Great Books #10: Dante's Hierarchy of Hell

Jiang Xueqin· Host0:00

Welcome to hell. So, um, we finished Dante's Inferno today, and so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to give you the overview of how Dante constructs hell, the inferno, and I'll explain to you his, his reasoning for the structure. So, um, first thing I'm gonna do is explain to you, uh, Dante's cosmology, how he understands God and our relationship with God. So, um, God in Dante is really the monad of Plato, okay? Um, for Plato, God or the monad is eternal, perfect, and immutable. It is, it has always been there, it will always be there. It is perfect, and it is, it will never, ever change. This creates a problem for the universe though, because if something is perfect, it cannot be creative. It lacks an imagination. If it knows everything, there's nothing for it to learn, okay? So it lacks an imagination. But without an imagination, the problem is the universe cannot expand. It cannot renew itself. It cannot rejuvenate. So to solve this problem, what God does is create us,