Paideia Today

In today's episode, we begin by looking at cosmology and the medieval  synthesis of science with Christian truth in Dante's Divine Comedy. We  do so by looking at some pictorial representations of Dante's cosmology  in order to be able to visualize Dante's integration of small and, to  the modern mind, discrete fields of knowledge. We make it clear that  this must be understood allegorically.  We conclude this episode by discussing that it is love that moves what  appears in the visual portrait to be a static thing. Love is the  organizing principle of the whole of the Divine Comedy, and Primal Love,  Dante explains, is what organizes the various layers of Dante's  portrait of Hell. It is the perversion of God's charitable love  (charity) that results in variations of lust (cupidity), which are  thereafter justly punished in Hell.

This week's episode begins a series of episodes on the extraordinary  work composed at the outset of the fourteenth century by the great  Italian poet Dante Alighieri.  With his Christian understanding of the  soul, Dante's epic poem is an imaginative and moral vision of this  earthly life in the light of what will happen after death.   The narrative takes as its literal subject the state of souls after  death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due  punishment or reward, and describes Dante's travels through Hell,  Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven, while allegorically the poem  represents the soul's journey towards God, beginning with the  recognition and rejection of sin (Inferno), followed by the penitent  Christian life (Purgatorio), which is then followed by the soul's ascent  to God (Paradiso).    The first episode is a general overview of the verbal architecture of  the poem, looking at some of the many extraordinarily well-wrought  poetics and its basic motifs.  As a humanist, we will emphasize how  different Dante's theological and philosophical premises are from a poet  who believes that poetry is first and foremost a mode of  self-expression rather than an engagement with ultimate reality.

This episode looks at a little-read but fascinating Anglo-Saxon poem  called Andreas, named after St. Andrew.  Andreas is plainly patterned  after Beowulf, but is more explicitly Christian in its literary  features, particularly its symbolism.    In the tale, Andreas is a missionary to a cannibalistic tribe called the  Myrmidonians, who are so savage that they violate the xenia taboo and  even eat their guests.  Andreas is sent by God to rescue Matthew, who  has been thrown into prison and is soon to be eaten.  The text is in  many ways typological and engaging richly with various Biblical texts,  as well as Beowulf.    The most important feature of this poem is the way in which Andreas is  marked by liturgical elements that demonstrate that its poet is clearly  seeking to make his culture Christian, not just his civilization.

The great Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf is the subject of today's  episode.  We look at the strange history of the document, and its status  as an epic.  While it is very different than the Greco-Roman epics, we  argue that it nonetheless deserves its status as an epic not only  because of the magnificent heroism of the character Beowulf, but its  sad, elegiac, majestic sweep that engages with notions of monstrosity.   It largely owes its rise to fame thanks to the scholarship of the great  Medievalist J.R.R. Tolkien.  We look at the characteristic features of  Anglo-Saxon culture that infuse the epic, and in particular the value of  loyalty and a heartfelt patriotic affection for their leader.

A common presentation of the period extending from the fall of Rome  until the Renaissance is that of the 'dark ages'.  But were the entire  Middle Ages actually characterized by oppression, ignorance, and  backwardness in areas like human rights, science, health, and the arts?  We take issue with the popular misrepresentation of the era.  While we  do see a dark age following the destruction of the Western Roman Empire,  what light remained in it was salvaged by Christians in the monastic  movement, which eventually led to the establishment of the university, a  medieval Christian institution.

In our first episode of Season 2 of Paideia Today, we look at the  now-neglected genre of hagiography, and debunk the popular misconception  that medieval hagiography was the product of weak artistry or even a  form of propaganda, a type of embellished historical document recording  superhuman individuals. We tend to read it as if hagiography were a  Christian variation on the nineteenth-century accounts of the lives of  great men, as Thomas Carlyle made famous. On the contrary, we explain that authors of hagiographic accounts had no interest in the  Romantic obsession with originality as an indicator of artistic merit,  or with making their subjects superhuman.  On the contrary, they are  thoroughly generic in their portrait of virtue and seek to hew very  closely to the pattern of imitatio Christi.  We mention the lives of St.  Paul the Hermit, St. Martin, and St. Anthony as variations of lives  patterned upon the well-known deeds of Jesus Christ as recorded in  Scripture. The greater the saint, the less exemplary he will be, and the more Christ will be seen in the pattern of his life.

A conversation between Dr. Scott Masson and Dr. Bill Friesen, professors of literature, about one of the most important, studied and discussed books in all of western history: The Iliad. Until recently, this was considered one of the few texts that every learned man and woman had to have read and studied in depth in order to be considered cultured. (Apologies beforehand for the sound quality, which will improve greatly on Episode 4).

Drs. Masson and Friesen discuss one of the most influential thinkers in western history: Augustine, whose thought undergirds great ranges of the western worldview.

Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss one of the most famous underworld scenes in western literature: Aeneas' journey to Dis.

In this episode, Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss one of the most influential plays in western drama.

In this episode, Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss the origins, structure and aims of ancient Greek drama, and its overwhelming influence on the course of western culture.

Drs. Masson and Friesen discuss one of the earliest classical literary conceptions of death and the underworld as Odysseus journeys into Hades.

In this episode, Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss Telemachus, classical notions of coming of age and how this is bound up in the centrality of storytelling to the human experience.

In this episode, Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss Odysseus' son, Telemachus and the ways that domestic and heroic identity coincide in this epic.

In this episode, Drs. Masson and Friesen discuss a radically different form of heroism than encountered in The Iliad addressed in Homer's Odyssey.

In this episode, Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss the foundations of epic and nihilistic heroism from the ancient Greek worldview. This episode was recorded earlier, but lost through technical complications, and would have been aired before any of the other podcast. We think it necessary to understanding the texts we are discussing, and have therefore inserted it between a discussion of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

This is the last episode on The Iliad, in which Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss the motif of death. *Note: this is the first episode with considerably improved audio quality.

Professors Masson and Friesen discuss the power and artistry of rhetoric in the Iliad and how this exerts an influence on later great works of western literature.

In this episode, Dr. Scott Masson and Dr. Bill Friesen, professors of literature, discuss a bit about how they came by their love of literature and their reasons for putting together this podcast series on the classics of western literature. They speak about ways of approaching such famous texts  which can begin to unveil to the modern reader why these texts were so valued by 2800 years of readers. (Apologies beforehand for the sound quality, which will improve greatly on Episode 4).

William Faulkner is acknowledge to be one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. His scintillating writing, masterful plots, mesmerizing characters, and shocking perspective make him the other great pioneer of Southern Gothic (along with Flannery O'Connor) and one of the Southern Renaissance's most intriguing voices. In this episode, Drs. Masson and Friesen focus in on one of his best known short stories, "A Rose for Emily," exploring its curious mix of the macabre and the illuminating.