Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed. When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”And they divided up his clothes by casting lots. The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is God’s Messiah, the Chosen One.” The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar and said, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.” There was a written notice above him, which read: this is the king of the jews. One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.

The Gospel of Luke, Chapter  23

John Dickson – Studio:

That reply of Jesus is strikingly relevant to Dante’s journey from Inferno to Paradiso:

“I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

The only cooperation with grace is to receive the gift.

John Dickson:
But people blame Dante for giving the modern world this Gordy literalistic torture-filled vision of hell. What would he say in response?

Karen Swallow Prior:
Yeah, of course Dante was a master, he’s written a masterpiece, and so he’s drawing on not only his own literariness, his own language, but also he’s drawing on a great number of classical myths and stories. And so he’s drawing on not only his Christian faith, but the whole of, of literature and culture and philosophy that went before him. And he’s creating a literary picture of real truths about the human condition, but not one that we’re supposed to take literally. There’s no place in Christian theology that talks about, you know, the nine circles of hell. Um, but I think it’s helpful to remember that he lived in a time and place that was hierarchical, that understood the world to be layered. And everything in the universe sort of reflected those layers and those hierarchies. There’s something called the great chain of being, which is a metaphor for how medievals understood the order of creation, with God at the top, and angels in the middle, and human beings below that, and then the animals and so forth. And we live in a very democratized society. So we … tend to have a flattened view of relationships and creation. And so we have different metaphors to describe it, but they’re all metaphors. And so it’s helpful to, when we encounter a work like that to, to realize that this isn’t just literary metaphor, but these are metaphors that reflect an entire worldview and understanding of creation that’s different from the modern one. And we can borrow from both because each is limited in our understanding of, of how God really created the world and, and his omniscience about it. But each of these metaphors, um, gives us a slightly different bit of light or illumination on the world as God created it and our limited place in it as humans. And, uh, we can, we can learn from literature, uh, and other art, a little glimmer here and there of, uh, the total truth that God will reveal to us all someday.

John Dickson:
My final question is, uh, what is there for the unbeliever, for the skeptic? What, what do you think Dante says to us? Why is he important for the person who doesn’t believe in the mumbo jumbo as they might say.  Because, I know you believe Dante’s got a lot to teach us about important things, whether or not you go along with his theology,

John Took:
For myself, in as much as an answer to this question, and perhaps it’s not a satisfactory answer, I would say that you and I and everyone else, are called to consider or are called to at least to inquire as to, to look over the fence, to see how it is with the next man and to say, ‘Oh, well, yes, there is something there’, or perhaps ‘No, there is nothing there’. And, but whatever you do to affirm self, even in the over againstness. Dante was, as I said, a Catholic spirit is a Christian poem. It is the work of a Christian conscience and this therefore, it’s not going to commend itself to those who are over against. But why do we read Aristotle and enjoy Aristotle? I’m not an Aristotelian, but I enjoy Aristotle because there is a wisdom there and a humanity, a form of humanity. And the same with Seneca and Cicero and all the way down to Heiddeger and Marcel and Jaspers and all these people. Yes, yes, yes. So I think the mature thing to do is to ponder it and say, ‘Well, yes, possibly, but for me, no’. For myself, and I’ve regarded this as my life’s work working with Dante to encourage a sense of the way in which Dante – for all great poets and philosophers in our tradition – has been the most powerful in affirming a significant selfhood, a significantly Christian selfhood in all the beauty and the power of that.

John Dickson:
Thank you so much for your time.

Undeceptions theme