In Canto IX Dante and Virgil gain entrance to the "City of Dis", a community built on sin. Perhaps it is not unlike some of our North American gated communities. But we will leave that thought alone for the time being. At first they are denied entrance, and have to await a "heavenly messenger" who will gain access to the city for them.
Now why would the City of Dis deny entrance to them? What has gone so wrong with the idea of a city, a community, that Dante and Virgil cannot enter? On the one hand one might say that to travel safely through this place they need such heavenly aid (as Sayers and others point out). That would be true enough. But from the point of view of the inhabitants of the city, why not let them in, with the hope of ensnaring them? Well, it may well be that such a disordered community, based on sin, has no place for reason (the figure of Virgil) or for real life (the living Dante, who is not a 'ghost' or 'shade'). A community based on sin cannot abide these two - it drives them out or seeks to prevent them from entering.
The first folk they meet in the City of Dis are the heretics. They are encased in tombs made of iron (representing a set, obstinate and determined will) but with fire on the inside. Charles Williams notes:
It is necessary to remember what Dante meant by heresy. He meant an obduracy of the mind; a spiritual stae which defied, consciously, 'apower to which trust and obedience are due'; an intellectual obstinacy. A heretic, strictly, was a man who knew what he was doing; he accepted the Church, but at the same time he preferred his own judgment to that of the Church. This would seem impossible, except that it is apt to happen in all of us after our manner."
The Figure of Beatrice, 125
The sense here is the choice between what one believes privately or locally, and the sense that the Church is truly catholic. On another level, it is by heresy that one enters the lower circles...
As they progress toward the seventh circle, Virgil gives Dante a brief overview of how Hell is arranged.
Dost thou not mind the doctrine of thy school -
Those pages where the Ethics tells of three
Conditions contrary to Heaven's will and rule,Incontinence, vice, and brute bestiality?
And how incontinence offends God less
Than the other two, and is less blameworthy?Canto XI; 79-84
Here we have the three great divisions of the geography of Hell. Remember the three beasts which Dante encountered at the very beginning of the Inferno? There are, in this view, three basic types or kinds of sins, and all sins are varieties or expressions of these three types.
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