Dante's Divine Comedy

Rowan Williams and Jesse Armstrong talked at The Idler festival, partly around the idea, caught in the expression, “boring as hell”. But is that right, they asked, when a drama like Succession so clearly appeals to us?The question is fundamental, for an age inclined to regard hell as appealing or intriguing, is one on the way to being lost. Drawing on Dante and William Blake, t

Dante lived through a period of almost total social collapse. Civil war and city-state terror, practiced by the church as much as secular powers, drove him into exile for the last 20 years of his life. For a while, he lost everything. But then, through the trauma, he regained a ground and rediscovered the fullness of life.The Divine Comedy is the product of that transformation. The

Dante's imagery, particularly in the Paradiso, offers powerful prompts to developing the sense of what it is to be intelligent. He wrote for modern times, he said. And now, as AI becomes more pervasive, he can help us understand how machine learning and human intuitions are very different capacities.This was part of a talk given at the Scientific and Medical Network - https://scien

Reason fails before the greatest spiritual truths. That much is not news. But part of the genius of Dante is his conjuring of images that reach beyond the impasses of paradox and seeming contradiction.I consider 8 such moments when Dante sees the unsayable and offers images of the ineffable.- how darkness leads to light- how appearances can be the opposite of the truth- how the imm

What is the meaning of Easter? How might Holy Week be more than an occasion for its retelling? Can death and resurrection live today, as they once did, 2000 years ago?Dante’s journey, in the Divine Comedy, begins on Maundy Thursday, 1300. It continues through the inferno, on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, before he enters purgatory on Easter Sunday morning, at dawn. The climb up

Dante would seem to be a key candidate for infernalism, the doctrine of endless punishment in hell for sinners who failed to turn to Christ.He’s said to be medieval and isn't that what they believed then? And doesn’t his Divine Comedy clearly, indisputably say as much?But Dante’s whole point is that nothing is as it seems to the unawakened eye.I think what Dante is doing is t

The Divine Comedy is all about guides - finding guides, following guides, conversing with guides. Virgil and Beatrice are the best known, but there are other modes of guidance that Dante seeks and explores.Angels, dreams and myths accompanying Dante, even in the darkest moments. He learns to be present to them and trust that whilst in one encounter they can bring fear or shame, in

Dante coined the word "transhumanise" in the Divine Comedy, 700 years ago. "Trasumanar" is the transformation he will undergo in order to share in the life of paradise.Today, the word has associations that are strikingly related to Dante's; partly quite similar, though changed in subtle but crucial ways. Understanding those differences illuminates the dangers of transhumanism today

A joy to speak again with Brian, this time on Dante's Divine Comedy.We talked about what happened to Dante, what happened to Mark that opened up the Divine Comedy, how the poem works as an initiation, what it reveals about Christianity, what happens to Virgil, the nature of paradise, amongst other things.For more on Brian see http://brianjames.caFor more on Mark see https://www.mar

Bernard Carr is a leading cosmologist who worked with Stephen Hawking and now investigates time, multidimensionality and consciousness, amongst other things. Bernardo Kastrup cites him as at the vanguard of the great task to integrate matter and mind.So I was delighted to get the chance to ask Bernard about images from Dante. We talked about relational cosmologies as advocated by C