Over a century ago, an Italian critic leveled a charge at people like me—and maybe you, too. People like us, he claimed, have killed Dante’s COMEDY with an overabundance of footnotes.

Since Virgil has stopped our pilgrim on the descent and offered a map of the road ahead, I thought it was important for us to stop and look at the road behind us—to answer this critic’s charge and to see this magnificent poem, not a series of interpretive knots, but as (already at this point) an achievement without parallel.

Sure, there’s lots ahead. I’m still going to paper the thing with footnotes. But join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we take a pause and reflect on the sheer artistry of what we’ve already seen, not in the specifics, but in its grand arc, like a firmament above us.

There is no passage from COMEDY for this episode.