Hello, everyone. Because we're getting ready to do our last class of Dante's trilogy of Dante's

comedia, we're going to do the Paradiso very soon with the Deacon Seraphim Roland. I thought that

because now it's getting dark and because it is fall and winter is coming and the days are getting

shorter and we're in the season of Halloween,

that I could maybe read the first canto

of Dante's Comedia, of Dante's Inferno with you.

And you can see how masterful Dante is in terms of symbolism,

how he is able in a poetic form of pulling in all of these analogies that are related

to this idea of being lost in the dark wood. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to, I'm

going to read the canto and we will stop in certain places in order to look at how beautiful and

how powerful Dante is able to contract all of these ideas.

I This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the symbolic world.

Hello everyone. We are finally announcing our Paradiso class. We have done two already. We have the inferno. We have the purgatory. And now we are moving to paradise. That is right. Dante himself says Inferno that we prefer hell to paradise.

And similarly, most of us prefer to read Inferno, but when we come to reading Paradiso,

we're very confused. So we're going to be actually taking you through that poem line by line,

like we did with Inferno and Purgatorio, and actually looking

at how Dante very carefully reconciles some of the contradictory traditions about the heavens

in the Christian Apocalyptic tradition, and does that through the persons of the saints.

And so this is truly important for us right now.

With the re-enchantment of the world happening, we have to be able to look at those that did

it, that did it in the most powerful way, that we're able to reconcile the ancient pagan

traditions with Christianity, with his modern understanding, the most modern understanding

...