Key to All Mythologies

Alex Earich
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  • Books
  • Semimonthly

a fun podcast about reading old books very slowly and discussing them in exhausting detail. If you would like to read along, the reading list can be found at https://keytoallmythologies.com/ktam/

  1. 11/15/2023

    Ep. 61: Dante, Purgatorio, Cantos 16 – 18.

    Why does the discourse on love begin with the words of a minor character, Marco of Lombardy, rather than Virgil? Are Virgil’s discourses on love and free will more Augustinian or Aristotelian? Is love the only thing in the cosmos that does not diminish as it is shared? Light? What does it mean to say God is Love? Is God love? Is Virgil’s schematic approach to these questions an example of the limits of human reason? Is faith what is missing? Is Dante the poet critiquing Virgil, or are we critiquing Dante? Even if you claim to hate God, must you still love God in order to live at all, since whatever you love was created by God, and your love for it is ultimately directed toward God, by your free will (or “free will”) via the object of your love? Because God loves every thing that God created, and free will is the spark of the Divine in you? So – evil?

  2. 10/16/2023

    Ep. 60: Dante, Purgatorio, Cantos 13 – 15.

    Some questions discussed in this episode: Can love undo the damage inflicted – to the self and the the community – by envy? Is there a Golden Mean between vice and virtue? Just how Aristotelian was Dante anyway? How does the kind of person you are change the things you can (and cannot) see? What is the distinction between truth and fact? What does Dante means when he speaks of art as an “error” that is not false?

  3. 10/02/2023

    Ep. 59: Dante, Purgatorio, Cantos 10 – 12.

    Some questions discussed in this episode: What role does art have to play in the transformation of vice into virtue? What is the connection, if there is one, between the soul of the artist and the beauty of what they create? If virtue is properly presented by the artist, will it always be attractive, and vice always disgusting, to the audience? Why is this the where Dante worries the reader might fall away? Why is this an especially dangerous moment for Dante’s vision of the unity of divine justice? Why is the dominant metaphors in theses cantos economic? Does every penitent in purgatory pass through every terrace? Or are the prayers of those on Earth enough to zap you past one or all of the terraces and directly to Heaven? Why is the capstone image of pride the fall of Troy?

  4. 09/21/2023

    Ep. 58: Dante, Purgatorio, Cantos 7 – 9.

    We are now through Cato’s gate, and into the antechamber, the incorporeal coat-room, the final stage before Purgatory proper. Dante moves among the penitents as they receive their just punishments, and serve their allotted waiting times, before they can slowly make their way up the mountain, and eventually to Heaven. We discuss the delicate interplay of light and darkness, of faith in the unseen and clarity of vision, and of certainty and doubt, which this painstaking crawl of redemption inspires. Bonus thoughts: We also think about what role beauty plays in religious art.

  5. 04/12/2023

    Ep. 57: Dante, Purgatorio, Cantos 4 – 6

    We continue our climb up the mountain of Purgatory. Canto Four begins with a consideration of the meaning of prayer for the process of purgation. God, we are told, cannot hear the prayers of those passing through Purgatory, but their time on the mountain can be shortened by the prayers of the living. We discuss this rather strange piece of doctrine. Given what we learned in Hell about the very precise nature of divine justice, doesn’t this violate or circumvent it somehow? Or is this an argument for the God-granted power of the human mind, and the importance of community within Christianity? We also discuss the importance of paying attention. Dante seems to suggest here, in an almost proto-Existentialist way, that certain aspects of reality are revealed through attentiveness that can’t be discovered any other way. Does this connect to these Canto’s focus on prayer? Finally, we consider again Dante’s political commitments. Can his longing after the perfect monarch be squared with his metaphysics? Is it incurably naïve, or are we just being decadent moderns? Is the naivety with him or with us?

  6. 02/01/2023

    Ep. 56: Dante, Purgatorio, Cantos 1 – 3.

    We join Dante and Virgil as they begin their climb up the mountain of Purgatory. Why is Cato, a pagan who lived before Christ and died by suicide, the honored guardian of that mountain? Does he have access to Heaven? If so, why only him and no other “virtuous pagans” (including Virgil)? We also reflect on the tragedy and meaning of Virgil’s fate, and what this fate might say about his supposed status as the Divine Comedy’s embodiment of human reason. Finally, we talk about Dante’s larger plan for the Comedy. What is his grand vision of Christianity and the Christian life? And is this vision meant comfort us, or disturb us?

  7. 01/10/2023

    Ep. 55: Dante’s Divine Comedy (Hollander trans.), “Inferno,” Cantos 31 – 34.

    We arrive at the end of the Inferno, where Satan is frozen in a lake of ice. Dante’s Satan is a mechanistic creature, seemingly without agency, personality, or voice. His main function is to sit at the center of Hell, the lowest point in Dante’s hierarchical universe, where the flapping of his six wings freezes the landscape around him, and to allow Dante and Virgil to use his body as a ladder to climb up and out of Hell. He is, to say the least, not charming, duplicitous, playful, or mocking. The most life-like thing about him are the tears he continually cries. What is the meaning of these tears? Is Satan expressing sorrow or regret, rage, or pain, some other emotion – or is he just cold. In a poem full of memorable characters and self-aggrandizing monologues, why is Evil’s most famous representative a blank – more of an object than a living being. What does this tell us about Dante’s sense of Evil and Goodness, and about the many questions of poetry, rhetoric, representation, and power we have discussed throughout the Inferno? Can we conceive of a Satan who spoke his piece and did not emit at least a touch of rebellious glamour?

  8. 12/14/2022

    Ep. 54: Dante’s Divine Comedy (Hollander trans.), “Inferno,” Cantos 28 – 30.

    We are now deep in Hell. Two of the sinners we encounter in canto 29 introduce a new wrinkle to the poem’s psychology. They seem to have some degree of self-knowledge about the justice of their punishment, or at least they refer to their own punishment as fitting. What does it mean to have self-knowledge post-damnation? It can’t be that sinner’s learn once condemned to Hell, can it? Is total self-knowledge equivalent to a complete severing from God’s being? Why is forgery a sin punished so deep in the pit? And why is it’s contrapasso that the forger is made too heavy to move, and tormented by images of lovely, flowing rivers? We also discuss the meaning of being entertained by the grotesque scenes of torture and demonic slapstick throughout the Inferno. Is the only purpose of these scenes to deliver moral lessons, and could you deliver the lessons without the moral dangers posed by the base entertainments? How does Dante respond to the artistic and rhetorical challenges posed by the obvious fact that it is more fun to think and talk about Hell than about Heaven? Or is this merely a problem for us decadents moderns, and not one for Dante and his contemporary readers who, presumably, had no lack of faith in the very real existence of the afterlife and its fiery punishments?

    Ep. 54: Dante’s Divine Comedy (Hollander trans.), “Inferno,” Cantos 28 – 30.
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About

a fun podcast about reading old books very slowly and discussing them in exhausting detail. If you would like to read along, the reading list can be found at https://keytoallmythologies.com/ktam/

Information

  • Creator
    Alex Earich
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2023
  • Episodes
    61
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Alex Earich
  • Show Website
    Key to All Mythologies