Was Virgil Divinely Inspired? | Episode XXXIII

The late antique and medieval Church saw Virgil as a pagan herald of Christ, due to the seemign messianic prophecies in Eclogue IV. In a 1953 essay titled "Vergil and the Christian World," T.S. Eliot argues that the Christian sympathies in Virgil's poetry go even deeper than that single poem, and in fact suffuse the entire Virgilian corpus.

T.S. Eliot's Vergil and the Christian World: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27538181

Vergil's Eclogue 4 (Latin): https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/vergil/ec4.shtml

Vergil's Eclogue 4 (English): http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/eclogue.4.iv.html

Virgil's Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (Latin-English): https://amzn.to/3VlnUqr

Fustel de Coulanges's La Cité Antique (French): https://amzn.to/3yzATuZ

Fustel de Coulanges's The Ancient City (English): https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780648690542

Alan Jacobs's The Year of Our Lord 1943: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780190864651

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: https://poets.org/poem/waste-land

Plutarch's On the Obsolescence of Oracles: https://amzn.to/3RVk4kW

New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com