Show Notes
Paradise. Destiny for a chosen few? Dismissed today by many. Or might it be the end for us all? Dante tells us to follow closely in the richest, subtlest and most expansive part of the journey conveyed in the Divine Comedy. He shows us how to develop paradisal perception, the way to know this experience of reality now, and to become ready for it in the hereafter. Paradise is when the deepest truths become clear, the most intimate participation with life is known as divine. This is the thir...
More from Dante's Divine Comedy
Dante encounters seven popes in the Divine Comedy, five in hell, one in purgatory and one in paradise - that last being Saint Peter. His condemnation of individual popes and, I think, the papacy is extraordinarily strong and discomforting to relate. But was it all revenge? Did he fall for the politics too? Or was his message one of renewal, revival and reunion with God? Dante was concerned about salvation, the role of women and friars, the love of the gospel, and the fate of Christian...
This talk was first given to Idler Drinks. For more on Mark's work on Dante - https://www.markvernon.com/dantes-divine-comedy
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Rowan Williams and Jesse Armstrong talked at The Idler festival, partly around the idea, caught in the expression, “boring as hell”. But is that right, they asked, when a drama like Succession so clearly appeals to us? The question is fundamental, for an age inclined to regard hell as appealing or intriguing, is one on the way to being lost. Drawing on Dante and William Blake, two great diagnostic writers about different states of mind, this talk explores how the passions of the soul,...
Dante lived through a period of almost total social collapse. Civil war and city-state terror, practiced by the church as much as secular powers, drove him into exile for the last 20 years of his life. For a while, he lost everything. But then, through the trauma, he regained a ground and rediscovered the fullness of life. The Divine Comedy is the product of that transformation. The journeys through hell, purgatory and paradise hold nothing back, be that terrible tortures of extraordinary de...