Part II of our trip to hell and back!
Historian of Italian art and owner of Tuscan Tour Guide, Paul Costa, brings us into the life and times of Dante Alighieri, his influence and how he saw the world around him.
But why Dante? What does this have to do with workers’ compensation? We will arrive at the answer at the end of our series. To get there, we must go through Inferno itself. See you in hell.
If you’re a workers’ compensation provider, adjuster, or case manager check out RateFast Express: the service that writes your impairment reports for you!
RateFast Podcast: The Gates of Hell Pt. II – Raising Inferno
Corey Oleson (Host): Welcome back to the California Work Comp report. We are here for part two of our series on the gates of Hell in which historian of Italian art Paul Costa tells me, Cory Oleson, and you, the listener, about Dante Alighieri, and the condition of the 14th century Florence, which drove him to write his most famous poem, The Inferno.
Paul: Dante was born from a family that was extremely Guelph. They love the Pope, they loved everything about him. They went to church, they were extremely Catholic at this time. So just let me just get two more things. And we’ll get back to Dante because Dante has a lot to say about the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope.
That was 1240s. So there’s a big fight. 1250s is a big fight between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. And Florence. And when you when the city was won over by the Guelphs, every single Ghibelline was exiled physically out of Florence. Yeah, so it’s like saying, if, if our current president is a Democrat, yeah, the Republicans have to leave America. And when the next president is a Republican, then all the democratic vice versa. So it’s crazy. Like there were there was a lot of movement as well. Because when you get kicked out of your city, well, where the hell do you go? You got to sell your house, you got to buy another house, but I don’t want to go to Luke, I don’t want to go to Pisa, I don’t want to go to Sienna, I hate those towns. You know, it’s like saying, like, I’m from New York originally. I the last place I live is in Boston with the Red Sox fans. I’m a Yankee fan. So you don’t want to go where you don’t feel at home. And if you’re not part of that Ghibelline party that’s winning right now, then you’re exiled. And then if they have wars, the Florentines were having wars among themselves to gain control again as Guelphs. So this goes back and forth quite a bit.
Cory: Also, I mean, property is a, you know, it’s a luxury. And when somebody says, you can’t have your property anymore, people will be violent when exiled out of these places. Just to add to what you’re saying, Paul, like when people get exiled out of these places, it’s not like the boot and then they turn around and walk out. But to your point, they get very angry and fight back. You know, a lot of people do move.
Paul: It’s also very, you get very angry because you’re fighting with your own kind. You’re all Florentines, you’re all part of unions. You’re all part of the guild and you’re paying taxes and you want your city to be better than the other surrounding cities. Because before it’s really I mean any even today any city truly hates or dislikes or has it out with the other surrounding cities, so far started out with again, Lucca, Pisa, Siena, Bologna, but forest and care about Seville, it’s too far. It’s insane. You follow me? You always hate the local football team from your rival high school because they’re local to you. Not with a school that’s across the country. Exactly. When not the country, the only another, you know, that team around there. It’s coming all together. But in 1250, smack in the middle of the 1200s, something major happens. The guilds start getting some executive power alongside with the aristocrats. And the aristocrats are losing their crap right now. Because, you have these dirty people that work.
Cory: The workers are rising.
Paul: Yeah. And they’re getting executive power alongside with them. So now the aristocrats are getting a little antsy. They’re going, What the Hell is going on here? To the point where – I don’t know if you know this, if you’ve been to Tuscany, but the more money you had, the higher your house was. So it was like New York City during the skyscraper.
Cory: That symbolically I have to get up and to see a greater sort of Vista, you know, right to feel taller to have more power.
Paul: You put yourself on a pedestal right when you’re employing, right, so the more money you have, the higher your house has to be. So Florence, it’s was truly like a modern New York City with all the skyscrapers coming up everywhere. Yeah. And then in total, in total 50. When the guilds and these the merchant class was starting to get some executive power, they passed a law that every single house had to be lower than the highest political building. So now, you have the Bargello. The Bargello is a block away from the main square and Florence, in the Bargello was where the politicians worked, and the Bargello had a bell tower. And every house had to be lower than that bell tower. Imagine people in New York City having to chop their skyscraper.
Cory: Oh, well, yeah, let me in here in Philadelphia. I didn’t know this but, for a very, very long time, none of the buildings in Philadelphia were allowed to be taller than City Hall, which is the largest, I think it’s the largest masonry building, I think in this on the western hemisphere. And maybe in the world, but it’s got a very, very, very tall clock tower, but it is not skyscraper tall. You know? So I can imagine.
Paul: Right? Yeah. These rich people saying, we let these guilds come in, we’ve had them, you know, be part of our society. And now they’re passing laws, and they make us look like fools, because now we literally have to chop our house. Because if we don’t chop our house, we’re gonna have to go to war with them. And I don’t want to go to war. So to make a long story short, yeah, 100s of houses were chopped by their owners, because that was the new law that was passed, which leads me into the subsequent thing that’s going on. The biggest thing that happened in the 1200s, I think, in Europe 1252 Florence coins, the first gold coin for Europe called the gold florin. And if you’re ballsy enough, if you’re rich enough, if you’re big enough, and if you’re wealthy enough to be able to coin a gold monetary unit for your town, and now everybody across Europe is going to accept it, including Northern Africa, all of Northern Africa was accepting, the Middle East was accepting the florin. All of that is huge.
Cory: Oh, I was gonna say a real quick one. You can’t say no to a gold coin, because it’s a gold coin. I heard I heard something it you know, that’s like, if you see that, and you already know what gold is, which I’m sure most of like the trading world did at that point. You know, we’re going back, you know, talking about oil. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, if you see a gold coin, it just like, you can’t argue with the fact that this is currency, even if like your understanding of like fiat currency, it isn’t.
Paul: It’s, it’s like anybody could grab a piece of gold and make a coin out of it, or make two coins or three coins. But when you start making a little currency out of it, where everybody is using it, and you have all these aristocratic families in Florence, and Florence is being flooded in by merchants and pilgrims going to Rome. There’s a lot of richness in Florence, true richness, which leads into greed. And loan sharks, which is awesome. I mean, awesome, quote, unquote. But it makes everything a lot more interesting, isn’t it? Yes, because when you when we’re talking about Dante coming up shortly with Inferno? Well, if you have a city coining of gold florin, and we have the richest city in Europe, you know, ruling everything and that florin was truly like the US dollar in the 1980s. You could, I don’t know how old you are, Cory. But in the 1980s, the US Dollar was accepted everywhere across the globe. Now not so much because there’s other currencies, including the Euro that are stronger.
Cory: Yeah. We expect that to change very soon. I’m sure. We’ll see.
Paul: People have been saying that since 2000, when the Euro came out. So the gold florin is into play. People are getting rich people getting richer, which leads people to be loan sharks because now people need money on bigger houses. There’s a lot of greed going around. But that greed shows up in the fourth circle of hell, and Dante, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and us being a loan shark shows up three circles later in the seventh circle of Hell. So and Dante is born 12 years after the Florin was was coined. So Dante when Dante was zero, when he was just born, the gold florin been around for 13 years here. He was a new coin, it was still building up, Florence is doing well. You have this this Guelph family, that’s very religious, Dante eventually gets married as three kids, he falls in love with a girl called Beatrice at nine years old, which she never, never even. And he was lucky if you spoke to her maybe two or three times. It was like a platonic love that he had with this girl. He had, he never mentioned his wife and all of his writings, but he mentions Beatrice everywhere. So yeah, I have a little mental patient going on as well, with this guy called Dante, he’s got his own things going on.
Cory: We’re gonna get into this a little more next week, but it will become apparent that there’s a bit going on inside.
Paul: Absolutely. Because the first thing I want to talk about in the next podcast is why in the world did Dante write it? Right? Why did you write the Divine Comedy? And how did you get all those ideas that we still talk about 700 years later, but we’ll get into that next week.
What I like to talk about is Dante and how he actually learned to write because he wrote quite a bit. He studied philosophy and we know he studied – don’t forget, no schools anywhere. There’s no printing press. Most people are illiterate. Dante, he is born from a very religious family. And he decides, and we don’t know how, because we have no records of this. But he ends up studying Greek and Latin and philosophy in the church that I mentioned before in Santa Maria Novella The Dominican church. Yes, that was built in 1220. So Dante is what 20 years old, maybe 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old. And he’s studying at a brand new church called Santa Maria Novella. And he’s studying this philosophy. And the philosophy always goes back to St. Augustine, not Florida, but the legit St. Augustine.
St. Augustine lived in the year 350. And he’s from Algeria. Algeria, is on the north coast of Africa next to Morocco. So, you have a guy from the year 350, who wrote a lot of a lot of philosophy, philosophical stuff. And one of his main theories was that you have to visit Hell when you’re alive in order to understand that and then not go there when you die. So that’s kind of neat. Like to understand the consequence. So go to Hell, live Hell while you’re here on Earth, so that when you do die, you don’t live it physically, for the rest of eternity, or psychologically for the rest of eternity. So, Dante is learning how to read Greek, how to write Greek, how to read, learn how to write Latin, he’s learning about philosophy, but he’s also talking in what we would call Italian. They didn’t call it Italian back then, when Dante was alive.
Yes, the poor people, the dirty people. The aristocrats spoke Latin. And the plebs, the locals, the merchants, the farmers. Well, they spoke that vulgar language.
Cory: Okay, so the common tongue, I guess, or the, the commoners tongue, I guess.
Paul: But I mean, the aristocrats must have spoken the common tongue as well. But when they meet among themselves, and they speak a better language, you know, it’s like it’s like going to a baseball game and speaking a lot of lingo with your with the guys that you’re at the stadium with, and then going to the courthouse because you’re a lawyer, and you’re not speaking like it did last night at the at the ballgame. So we have different ways of speaking, depending on where we are and who we’re with. So he’s out at this point. He’s about 25 years old, and he knows he wants to get into politics, but you can’t become a politician unless you’re part of the guild. And he’s like, what? I’m not part of a guild. So where the hell what guild? Do I become part of? Well, he thought it through and he said, Well, the only guild that sells books, quote unquote, books, because there’s no books back then there’s manuscripts as we said before, but the only the only guild that was legally authorized to sell manuscripts was the pharmacy and physicians guild. Or the apothecary guild.
Cory: So it was important for the doctors to write?
Paul: Yes, we as doctors wrote quite a bit back then. Right? Because then take a note on on what to do and how to help people now. We can’t call them doctors. That was I knew I knew you were I were gonna say the word doctor. Yeah, we can use the word doctor in the 1200s for a reason. There was no such thing. There were there were physicians. The huge difference. So you had the pharmacy and the physicians and they had their own guild called the apothecary guild. And it becomes part of it, not because he’s a doctor, not because it’s a physician, not because he’s a pharmacist, because he reads and writes a lot. And he wants to have access with those books and those manuscripts. So he said, or, I’ll join that guild. As long as important a guild it doesn’t matter which guild them in, then I could become a politician. Which was key, because it would become a politician, you had to be part of the guild. So he became he joined the apothecary guild because they sold books and he thought there was a good link between his lifestyle and joining a guild.
The cool thing about what’s going on now in the late 1200s, is that you have a very important influential person called Dante rolling around Florence, and he knows he’s known to the politicians, people know that he wants to become a political officer. The political offices, they’re only lasted two months, 60 days. So you know, 60 days to get a lot of things done as quickly as you possibly could. While that’s happening in the late 1200s, the Duomo starts getting built. Now, when I say that it may not sound like much to sway a Senate, but the Duomo, one is built as the largest church on planet Earth. When the Florentines take it upon themselves to say let’s build a church, and well while we’re at it, let’s build the biggest in the world. So now, everybody’s head off, you know, and the Pope could get pissed off at us because they’ll have a small rinky dinky church built by constantly the year 300. While all this stuff is going on, that’s the religious side of it.
Because don’t forget we have the gold Florin going on. We have a lot of rich people that could contribute to the to the, to the to the construction of biggest church in the world. But the political side has to kick in as well. You just can’t have the biggest church in the world with small rinky dinky political building. So they decided to build the Palazzo Vecchio that’s still in Florence and still to this day is still the mayor’s office, still City Hall. It was 1299. The Duomo starts in 1296. So we’re rounding off the 1300. But there’s a lot of the Mason guild must have been like, how do we handle all this work? We got to build a political building and a religious building stone workers and we need this ever we need so much, you know, come together at the same time to build now that the miniatures are in town and the Medicis are becoming bankers and there’s so much money going around. It’s an awesome time and to think about in the year 1300.
So June 15, the year 1300, Dante becomes friar of Florence, he’s the highest rank in Florence. And he’s got those 60 days to do whatever the heck he wants. With all that info in his head with it with the philosophy that I mentioned before, and the studying in the churches and stuff like that.
Cory: Physicians texts, yeah.
Paul: He’s got so much under his belt right now. And he has to figure out what to do in this in this short period of time, with all the information his head but he also is also the year 1300 that I mentioned before, and Pope Boniface VIII all of a sudden comes up with this brilliant idea, brand new idea. He comes up with this word called Jubilee. And the first Jubilee was in the year 1300, while Dante was prior, so Dante in the year 1300 has to take it upon himself to go, don’t forget, he’s at Guelph he’s extremely religious. He wants to get down to the Vatican. And don’t forget, this is the old St. Peter’s Basilica that was built by Constantine in the year in the three hundreds. It’s not the new St. Peter’s that we all go see with the Sistine Chapel and stuff like that.
Cory: It kind of needs an update a little bit. Especially with the new Florentine. What was it called again? The Duomo?
Paul: Duomo? Yes. Think about the whole dynamics right? So you got Lawrence, he’s he’s in a town that’s building the biggest church in on planet Earth. But he doesn’t want to go pay respects to the Pope who started the Jubilee. But he has a little issue with this. Because the Jubilee was meant to quicken your way to Heaven when you die. If you if you become a pilgrim, and you do a pilgrimage to the St. Peter’s Basilica, and to Rome and the 1300, I will forgive your sins as Pope Boniface St. Eighth and I will make sure that you go to Heaven quicker and stay less time in Purgatory.
Cory: So if you put a couple of guns in if you wait…
Paul: Okay, so hear me out that was so you jumped the gun, but let’s get rid of that collection plate if you simply as Pope because he this pope is quite obnoxious, he declared religious and secular supremacy above all and everybody, so he’s actually stepping on a Holy Roman emperor’s toes right now. He’s saying I am more important than you and without me you’re a loser and you’re a nobody. So Pope Boniface VIII was was quite self centered, quite narcissistic, and declares his supremacy over everybody then says, Well, I’m going to quicken your chances to get to Heaven if you come on as Jubilee pilgrimage to Rome.
So forget about the collection plate. If millions of people are going to get up and get on their donkeys or simply walk to Rome from France, Germany, England, Spain, Portugal, I don’t care where you’re coming from. And all the roads still lead to Rome. Thanks for the Romans. Everybody’s going to Rome well, you need to sleep when you get there. You got to eat when you get there. Yeah, maybe your mind will souvenir no magnets put in your refrigerator when you go back home, oh, no, I wasn’t a jubilee in the year 1300s. So money is gonna go round regardless, and that’s where Dante had a huge issue with Pope Boniface the eighth saying he’s not doing it to save your soul. He’s doing it because he wants all that cash because I’m not gonna say half of Rome was owned by the Vatican. But the whole outside area of where St. Peter’s Basilica is today is still all owned by the Vatican.
So there were plenty of places where you can rent a bed and breakfast in Rome or a restaurant and have a nice, you know, a nice meal in Rome while you’re there. The Jubilee. I know that money’s going straight to the to the church and to the Vatican, and to Pope Boniface VIII pocket. So, and that’s what Dante declares as simony. You’re selling something religious, that’s not tangible. So you’re selling heaven, you’re selling forgiveness. So Simon actually has a huge issue with Pope Boniface VIII, which we ended up meeting and we’ll talk about next week, when we talk about Inferno and how it’s kind of neat how it all intertwines in the year 1300, because everything’s leading up, so to corruption and evil doings on behalf of the church as well. Which leads me to two more things. Corey, if I have more time?
Cory: Oh, please, please.
Paul: Dante is infatuated with Aristotle and his ethics. And I don’t know if the listeners know about Aristotle’s ethics, but it’s huge. If you just Google Aristotle, ethics, there’s books and books and books and books on Aristotle.
Cory: He again, ethics is Aristotle’s kind of concept. Am I right? Like, isn’t that? I mean, he wrote the book on ethics.
Paul: Awesome. He did write a book on it and but so did his teacher, Socrates. And so did his teacher Plato. Oh, yeah. But ourselves. Just to make it really simple. He gives it a different twist than his his previous to Greek writers. His study is out of one word eudaimonia. This is a Greek word and eudaimonia Unfortunately, for us, English speaking people, is incorrectly translated, because sometimes it’s difficult to translate from foreign languages to English. 99% of the books in the world written in English, translate eudaimonia, which is Aristotle’s whole concept of life as the word happiness, and it’s really not happiness, he doesn’t focus or mean, happy, or how can somebody be happy. Eudaimonia is really focusing on how to have a good soul. And if you have a good soul, then that will lead you to be happy. So it’s really about having a good soul. So how do people get to have you eudaimonia? That’s the key question that Dante was hammered with, while he was studying in Santa Maria Novella, not far from his house in Florence.
Cory: Just as Siddhartha you know, Siddhartha would meditate on the feeling of enlightenment, or the you know, experience of it.
Paul: You got it. So, when you get into eudaimonia, and Aristotle’s theories about eudaimonia was quite simple. You need constant habitual virtuous deeds and actions. I’m gonna say that one more time because it may be it may sound easy but it’s actually not. So to get eudaimonia, to have a good soul, all you need, and that says, quote, unquote, all you all you really need to do is to have constant and habitual virtuous deeds and actions. So you just got to be a good guy, you have to be a good person. And if you’re a good person, and you constantly have those good deeds and actions that will have that will make you have a good soul, which in turn will make you happy will make you happy. Yes. Now, all those things that may that that should be habitual, are the virtues. So there goes courage, wisdom, justice, all the all the good things that we should do.
Cory: All the life skills that we see in school.
Paul: It’s not easy to be virtuous. In today’s world, because anybody’s world.
Cory: Yes. Because Because similar to you know, people’s people’s need to be tied to the Divine when you know, when a new coin rolls into town or something, then they can get a little loose.
Paul: Absolutely. But Aristotle is pretty simple about it. And Don, and I say Aristotle, but when I say Aristotle, then you’re going to think Dante because Dante thinks exactly like Aristotle. So he loves his Eudaimonia good soul, you know, habitual virtuous deeds, actions, philosophy here.
Cory: Yeah. And the money and the corruption are a temptation. It’s outlined in the Bible.
Paul: Now, you hit it on the head, those are the basics. So, if you’re virtuous, and I don’t know what’s let’s use justice as one of the virtues. Okay, so everybody should have should be just in their decisions. Well, that’s the virtue. If you have a deficiency in justice, you’re discriminating and begins, if you have an excess in justice, you’re favoring somebody, you follow me?
Cory: Yeah. Because it’s a balance, you need to stay –
Paul: There and there goes stood up the there goes the Greek, you know, counterbalancing, everything right? Everything’s got to be balanced properly. So in the middle, you have justice deficiency. Deficiency is depriving somebody from something and discriminating somebody or somebody, and the excess is favoring somebody so, but it’s not always the same, because we have 1000s of decisions to make on a daily basis in our brains. And you have to make a conscious decision of which is a good decision. And which is a bad decision upon the, on the moment that it arrives, right? Because it could change, you know, I had a different day than you did. Cory, right? You’re really who’s it’s so we had different conversations with different people and different things happen to us. And maybe we had to both be just at a certain point, but you have to make the right decision at the right time with the right people at the right moment.
Cory: And the key word there being you know, or rather kind of hearkening back to what you said a minute ago, a conscious decision.
Paul: You have to be aware of it, but so you have to be conscious of it. And you have to be aware that you can be screwing it up. Yeah, maybe you were, you’re cutting somebody short, or you’re favoring somebody? And those are the vices, which is what Dante focuses on his entire Inferno. So there goes lust and greed and anger and violence and fraud. All those are deficiencies are access to virtues.
Cory: From…?
Paul: Aristotle, Aristotle, but what they’re doing is saying, Okay, I’m Catholic, I go to church, I’m a Guelph I like, I like to figure a pope, I hate the current pope because he’s selling your tickets to Heaven in reality, I don’t like the Jubilee. I don’t like a lot of things that are going on. I don’t like that there’s a lot of French Pope’s getting involved in our Italian side of things, which I’m going to end the podcast in a few minutes with. But Dante is saying what Aristotle wrote about, what over 1500 years before Dante was even born as a non Christian. Dante says, Aristotle had it right. I mean, regardless of what your religion is, this is all you eudaimonia is what everybody should achieve and go for an aim for because who wants to focus on Western greed and anger and violence, for crying out loud?
Cory: You don’t have to focus on a constant fear of God, if you’re living, you know, if you’re electing to live the way that –
Paul: No, but you can go into God. So you said God meant it to be your God, because there’s nothing to do with God. It’s got to be about being happy, having a good soul, regardless of what’s going to happen to us afterwards. Yeah, why not be a good person and be complete inside your heart? See the conversation had nothing to do with God?
Cory: Okay. Okay. That’s it. That’s interesting, because even in the context of Dante is, you know, sort of religious nature.
Paul: Well, it gets into Catholicism. Absolutely. But he’s focusing on something that was written by a guy who didn’t believe in God. Aristotle had gods, he had all those gods in ancient Greece. Right. So, to conclude tonight’s podcast, it’s kind of neat to see Dante focusing on on people that were born 1000s of years before him hating the current pope, even though he’s a Guelph and he’s a he’s a true Catholic. I mean, he loves the church, and he loves the idea. Yeah, and Dante believes, again, that the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, certainly, you know, church and state should coexist together, but it’s extremely difficult when you got a pope who’s who’s declaring supremacy over everything in the world.
Cory: And he’s experiencing, I’m sure insane amounts of cognitive dissonance. I mean, you know, we, absolutely the lack of distractions probably meant, you know, people’s convictions back then, or at least, you know, those who hurt somebody like Dante, you know, you know, his conviction is just completely unflappable. And so, like, the fact that you’re seeing this thing that you know, represents a Dante he kind of irrespective of the, the ethics thing and everything, I mean, he was a raised Catholic his entire life he you know, you do believe that there is like this, or you know, at least up till a certain point you believe that there is a light that shines like right into the pope that is God talking. And then suddenly this this, this happens, which just flips your entire you know, universe you know, reaching all the way out to the heavens are completely on its head and you have to it probably felt like Hell.
Paul: It did for most yet at this point, with the Jubilee going on hating every minute of it. Yeah, but according to him this bad Pope was Collective’s cashing in and all these pilgrims as a politician in Florence trying to do the right thing. And then you have these aristocrats who really don’t care about anything but cash and then he thinks that all these gold florins that were swinging around Florence was was doing a bad it was a bad thing in reality because where there’s money there’s greed and greed that there’s no good life. The it all comes to a conclusion the year after in 1301 when obviously he served as 60 days prior so that’s all done with the Jubilee is over with because it only lasts. You know that one year the year 1300.
When the Pope is still Pope manifest the eighth exiles all the graphs from Florence, the Pope, who is head of the Guelphs is exiling the Guelph his own people out of Florida because of some I can’t get into because it’s gonna take me another three hours to talk about it. but Sure, sure, getting angry with the Guelph in Florida, so he exiles him. So what we have now is a subdivision of the Guelph so you got the white grouse and the black Wolf’s so the Pope is a black Guelph and Dante says well I hate him. So I’m going to be a black wolf I’m going to be a white Guelph and all the white groups were exiled out of Florence. So Dante loses his house, he physically loses the opportunity to sell, cash in on the house that he owned and foreigners buy a house somewhere else. So he literally gets kicked in the rear and out of Florence gone.
So Dante obviously has like a personal vendetta out for Boniface VIII now because he literally lost cash. Yes, his own home, he lost his his residency for crying out loud, get the hell out of Florence. So that was the end of it. Boniface VIII was on Dante’s shit list. That’s for sure. That’s the least I could say about that. Yeah. Now, Dante’s out of floors, he’s pissed off at the church, he’s pissed off at the Pope. He’s got all this information with his head with Eudaimonia and Aristotle and the ethics and the money coming in the biggest church in the world called the Duomo being built. The marriages are in Florence. And they’re they’re feeding this this this evil, greedy cycle of loan sharking and usury. And then it all goes even worse, when in 1309. The papacy is brought out of Florence and is brought to France, a French Pope was elected in 1309. And the French Pope simply said, Well, I’m Pope and I’m French. And what the heck am I doing in Italy? Let’s move the papacy to my town.
So he literally got up and moved to Avignon France, and the papacy stayed in Avignon France for about 70 years and guess what all the Pope’s that were elected in France happened to be? They were all French.
So you see how it’s not about church anymore, it’s not about good ethics anymore it’s about greed, it’s about me myself and I let’s bring the papacy to France and elect French Pope’s and keep the money in France now. Not in Italy. Yes, it was. It was a great time for chaos. Yeah, it was It was chaotic. It was crazy. But that schism because that’s what a schism is as a division right? So that that that schism in the church, but leaving the papacy in Rome and bringing it to France? Yes, is the biggest sin that Dante believes could exist on planet Earth on behalf of a human being. So the people who cause schisms and divisions because God wanted it one way, but you screwed it up and you divided it, yes, doesn’t make puts people who create divisions and schisms in the deepest, darkest circle of Hell and the nine, I’m sorry, the eight circle in the ninth ditch all the way like close to Lucifer.
Cory: Just, it’s close to him as you could get, essentially.
Paul: There is nothing worse than dividing what God intended to be together. So it’s kind of neat how you have all this chaos that leads up from 1192 when the guilds were built as we began the evening, all the way through the biggest church in the world and the guilds with the executive power and so on and so forth, all the way down to a huge decline with this idea that the church should be one should be together, should be helping each other. It all blew up in In Dante’s lifetime, and he truly hated every minute of it, because as a good Catholic boy, he wanted everything to go well. And it didn’t happen.
Cory: And it didn’t happen. And it wasn’t just it wasn’t just him that, you know, that was a feeling this way, either.
Paul: No, but he was the ballsiest one, the gutsiest one. One day decided on his exile with no money, having lost the money from his house that he had, you know, he would have sold before he got exiled from the Pope. He says, I’m gonna get, I’m gonna get my vengeance. And it’s not gonna be a physical vengeance. It’s gonna be a psychological vengeance, because I’m gonna write a poem. It’s gonna be a pretty long poem. Yes, I’m gonna write a poem. And I’m gonna call it in Inferno, and I’m gonna follow it up with purgatory. I’m gonna end it with paradise. So on that note, I would say that we should continue this conversation in our next podcast, Cory.
Cory: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Paul Costa, thank you so much for kind of setting the scene for you know, the Inferno, Dante, Elite Series Inferno. And yeah, and yes, it’s kind of, you know, we I learned a lot today. And it’s, it’s, you know, fascinating to kind of look and what I was saying earlier to learn about that world, of which there were few dots to connect. And yeah, so we so what we have now is we’ve gone through and established that all of the cantos of Hell, in the forthcoming episode about Inferno are in regards to the eudaimonia.
Paul: The coolest part of all this podcast, and my life is that people will listen to this podcast one day and they will reach out to me and maybe go to my website at Tuscantourguide.com. And say, I heard your podcast, I’m coming to Florence with my wife and my kids bring me around, I want to see Dante’s house. I want to see where Dante studied, I want to see the Duomo, walk me around and show me what you spoke about during those podcasts that I enjoyed. And I’m not here to become a millionaire, obviously. But I love sharing all this information with everybody.
Cory: There’s a there’s an additional Canto in Hell for the people that go to Italy and they don’t contact Paul about. We’ll make sure we add it to Dante’s Inferno. Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, an appendix. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and we very much look forward to these next few episodes that we’ll be doing on Dante’s Inferno and how we’re going to bring that back into the realm of Workers Compensation and maybe have a whole new perspective on things. So once again, thank you again, Paul, for coming on the podcast.
Paul: Thank you, Cory. Thanks for having me. Have a great night. You too.
Cory: Thanks for listening. For more about Dante, legal theory, the inferno, the gates of hell and what all this means to workers compensation, visit our blog at blog.rate-fast.com. And for more about RateFast, the service that rates your workers compensation impairment reports for you, visit our website at rate-fast.com
