Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. This is Matt Petrucic Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute.

This week we are bringing you the next lecture from Bishop Barron's popular course, Dante's Catholic

Imagination, which is available in its entirety inside the Word on Fire Institute.

We hope you enjoy this deep dive into Dante's Evergreen, always relevant, poetic, moral, and

theological genius.

So we've left Virgil and Dante now at the very mouth of hell. The famous line, you know, abandoned hope all

you enter here is from the divine comedy when they see the sign. Now the

irony is that Dante does indeed enter there but doesn't have to abandon hope but I won't go into all

that Virgil's told them all right we've got to be courageous and you've got to be

willing to see what's down here that That's always required everybody in the spiritual order.

I tell people that in spiritual direction or confession. What's required here is

great courage to look at what's off kilter in your spiritual life.

Down they go, and as I mentioned they go through the three levels of the sins of incontinence, of violence, and of fraudulent.

But here's how hell is shaped in Dante's imagination.

Think of a great inverted cone, so it's bigger at the top, and then as you go down down it gets narrower and narrower.

The image by the way he has is Satan when he fell from heaven like lightning crashed crashed into the earth.

And as he goes down, he created the sort of cavern of hell.

So he's going to be at the very bottom of this,

but he's created this inverted cone of hell. Look first at this image of narrowing. St

Augustine said that sin is the state of being incurvatus in say.

Boys love that.

It means to be caved in on oneself.

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