We Need a New Translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy | Dr. Jason Baxter

Surprise, surprise, translating Dante is a psychologically depleting experience, especially curling through hell on your knees.

You know, I wanted to do it because you remember when you’re a kid sort of playing piano, and then you had to get ready for a recital, and then you had to memorize the piece, and then you could throw away the book.

I wanted to feel like that with respect to the master.

Dr.

Jason Baxter is the Director of the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College.

His written works include The Medieval Mind of CS.

Lewis and A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy.

And he is currently working on an original translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy with The Inferno to be released this month.

Listen in as we discuss why beauty matters, the role of poetry in the formation of the soul, and the work of the Center for Beauty and Culture.

Benedictine College is transforming culture in America one conversation at a time.

From our studios in Atchison, Kansas, these are The Benedictine Dialogues.

All right, Jason, wonderful to have you here in the studio.

Great to have you on the show and welcome to campus as well.

It’s great to be here.

Yeah.

So I definitely want to introduce our audience to you, to the work of the Center and maybe to start off, give us a little bit about your background, where you’re from, your education, and how you ended up here at Benedictine.

Yes.

My mom is from Kansas, so I’ve come home.

In fact, I’ve had these sort of vague feelings of a homing instinct, sort of been driving through Kansas, just going like a pigeon or something like that.

So I don’t know if this is me making it up or if it’s a real deal.

But yeah, I grew up in Arkansas, went to University of Dallas, studied classics, got married right after school, went to Washington, DC., taught at an all-boys school for a year.

Then we went off to Notre Dame, where I studied comparative literature, but really focused on medieval literature, especially Dante.

And then from there, got into CS.

Lewis, because I was delighted to discover how much CS.

Lewis’ mind was medieval and how successful he was, not despite his day job of teaching medieval literature, but because of it.

Have you always been Catholic?

Were you born and raised Catholic?

No, I grew up Protestant.

I went to an evangelical church that sort of leaned in a Calvinist direction.

And yeah, was a devout kid.

Maybe one of those like 5% of kids who rebelled against his parents by growing more conservative.

But it was for me, it was at sort of University of Dallas, where all kinds of interesting things happened.

But including there was a Eucharistic chapel there.

But I was I was I was a famous Protestant.

And I thought I was like a Samson with the jawbone of an ass laying Catholics at the lunch table.

And I started reading the catechism so that I could beat the Catholics better.

And I think that must have done something.

But but in the evenings, I would go to the Eucharistic chapel at night and would go and pray in secret, like Nicodemus or something like slinking around in the dark.

And I remember I would I would pray, Lord, this is so beautiful.

I just wish it were true.

Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

I must have said that like a thousand times in front of the Eucharistic chapel.

But yeah, so I entered the Catholic church and proposed to a Catholic girl to become my wife in a very momentous January of my senior year of college.

Wonderful.

Now, did you were you interested in Dante as a Protestant?

Or did that kind of shift in your Catholicism?

Or where how did that work out?

Dante is a late love.

I think the first hopefully this would be encouraging for everyone.

I think the first three times that I read it, I despised it.

Maybe sort of like descending levels of of of disdain.

But the first time I read it, I thought this is this is just ridiculous.

I don’t have any idea what’s going on here.

And the second time I read it was at University of Dallas with a group of students.

And I remember prying out one or two things, which I thought were worthwhile.

But it wasn’t until that third or fourth reading where the things started to fit together and I thought, oh, this is what we’re doing.

But I think I think that experience has really influenced my teaching of Dante.

Just to know this is, you know, Roger calls Dante’s comedy, the Mount Everest of literature.

Everyone knows about it.

Everyone wants to climb it, but they’re afraid of that thin oxygen at the top.

And so I think a lot of my teaching, a lot of my writing has been thinking about a previous version of me.

If I had an older version of me, you know, back to the future style, right?

Just like, no, no, no, no, listen, listen, be patient.

Because it very easily could have been, I would have thought that I had read it and moved on in life and people would say, had you read Dante?

I say, yeah, it’s no good.

Whereas what I really need to do is read it that second or third time or to have the sort of guide who would force me to pay attention.

Yeah.

Well, I do want to come back to Dante and your work on all of that.

But I do want to, of course, you’re the new director of the Center for Beauty and Culture here at Benedictine College.

And I thought maybe you’d share a little bit about how you got into that role as well as your vision for the center itself.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think it’s this tremendous opportunity.

I love my classroom teaching.

But in the meantime, I’ve had this writing, which has been had a sort of growing audience.

And so I’ve enjoyed this kind of outward facing aspect.

And this is something where we can really do both.

And I’m thinking about the Center for Beauty and Culture as a kind of laboratory for beauty.

And I don’t want people watching this or listening to this to laugh.

But we’re really thinking about making Atchison, Kansas, the center of the arts in North America.

Let’s do it.

And the vision is what if you could get major speakers?

What if you could get critics?

What if you could get artists and interesting people working in the arts to come to Kansas, to nourish our students here on campus, but then to work in these collaborative relationships?

So that my hope is for the next three years, a kind of test of concept, is that we’ll create a major work of art each year for the next three years, but we’ll do it in this collaborative process.

So we’ll do some things that look kind of traditional, like a university bringing lecturers to campus and so forth, but then we’ll also bring artists, but then commission them and create something, which will then have this national impact.

So that’s the hope, is in some sense to bring Kansas to, to take Kansas to the world by bringing the world to Kansas first and creating these collaborative relationships.

Yeah.

Well, I always think of Acheson as kind of like the beating heart of the literal middle of the map of the United States.

So to bring art right into the heart, that makes a ton of sense to me.

Do you envision this leaning towards poetry, sculptors, you name it, or is there kind of areas of interest that you’ve kind of honed in on?

Exactly.

I think, I mean, look, I think if you think about the pursuit of science in the natural world, you have chemistry, and you have organic chemistry, and inorganic chemistry, and you have physics, and you have astronomy, and you have biology, and you have all these, you have geology, all these things that sort of link up together.

I’d like to do something like that for beauty, in which we pursue beauty and all of its different manifestations, all of its, and so, yes, I want to do poetry.

That’s my background is literature.

Yes, the Medievals are going to figure prominently because I think they took art as seriously as we take our science.

And so, in some sense, they’re our masters.

They are to the cathedral and to the icon and to the painting and to the long poem.

Well, we are to the particle accelerator, right?

Or, you know, for the James Webb telescope in space.

So, yes, I think the cool thing about this is this is beauty and culture.

It’s interested in all the possible manifestations of beauty, natural beauty, as well as artistic beauty, as well as all the individual ways in which artistic beauty manifests itself.

But we’re also interested in how that influences culture itself.

Or this really sort of fun question, is culture worth living if it’s not centered on beauty?

And, spoiler alert, my answer is no.

And I think we’re all, I think, but I think we’re proving it to ourselves.

I think we’re living through it.

I mean, a writer a couple years ago published a book called Digital Lethargy, in which he said, I know you’ve had the experience that it’s 1147 p.m.

and you’ve run out of things that you actually want to watch or look for, and yet you can’t stop the bottom of scrolling.

None of it’s actually nourishing you.

You know it’s empty calories, but you just can’t stop.

You can’t put the screen away.

You don’t want to choose anything, but you don’t want to not choose anything as well.

If in some sense, if you live in this culture of infinite consumption, but it’s an infinite consumption of zero calorie, you know, spiritually, morally, I think it sort of creates this deep sense of lethargy.

And all of my students kind of know what this is, right?

They’ve been called by Jonathan haidt, the anxious generation.

They don’t know it, but I think in a counter with beauty and experience of beauty is one of the most urgent things that could happen right now.

Why is that?

What do you think it is about a lack of beauty or where we’re at as a culture that’s causing us to be anxious?

This is an intuitive question.

This is part one of the class.

How did we get here?

The Korean philosopher, as I always jokingly say to my students, your next favorite Korean philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, says in his book Saving Beauty, for us the experience of beauty is now impossible.

For us the experience of beauty is now impossible.

And so I want to, the first part of my class that I’ll be teaching with my Angelico Fellows, this fall, is exploring that idea.

Why does Byung-Chul Han say, for us the experience of beauty is now impossible?

And I think it’s an interesting story.

It’s an exciting story.

It’s a long story.

It’s a story that CS.

Lewis knew needed to be told because he was, you remember, he was an expert in 16th century literature.

The literature that was being made is at the very end of the Middle Ages, right as the scientific revolution was beginning to happen.

This kind of competing paradigm for understanding the world.

So the story goes back to the scientific revolution and the term that I used two terms for it, fancy and pretentious terms, which I explained to the students.

But the one is the mathematization of space and the other is the mechanization of the world picture.

But, you know, Descartes, René Descartes, the French philosopher, as everyone knows, who’s had algebra inflicted on them, invented the graph, the grid.

But over the course of time, especially during the Enlightenment, there are all these attempts to see if you could take this grid-like thinking and apply it to things which were not fundamentally mathematical.

And the Enlightenment has the great sort of legacy of seeing if you can control people, seeing if you can control societies, right?

Seeing if you could treat people like data points whose vertical functions are graphed, right?

And the Enlightenment explicitly says that kind of stuff.

And it’s some of the times they’re so direct that it’s horrifying.

So that sort of enters into enter the mathematization of culture enters in, especially with the Enlightenment.

But then it gets perfected during the Industrial Revolution.

So that now we live in this world that a French sociologist, Marc Auger, wrote an unlikely bestseller in 1999 called Nonplaces, An Anthropological Introduction to Supermodernity.

Right?

Everyone has that on his wishlist, right?

Everyone wants that in his stocking for Christmas.

But it was an unlikely bestseller because Auger took all these experiences that we’ve had.

Being on moving walkways, deep underground in an airport, sitting in an embassy suite’s lobby, right?

Or in an international airport.

Being on a light transit train, being on a cloverleaf, being in a parking lot in a strip mall, you could multiply these experiences.

And he sort of did an anthropology of these places, and he called them nonplaces, by which he meant spaces which had been so radically reduced to the mere transportation of goods or information that they felt empty even though they were fast.

Auger said that we’ve created a world in which it’s not just nonplaces, but the nonplaces were beginning to be patched together like a patchwork quilt.

And that’s what he called super modernity.

That’s why beauty is now impossible for us.

And that’s why CS.

Lewis called our world the world of evil enchantment, in which even when you have an experience of beauty, you’re sort of suspicious of it because we’ve been so hyped up.

First of all, by our environments.

And secondly, by our own hand-held devices that we think within the grid.

We think of our lives as work functions that need to be accelerated.

And thus, when you have this different type of thing, an experience of beauty, which is not so much in terms of speeding up time and productivity, but in terms of amplifying spaciousness, it’s an experience we’re not ready for.

And so it has to be prepped, but that’s why we’re teaching this class.

Yeah, I often wonder, too, you know, we’ve kind of created attention currency, right, that our eyeballs require.

Yes, and I think sometimes, too, that authentic beauty does not require a payment from you.

It requires kind of a self-denial or like a self-gift of not the selfishness that attention currency creates, because my eyes mean a lot to me and my time is so valuable, versus just sitting and looking at a beautiful painting or looking at the Sistine Chapel.

You have to stop and you have to not think this thing is taking from something from me, rather it’s giving something to you and it doesn’t cost anything, right?

I mean, that seems to me like we’re in this mindset that unless I’m paying for it, unless they’re paying me, what’s the point?

That’s right.

Yeah, that’s right.

You know, I think, yeah, I think, I think it’s hard to, well, we do try to commodify beauty, but we’re always pulling it, pulling it in its own way into the into economic structures.

But I think you’re right.

I think when it’s when it’s a legitimate experience of beauty, Lewis said is not mistakeable with any of our sort of daily drives and our sort of daily desires and all of those sort of other desires, all those sort of anxieties about my productivity for the day, right, all of my my my ambitions for where I’m going to go, all of my lust or greed or envy temporarily sort of melt away in the midst of that experience.

But I think this I think the scariest part of the class is what if what if that type of experience of beauty began to unfold in front of us and we didn’t have eyes to see it and we thought it was boring?

What if you just grab the you know the you know the stereotypical man off the street and took him to an ancient liturgy, right?

Whether it’s a Byzantine liturgy or an old you know an old Byzantine mass or or whatever, right?

And said, what do you think of this?

You’d think it was slow, right?

Or and I think I’ve seen that happen numerous times, right?

Is that is that students come in with with the loftiest expectations.

But you know, but really, Bach, it hasn’t been sort of reduced to a pulse, right?

Well, we began with talking about the difficulty of Dante.

So I think I think that’s kind of the both the challenge and also the scary part is, is that we could come into we could actually be in the presence of beauty, but think it was boring because it felt to us slow.

But we’re the ones who bring the mechanized speed with us.

There’s also a bit of an unfortunate class distinction as well when it comes to these kind of high beauty moments, right?

So you end up thinking, well, that’s for the rich to enjoy Bach.

This is your Hauerwas talking.

Yes, exactly.

But to me, I mean, beauty is for everyone, right?

But unfortunately, the average man on the street doesn’t think that’s even for them, that there’s a disconnect there for them.

So they don’t even know how to have ears to hear Bach or how to have eyes to see the Sistine Chapel.

I think so.

I think I think the experience of of I think there was a time in the world, you know, this is going to be somewhat arbitrary.

But maybe in the late 1800s, right?

Or the very early 1900s, the sort of the world of Thomas, that Thomas Hardy writes about in his Wessex, in which there was a class of agrarian folk who were still close to the to the land.

And although they couldn’t necessarily, you know, reflect upon what they were experiencing, they had, they lived the experience of beauty.

It was in their bones and in their marrow.

I think the sort of the project, this is not necessarily a critique of modernity, but it’s just having eyes open to it.

The project of modernity and the industrialization and the technologization of our lives has continued so much since then, that even the sort of folks that we would now consider agrarian have little encounter with the sort of world of seasons and this agrarian lifestyle.

They themselves, of course, are watching YouTube videos as they’re being driven in GPS combines in order to accomplish quantifiable tasks.

So I think you’re right.

I think what the whole class of people who had once been sort of close to the natural world, the lived experience of beauty, I think has largely been been removed from their lives.

So yeah, I think we can talk almost in apocalyptic terms.

I mean, the funny thing is that people wouldn’t know that the experience of beauty is so urgent, right?

That it’s almost kind of like emergency room type of urgency.

Like we need to put people on letters and take them into a classroom and say, this is what you’ve been missing.

This is why you’ve been so sad.

This is why you’ve been so anxious and lonely, right?

What you’ve been looking for your whole life is beauty.

As Lewis put it at the end of Last Battle, it’s all in play though.

We’ve known this stuff for a long time, but it’s become unfashionable and out of season.

And so it’s cool that we have a place which is dedicated to its resuscitation.

So I’m a big Russell Kirk guy.

And he talks about there was too much of a distinction between the folk and the high beauty and the high architecture that, you know, prior to pre-recorded music, usually you had one or two of my family members that would play the violin or the piano at Christmas.

And you would have an experience of authentic beauty right there in the home.

But now, given, of course, now we can pull up on our phone and have Frank Sinatra during Christmas and not have, you know, have to create anything ourselves.

Frank Sinatra.

But the commercialization of things even like music, that it’s created this inability or at least lack of desire to create it ourselves, because where there was a void, you had to fill it with music and fill it with folk song, fill it with these beautiful spaces.

But now you can just press play, right?

I think that I think that’s really profound.

My term for that is I call it scaling beauty, right?

That and I’m I’m borrowing a little bit from Roger’s Scrutinum, but also kind of taking it my own direction.

That are we glad that there are certain churches in Venice?

And are we glad that Bernini carved the St.

Teresa in ecstasy?

And are we glad that the mother house of the Jesuits in Rome, Il Gesù, has this incredible painted ceiling fresco?

Yeah, we’re glad about that.

But it’s probably a mistake to try to get the ceiling fresco of the Jesù into your living room when you live in Atchison, Kansas.

I don’t have enough room in my on my dining room ceiling.

And to just to have a, you know, to have a reduplication of that, I think would actually make it silly.

But the idea is that in our daily lives, we can we can create scaled down models of an encounter with beauty.

And for Scrutin, it’s as simple as having, sometimes having a well organized room or sitting and eating with with real cutlery and having a kind of ritualistic, into a small way, but having having manners at a meal and having a sort of ritualistic approach to it.

It just elevates those sort of daily aspects.

And I think for, you know, for this reason, similarly sort of making your own music, telling your own stories, reading things aloud with the family, all these sort of rich experiences, all these sort of slow experiences, I think sort of protect beauty on the smallest possible scale.

And they make it accessible, especially to children.

And those are those are easy ways for beauty to sort of come back into our lives.

But they’re also probably pedagogically necessary for later us for to have the big encounters.

Because if you’ve been to Rome, you know, in some sense, this is going to sound kind of funny.

You know how disappointing the Sistine Chapel ceiling is, right?

If you’ve been to Paris in the Louvre, and you’ve seen the Mona Lisa behind, you know, 18 inches of bulletproof glass, and you have to like elbow your way just to put your stupid phone up, to take a selfie of it right in front of it.

You know how vacuous and unnutritious those experiences are.

But in some sense, it’s this huge crowd of people who have been told, go have an experience of beauty, go have an experience of beauty.

And they flock together and step on each other’s toes and can’t have the experience.

But maybe because they haven’t had the sort of scaled experience of beauty, which would prepare them for this heightened experience of beauty.

And my whole, one of the things that I’ve just been writing about is how I think the whole sort of selfie phenomenon is just sort of indicative of our starved selves, right?

That we have the right impulse.

We have the noble impulse to go find this experience of beauty.

But then when we stand in front of it, precisely because of what you’ve said, it’s a slow, spacious experience.

But we’re so hyped up that we have to take pictures in front of us and then translate those images back into a platform in which I scroll through at lightning speeds.

Now I’ve recontextualized the experience of beauty in my accelerated life.

And now it makes sense.

So I think we have some work to do.

And one of my kind of guiding insights of how to run the Center for Beauty and Culture is that it has to be ecological.

In the sense that, you know, if you take certain species, you know, famously the orchid is a delicate flower and drop it into, I don’t know, say the middle of the prairie of Kansas, it won’t survive because it needs all these other nourishing elements for it to work together.

I think the experience of beauty is like that.

The reality is, we probably have natural geniuses, we probably have Michelangelo’s walking around among us.

And they’re not Michelangelo’s because they don’t live in the ecological environment in which beauty and arts can actually flourish.

And for that, you need all kinds of, you need interested, you need an interested audience, you need students who care, you need critics who write about it, you need professors who try to figure out what it is.

You need, of course, artists, you need, of course, patrons, you need this whole kind of balanced ecological system for beauty to flourish.

And I think that’s why it’s difficult.

You can’t just say, you can’t just put a paintbrush in a kid’s hand and expect a beauty to be revived, but we have to sort of work in these ecological patterns for resuscitating it.

Yeah.

And I think one of the great losses of the attraction to or desire for beauty, there’s a moral aspect in regard to an experience of beauty that it asks you to the good, right?

So the transcendent of the beautiful can bring you to desire for the good.

And sadly, when you remove the beautiful from the regular experience from the everyday man, the morals are going to reflect that, right?

Scrutin talks about that quite a bit in the fact of architecture, right?

Surround people with ugly architecture, you will end up with ugly people.

And I think we’re seeing that downstream, that we don’t have the regular experience of beauty.

It seems to me that one of the fundamental mechanisms of the experience of beauty, as I like to tell my students, is that when I encounter something beautiful, this is plagiarizing Lewis a tiny bit, I always feel a slight note of sorrow that is over there and not in me.

And the experience of beauty is really to take that experience and not to stream it, but to download it.

It’s not just to see it, but to be it.

It’s not just to see it, but I want to eat beauty.

I want it to become part of my being.

And I think when you talk about connections of morality, maybe you could even say that in some sense, beauty is the beating heart of the virtuous life, right?

Beauty is what actually makes me wake up in the morning and want to be honest even though it’s difficult.

Beauty is what makes me want to be courageous, even though I believe I’m in times which everything seems to be coming unglued, right?

In some sense, that’s what sort of protects all those other moral virtues, but it’s the aliveness and the desire for eternity.

I think there’s also, I always take of Taylor’s idea of the buffer itself, that we have created these, if I can better term, buffers around ourselves so that we’re unable to have an actual transcendent experience because we don’t even know, it’s almost a safetyism of sorts.

There’s something in beauty that asks something of me, or at least wants me to draw out of myself, whether it’s moral or whatever other aspect of my life.

But as you’re saying, it’s like, I don’t want that to just be out there.

I want it to become part of me.

And that often calls you to the tape.

Like, what kind of life are you living?

What are the things that you’re not living up to in accord to what is beautiful in this thing?

And the buffered self requires, I’d rather just stick away from that so that I can live my life in the peace and happiness of my own decisions, right?

Or, yeah, and by peace and happiness, perhaps we mean comfort and predictability and control over all the details of my life.

But yeah, I think this is great.

again, as Lewis says, it’s all in Plato.

And Plato knew that the experience of beauty was dangerous.

And, you know, of course, for him, the sort of prototypical experience of beauty, which is dangerous, is falling in love, right?

Because when you fall in love, you don’t feel like doing your homework, and you could get bad grades, and your whole sort of career trajectory could, you know, could go to pieces if you can’t, you know, exercise the virtues to keep that all together.

But in some sense, yeah, the experience of beauty is a tiny bit dangerous, right?

Because it’s demanding and because it’s not, chiefly concerned with us feeling comfortable about who we already are.

But it wants us to change.

It wants us to open up our hearts radically and be capable of things we weren’t previously capable of.

And that’s frightening.

But I think it’s also I think it’s just also sort of telling when you think about this is that some since conservatives have completely abandoned the pursuit of beauty, right?

It’s become the cultural property of the of the progressive left for for a half century.

And conservatives have just continued to crank out these reproductions of of old masters.

Like, I mean, how dead, how dried up, how arid, how desiccated is that is that we’re still reproducing, you know, ancient works of beauty, which are legitimately beautiful, but we can’t make anything new.

And so I think these things, in some sense, the left has become sort of.

Has so lost touch with what beauty could be, it’s lost metaphysical sense that beauty is built into the DNA of the universe.

And so it merely pursues these shocking things.

And it’s kind of goofy.

Right.

I get it.

But in the meantime, if the conservatives have just abandoned the whole field, right, this, you know, this energizing ability to refresh our hearts and souls.

And by just creating things from the past, we’re just making safe images that everyone feels comfortable around.

Whereas if we’re going to make new works of beauty, they’re going to be slightly challenging and they’re going to be slightly uncomfortable.

This is not necessarily like weird shock art, right?

But they’re going to be more than we can handle at the present moment.

And it’s going to be a little bit scary.

And that sort of aspect of beauty, I think we need to recover.

You could call it the shock or the surprise of beauty.

And that’s just good Platonism right there.

Thank you for listening to the Benedictine Dialogues.

We’ll be right back to the show after this brief message.

Have you ever desired a deeper understanding of the life of Jesus?

Check out the Extraordinary Story with Tom Hoops.

This is the Extraordinary Story, a podcast about the life of Christ.

Jesus Christ, God himself, entered the confusing maze that is our world to show us who we are and to give us his cross as a ladder up and out.

This is his story and ours, the Extraordinary Story.

The Extraordinary Story has been featured in The Loop, Alatea, Our Sunday Visitor, and Relevant Radio.

You can listen to the Extraordinary Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

And now, back to the show.

So tell me a little bit more about your work in Dante.

I know you’ve been working on Dante for many years, and you mentioned how you got interested in Dante, and Dante himself, but what’s that been like, and what areas of work are you working on now?

Yes, so my new translation of Dante’s Inferno is going to come out this fall.

Very excited about that.

And then the Purgatory will be out next year, and then the Powdered Diesel will be out the year after that.

So it’s started, and that’s been an incredible experience.

Surprise, surprise, translating Dante is a psychologically depleting experience, especially curling through hell on your knees, right?

Just figuring out every single one of those little words that Dante sort of uses.

But that’s been an incredible experience.

You know, I wanted to do it because you remember when you were a kid sort of playing piano, and then you had to get ready for a recital, and then you had to memorize the piece, and then you could throw away the book, right?

And sometimes you could even close your eyes and just play it, and you could feel music not in your brain, but in your arms and in your pulses and in your nerves.

I wanted to feel like that with respect to the master, and I’m not entirely there, but I feel more like that, that there are passages which I can close my eyes and play, which I can feel, and not just as a brain thing, but in some sense, a whole body and a heart thing.

And I’m really excited about that.

And in fact, that whole sort of idea of about, about Dante’s poetry, not just dwelling in our brain, but dwelling in our body has been the guiding principle of this translation.

Dante made a controversial decision to write his great poem in Italian.

Even in his own day, he gets praise for writing this poem of great learning.

They called it the poem of an encyclopedic learning, right?

In which you go all the way down to the center of the universe and then continue going up to the very apex of the universe, right?

It’s encyclopedically conclusive.

But he gets, he literally gets letters of people suggesting he should have written it in a learned language like Latin.

But Dante doubles down on this, says, no, it had to be in Italian.

And I think for him, the reason that it had to be in Italian is he knew intuitively what cognitive psychologists have now proven to us, that when there’s a gift of speaking your mother tongue, that it’s close to the earth and it’s close to the body and it literally registers differently in the brain.

And so when he in some sense took all this wonderful world of learning and theology and philosophy and the classics and the sort of the weight and dragged it into a language which had not yet spoken these things before, it managed to feel like the world had been created anew for the first time.

Like, oh, you know, the kind of the experience of the creation of Narnia, right?

As the children sit there and watch it sung into being.

So I think for, you know, so to try to catch those, what you could call, radical transfers of registers, right?

In which sometimes Dante spores to the heights with his language and he uses these lofty expressions.

But sometimes he uses these funny, sometimes even obscene, right?

These kind of funny, local, Florentine, when he starts to talk to his Florentine buddies, his register drops, like he’s just talking to a bunch of guys from back home, right?

He code switches into something which feels kind of down home and local, like one of the good old boys.

And he mixes this fabric of words together.

So I wanted to create a translation that did something like that, that, as I jokingly say in the introduction, Dante is not Haydn and he’s not Mozart.

He’s Jannisak, he’s Mahler, right?

He’s one of these sorts of composers who’s big and all over the place and has these sort of moments of complexity and difficulty.

And we’ve talked a little bit about before of, I’m from Texas and every now and then I’m sure you can hear a little bit of a Texas accent coming out.

But I mentioned even like where in Texas where I’m from, the Hispanics that come up, a lot of times second and third generation still pray in Spanish.

There’s something to the heart that they love the language that they were taught how to pray in.

Or I think of my grandmother speaking to me in a very thick Texas accent.

There’s something that’s going to hit me a little different than if, say, a New Yorker said it to me in the same words.

There’s something there.

So it seems to me, like, out of a great love of his people, the vocalism of his Italian people, that was part of it, I guess.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, so he’s living in this time in which he has access to all these highly ambitious poems, poems which have haven’t, which are no longer inflicted on students.

Really boring stuff that only professors read and maybe grad students.

But like Bernard Svastri’s Cosmographia and Alan O’Leal’s, you know, plaint of Nature and this kind of stuff, right?

The De Claudiano and stuff like that.

But Dante is reading these own types of things.

And what he sees is valuable about these things, that they do try to go from from top to bottom to discover the whole world.

But at some point, Dante discovers that his his own vernacular, his own Italian becomes an asset and not a liability, because precisely because it hasn’t been purified of all of its of all of its materiality, right, of all of its madderness, of all of its earthiness, of all of its dailiness.

And so in some sense, Dante creates this this epic for which goes from from from lived life to the angelic vision of eternal celestial fire.

But he’s more inclusive in this way because he works in not just the brain, but the heart and the pulse and the nerves as well.

Well, let’s say someone was at the position you mentioned, like the first and second time you read it, it wasn’t really your thing.

Let’s say somebody is watching or listening that is kind of there.

You know, what advice would you give to them to to jump in, to take the chance to to have Dante change their world?

OK, besides pointing out that there’s a great new translation that makes it that makes it feel like the most urgent thing since, you know, more urgent than Netflix.

I mean, my whole life I’ve been writing for that type of person, right?

The smart person, the person of moral seriousness, who has felt that this whole sort of domain of our Catholic heritage is too lofty for him or her, right?

So I guess I would say, yeah, of course it’s difficult, but there are groups of people who are doing this.

The Well-Read Moms, for example, are going to be reading this next year.

They’re going to be reading Purgatory, hopefully, a particular person’s translation, which is, but I think, I think it is difficult, but it seems to me that if our imaginary person is already asking the question, I would say, you know, half of your work is already done.

You care, right?

You have desire.

You’re ready to encounter the difficulties.

But I’ve read in The Beginner’s Guide to Dante to help people like that.

I have video series out there to help people like that.

But I think if you can, if you can find a group of people who want to do it with you, and you can just have modest ambitions, you can just read four or five of these little canti, these little short, what we might call chapters, but these little short songs.

It only takes about eight or nine minutes, right?

I’m going to be making my own audio version of the book as well.

And so it takes you maybe 30, 40 minutes to get through four or five.

And then you could just, you know, get together with these people on a regular basis and ask, okay, what is he saying?

And then, of course, the next, you know, exciting question.

All right.

How much of this is still relevant?

What did he see that we’ve forgotten to look at?

Right.

Lewis says that part of the reason that you read books from the past is because every age has this spot right here, this cultural blind spot.

Right.

Our age is not entirely evil.

We’re really good at some things that our ancestors were not as good at as they should have been.

We’re really aware of some important moral issues.

The problem is when we become so obsessed with those things that we think that that’s the totality of virtues.

That’s where the problem comes.

Right.

So to care about questions of equality and justice and inclusiveness in general, in general, those are really important concerns.

And I think if you go to a past age and found them lacking, I think we would recognize they didn’t have the virtues, the virtues that they needed.

But in the meantime, they knew some things that we’ve now forgotten that have moved off of our cultural radar into our blind spot.

And so, encountering a very old book, a very encyclopedic book like Dante, in which he presents virtues which we’ve almost lost names for, is really important for us to help to discover our own cultural blind spots.

Another great place to start, of course, is at our own Media and Culture website, which hosts the series you did in partnership with Exodus 90, which I think offers a great intro into it.

So for me, it always helped whenever I would get into literature to understand the context a little bit before you actually dive in.

Because if you dive straight into Dante, you can still get a lot out of it.

But if you don’t understand what was going on, if you don’t understand what the project is, if you don’t understand even really who Dante was and what his inspiration was, that just helps quite a bit.

That’s right.

And that’s also how I teach as well.

If you say spend an hour giving students nothing but facts, at some point, they would stop listening.

Even good students, they come in with a certain range of attention span.

Not necessarily that they don’t think it’s important, but at some point, they want to know why they should care about the facts.

They want the so what question to be answered.

That’s sort of my hope is that, okay, let me give you five, six, seven facts, and as soon as I feel you’re getting fidgety, right?

But let me tell you why you should care.

Then you could kind of zoom out and make this bigger claim, right?

But then you can kind of…

But that wins the right to zoom back in and give a couple more facts, right?

Because big claims which are unsubstantiated are not interesting.

But in the meantime, just a sort of mountain of facts dropped on you like a pile of rubble is also not interesting.

But we have to, I think, sort of constantly kind of zoom in and zoom out on these things.

It reminds me of…

So I had never experienced Wagner until my doctoral studies, and we watched the entire ring cycle.

And I wouldn’t have understood anything except for the fact that we had a scholar work our way through it.

So he gave us context.

He was figuring out who Wagner was.

What is he trying to do?

All of the different stanzas that are involved and everything involved.

And it just created this whole world that at first, I’d be like, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced.

But it turned into a beautiful experience.

So it’s kind of the whole, to take Dante’s own advice, find a guide.

We still need Virgil.

We still need Virgil.

We still need Virgil.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, well, again, it’s all in Plato, but Plato has the same sort of idea that down in the cave, people are sitting watching their digital reproductions of shadowy things.

Right.

And the only way they ever know to get out of that is that someone who’s gone up to see the light comes down, liberates them and drags them up and helps them adjust to the to the sunlight.

But I think you’re right.

I mean, I don’t think we’re not here without teachers.

And now in some sense, we have this kind of debt of gratitude, which now we sort of pay to it to the extent that we can try to try to pay back to our students in to honor those who taught us and who set our hearts on fire for the first time.

Well, to wrap up, I really want to bring you back on probably on a regular basis if you’re open to that.

And I know we’ve got a lot of content ideas as well.

They’ll be coming out in the coming months.

But one of the wrap up questions I wanted to ask, and we’ve talked a lot about poetry, beauty, our great mission here at Benedictine College is to transform culture in America.

What is it about beauty that will help transform this culture?

Yes.

Easy question.

Very easy question, especially because you didn’t prep me on it.

I think I’ve spent a lot of time after I accepted this job, but preparing to come down here.

I mean, how does Benedictine College, a place, a college in Atchison, Kansas, lay claim to such an ambitious thing to transform culture in America?

I mean, how do you actually do that without being cynical?

How do you really put your shoulder into that and see what happens?

And I want to give a sincere, authentic go at that.

And I think, I mean, I think how do you do that?

Well, Augustine says that God’s beauty is ever ancient, ever new.

And I think that our world tends to be the ever new.

And we’re constantly inventing the next phone, the next generation car, the next thing, right?

But also, you know, the trending ideas.

And we’re kind of, we’re so giddily obsessed with the new that we’ve we’ve severed ties with the old.

In the meantime, we’ve already sort of suggested, I don’t think the answer is merely sort of reproducing the art of the past, the experience of beauty.

We’ve got to make new things, which are as old as they are new.

Why?

Because ultimately, eternity is outside of time.

And when it comes into our world, it feels both new and it feels ancient, right?

As Tolkien and Lewis love to point out.

So one of the things that I want to do is I want to make new things.

So, for example, I am going to take a group of Angelica students next August, and we’re going to go hike St.

Cuthbert’s Way in the north of England on the Scottish border.

That’s already an amazing thing to do.

We’re going to go from the ruined Cistercian Abbey of Melrose, and we’re going to hike 40, 50 miles all the way to the sea, where the ancient island of Lindisfarne is, which is only accessible at certain times during the day because the waters come in and the waters come out.

But this is the cradle of Catholicism in England.

That’s already good.

But we’re going to make a film about it, and we’re going to make a Catholic reality television show slash documentary of St.

Cuthbert’s Way.

And hopefully, as we sort of gather energy on this, we’re going to be able to commission some original music for the score.

And my hope is, and I’ve talked with our production company in the UK, my hope is that we’ll make a visual icon.

We’ll give in the midst of a world of nonplaces, we’ll show a picture of something which is still real and deep and sacred and old.

And we’re going to do something like that hopefully once a year.

And so, like I said, we’re going to bring the world to Kansas and take Kansas to the world.

And I think the good of that is, and this is the optimistic part, is if the gospel is written on the human heart, there’s a part of us which is hungry for that and thirsty for that, even if everything on the periphery of our being has forgotten that.

If we could enable people to see that piece of the soul, even if they encounter it out of the corner of the eye for a split second, then I think that’s going to be transformative.

praise God.

Jason, this has been a wonderful conversation.

So happy to have you in the studio.

So happy to have you here at Benedictine College.

I know our students and everyone involved will certainly learn a lot from you.

So thank you for all of your work.

And for all our listeners and viewers, thank you for tuning in.

Be sure to visit media.benedictine.edu to catch up on all the latest episodes.

And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel as well, where you can get the latest as well.

So thanks again for listening.

God bless.

If you enjoyed The Benedictine Dialogues today, I want to invite you to visit our website, media.benedictine.edu.

Be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter where you will receive all the latest in your inbox or subscribe to our YouTube channel as well.

Thanks again for watching.

God bless.