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.

We're not ready for the flight into the power deso, so the flight upward through the various

levels of heaven.

I just want to read to you from the very beginning of the Parodizo, some Kanto 1.

Dante says,

The glory of the one who moves all things, penetrates all the universe, reflecting in one part more and in another less.

It's a beautiful description, and it's very close to the spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The glory of the one who moves all things. We do not have a god indifferent to the world he makes.

Instead, a god who's continually luring it to himself. Think of moving

here along the lines of final causality, God who's drawing and attracting the world to himself.

And see, Dante at the beginning of this poem,

having wandered from the straight path,

he'd wandered from the allurement of God.

He was no longer being drawn by God but by something else.

That's how he got lost.

And then beautifully, who penetrates all the universe, reflecting in one part more and in another part less. This is the

participation metaphysics also on display in Thomas Aquinas. So all

things reflect the divine majesty some more some less. Think of a very high

...