Key to All Mythologies

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

Cantos 16, 17, and 18 revolve around interactions with violent sinners from the recent political conflicts in Florence, Dante’s home city, and the city from which he was permanently exiled, shortly before he began work on the Comedy. What is the purpose of a poem aspiring to universality being laced with references to particular, local people – people who would have been long forgotten had they not appeared in Dante’s poem (as opposed to say, Greek mythic heroes, or Caesars). Why does Hell have such a political quality – especially given how central and inescapable politics is to human life and human goodness, as Dante conceives of them.

We also consider how politics relates to love, desire, and human freedom. And the difference between effective rhetoric and lying. And the difference between lying and writing poetry. And if Hell is just the ideal city with all God’s grace removed. And if Hell is a political domain or not. And we talk about Francesca again! And there’s also more talk about sodomy!

[Special note: The Episode covering Cantos 10, 11, and 12 was lost to history and the fires of Hell/Zoom].

Friends, a periodic warning. This podcast is not about summary, nor content, nor entertainment, nor facts. This podcast aims for aporia. That is, we aim to begin in uncertainty, and to end in paradox, silence, and doubt. And, if nothing else, these aims at least we achieve…. Today we are discussing Cantos 13, 14, and 15 of Dante’s and Virgil’s continuing descent into Hell. This turns out to be an especially dense reading, covering many thorny topics. What is the difference between suicide – a damnable act – and dying to yourself in order to live in Christ – an act which Dante celebrates? What is Dante’s relationship to homosexuality? Clearly he deems it a sin, yet the homosexuals we meet in Hell are among the noblest characters and receive the gentlest treatment of any sinners. What is the relationship between sodomy, usury, and suicide, and between these sins and their (highly allegorical) punishments? As you can tell, it’s another fun-filled episode!

In these Cantos Dante continues his journey deeper into Hell, guided by Virgil. They cross the river Styx, where the shades of the wrathful are boiling, and descend into the city of Dis, within which much of the rest of the Inferno will take place. What kind of character is Dante the pilgrim? Is he a hero? A Christian hero? Can a hero need a guide who babies, protects, and reassures him the way Virgil does for Dante? Can a Christian hero revel in the suffering of sinners of the damned in hell, the way Dante does in Canto 7?

In a poem always interested in what should be seen and what should not be seen, why does Dante peer into the thickest fog to find his way? Why is an angelic messenger compared to a snake in an epic simile? We also consider Dante the poet’s direct address to the reader, as Dante the pilgrim and Virgil pass by Medusa and enter Dis, in Canto 9: “Oh you who have sound intellects, consider the teaching that is hidden behind these strange verses.” Is the interjection meant to just apply to the surrounding images, or to the entire Inferno? If it is meant to apply throughout the poem, why does Dante choose this moment to interject?

Today we continue our journey into Hell, discussing cantos 4-6 of Dante’s Inferno. Canto 5 contains one of the most famous monologues in the Inferno, where the Italian countess Francesca da Rimini relates the tale of lust, woe, Romance literature, and murder that ends with her eternal punishment. Her story raises a host of interesting questions about love, free will, passion, reason, and rhetorical persuasion. We spend a good bit of time discussing these thorny problems. However, we begin with Dante’s encounter with the great poets in Limbo, a grey field that is not quite Hell, but is nonetheless a very bland and unpleasant place to spend eternity. What sense of history and time is suggested by the existence of Limbo, both for Dante and his age? How and why is Dante linking himself to the great tradition of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid? Can epic poems be religious and didactic, or do they inevitably surpass such aims? How is the poem Dante will write different from the romantic stories that led Francesca into adultery and damnation?

We begin our epic journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven, accompanied by Dante the poet, Dante the character created by the poet Dante, with Virgil our guide, and Beatrice our semi-divine benefactor. We spend most of our conversation today trying to orient ourselves in our strange new world. Why was Dante chosen by divine grace to be the one living soul to pass through Hell – and why is Virgil, of all the honored names of the pre-Christian past, his guide? Are the primary goals of this poem theological, aesthetic, ethical, or otherwise? Can such categories even be separated for a work like this, which must rank as the culminating artifact of the high middle-ages, the culminating artifact of European Christendom. But, given that, how do we understand the literalness of Hell as Dante depicts it? Are we intended to think of this as a real place, as real as Florence and Rome? Or more like an allegory or a poetic flight of imagination, or a mystical vision, or something else? Abandon all hope of firm conclusions or easy answers, ye who enter this podcast.

We finish Aristotle’s On the Soul, where, near the end of Book III, Aristotle claims, possibly, that there is, maybe, something of the soul, perhaps, which persists beyond death, in theory, and what persists of the soul might be thinking, potentially, or have something to do with thinking, or so they say. Can you think a thing in its being without recourse to any symbols? What kind of thought would this be? If something of the mind is indeed deathless, yet that deathless part is also not imagination, nor will, nor anything to do with language, nor body, nor any particular thought about any particular thing at all, well… what the hell is it then? We try and think through the puzzles of thought that Aristotle leaves in his wake.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, is it being at work sounding, despite the absence of one who is being at work hearing? The answer, obviously, is yes. And the answer is also no. This is Aristotle, after all. Join us as we discuss the Master of Those Who Know on the two-fold nature of hearing and seeing, the perils of explaining how you know that you know without getting caught in an infinite regress, complex relationships the qualities of which are not contained in their component parts, and many other nearly-imponderable wonders.

Another over-stuffed, stimulating conversation on this very captivating, very ancient, shockingly modern text. We first discuss how Aristotle thinks about the relationship between teaching and learning, in light of his claim that the thinking soul is not properly altered (that is, moved) while being taught how to think. It’s quite a puzzle! About half-way through we transition to a fascinating conversation about the value of reading “outdated” or “disproved” scientific texts. Can such texts have more than a purely historical interest? Is Aristotle truly outdated? Or does he give us a method for using observation to consider problems that are beyond the proper ken of science? Is any hint of modern, Cartesian skepticism to be found in Aristotle’s approach to nature, or does he begin from a fundamentally different place? A place of wonder, rather than a fear of being tricked? As always, you can trust us to leave you less certain than you were before, with more questions than answers. You’re welcome.

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