The Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University cordially invites you to attend lecture series by Prof. Denys Turner, hosted by the IRCI’s Religion & Theology program.

“Dante, Theologian of the End of Time” will include three separate lectures:

Wednesday 24 June, 8am AEST
Dante, Theologian-Poet
It doesn’t make a lot of difference to Dante if one calls him a medieval theologian, but it does make a great deal of difference to how one thinks of theology in the Middle Ages. This lecture explores the difference it makes for how we think about medieval theology to take the Comedy as a paradigm for theological work. One consequence is that letting Dante into the club relativises the theology of the university men by making their approach but one way of doing theology rather than definitive, which, by the same token, lets in a lot of women too.

Thursday 25 June 8am AEST
Dante, Augustine, and Confession
Curiously, Augustine does not appear by name in Dante’s Comedy. This lecture explores the possibility that this is because his influence on the theology of the poem is pervasive throughout its whole trajectory. It contributes something of significance to both theologies to compare the “confessing” strategies of them both.

Friday 26 June 8am AEST
Dante, Aquinas, and Hell
Recent critiques of “infernalist” theologies, in particular of Aquinas’s, raise the question of how far Dante’s Inferno entails a commitment to a doctrine of eternal punishment in hell for unrepentant sinners in the way in which Aquinas’ teachings on hell seem unmistakably to do. Do we have to read Inferno as descriptive, howsoever imaginatively, of a real condition of eternal punishment of unrepentant sinners? And if not, how may one legitimately read it as allegory?

Please send your RSPV to rachel.davies@acu.edu.au to receive a Zoom event link and instructions for joining. In order to ensure safety and security for our participants, you will not be able to join the lectures if you haven’t registered by email. However it isn’t necessary to confirm which of the three lectures you’d like to attend, as one RSVP will get you links for all three events.