This is Jonathan Peugeot amazing text called the Comedia. This is what I'm going

to be talking about most, but he was, as you, if you've studied Dante a little bit, he was

part of a brotherhood of poets that were focused on the notion of love.

Now, love in the comedy can be seen as the animating force behind everything that Dante talks about.

And not only the animating force in the story, but really presented as something like the animated,

animating force of everything.

That is the manner in which the world exists.

And for us, as modern people, that is a very strange thing to think, to think that the world exists through love, let's say.

But hopefully, by the time I'm done speaking to you, to at least understand how we could think something like that

or how it is that people could think that way.

So Dante has this whole massive experience of going down into hell,

encountering all these people that are suffering for different sins,

and then all going up to purgatory,

encountering again people that are expiating some of their sins,

and then moving up into heaven, where there's this slow ascension

all the way up into God.

But when you read the text, you realize that,

for example, the people in hell, they rush into hell themselves. They want to be there.

And there's a sense in which the people that are at the different levels of reality that Dante

encounters, they want to be where they are. And the reason why they want to be where they are is

because of love that is it is

something like in the lower spheres let's say in hell and in purgatory it's

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