Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to The Classical Mind, a podcast about the great books in the Western canon. We're your hosts. I'm Father Wesley Walker.
And I'm Dr. Junius Johnson. And we're joined today by a really good friend of mine, Dr. Jonathan Jost, who's an associate professor of English at Redeemer University in Canada. And there he's a specialist in medieval literature, particularly English and French language, vernacular literatures. And his work...
sits at the boundary between literary studies and theological studies, which is really what you have to do if you're going to do medieval literature, because that's how they thought about it. I got to know Dr. Joel Speck when we were both students at the Divinity School. He was my second friend at Divinity School.
And our first year there, we actually took a Dante class together, which was my first time reading through the entire Commedia.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of Dante's Paradiso in the Commedia?
with Peter Hawkins, who is another dear friend and has been an excellent mentor in Dante studies and whatnot. So we spent a lot of time talking about Dante together, talking about all the medieval things together, talking about Tolkien and Lewis. And he's a musician. He's a singer as well. So Dr. Jost and I go way back, and it's just really exciting to have him here.
So thank you for joining us, Jonathan.
and it's fun not only to reconnect with you, but specifically to do so over Dante. There's this strange thing, it may have been Peter, it may have been some of my other medieval professors who have given this to me, but there's a special kind of club that the study of Dante kind of promotes, and some of it is about teachers and students, about
virgils and guides and then this wonderful place where you turn over from being the student to being the teacher and to being the maestro for others. You and I, every time I teach Dante and I get to do it yearly as a part of the humanities core classes that we have at Redeemer, I think of you and I think of how It is fun that I get to teach out of the things that we've had conversations about.
So this is pure joy for me.
That's exactly right. It's in a sense, you know, in Inferno, so much of it is about the Virgil Dante relationship. And it's as if we've kind of made that shift to purgatorio now where so much of the relationships are horizontal and your folks are calling out to one another and encouraging one another along the way and the prayers of the living helping the dead and all of that.
And then, so yeah, I feel like we're definitely on that journey. And I look forward to the time when we'll be able to reach the Paradiso stage when we'll have renewed in-person fellowship and can go over these things at our leisure. But we'll borrow a page from that book today and get a little foretaste of what that'll be like. Well, listen, Paradiso is crazy.
We're going to just dive right into this. And I think the first thing that is important to say, I'll take you all the way back to our first guest, Catherine Illingworth, who was mad at me for having her do the Inferno when it's her least favorite of all of the canticles. And you heard our last guest, Heidi, say that Purgatorio was her favorite of the canticle.
For none of us is Inferno our favorite one. It's everyone's least favorite, not because it's not amazing. It's so very good, but just because they just keep getting better. And for me, my favorite is Paradiso. And I think that for me, that's almost a litmus test of a true dentista is Paradiso. do you like Paradiso more than the others?
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Chapter 3: Why do some readers find Paradiso boring compared to other canticles?
Which is so easy to do in a world where we think to err is human is a true statement that doesn't need qualification.
Right.
when it isn't, right? Because that belongs to fallen humanity, not to humanity as such. And so we've lost sight of Lewis's... What Lewis is always trying to remind us of is that humanity is something way bigger than we think it is. I love in Paralandra when Ransom sees Tor and Tenadriel unmasked for the first time and he falls at their feet and he says, "'Forgive me. Do not try to raise me.
I've never seen a true human before.'" And I'm blown away, right? And I think I agree with you. I think that's what Dante's on about. It's not about becoming other than what we are. It's about breaking through the glass ceiling of what we always thought it could mean to be human, which is really less of a transhumanism than it is a true humanism, right?
But it requires a radical reorientation from the humanity that we've always known.
Whenever I... I always use Muses' translation here. This is the Penguin edition and the second Penguin edition, not the one that was done earlier by, who's our Oxford? Anyway, in Muses' translation in his notes, he says, I'm really tempted here to use the word superhuman.
And part of what he was trying to get at was to keep it on the human side, but to say it was the humanity that we always should have had, not something that we had to, it was something lost, not something that had to go above and beyond what it already. And I liked that logic in part because it gives,
Dante's vision isn't going to end simply with Visio Dei, with the beatific vision of God, and then there's nothing else. Dante will return. In fact, the whole premise of the fiction here is that he returns in order to write the great poem that this becomes.
Yeah, and Dante's biggest theological influences are Aquinas and Bonaventure. And both of them, when you look at their Christology, it's a very souped-up humanity that Jesus has. Aquinas says that the human nature of Christ, his human mind and human soul, have the fullness of beatific vision from the moment of conception. And then it just gets even more souped up from there.
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Chapter 4: How does Dante's understanding of blessedness manifest in Paradiso?
It ought to have come up in Inferno as well, but interestingly, it doesn't. They're totally okay with some sinners being punished worse than others. But when it comes to some people getting rewarded more than others, they're like, hold on, I thought God loved us all equally. Hold on, I thought, I thought, I thought. And I want to say, okay, fine. Okay, cool. Great. Think about your life.
Think about how you've lived your life. And let's say you were to die tomorrow. Do you really think that you have merited the same level, that you should be placed on the same level as the minors? Do you really think you should be placed on the same level as the Apostle Paul? Right. And say, well, I don't think they'd mind. It's not about whether they would mind.
It's about what have you done to yourself? And what did they do to themselves? Because in Dante, it's all about how you're fashioning yourself. If I were to allow this to be a Renaissance text, which I am not, I would say that it plays into that Renaissance fiction of self-making. But precisely because in Dante, self-making is overturned for God-making.
It's what you allow God to make of the self, not what you can make of the self. That's one of the proofs that he's medieval and not Renaissance. But I digress. So I think we have to say something about this hierarchy of heaven. And for me, I always go to Picard for this because I think she's got one of those puddle glum moments.
It's one of the great mic drops of the whole commedia when Dante asks her this question in Canto 3. He says... In your radiant faces, there shines I know not what of divine that transmutes you from what we knew of you before. Therefore, I was not quick to remember, but now what you say helps me so that making out your features comes more easily. But tell me, you souls who are happy here,
Do you desire a higher place so as to see more and to share more love? And this is a really urgent question because you might think, okay, I mean, you shouldn't be ungrateful. You're in heaven, right? We focus on what you have and not on what you don't have. But at the same time, how could it be wrong to long to see more of God, to long to love God more?
And so I remember I read that and I thought, wow. Yeah, Dante, that's a good question, right? How's she going to handle this one? And she starts off, brother. Brother, our will is quieted by the power of charity, karita, which causes us to desire only what we have and does not make us thirst for anything else.
If we desired to be higher up, our desires would be discordant with the will of him who assigns us here. which you will see is contradictory to these spheres, if to be in charity is here nekese, necessary, and if you consider well its nature. Indeed, it is constitutive of this blessed essay being to stay within God's will, and thus our very wills become one.
So that how we are arranged from level to level through this kingdom delights the entire kingdom, as well as the king who enamors us of his will. And in his will is our peace. He is that seed to which all moves that his will creates or nature makes.
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Chapter 5: What role does hierarchy play in Dante's vision of heaven?
always strikes me so deeply. And the painters, this is the first arrow coming off of the bow. There's going to be more. And the very next line, you're going to learn how salty tastes the bread of another, which is a very specific reference to Italian culture. When they make their focaccia, different regions salt it different amounts.
And so where he's going to be in Ravenna, it's going to be a lot saltier than he's used to back in Florence. And every bite reminds him that he's not at home and that he can't go home. Right. That's beautiful. But that's right. I mean, it's this is this is painful. This is really, really bad news. There are times when some of the souls in Inferno seem like they wanted to kind of let this out.
Like, oh, yeah, I've got a secret about you. But, yeah, it comes here because I think you're right about that, that he is he still gets something. worth holding on to, something that matters to him, that he hasn't yet let it go so that it can come back to him in the right way, so they can come back to him transformed.
And just as throughout this poem, he's got to, his eyes have to keep getting changed. They get overwhelmed by the light and then they slowly grow accustomed to it. And that allows him to see more light. So he's also got to, it's interesting. This is not a purgation thing. This is not a sinful thing because all that stuff was dealt with in purgatory.
This is a non-sinful personal block still, a misorientation. His loves are still slightly out of alignment, right? Yeah.
It kind of strikes – go ahead.
Go ahead, Wesley.
I was just going to say it strikes me as he's doing for Dante on the front end what Lady Philosophy is doing for Boethius on the back end. When she arrives, Boethius is in tears. He's despondent about his plight, none of which he can control, right? And so Lady Philosophy has to recenter everything on –
What matters isn't what can be taken away from you because you really didn't acquire that on your own to begin with. What matters is that there are these virtues that have to remain kind of constant regardless of the fluctuations of life. And kind of a similar thing is going on here.
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Chapter 6: How does the concept of mediation appear in Paradiso?
Portland, Oregon is called the city of roses. And so there's a fun picture that my mom has of me. I was about two and they were living, dad and mom were living in a really simple apartment, two bedroom apartment kind of thing. And mom had placed a rose in a vase on the table in the kitchen. And somehow I had gotten up on the table and I'm sitting there sniffing the rose.
And I have always loved the rose as a kind of classic Western image of love, of desire, of beauty. There's literally hundreds of love poems and song lyrics and things that touch on this. And for we medievalists, It's a rich intertextual place with one of the great, the great bestseller, the New York times bestseller, the 13th century, the romance of the rose baby. Right.
And, and part of the reason that I love teaching the sticks, I do a course specifically on medieval romance is that we look at the secular romances, but I like to close with this because this to me is one of Dante's most genius moves, which is to transform the, secular, strictly oriented human love by now seeing it in the relationship to the divine.
And I have to take a Lewisian kind of detail here because in the marvelous book, The Four Loves, and I always have my students read the chapters on Eros and Charity, He defines eros there, not as something to be ashamed of or something prurient, but he talks about it as the desire for something singular. And he genders it and says it's a man's desire for not for any woman, but for one woman.
And if we take that as an analogy for our spiritual lives, it's about our pursuit of God, also about his pursuit of us. and something about the way that that works. And so the rose to me is marvelous. It's living, it's alive.
It's the inversion, it's the anti-image of what we saw in Kositis at the end of Inferno and all of the static quality of the ice and souls that are cannibalizing one another. Here we have real community. It's vibrant. And like you talked about the angel, I love that image of the angels. I love bees. And so there's something about that that just feels elementally good.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the romance of the Rose... The rose is an allegory, and the rose is an allegory for the beloved woman, but more specifically for physical union with the beloved woman. And the allegory, after thousands and thousands of lines, it breaks down and gets almost crass at the end.
Hortographic, of course.
Yeah, it kind of is. Yeah, that's right. And then for Dante to be able to take that and effortlessly just flip it into this image of beatitude, it's an image of the way the divine works, right? Dante is, you keep talking about Lewis and Tolkien, which I love, Dante is a sub-creator. He's doing what he sees his master doing.
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