This is John Bachelor, conversation with the historian Matthew

Schendel. For the love of Mars is his new book a human history of the red planet.

When it comes to Renaissance Mars, however, it's important to take into account the one person who directed the study of Mars

away from war, violence, horrors, to fortitude.

Dante in the divine comedy, and Matthew Schendel here explains why.

Dante needed to transform Mars. Perhaps that's the

fascination here in the 21st century, the idea of civilization on Mars. I know there are lots of explanations coming out of SpaceX and

we no longer associate Mars with war. Not in the sky. We're studying it. We have two rovers, curiosity and perseverance.

There are a number of orbiters and there are a lot of missions planned. But fortitude.

Here's Dante, as you've never seen him before, making a new way of viewing Mars.

Perhaps we'll get back to it when there is a colony on Mars, and it needs to be inspired and not castigated as warlike.

More of this later tonight.

Yeah, I was a little surprised by that.

I mean Dante does something really interesting.

He's kind of, if you will, forced to make Mars more positive than it's usually depicted

because when he has come out of hell in purgatory he's going now up into the heavenly spheres and all the planets now have to represent a virtue as opposed to a vice and war doesn't seem like a great virtue. So what Dante does is he

transforms it into fortitude. He keeps that connection to war by making Mars the heavenly sphere in which all of the people who died in holy war, all of the martyrs, are going to reside.

And of course, their model, the greatest martyr of all time in Dante's mind and in Christian Europe, was Jesus Christ.

And so Mars becomes this very special planet in embodying that sacrifice that Christ made on the cross in dying for God.

So it does become very important to Dante's world.