Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

As all of you will know who have ever picked up a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy,

the poem begins with a profound encounter. Dante in the middle of the journey of our life

attempts to climb the mountain of virtue of holiness, but he fails. He falls into a ditch,

a dead end. And at that very moment, a miraculous but surprising grace is given him.

He's met by the classical poet Virgil, Poet of the Aeneid.

Here Dante embodies in fiction an experience at once humdrum, very ordinary,

and marvellous, extraordinary, that all of you, all of us,

readers of literature, I think, can relate to. That is the encounter with the soul, with the essence

of an author through that author's works through their writings.

Dante writes,

Before my eyes was offered to me,

one who through long silence appeared hoarse.

But how can someone who has yet to speak appear hoarse?

How does Dante know that Virgil appears hoarse through long silence

when Virgil has only just appeared to him and said not a word?

It's surely because Dante is referring symbolically to the works of Virgil

that have been in his view neglected, left gathering dust on the shelves, and are thus

silent or hoarse, partially read, partially understood, barely sounding forth.

...