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April 11, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:29
ENTRAPMENT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep308
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Quick announcement, guys.
I'm going to do my live Q&A on Locals tonight, so not Tuesday as I usually do, but tonight, 7.30 p.m.
Eastern, and you can go to dinesh.locals.com to check it out.
Coming up, how the FBI entrapped a bunch of poor, angry men into a kidnapping plot and all with the intention of sacrificing them to help Biden win the 2020 election.
I'll celebrate another win for the good guys, a January 6th defendant, completely exonerated on all charges.
Political philosopher Rob Koons joins me.
We're going to talk about Aristotle.
And I'll continue my discussion of Dante's purgatory.
We're going to meet Provenzan Salvani, whom Dante encounters twice, one in the circle of the Terrace of Pride and also in the Terrace of Envy.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
In a stunning defeat for the Biden Justice Department, a jury has acquitted two men accused of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the fall of 2020.
The jury also deadlocked on a verdict for two other defendants, which meant a hung jury, a mistrial.
So another way to put it is the DOJ, in one of the most high-profile terrorism cases, in which they put enormous resources, they could not convict a single defendant.
Now earlier, two other guys pleaded guilty.
This is they succumbed to the sort of legal intimidation of the DOJ, and they took A reduced sentence for that.
But I think when they look at these verdicts, they're probably going to be sorry that they didn't go to trial.
Essentially, the defense mounted a case of entrapment.
They said that the FBI, in a sense, made us do this.
They came up with the idea.
They moved the plot forward.
It was their plot, not ours.
They made us into terrorists that we wouldn't otherwise have been.
Think about the stunning implications of this.
And yet, the jury agreed.
The jury found entrapment.
The jury basically let these guys walk.
The jury did not believe the FBI and they did not believe the Biden DOJ in a case that, quite honestly, was being portrayed just a few months ago as kind of a slam dunk, a kind of a sure thing.
And let's go back to October of 2020, because it's kind of fun to look at the way that you have these, you know, blaring headlines in the New York Times, ABC News.
Here's the New York Times. Here is ABC News beginning its broadcast this way tonight.
We take you into a hidden world, a place authorities say gave birth to a violent domestic terror plot in Michigan foiled by the FBI. So this is the true deep state propaganda that our moronic and subservient journalists love to go with.
And of course, Governor Whitmer was there with a press conference, you know, blaming Trump.
CNN, by the way, had a very interesting article I'm going to quote CNN. And recordings,
quote, allowed the Bureau to monitor what was happening from then on.
So the Bureau isn't participating.
They aren't driving the plot forward.
They are merely monitoring it.
So, you have to look back and recognize the thorough mendacity of this entire operation.
I mean, quite honestly, if you or I are called to be in a jury, we should at this point disbelieve anything that the Biden DOJ says, disbelieve anything that the FBI says, believe only things that are presented with irrefutable evidence, take nobody at their word, because they are proven prevaricators and liars.
What's so terrific about this case, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta were the two defendants who were found not guilty.
Not guilty of terrorism, not guilty on charges of conspiring to use a weapon.
You know, the FBI, as usual, they hurl a bunch of different charges, thinking, if we don't get him on this, we'll kind of get him on that.
And the whole trial was carefully constructed to be very favorable to the prosecution.
In fact, in the beginning, the judge was not even going to allow the entrapment defense to come in except until the end.
Then the defense lawyers prevailed on him and basically said, we can't make our case if we aren't able to appeal to and provide evidence for, counter evidence for FBI entrapment.
So the judge finally said yes.
But it's so telling, isn't it, that the Biden DOJ didn't want its own agents to testify, which Constantly trying to exclude evidence, communications among FBI agents, one to the other, communications between the FBI and the defendants.
They want to keep all of this out of the trial.
In other words, they want to keep the orchestration out so the jury doesn't hear about any of it.
And the jury goes, well, yeah, I mean, these guys, they had some very, you know, violent and turbulent anti-government rhetoric.
And after all, they did participate in the plot without noticing, well, who put them up to it?
Who are the wily deceivers that came to them with the idea?
Well, the head of the operation here was this guy named Big Dan, a fellow named Dan Chappelle.
And this is a guy, he even testified about how he's the one who brought this group together.
He's the one who set up the kind of chat room in which they all exchanged ideas.
He organized excursions for field training.
He's the one who set up the surveillance of Whitmer's Cottage.
This is the FBI doing all this.
And the FBI paid him handsomely.
Over just a few months, they pay him $60,000 in cash.
They give him all kinds of gifts, laptops, and smartwatches, and this and that.
Now, admittedly, the Yahoos who are involved in this were these angry men who made some inflammatory and, in some cases, violent comments, but they were not in a position to carry out a plot.
The Assistant Attorney, U.S. Attorney Niles Kessler, he tried to say that, listen, you know, it's one thing to protest against the government, but what you can't do is kidnap them, kill them, or blow them up.
It wasn't just talk.
Well, it would have been just talk if it wasn't for the involvement of the FBI. And one of the defense attorneys summed it up beautifully when he said that this is conduct unacceptable in America.
That's not how it works.
We don't make terrorists so we can arrest them.
And that's exactly what the FBI did in this case.
The really good news, Harris and Caserta are now free.
They're out. Fox and Croft, the other two guys, where there was a hung jury, they are still in custody.
The government has to decide whether to retry them.
But given what happened in the first trial, I think the government might very well be setting itself up for the exact same outcome.
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Why does the FBI set people up?
Why do they frame people?
Why do they orchestrate plots and then bust people in the process of, quote, carrying them out?
Well, one answer in the case of the Whitmer plot was they were trying to help Joe Biden get across the finish line.
Because the very idea that you've got sort of this right-wing militia and they're trying to kidnap a Democratic governor, it feeds the left's narrative that the greatest danger in America is coming from a white supremacist extremism.
So that's what made this whole story so...
Tantalizing to the media at the time.
And remember, this was just two weeks before the election.
But there's a second motive that often doesn't get focused on.
And this is the FBI setting people up and framing them in order to fortify the fear that keeps the FBI at center stage, that keeps feeding the FBI's huge budgets.
If this seems like a bit of a far-fetched argument, it isn't.
Here is FBI Assistant Director Thomas Fuentes.
This is going back to 2009.
Making a very candid admission.
And he says this, I'm not quoting him.
If you're submitting a budget proposal for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you're not going to submit a proposal that says we won the war on terror and everything's great.
Why not? He goes, because the first thing that's going to happen is your budget's going to be cut in half.
So the guy is basically saying we got to keep the fear alive.
Not the hope alive, but the fear alive.
Because as long as people think this could happen to me, they're willing to support and elected officials are willing to support more money flowing to the deep state.
Now... We know about the Whitmer plot, a plot in which the FBI was involved in every stage, and it's really clear that this plot would not have gone forward without the FBI. In fact, one of the FBI's informants was the second in command in charge of putting the plot, executing the plot, and bringing it to fruition.
The primary impetus came from the FBI. It was the FBI's plot, not the plot of these A handful of, by and large, dislocated, confused, angry young men.
But Glenn Greenwald, who's been reporting on the FBI and on the deep state for a long time, says that the FBI began this kind of operation, framing people, with the war on terror.
And he gives a number of cases that are really eye-opening.
In 2015, the FBI flamboyantly praises itself for arresting three Brooklyn men on charges of providing material support to the Islamic State of Iraq.
So apparently these are three guys supposedly trying to aid ISIS in its fight against America.
But as you begin to look closer to what these three guys did, apparently it was all talk.
In fact, the FBI itself said that the threats of violence were, quote, aspirational.
Aspirational means we kind of wish we did it.
And so there was no even implication, let alone activity, that suggests that these suspects were close to actually staging an attack, large or small.
These are basically people in their late teens or early 20s.
A lot of them are in no position to do any of this.
And what does the FBI do to set them up?
Well, it sends an older Muslim man to gain their trust.
And this older man basically says, listen, you've got to pursue this plan concretely, and let me guide you in how to do that.
He befriends them.
He actually moves in with them.
He spends months convincing them that they need to go and visit the Islamic State.
There's no point in trying to help an organization that you haven't seen close up.
And just when the guys plan to do that, boom, they're busted.
Oh, we got some terrorists, and so on.
And you can see, again, give us more money, says the FBI, because we're so good at this.
We are able to grab these terrorists before they do real harm to the American people.
And this is the FBI's MO now.
This is basically a rogue agency, far more dangerous than the so-called criminals that they supposedly go after.
Here's another case that Greenwell covered, 2011.
The FBI arrests a guy named James Cromady.
This is an African-American guy who converted to Islam.
And he's accused of a terror plot where repeatedly he says, I don't want to do it.
I don't want to do it. And the FBI talks him into it.
The FBI, in a sense, says, no, you've got to do it.
You've got to do it. And finally he goes ahead.
And the judge, who actually sentences the guy, gives him a heavy prison sentence, nevertheless says that, quote, the defendant was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own.
And then this telling statement, quote, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that James Cromady could never have dreamed up the scenario in which he actually became involved.
So who dreamed it up?
Answer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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Another major kick in the rear end to the Biden DOJ, which is another way of saying more good news for us.
A January 6th defendant, Matthew Martin, has been completely exonerated on four separate misdemeanor charges by a judge.
This was a so-called bench trial.
You can have a trial in which the judge decides or a trial in which the jury decides.
Well, Matthew Martin was smart.
He decided to go for a bench trial.
And I think he did that because the judge...
In question is, in fact, a Trump appointee, a guy named McFadden, Trevor McFadden.
McFadden, although he was very pro-prosecution in the beginning, he seems to be slowly dawning on him what a racket this is and how they're going after people for doing essentially nothing.
They're going after people for doing what the left does all the time and gets no penalties at all.
And in this particular case, Matthew Martin had a very simple defense.
He was accused of, by the way, four things.
One, entering and remaining in a restricted building.
Whoop-de-doo. Disorderly conduct in a restricted building.
We'll find out he did nothing.
Violent entry. There was no violence involved.
And parading in a Capitol building.
This is all, by the way, highfalutin language that means absolutely nothing.
What does it mean to say you're parading?
It's another word for walking.
Dinesh paraded to his podcast this morning.
So this is all fancy language that's intended to sort of beguile and bamboozle the jury and the judge.
Well, the judge wasn't going for it.
Now... This guy, Matthew Martin, had a very simple defense.
It was called, the cops let me in.
And the beauty of it is, he had video to prove it.
Basically, what you see in the video is kind of clear.
You see two Capitol Police officers standing on either side, and they're standing still.
And there's a crowd that's kind of moving by, and the cops are not even reacting to it.
Now, it turns out that U.S. Capitol Police Inspector John Erickson testified.
He was asked, why did the cops tell these people to leave?
And he goes, well, there were so many people coming in, the officers understood that they couldn't do anything, so they could only observe and try to make sure no one got hurt.
In other words, the cops told no one to leave, not even politely.
And so this guy, Martin, said, well, I didn't know that I wasn't allowed to go in.
And the video was a little ambiguous as to whether the cops waved Martin in, but apparently Martin thought so.
Martin basically testified.
He testified in his own defense.
And you do see this on the video.
Martin is waiting to enter.
The officer leans forward to speak to another person, then leans back, and then opens the passageway.
And in goes Martin, right through it.
So the judge goes that he found Martin, quote,"...largely credible in his description of these events." And when Martin got in, what did he do?
It should be said that this may not be the normal fate of January 6th defendants.
Why? Because most of these judges are left-wingers.
They're Democrats. Even some of the older Reagan and Bush judges are very hostile.
They're part of the D.C. establishment.
We know that D.C. juries are overwhelmingly left-wing.
So this is not something that one can count on.
However, in front of a fair judge, at least fair in this respect, like McFadden, This guy, Martin, realized, I can make a case.
This is the reasonable judge, and I can not only say what happened, but I can show him what happened.
And really, all I have to do is reasonable doubt, even if the judge isn't sure if the cops are letting him into the building, as long as the cops aren't acting to say, hey, get out of here.
Hey, step back. It is not...
It's uncommon for someone to interpret it as, you know, if you're in a museum, you're trying to go into a section, there's a security person sitting there, and you walk right by them, and they don't say anything.
They don't say, hey, you're not allowed to go in here, hey, you've got to leave.
You just walk by, and they just talk among themselves.
You will obviously assume that it's okay, that you're allowed to do this, and if you weren't, you would be notified about that.
So... I think that the beauty of this verdict, the good thing, is that other January 6th defendants can now point to the decision and the reasoning behind the decision to make the point that this was a case where the Capitol Police, in some ways, in some respects, in other respects, they played a more violent role, particularly outside, firing into the crowd, tear gas, using all these flash bangs, so provoking violence.
But then inside the Capitol, and there's plenty of video to support this, the cops are basically standing around twiddling their thumbs, doing nothing.
In some cases, actually taking photos of the protesters or chatting with them.
And so the protesters can be forgiven for assuming that what they were doing was, in this case, okay.
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That's 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code BALANCE. Folks, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast Rob Koons.
Rob is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.
He is the author of a whole bunch of books, Realism Regained, The Waning of Materialism, and The Atlas of Reality, a Contemporary Guide to Metaphysics.
He's got a forthcoming book on Thomas Aquinas, which asks whether Aquinas' philosophy of nature is obsolete.
Rob, welcome back to the podcast.
Delighted to have you.
I haven't talked...
Thank you, Josh, for having me here.
I haven't talked a whole lot about philosophy on the podcast.
I want to, so I'm kind of opening, you're clearing the pathway for me to get into this topic.
But let me begin by asking you on a personal level, what is it about philosophy that sort of lit the fire in you?
What is philosophy itself, and what is it that makes it important for us to know about today?
Yeah, just think about that.
So I've been studying philosophy now for about 48 years, I think, so almost half a century now.
And it was my first semester of freshman year at Michigan State.
An advisor told me to take this course in philosophy.
I had no idea what philosophy was.
And they started with the ancient Greeks, with Thales, everything's water, that sort of thing.
It was just immediately captivating to me.
It made me realize that that's what I resonated with.
So in philosophy, what we're really trying to do is always trying to get to the most fundamental questions, right?
To peel back We're good to go.
So, Rob, a couple of things stand out from what you just said.
I think the first thing to me is that philosophy is an enterprise of reason.
In other words, it is an enterprise of reason alone.
What you're trying to do is use human reason to discover truths about the world and perhaps about ourselves.
But right away we have kind of a distinction, don't we, between the province of reason and the province of revelation.
Because there are many people who might say, wait a minute, the most important truths are not truths that are sort of figured out by human beings through reason, but they are delivered by divine revelation through truth.
Various sacred books, the Jewish scriptures, the Christian scriptures, and so on.
So, how would somebody coming at this topic, and I believe with you, you're coming at the topic both with an appreciation for revelation and for reason, how do you begin by carving out the territory between the two?
Yeah, that's a great question. So, I was a believer, Christian believer, coming into the study of philosophy.
And I've never left it. I remain a strong believer.
Actually, looking back, I'd read people like C.S. Lewis and the American evangelical philosopher Francis Schaeffer, who had both talked about how Christian faith can be in dialogue with philosophy in creative and in constructive ways.
And so I was predisposed, really, to think of Faith and reason as being compatible and really complementary rather than competing or incompatible sort of approaches to things.
So I don't anyway discount faith, right?
I don't think that I'm only going to believe something if I can fully understand it and prove it for myself and, you know, disregard any possible revelation.
That's not my approach at all.
It's rather, you know, everyone comes to philosophy with some kind of Assumptions, intuitions, whatever you want to call that.
And what philosophy is all about is examining those, right, and trying to understand them and putting them into dialogue with other people.
And you can do that without suspending your faith, right, in any way.
I think that's what I would recommend.
Do you agree with the general, I would call it Thomistic, Thomistic here referring to Aquinas' framework, that reason and faith overlap on part of the journey?
In other words, there are some things that can be believed on faith, you don't have to prove them by reason, but reason is capable of figuring them out.
And Aquinas would put in this category, for example, the knowledge of the existence of God.
But then Aquinas would say there are certain other things, the Trinity being a perfect example, which are not provable by reason, but because they are outside the province of reason.
Do you agree with this kind of way of thinking about how we can know things?
That reason takes us far, but only so far.
Right. That's exactly my view.
And you put it very well.
So there's definite overlap.
Aquinas calls these the preambles of faith.
So the existence of God, the existence of an objective moral order, those things are things that he thinks we can discover by reason.
And those are not incompatible with the faith.
There's no contradiction between reason and faith here.
But, you know, having those under your belt, so to speak, I think makes you open to the revelation in a way that you wouldn't be if you'd reached the wrong conclusions by reason, which of course a lot of people do.
Rob, let's trace philosophy right back to the beginning.
You mentioned Thales, and Thales Parmenides, these are the so-called pre-Socratics, and they're so-called because, in a sense, the founder of philosophy is this rather remarkable figure of Socrates.
Socrates, of course, immortalized in the works of Plato.
Your own work has focused...
On Aristotle, who is the other major figure in ancient philosophy, and I think probably most philosophers, if forced to choose, would go with Plato or Aristotle, perhaps, as being the greatest philosopher.
If you had to cast a vote, would your vote be for Aristotle, and if so, why?
Yeah, yeah, I think it was Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead, who said that all of philosophy, Western philosophy, is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle, and that's roughly true.
So I guess I'd have to vote to Aristotle if he held a gun to my head, but I don't actually see them as incompatible as a lot of people do.
I think Plato and Aristotle are really part of a common project, and Aristotle's really building on Plato's foundations in lots of ways.
So I don't There's the famous School of Athens painting by Raphael, I guess it is, and you've got Plato looking up in those heavens, and Aristotle's poking at something on the ground, emphasizing this idea that Plato's somehow very ethereal in his thinking, and Aristotle's more grounded in empirical reality.
That's a bit of a caricature, actually.
They're both interested in the heavens, and God, for instance, they're both interested in the empirical world.
So I would say that there's a lot more continuity there than a lot of people think.
Let's take a pause, Rob. When we come back, I want to probe further.
What is it that Aristotle said that's distinctive and that is important for us to know?
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You'll feel the difference. I'm back with philosopher Rob Koons from the University of Texas at Austin.
And one of his recent books, The Atlas of Reality, a comprehensive guide to metaphysics.
Rob, we're talking about Aristotle and we're talking about Plato.
And you mentioned by pointing a painting that Plato is seen as...
Identifying these forms that exist in the kind of empire somewhere out in the sky, Aristotle is known as an empirical philosopher.
Let's start by talking about that.
What do we mean by an empirical way of looking at the world?
And is that the main distinction between Aristotle and Plato?
Yeah, I think that's right. So Aristotle gives a kind of priority or importance to the individual, particular individuals like you and me and Iraq and so on.
Whereas Plato does have a tendency, especially in his earlier work, to put the emphasis on the abstract domain.
So humanity in general, that's what really matters.
We're just copies, imitations of humanity, right?
Chesterton once said that Thomas made Christianity more Christian by making it more Aristotelian.
And the reason for this is, of course, that for Christianity, the incarnation is crucially important, right?
That God is a particular individual human being, not just humanity in general.
And Aristotle, in a way, is compatible with that, I think, because he does give this importance to the individual.
Another way to think about this is that Aristotle represents a kind of third way of Between the materialism of some of the other Greek philosophers, like Democritus, and the dualism of Plato or Pythagoras, where for Plato or Pythagoras, you've got the material world, it's relatively...
An important kind of dead matter moving around, and then you have separate minds or souls that interact with the material world.
Democritus says, forget the minds and souls, it's just the atoms in the void, right?
And Aristotle's view is that there are what he calls substances, you see I in Greek.
You and I, again, individual rocks, planets, and so on, are substances which have matter, but they also have a form which makes them what they are.
And so Aristotle's picture, you might say, compared to a democratist, is much more of a top-down rather than bottom-up picture.
So I'm not just a heap of particles, right?
That's the lesson that Aristotle's telling us.
I'm a human being, fundamentally.
And the fact that I'm a human being is what explains why my particles are the way they are.
So the form of the whole determines the parts.
The whole is prior to the parts, or more than the sum of the parts, as sometimes it's put.
That's a key idea in Aristotle.
So, one of the things I've been working on the last 15 years or so is arguing that this top-down picture of Aristotle is not obsolete.
A lot of people think the scientific revolution that we had in the 17th century, you know, with Descartes and Galileo and Newton and so on, that that vindicated Democritus, right?
Showed that we live in a materialistic world where it's really the electrons and protons and photons that are in charge, right?
And we're just kind of epiphenomena.
We're the byproducts of those more fundamental physical motions.
And so I've been arguing that actually the quantum revolution of 100 years ago has changed things dramatically.
It's actually a kind of counter-revolution that has argued now, has shown us, that holes can be more important than the parts.
That quantum holism is something that's a pervasive fact about the world.
And in particular, it shows us things like chemistry and thermodynamics are not reducible to the microphysical level, which really opens up the possibility that biology is not reducible either, and that psychology is not reducible to biology.
So it gives us a much more Aristotelian kind of picture of the world where you've got whole individuals who are the fundamental building blocks and who have, who are alive, who are sentient, who are rational in our case, right? In ways it's not reducible to the physical level.
This is all extremely fascinating.
I want to probe it a little bit more.
So materialism as you're defining it is obviously not materialism in the conventional sense.
We're not talking about people who like to go to the mall.
We're talking about the idea that there is only material stuff in the world and nothing else.
And that if there appears to be any non-material stuff like thoughts or emotions, they are merely the product of the interaction of atoms.
So this is the materialistic picture which remarkably was not a product of modern science but predated it.
Actually came much earlier in the pre-Socratics.
And I think what you're saying is that many times people have tried to fight this materialism by positing a kind of rival abstract notion of humanity, that all that matters are the forms and that matter is just a kind of cheap copy of those forms.
And you're saying Aristotle has this exquisite balance in which he's able both to affirm the material world as it is, but also show its insufficiency in that there are ideas and forms that go into the material things that are critically important in making them who they are.
Can you spell that out a little more?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I think one thing I'd add is that for Aristotle, this role of form is pervasive.
So it's not just in human beings and living things, but in inorganic things as well.
They're not just the particles.
They're already, if you have a pond full of water, already the water is more than just the particles.
It has a watery form.
that's responsible for the way in which those particles interact.
And so, in a way, Aristotle makes people like you and me at home in nature.
We're not some kind of misfit that doesn't fit into the pattern that we see otherwise.
The water has its form, you and I have our forms.
And our forms are human souls, in our case rational souls.
And so you can have, you know, again, take seriously the fact that we have free will, that we can reason, that we can grasp abstract truths, while at the same time not dividing us into these two incompatible parts, you know, this lifeless body and then this separate soul.
It's rather the whole human being that is rational and alive and sentient and so on.
I think the crucial point here, and it's really one that makes us think, particularly as believers, is what you're saying is that the soul isn't a thing that is separate from us, that is located somewhere in us.
I mean, I obviously have lungs, and I have a heart, and those are objects inside of my body.
You're saying the soul isn't like that.
It doesn't have a location, because I know in philosophy, people have debated, where can we find the soul?
Where can we locate it?
And so on. And what Aristotle is saying is that's kind of missing the picture.
The soul of a horse is the hoarseness that makes a horse into a horse.
And the soul of a human being is that animating quality that makes us the kind of beings that we are.
Isn't that what Aristotle means by soul?
Yeah, I think that puts it really well.
That's right. So Aristotle doesn't have the problem that, say, Descartes had, where he had the soul as a separate entity and But then has to somehow interact with the brain, you know, pushing particles around in some funny way.
That's just not the way it works for Aristotle, because for Aristotle, the body doesn't have any independent existence of its own.
The body is what it is because of the soul, right?
And so there's no interaction problem, really, for Aristotle.
Rob, this is great stuff, and I'd like to have you back to Probit further.
These are conversations that I think really help people.
Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.
I look forward to having you back.
Great, I'm looking forward to it myself.
Thanks for watching.
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We're now in the Terrace of Pride in Dante's Purgatorio.
And what I want to do in this segment is complete my discussion of the Terrace of Pride.
And in the next segment, I want to talk about the next Terrace, which is the Terrace of Envy.
Now, these are very big and bad sins.
And part of the... Part of what we learn from Dante is why they are so bad.
What is it that makes pride the deadliest of the deadly sins?
What is it that makes envy so destructive and so corrosive?
Now, in the Terrace of Pride, we've met a politician named Umberto, as well as an artist named Odorisi, both, in a sense, being purged and cleansed of the sin of pride.
And now we're going to meet a third man And this guy's name is Provenzan Salvani.
Now, Provenzan Salvani was the great victor at the Battle of Monteperati.
If you remember back to Canto V of the Inferno, we met this imperious character.
A Florentine named Farinata.
And what he did was he betrayed his own city, Florence, and he made allies with Siena.
And together, the Ghibellines of Florence and the Sienese army invaded Florence, defeated the Guelphs.
That was the Battle of Montiperti in the late 13th century.
Well, if Farinata was the leader of the traitorous Florentines, The leader of the Sienese army was Provenzan Silvani.
And interestingly, Provenzan Silvani is not in hell, Farinada's in hell, but Silvani is here in the Terrace of Pride.
And he's here, and the question we have to ask is, why was he so proud?
What was the pride?
And second of all, how did a man like this, so proud, in fact the hero, the great champion of the Battle of Monteperty, what put him on the path to humility, which is the opposite of pride?
So, here's Dante in the Circle of Pride, the Terrace of Pride, and he sees this guy bent over, carrying stones, carrying rocks, and this is Dante's way of humbling the proud.
They are actually looking at the ground, and Dante, interestingly enough, has these so-called pavement sculptures, Where they can see both historical and artistic depictions of both pride and humility.
So you see both the sin and you see the cure all depicted through art.
And the stones are supposed to represent the stones you're carrying, sculpture.
And they represent the idea that we need to sculpt ourselves.
But sculpt ourselves, you may say, in God's image.
We should allow God, the ultimate, the divine sculptor, to sculpt us.
So here we go.
That's Provenzan Salvani, he replied.
And he is here because he presumptuously sought to gain control of all Siena.
And so he crawls on and has crawled since he died, knowing no rest.
And then Dante turns to his story.
But his story is told in the third person.
Salvani himself does not speak.
Rather, we're hearing Salvani's story told.
And here's the story.
While at the apex of his glory, in Siena's marketplace, of his free will putting aside all shame, he took his stand and there, to ransom from his suffering a friend who was immured in Charles' jail, he brought himself to do what chilled his veins." So what's going on here?
Well, it turns out that a friend of Provenza and Silvani was seized by the emperor, this is the French emperor, and is put in prison.
And he wants to be ransomed or bailed out.
And so he comes to Provenzan Salvani.
And Provenzan Salvani doesn't have any money.
He can't bail him out. And yet this man is his friend.
And so what does he do?
This great figure recognized everywhere in Siena, the hero of the Battle of Monteperti, which Dante is talking about decades later and we talk about today, centuries later.
This man, Provenzano Savani, decides, you know what, I don't have the money, I want to help my friend.
And so he goes begging in the piazza of Siena.
He humbles himself and he asks for money, like a common beggar, to help a friend.
And what Dante is implying here is that this put him on the right road.
This was the first step, not the final step.
Because, in fact, the final steps are still being taken here in purgatory.
Provenzhan Salvani is still bent over.
He's still looking at the ground.
He's still carrying the stones.
but he is also, he was also set on the path to humility.
And this was a path that ultimately helps to explain how he was able to repent of his sin of pride.
Repent not only by the way in thought, but also in action.
He takes an important action here to show that he is willing to humble himself.
It hasn't sort of all gone to his head, or if it went to his head, it didn't stay in his head.
And this is the essence of pride.
Pride is not taking a kind of just satisfaction in a job well done.
Dante does that. Dante takes satisfaction in a great work that he produced, The Commedia.
But pride is what you see in pretty much all the sinners in hell.
They might have other sins, but they almost always have this one.
And the sin is one of human beings making more of themselves than they are.
Human beings putting themselves at the center of the universe.
Human beings treating other human beings as objects for their satisfaction.
Human beings displacing God, the creator, and making themselves, if you will, the creative center of the universe.
All of this suggests a certain inflated idea of who we are.
And it's disgusting and insulting in the sight of God for human beings to do this.
This is really why pride is so bad.
This is why Dante, who is very well aware of the temptation of pride, devotes a lot of space, a lot of time.
Here, well, he did Inferno, and here again, because for someone who is as talented as Dante is, it's important to resist this temptation.
It's important to remember that I may have the talents, but you know what?
Who gave them to me? Where did I get them from?
I don't deserve them.
They were given to me, my God, and they should be used for His glorification.
From the Terrace of Pride, Dante moves on to the Terrace of Envy.
By the way, when Dante leaves the Terrace of Pride, one of the Ps, remember there were seven Ps representing the seven deadly sins, the letter P. And this P is removed from his forehead, so he's got more terraces to go.
The next one is the Terrace of Envy.
And interestingly, the souls there, their form of punishment and purgation, Is to have their...
They're dressed in a kind of sackcloth or haircloth and their eyelids are stitched shut with iron thread.
Wow! How kind of ingenious of Dante.
Think about it. Envy is casting a kind of covetous gaze or malicious gaze towards somebody else.
And Dante's like, you know, the way you learn to get out of that...
That covetous eye needs to be kind of closed.
And so this is the punishment.
So the punishments in purgatory are not always mild.
They can be quite severe.
The reason that the people in purgatory have a different mood altogether than hell is that purgatory is transitory.
This, for all its anguish, is temporary.
You are on the road to heaven, and you know that.
Now, In the Terrace of Envy, we meet a woman named Sapia of Siena.
And she tells a very interesting story.
And that is, she says that she hated one of her relatives.
And this relative was a very important person, a kind of a great man.
And she says that, but finally, this great man was brought down on a battlefield.
He was killed.
And she goes, when he died, she rejoiced.
Let's read the passage. She goes, I always reveled in another's grief, enjoying that more than my own welfare.
So pause for a second right here because this is the nature of envy, right?
Envy isn't just...
Some people think that envy means that somebody else has more and I want it and so I'm going to be envious.
No, that's not envy.
If somebody else has more and I say to myself, well, you know, I want it, so let me go to school and study for it.
Let me work harder so I can get it.
Let me emulate this person to figure out and maybe I'll have the same success that they did.
That's not envy. Envy is, I would rather see that person pulled down than for me to come up.
Envy is the deep desire to see ill and harm come to somebody else.
Typically somebody else that is of a higher stature, but not always.
But in this case, you have this woman, Sapia, and she hates a relative of hers.
And she goes on to say, It happened that my townsman was engaged in battle.
I prayed to God for what he had willed.
Meaning God had already willed that this guy be killed in battle.
But I prayed, Oh God, yes, let's see this guy fall in battle.
And our men were scattered on the plain and forced to take the bitter course of flight.
I watched the chase seized with a surge of joy.
So fierce I raised my shameless face to God.
And cried, I have lost all fear of thee.
So here's this woman, and she is just excited and thrilled at the harm that is coming to her own relative.
Well, here's the interesting thing.
Who is that relative?
He is none other than Provenzan Salvani himself.
And so, we've met Provenzan Salvani in the Terrace of Pride.
Dante now moves on to the Terrace of Envy, and he meets, although he doesn't know this at first, a woman who was related to the same guy, related to Salvani.
So evidently, what happened to Provenzan Salvani was that he experienced the thrill of victory, Monteperati, but he was also defeated by the Florentines subsequently in a battle In a different place.
And that's the one that this woman Sapia is referring to.
So this once great man has his comeuppance, if you will, in the second battle.
In fact, that's the battle that ultimately allowed the Guelphs to come back to power in Florence.
And that's Dante's party.
But of course, then later there's a schism within the party and Dante is sent into exile.
So here we don't have Provenza and Salvani himself.
But what we have is a discussion of him.
He is, if you will, the object of this woman's envy.
And what Dante correctly discerns is that envy is very destructive because envy is a desire to do harm or to see harm come, sometimes without one's doing.
You're just watching it, but you're taking a certain kind of just sinful pleasure in it.
And so as a repentance, on the terrace of envy, the souls have their eyelids shut.
They can't cast envious glances anymore.
They've got to learn not to feel that way.
Not just to repent of having felt that way before, but not to feel that way now.
And this is part of what is going to ready them for the bliss that awaits them, for sure, in heaven.
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