I want to read you the two most terrifying sentences that Thomas Aquinas ever wrote.

Here's the first one.

They will be tormented with the thought that the knowledge they had of speculative matters was imperfect

and that they missed its highest degree of perfection, which they might have acquired.

And here's the second one.

In hell, the place must be so disposed for seeing as regards light and darkness,

that nothing be seen clearly, and that only such things be dimly seen

as are able to bring anguish to the heart.

Okay, sorry to be a downer. I don't really even have a joke or a funny line to open this particular episode with because we're in the part of Dante that is most distressing to me.

Maybe not most of all distressing, but it's definitely up there in the top five moments that give me the most trouble. And that's because Dante

puts Socrates in hell. Look what they did to my boy. My boy Socrates is in hell. Now,

granted, he's in the least painful part of hell. He's in a part of hell that maybe isn't even painful exactly.

It's just really, really depressing.

And I read you those two sentences from Thomas Aquinas to lead us in because Aquinas can feel very dry when you read him.

Those are both from the Summa Theologica,

which is this big treatise covering basically all questions of faith. It's from the supplement

at the very, very end, the highest numbers of questions. You get to these matters of damnation

and ultimate things, heaven and hell.

And he has these two statements.

One, he first deals with the physical torments of hell, and then he deals with the intellectual deprivations, the mental or cognitive deprivations of hell.

And both of those sentences have to do with this thing we've been talking about in Dante, which is the deprivation of the intellect. The eyes in medieval theology and philosophy and in classical philosophy, too, were key.

They were the central or the most important senses because light is what gives us the most knowledge and information.

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