Show Notes
What is the meaning of Easter? How might Holy Week be more than an occasion for its retelling? Can death and resurrection live today, as they once did, 2000 years ago? Dante’s journey, in the Divine Comedy, begins on Maundy Thursday, 1300. It continues through the inferno, on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, before he enters purgatory on Easter Sunday morning, at dawn. The climb up Mount Purgatory, then, takes until Easter Wednesday when, finally, Dante reaches paradise. Though that is ...
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
“Circles of hell" has become commonplace in language. But what was Dante trying to show us when he wrote the inferno? What has been lost in translation, with this first canticle in Dante’s trilogy now part of a secular culture? Jason Baxter talks about his new translation of the Inferno with Mark Vernon. They discuss what Dante could convey in language and why the text never ceases to offer fresh insights. How can we understand his encounters with figures from Virgil to Ulysses? What is it t...
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...