Lying as Contraceptive Speech: Lessons from Dante’s Inferno

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.