Dr. Jonathan Juilfs

And here for a moment, someone he recognizes comes in.

And not just recognizes as like a famous person or somebody that he'd heard about in one of his texts, but actually a family.

It's like, oh, dude, hi.

And in the process of this, the reference there to blood, sanguis, we use blood in a couple of different domains when we're thinking about it.

Blood is, of course,

what we need to live.

It's life, right?

It is also family, right?

Descendants, it's ethnicity, what the Romans call gains, your people, your race, your ethnicity.

But there's also, because we just had it fall out of the cross, there's the blood of the cross here too.

And I think there's a competition of sorts that's happening.

And the question is,

Which blood will Dante Pilgrim choose?

Will he choose his birth family line, his allegory name, or will he choose the blood of the cross, the blood of Christ that gives you a new identity, that makes you a new creature?

And so something here reads to me like Dante's real...

There's several moments in Purgatorio and then again in the early parts of Paradiso where I think Dante is at a threshold and literally a crucial moment, a crux, an intersection of pathways.

And I think this is one of them.

We know that all good Italians value their family line.

They have inherited that from their Roman ancestors.

We've got Virgil dealing with Aeneas, who is