Sep 30, 2026 · 29 min · 8 segments
Piccarda may have vanished but questions remain. The pilgrim Dante is caught between them, unable to voice them. Beatrice to the rescue! She voices what he cannot say . . . or perhaps what he is…
Mark ScarbroughHost
Between two foods equally removed and enticing, a free man would die of hunger before he could set his teeth into one of them.
So a lamb would stand still between two hungry, ferocious wolves, terrified equally of both.
In the same way, I don't condemn myself if I kept quiet, since I was pushed by my doubts, which were then necessary, if not commendable.
i kept quiet but my desire was painted on my face and my questions with it much hotter than if they were delineated in speech therefore beatrice did as daniel did when he comforted nebuchadnezzar's anger which had made the king unjustly poisonous Beatrice said, I see fully how you are pulled by one and the other desire, such that your care is bound into itself and cannot breathe.
If the good will endures, by what standard does the violence of another reduce the measure of my merit? Yet another cause of your doubt appears to be that the souls return to their stars, as follows from Plato's thesis.
These are the propositions that weigh equally on your vele, and therefore I will treat the one first that has more poison.
I'm sure you could feel how complicated that passage can get when she gets into the questions themselves, the goodwill and standards and violence and measures of merit.
We're going to talk through some of that, but before we get to that, we're going to talk about the background for Canto IV.
four and even canto five ahead of us then we'll go through this looking at that simile or the questions that she lines out that she intuits or sees the pilgrim wanting to ask he doesn't voice them but she knows them and then we're going to turn back to that simile again at the opening those nine lines because they're going to trouble us for a while so let's get to the background material In many ways, Canto's 4 and 5 of Paradiso are an answer to Purgatorio 18.
Remember this? all of the seven deadly sins are perversions of love how love is the essential motivator of everything that giant central discourse not only in purgatorio but in comedy as a whole the very apex i don't know the center point of comedy itself the discourse on love That discourse caused the pilgrim to have doubts.
Your words and my wit in following them, I said, so the pilgrim is speaking, have revealed the nature of love to me, but that has filled me with even more doubt.
For if love is offered from outside of us, and if the soul moves on no other foot than love, it has no merit in going straight or crooked.
If love is the fundamental motivator, the fundamental, in fact, informant of our actions, the pilgrim is then asking, well, then how can there be praise or blame? No merit in going straight or crooked.
Between two foods equally removed and enticing, a free man would die of hunger before he could set his teeth into one of them.
So a lamb would stand still between two hungry, ferocious wolves, terrified equally of both.
In the same way, I don't condemn myself if I kept quiet, since I was pushed by my doubts, which were then necessary, if not commendable.
i kept quiet but my desire was painted on my face and my questions with it much hotter than if they were delineated in speech therefore beatrice did as daniel did when he comforted nebuchadnezzar's anger which had made the king unjustly poisonous Beatrice said, I see fully how you are pulled by one and the other desire, such that your care is bound into itself and cannot breathe.
If the good will endures, by what standard does the violence of another reduce the measure of my merit? Yet another cause of your doubt appears to be that the souls return to their stars, as follows from Plato's thesis.
These are the propositions that weigh equally on your vele, and therefore I will treat the one first that has more poison.
I'm sure you could feel how complicated that passage can get when she gets into the questions themselves, the goodwill and standards and violence and measures of merit.
We're going to talk through some of that, but before we get to that, we're going to talk about the background for Canto IV.
four and even canto five ahead of us then we'll go through this looking at that simile or the questions that she lines out that she intuits or sees the pilgrim wanting to ask he doesn't voice them but she knows them and then we're going to turn back to that simile again at the opening those nine lines because they're going to trouble us for a while so let's get to the background material In many ways, Canto's 4 and 5 of Paradiso are an answer to Purgatorio 18.
Remember this? all of the seven deadly sins are perversions of love how love is the essential motivator of everything that giant central discourse not only in purgatorio but in comedy as a whole the very apex i don't know the center point of comedy itself the discourse on love That discourse caused the pilgrim to have doubts.
Your words and my wit in following them, I said, so the pilgrim is speaking, have revealed the nature of love to me, but that has filled me with even more doubt.
For if love is offered from outside of us, and if the soul moves on no other foot than love, it has no merit in going straight or crooked.
If love is the fundamental motivator, the fundamental, in fact, informant of our actions, the pilgrim is then asking, well, then how can there be praise or blame? No merit in going straight or crooked.
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