Here's something new in Dante's COMEDY: a descent from one ring of hell to another within a single canto.

Dante-the-pilgrim and Virgil scramble down to find themselves on the shore of Styx--which brings up the whole problem of the hydraulics of INFERNO.

Stuck in the muck are the wrathful. And they're of two sorts. We'll talk about Thomistic notions of wrath (really, Aristotelean notions of wrath) and also the strange inversions of medieval iconography in this passage.

But more importantly, we'll talk about what's up with Virgil, who seems to know things nobody could know. He may be a "fount of all knowledge," but what if some of that is unknowable by any known means.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, on this slow stroll through Dante's COMEDY as we descent to the circle of wrath at the end of Canto VII of INFERNO.

Here are the segments for this episode:

[00:53] My English translation of the passage from INFERNO: Canto VII, lines 97 - 130. If you want to see this translation, check it out on my website, markscarbrough.com, under the subhead "Walking With Dante."

[03:27] The descent to the fifth circle, the wrathful--and Virgil's strange ability to tell time.

[05:07] The naturalistic details that are proliferating in this section of COMEDY (and that set up the naturalistic details to come). Often seen as allegories of wrath, I find them more interesting as the beginning of the larger project of the hydraulics of hell.

[09:28] Wrath. Two sorts, à la Aquinas and à la Aristotle.

[16:54] Virgil verbalizes the damned. How does that work?

[18:01] Walking the circle--we're starting to see more of hell as a landscape.

[18:43] The wrathful are an infernal perversion of standard medieval iconography. Of Leah and Rachel, to be exact