Well friends Dante in 100 days a hundred cantos we're embarked on a wonderful journey a trip through the greatest of all christian epics Dante's divine comedy. If we read and heed this epic well, it will change our lives, but first of all there's just a few data there are a few things that we need to know Dante's dates are 1265-1321. He was a native of Florence an important cultural and political city during the middle ages yet Dante was struck with tragedy fairly early in his life. It occurred in 1302 when dante was exiled from his high public office in florence on trumped-up charges of corruption he was never allowed to return. We can't really fathom what that meant to Dante. For Dante he had been stripped of his identity you were your city and if i were exiled from houston I wouldn't mine very much i'd be glad! Not in the middle ages you were your community. He died in 1321 he's buried in ravenna the seacoast italian city and yet in a paradoxical way we can be grateful for Dant's exile. For it was during these years that he wrote the divine comedy from probably 1308 to 1320. Dante would become eventually a married man with three children, yet his poetic inspiration came a good deal earlier it came through his personal vision of a young woman who embodied something transcendent in herself: evident beauty and goodness. She was a Florentine damsel named Beatrice Putinari remember that name Beatrice and pronounce it that way, it happens also to be the word that means blessed. He saw her actually only three times in his whole life first when he was only nine years old imagine and she was only eight. Again nine years later when they exchanged greetings in the street he would have been 18, she 17. And then finally a few years later when she met him in the street and she mocked him for this excessive attention he was given to her but dante was not deterred he remained convinced that he had discerned an eternal beauty and goodness that lies beyond mere human sight it called him to order his loves to the love of god and therefore to enable us as we read his great book to do the same. Beatrice therefore remains the central figure of the entire divine comedy now Dante did something really quite daring. He constructed this epic poem not in the grand latin of virgil's aeneid but in the ordinary speech of cultivated italians, florentines specifically, and therefore this was to be a colloquial epic an unheard of thing and yet he would seek to account for the existence of the entire cosmos the whole universe in the language of the people Italian. More startling still, he called this book the divine comedy he called it truth of the comedy the divine was lighted later because for people in the middle ages stories that begin in darkness and sorrow and sadness but end in gladness and hope and victory are a far off echo of the gospel itself so the word comedy does not have anything to do with guffaws, belly laughs, side splitting humor. There's some humor in Dante but it's very sly it means instead that while tragedies close down to death often noble deaths comedy becomes a Christian form that opens up the new life and that's the word of course for the gospel good news so Dante did something even more daring than that: he decided to include contemporary florentines in his epic: people who were known on the streets and in the city of Florence and throughout the whole of Italy. So if you can imagine Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in an epic poem of our time that strikes us as ludicrous but Dante brings it off. So we encounter people who were still alive in his own time many of them already in hell where maybe those two belong i don't know so for example the corrupt Boniface VIII is in hell Dante's beloved teacher Brunetto Latini is in hell though they're both still living but in making his epic poem something as engaging and direct and down to earth as he could, he did not neglect form, structure, patterns. The best way to read the divine comedy is to think about a medieval cathedral: it has a magnificence of symmetry and that symmetry depends upon the trinitarian number three God is three and one and one in three so what do we get in Dante three books each of them have 33 cantos plus this one introductory canto making a total of 100 and 100 was thought to be the perfect number 10 times 10. He does one other thing that i would like to bring out that is he deepens and dignifies the poem by his use of what's called an epic simile. An epic simile is a long careful comparison of one thing with another, so as to help us not simply stay on the surface of life reading things just literally, but to see their great depth. So here's the first one it appears it appears in the first page and that is he's had this awful, awful dream that he awakens from (he awakens by the way on march 25 the year 1300 good Friday the day of our Lord's own descent into hell), he knows he's just barely escaped with the hope of getting out of that terrible plight. So listen: "as a man with labor breathing drags his legs out of the water and ashore fixes his eyes upon the dangerous sea so to my mind while still a fugitive turned back to gaze again upon that past which never let a man escape alive." And that pass of course is the pass into hell. But you see Dante just said well i got a guy by jam he says with that epic assembly he's elevating he's dignifying he's showing this is something of cosmic transcendent significance. He does that throughout so look out for the epic similes everywhere to be found in Dante. One final word about matters of fact: be sure to distinguish between Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim. Dante the poet is the author of the entire great grand work whereas he also impersonates himself as Dante the pilgrim. So when our narrative is not spoken it's always Dante the poet, but when it is spoken it's Dante himself the pilgrim and of course we're one of those as well. We are embarking then, on a trip to the depths of hell up to the mountain of purgatory finally into paradise itself. Look at the very first line remarkable: "midway upon the journey of our life i found myself in a dark wilderness for i had wandered from the straight and the true." Notice it's midway this story begins on Good Friday of the year 1300 the trinitarian year. Dante is 35; in that year he's halfway to the biblically allotted seventy. And at the same time he universalized it in a big way in our journey I found myself so this poem is once universal and very direct and particular. He summons us to be his fellow pilgrims along this way. It's important to note that for Dante we will not discover truth goodness happiness beauty until we know we have lost it. And therefore Dante must discover the extent of which his life is damned before he can come up out of the entrapments that cage that he is himself caught in. And so for Dante so we must as well plumb the depths of hell with him so that we can go up to happier things at the end. Now Dante has to get past however this awful she-wolf she's called and she is a symbol of greed avarice and obsessive desire for more and more. Dante believed that greed damns more people than any other sin among all the sin. Not the worst sin, but numerically it damns most and Dante can't get past her. He himself knows he's greedy he's got to get around her and there's no way around. When suddenly there appears this shadowy figure whom Dante can't identify. He looks and says "who's that" and so Virgil has to identify himself saying "I'm not a living man but a shade from the underworld" because Virgil has depicted that underworld in the aeneid he knows what that dismal world is like and therefore he can lead Dante down into it. And Dante is just overjoyed overwhelmed at the prospect of having Virgil - Virgil! - as his guide. At this point we might ask ourselves who are our guides in our time? Who are leading us out of the abyss? So the first thing Virgil does is to call for an all-out attack on this pervasive greed that's consuming all of Italy. And he thus prophesies the coming of the greyhound. Who in the world is the greyhound? Well probably something pretty obvious! Con grande is the Italian for big dog and he had been Dante's host and he was a prominent figure in his time he hoped that a figure like khan grande, could come and rip out with his fierce denunciations the terrible greed pervading all of Italy. Here's a crucial point we'll discover throughout the comedy for Dante: salvation in the religious world is inseparable from uprightness in the political realm. Without fair and just government the people's moral and religious life will be compromised. Our time rings loud this means also that for Dante life is profoundly communal: we don't live as isolators to ourselves. We are webbed together in an inextricable life with others it was so for Dante. We often think that we live as self-made creatures not for Dante. We live and move and have our being only among others. now though this Virgil never knew the true god this doesn't disqualify him to be Dante's guide. For his moral and religious wisdom is poetic supreme poets like Virgil traffic in the concrete and the particular. While Virgil also represents reason: reason can often get lost in very highfalutin abstractions that are hard to understand and difficult to apply, not so with poetry. It deals with the concrete the particular unlike these theoretical areas speculation new images sounds characters events victories defeats that remain unforgettably alive in our imagination. They have the permanent power to transform us. Dante therefore salutes Virgil with the highest of all possible accolades: poeta! Poet! So let's follow them on this poetic journey of unparalleled importance.