Antigone is the "dark sign from the gods." Today, Dcn. Harrison Garlick is joined by Mr. David Niles of the Catholic Man Show and Dr. Frank Grabowski to discuss the Greek tragedy "Antigone" by Sophocles.

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From the guide:

This guide, like the podcast conversation, explores Antigone as a profound meditation on piety, justice, and the cosmic order. This guide addresses critical aspects of arguably Sophocles’ greatest work, such as: the moral conflict over burying the dead, the contrasting perspectives of Antigone, Ismene, and Creon, and the play’s potential as an early articulation of natural law—all while highlighting Sophocles’ role as a teacher shaping Greek thought.

The guide also moves from Greek notion of piety and justice to comparative Christian ethics. The goal is to help the reader love Antigone and see the cosmic order it reveals through one of the greatest female characters in Western literature.

What has occurred just prior to the start of Antigone?

Just before the events of Sophocles’ Antigone, the city of Thebes has been ravaged by a civil war between Antigone’s two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, who are sons of the late Oedipus, the former king. After Oedipus’ tragic downfall and death, the brothers were meant to share the throne, but a dispute led to conflict. Eteocles held power in Thebes, while Polyneices, exiled, rallied an army to attack the city and reclaim his right to rule. The brothers met on the battlefield and killed each other in combat, leaving Thebes without a clear ruler. Their uncle, Creon, assumes the throne and declares Eteocles a patriot, granting him a proper burial, while branding Polyneices a traitor, forbidding his burial under penalty of death. This decree sets the stage for the moral and familial conflict at the heart of Antigone, as Antigone and her sister Ismene grapple with the consequences of their brothers’ deaths and Creon’s edict.

What is the central moral conflict introduced at the beginning of Antigone?

The central moral conflict revolves around the duty to bury the dead, specifically Antigone’s desire to bury her brother, Polyneices, who has been declared a traitor by their uncle, King Creon. Creon decrees that Polyneices’ body must remain unburied, to be “torn apart by the dogs, by the birds,” as punishment for his betrayal of Thebes. Antigone, however, sees the burial as a moral obligation, rooted in familial piety and divine law. The burial of the brother, however, is a catalyst to deeper moral concerns, as how to resolve this moral conflict invites the reader to contemplate how the family, polis, and divine all align with one another within the cosmos. It is a question of law, piety, and justice.

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How would you respond to the will of a tyrant? Today, Dcn. Harrison Garlick is joined by Dr. Jared Zimmerer of Benedictine College to discuss Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound - the first play in an otherwise lost triad.

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WHY SHOULD YOU READ PROMETHEUS BOUND?

From the guide:

Prometheus Bound is the story of man and civilization. Within the contrast of Prometheus’ rebellion and Zeus’ tyranny, Aeschylus provides a narrative that explores the concepts of liberty and purpose. It is a story of human nature—of the identity of man and the role of technology in shaping that identity.

As the conversation with Dr. Zimmerer and Dcn. Garlick highlights, the play “tells us about human nature” by exploring Prometheus as “an anti-hero” who defies Zeus’ tyranny and embodies our natural desire to rebel against oppressive authority. The lines of the good and evil, however, are not straightforward in Prometheus Bound—and many characters must make difficult decisions and compromises.

Though not in the play itself, the chief act of rebellion is Prometheus stealing fire from Mount Olympus. It is, in many ways, an analogue of technological progress. Technology is the creation of man but often makes claims upon the nature of its creator. Prometheus Bound invites the reader to reflect upon how technology can bring civilizational ascension or collapse (think atomic power and Oppenheimer).

As Dr. Zimmerer observes, in an age where culture is often flattened into “pop cultural” shallowness, the play challenges us to engage with the beauty and depth of human civilization—urging us to resist the trivialization of our divine gifts. By wrestling with these themes, Prometheus Bound not only illuminates the struggles of its characters but also compels us to examine our own drives, freedoms, and responsibilities in shaping the cultural legacy of mankind.

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"Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." Today, Dcn. Harrison Garlick is joined by Mr. Thomas Lackey and Mr. Adam Minihan to discuss how to read the Bible like Jesus, St. Paul, the Early Church Fathers, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Dante!

There are four senses: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. The guys explain Divine Authorship, Dante's thesis that you read his Comedy like you Scripture, and then explain each sense and give examples.

Check our thegreatbookspodcast.com for resources on the Iliad, Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, and more!

Summary:

St. Jerome states, “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ” (CCC 112). In other words, we come to know the reality of Jesus Christ by reading Holy Scripture. Yet, what if we read the Bible incorrectly? If the Scriptures are a source of knowledge about our Lord, would not a wrong reading of the text twist our understanding of Christ? We, especially as moderns, are always in danger of distorting the Gospel to meet our own ideological standards. As Bishop Konderla teaches, “We are called to measure ourselves against the teaching of Christ and His Church, not our own imaginations or standards.” He continues, “We must receive the Jesus Christ who came two-thousand years ago, not create a ‘Jesus’ who meets the fashions and fads of this age” (God Builds a House, 6). If we are to discipline ourselves to receive Jesus—and not manufacture a “Jesus”—then a vital part of that reception is a proper understanding of how to know Christ in Holy Scripture. How then does the Church teach us to read Holy Scripture?

In the 1300s, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri wrote a letter to his patron, Lord Cangrande della Scala, regarding how one should read the Divine Comedy. His answer was simple: you read the Comedy the same way you read the Bible. In summary of Sacred Tradition, Dante explains that there are four senses or ways to read Holy Scripture: literal and three spiritual ways, i.e., allegorical, moral, and anagogical. These four senses were also taught by St. Thomas Aquinas (STI.1.10) and are contained in the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church (“CCC” 115-19). They represent the time-tested wisdom of the Church on how to come to know and love Jesus Christ through the Holy Scriptures.

Let us examine each “sense” of biblical interpretation, how it relates to the others, and how they all draw us into a deeper relationship with our Lord.

The literal sense of Scripture is also known as the “historical sense.” St. Thomas notes the literal sense is the meaning the author intended. For example, Dante gives the simple illustration of the passage: “When Israel went out of Egypt.” He observes, “If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses.” The literal is simply the intended, historical meaning of a text. It is important, however, to interpret the literal correctly, because “all other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal” (CCC 116). Similarly, Aquinas states that the spiritual sense of Scripture—allegorical, moral, and anagogical—is “based on the literal and presupposes it.” The importance of the literal sense of Scripture as foundational to all other senses emphasizes how vital it is that Catholics read commentaries that are faithful to the magisterium. Like a broken foundation of a home, a slanted literal sense can distort the greater spiritual senses built upon it.

The allegorical sense is the first of the three types of the “spiritual sense.” In the...

Lying is a sterile act that impedes the purpose of the intellect. Today, Dcn. Harrison Garlick is joined by Sean Berube and Shannon of Catholic Frequency to discuss "Lying as Contraceptive Speech." Dcn. Garlick gives several short talks pulling from Dante's Inferno, the Gospel of St. John, and liberalism with responses from Sean and Shannon from a live recording on X (Twitter).

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Master Adamo lies a bloated mass of “watery rot.” His amorphous frame bears his diseased paunch and distended limbs, as his lips curl and crack under his parching fever—despite being a waterlogged waste. He lies before Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil and explains how King Minos poured him into the last ditch of the eighth circle of hell. He was a counterfeiter of Florentine florins. He blurred the lines of reality in life and now he lays blurred—a poor counterfeit of his former self.

In Dante’s Inferno, the eighth circle of hell is composed of ten ditches populated by flatterers, fortune tellers, deceivers, alchemists, and other fraudulent souls. It is not surprising such souls suffer eternal torment, but it is surprising that Dante the Poet has them suffer with greater severity than murderers or the lustful. Why, for example, would a flatterer suffer a worse fate in hell than Attila the Hun? Why would an alchemist merit greater suffering than Cleopatra or Achilles? The structure of hell, as presented by Dante the Poet, moves from the lesser sins of incontinence—lust, greed, prodigality, etc.—to the greater sins of malice: violence and fraud. For Dante, fraud is more perverse than violence, because it represents an abuse of that which is highest in man: the intellect.

The suffering of Master Adamo invites us to three considerations: first, how acting contrary to reason creates a counterfeit anthropology; second, how the intellect suffers when it satiates on untruth; and third, how lying is an act of sterility that leads to a superficial embrace of reality.

It will remain, however, to question who is to blame for these unrealities becoming culturally normative, and the steps we must take to purge our imaginations of these counterfeits of Creation...

Check out the article that inspired this podcast on the Josias: Our Contraceptive Speech.

The frozen heart of hell. Today, Dcn. Harrison Garlick is joined by Mr. Evan Amato to discuss the frozen wastes of the 9th Circle of Hell - the damned guilty of treachery (or complex fraud).

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A few questions from our guide to Dante's Inferno:

78. What happens in the ninth circle of hell: Treachery (Complex Fraud) (Canto 34)?

Pressing onward, Virgil leads the Pilgrim to “Judecca”—named after Judas Iscariot—in which those souls that have betrayed their benefactors or their lords are frozen completely in the ice.[1] The Pilgrim notes the distorted figures, saying: “To me they looked like straws worked into glass.”[2] Finally, the Pilgrim sees the gigantic figure of Satan. The figure of Lucifer, the arch-traitor against his Benefactor and Lord, God, is frozen in the ice to the waist as his six bat-like wings eternally beating—thus, causing the wind that freezes all in the pit of hell.[3] The Pilgrim observes, Satan, who has three faces on his head, “wept from his six eyes, and down three chins were dripping tears mixed with bloody slaver.”[4] Each one of Satan’s faces bears a distinct color—red, yellow, and black—and in each mouth Lucifer “crunched a sinner.”[5] In the mouth of the central red face, Judas, who “suffers most of all,” and is inserted headfirst.[6] The other two souls are inserted legs first and they are Brutus in the black face—“see how he squirms in silent desperation”—and Cassius in the yellow face."[7] Bringing their journey to an end, Virgil, with the Pilgrim on his back, first climbs down the hairy shanks of Satan, and second, after passing the center of the earth, climbs up the legs of Satan.[8] Heading out toward the Mount of Purgatory, the Pilgrim and Virgil exit the earth and behold the stars in the sky.[9]

79. Why does Dante the Poet use ice to describe the bottom of hell?

In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, when he must answer how does the Unmoved Mover move all things if the Unmoved Mover does not move, he answers: love (eros). God is Pure Act, and all things are drawn to him by love—in other words, though unmoved himself, he is the source of all movement in the cosmos. As such, the pit of hell would be the furthest from God; thus, evil, as a type of anti-movement and anti-love finds a poetic home in the imagery of ice. Furthermore, evil is a privation of the good. Evil is not something real but rather something unreal, a lack. Evil is like a hole in the ground or like darkness is to light. Similarly, evil is like cold is the heat. Coldness is not necessarily real per se but is rather the absence of heat. Evil is the absence of good. As such, ice again makes a good image of evil and a fitting pit to a hell structured according to love.

80. Why is the...

We finish the 8th Circle of hell! Dcn. Harrison Garlick and Dr. Donald Prudlo of the University of Tulsa discuss pits 8-10 of the 8th Circle of Dante's Inferno (Cantos 26-31). Dr. Prudlo is an incredibly talented Catholic scholar! You'll want to hear what he has to say - especially about Odysseus, Troy, and the Garden of Eden.

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From our guide:

64. What happens in the eighth ditch (Cantos 26-27)?

Overlooking the eighth ditch, the Pilgrim and Virgil view the punishment of those souls King Minos found guilty of deception or evil counsel.[1] The Pilgrim sees columns of flames, and Virgil explains, “there are souls concealed within these moving fires, each one swathed in his burning punishment.”[2] Dante the Pilgrim observes a “flame with its tip split in two,” to which Virgil explains the flame contains the souls of both Ulysses and Diomedes.[3] The contrapasso of the eighth bolgia is that these deceivers burn as tongues of flame just as their tongues in life brought forth pain and destruction.[4] Moving on, the Pilgrim and Virgil meet another soul, Guido da Montefeltro, “a soldier who became a friar in his old age; but he was untrue to his vows when, at the urging of Pope Boniface VIII, he counseled the use of fraud in the pope’s campaign against the Colonna family. He was damned to hell because he failed to repent of his sins, trusting instead in the pope’s fraudulent absolution.”[5] Virgil and the Pilgrim press on, where, coming to the ninth ditch, they see “those who, sowing discord, earned Hell’s wages.”[6]

65. Does fire have a special role in the Inferno?

Given its name, most expect fire to be the normative punishment of the Inferno—but it is not. The question is whether the role fire does play has a special pedagogical purpose. Dr. Prudlo sets forth that fire, especially as seen here as “tongues of fire,” represents an “anti-Pentecostal sin.” Fire plays a role in the punishment of the blasphemers, sodomites, usurers, simonists, and false counselors. Fire, as Dr. Prudlo notes, is the “most noble element in Dante’s world,” and it plays a certain “refined punishment” in the Inferno. It seems to signify a certain “unnatural abuse” within the sin, an “abuse of some special gift that God has given us.” The role of fire in the Inferno merits further consideration.

66. Is there a special relation between Ulysses (Odysseus) and Dante?

Dante the Poet arguably has a certain fondness for Ulysses. As Dr. Prudlo observes: “genius untethered to virtue is one of the most dangerous things that can possibly exist.” Dante the Poet and Ulysses are both geniuses. Yet, Ulysses cannot find rest upon returning to Ithaca—the question for knowledge calls him away from his wife, son, and kingdom to journey out into unknown Ocean. He sails passed the Pillars of Heracles, which mark the boundaries of mortal men, and, upon seeing Mount Purgatory, God strikes his ship and all lives are lost. Dr. Prudlo remarks that where Ulysses attempted to make it to Mount Purgatory despite God, Dante the Pilgrim will make it to Mount Purgatory with God....

Seducers, Flatterers, Sorcerers, and more! Dcn. Harrison Garlick is joined by Noah Tyler, CFO of the Classic Learning Test, and Gabriel Blanchard, a staff writer for CLT, to discuss the first part of the 8th Circle: Simple Fraud (Cantos 18-25).

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Check out our written GUIDE to Dante's Inferno: 80+ Questions and Answer.

FROM THE GUIDE:

53. What happens in the Eighth Circle of Hell: Simple Fraud (Canto 18)

The Eighth Circle of Hell holds the souls of those King Minos found guilty of simple fraud and is composed of “ten stone ravines called Malebolge (Evil Pockets), and across each bolgia is an arching bridge.”[1] Each of the ten bolgias (pits, ditches, pockets, etc.) is filled with souls guilty of a different species of simple fraud: (1) panders and seducers (2) flatters (3) simoniacs (4) sorcerers (5) barrators (6) hypocrites (7) thieves (8) deceivers (9) sowers of discord and (10) falsifiers. Each bolgia in Malebolgia exhibits a different contrapasso.

54. What happens in the first ditch (Canto 18)?

After leaving Geryon, the Pilgrim observes the souls in the first ditch. Here, “two files of naked souls walked on the bottom” with each line walking a different direction.[2] The Pilgrim also notes, “I saw horned devils with enormous whips lashing the backs of shades with cruel delight.”[3] The souls here are pimps or panders in one line and seducers in the other. Notably, Dante the Pilgrim sees Jason the Argonaut suffering amongst the seducers.[4] Notice, however, that these seducers are not those who fell into passion, like Francisca, but rather those who act with malice to deceive others. It is the malice of malevolent nature of these sins that distinguish them from the incontinent sins.

55. What happens in the second ditch (Canto 18)?

Leaving the first bolgia (ditch), the Pilgrim and Virgil come upon the souls of the flatters suffering in the second ditch. The Pilgrim observes, “Now we could hear the shades in the next pouch whimpering, making snorting grunting souls… from a steaming stench below, the banks were coated with a slimy mold that suck to them like glue, disgusting to behold and worse to smell.”[5] Here, grunting in a ditch of excrement, are the flatterers. The contrapasso of the second ditch invites a stark juxtaposition between the honeyed words of flattery and the sordid reality of their deception. The Pilgrim makes this quite evident in his observation of Thais: “that repulsive and disheveled tramp scratching herself with shitty fingernails, spreading her legs while squatting up and down.”[6] Repulsed by Thais, Virgil and the Pilgrim move on. It should be noted, however, that this flattery is a malicious flattery intended to deceive.

56. How is flattery a worst sin than lust, murder, or suicide?

We enter the circle of violence. This week Dcn. Harrison Garlick is joined by Fr. Thomas Esposito, O. Cist., a Cistercian priest who teaches at the University of Dallas, to discuss the seventh circle of Dante's Inferno: (1) violence against neighbor (2) violence against self and (3) violence against God & nature.

Check out our website for more info: thegreatbookspodcast.com.

Check out our 80+ Question and Answer Guide to the Inferno.

From the guide:

43. What happens in the Seventh Circle of Hell: Violence Toward Neighbor (Canto 12)?

As Virgil and the Pilgrim press on toward the Seventh Circle of Hell, Virgil explains the topography of hell. The City of Dis marks the transition from upper hell to lower hell, while the Seventh Circle of Hell marks the beginning of the sins of violence (represented by the lion in the dark woods in Canto 1). Virgil explains, “violence can be done to God, to self, or to one’s neighbor.”[1] Next, Virgil explains there are two types of fraud. First, there is the “simple fraud” of the second circle of lower hell, the Eight Circle of Hell overall, in which “hypocrites, flatters, dabblers in sorcery, falsifiers, thieves, and simonists, pander, seducers, grafters, and like filth” are punished.”[2] Second, there is “complex fraud" of the final circle of hell, the Ninth Circle, in which are punished traitors who betrayed the “love Nature enjoys and that extra bond between men which creates a special trust.”[3]

Virgil and the Pilgrim enter into the Seventh Circle of Hell, which is guarded by the Minotaur—a half-man and half-bull creature from classical mythology known for its undying rage.[4] With the Minotaur consumed by its own anger, Virgil and the Pilgrim continue on and come upon a great “river of blood that boils souls of those who through their violence injured others”—known as the Phlegethon.[5] The contrapasso is made more severe by herds of centaurs galloping along the bloody riverbanks and shooting with arrows at “any daring soul emerging above the bloody level of his guilt.”[6]

As the Pilgrim observes, the souls are sunk in a river of blood to a depth commensurate with their violence: the tyrants, such as Alexander, Dionysius, and Attila, who “dealt in bloodshed and plundered wealth” are sunken to their eyelids; the murders who dealt in bloodshed are sunk up to their throats; and the rest of the violent are sunk to various lesser degrees.[7] Musa notes, “the sins of violence are also the Sins of Bestiality,” and the bestial and violent nature of these sins are seen in the theme of half-animal and half-human creatures: the furies on the walls of the City of Dis, the Minotaur whose very enraged existence spawned from an act of bestiality, and the centaurs who were known in classical mythology for violence and rape.[8]

44. What else should be noted about the first area of the seventh circle?

Lower hell is characterized by sins of malice, and Fr. Thomas offered malevolent as another good...