We look at Francis's  Povertà  and see lack, vacancy. As when we try to look at the logic and conclusions of Providence: La provedenz...

This scene from book 5 of Lucan's Pharsalia is placed here for ease of reference for the discussion in this blog post . It's the s...

The five cantos of the Sun (Par. 10-14) open with the Trinity, and with the chiastic (X-shaped) intersection of the celestial equator and t...

One is lost in conjecture as to the motive which impelled Dante , the admirer of Thomism , to place in the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas th...

Between the address to the reader in Paradiso 10 and the next line, which begins Lo ministro maggior della natura The greatest of the ...

Paradiso 10 begins a new moment in this canticle. We are in the Sun, and no shadow from Earth reaches this far -- as such, it is a place ...

Paradiso 10. 7-25 : Lift up then, Reader, to the lofty wheels With me thy vision straight unto that part Where the one motion on th...

[Update: The last few paragraphs have been revised in faint hopes of producing a bit more clarity.] Let's look at  Paradiso 9 with re...

Mary Beard author of SPQR , a recent history of Rome, talks about the relation of the contemporary mind to turbulence in the Roman world. S...

Dante was not going to leave the sphere of Venus without some dalliance with love stories from the ancient world and, in a different way, f...

A reasonable question to ask of Paradiso 8 is why Charles Martel is the focus of the first encounter after hearing Beatrice's account ...

At the Yale University Art Gallery hang wall paintings from one of the world’s oldest churches. Buried by the middle of the third century,...