Inferno: Canto 9 -- Circle 6

2004-09-24T21:46:00.000-07:00

"We built this city, we built this city on rock an' roll
Built this city, we built this city on rock an' roll
Say you don't know me, or recognize my face
Say you don't care who goes to that kind of place
Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight
Too many runaways eating up the night" -- Starship

And here we see human reason, faced with a perversion of its light, falter. Alexander Pope wrote in his "Epistle to a Lady" (1735) -- "Woman and Fool are two hard things to hit; For true No-meaning puzzles more than Wit." If we exclude the seeming misogyny from that line, we're left with the idea that when something doesn't mesh with the righteousness of G-d's truth, the falsehood or wordplay or obstinence of the fact causes problems for us if we do not have the tools at hand to deal with it. Fortunately, Virgil has a powerful tool, something no one else in hell has -- he has the power of prayer likely bestowed upon him by Beatrice when she gave him his mission to save Dante from the Dark Wood. (This will cause a theological problem for us later on, for when has G-d redeemed us with the grace sufficient to pray and taken it away from us once we've grown used to its power?) Virgil sends up a prayer, and it is answered in this canto as an angel scatters the sinners and throws open the gate.

Before that happens, though, we see Dante for the first time in mortal danger as Medusa, who can turn him to stone with a look (metaphorically erase everything he is and was--can you imagine what that would be like?), is called by the Infernal Furies to do that very thing. Virgil warns Dante to turn away and, to make doubly sure, covers Dante's eyes with his own hands. Dante the poet then exhorts "men of sound intellect and probity,/ weigh with good understanding what lies hidden/ behind the veil of my strange allegory!" -- in effect, what Ciardi describes, that there is an evil upon which man cannot look if he is to survive.

Once inside, we find an interesting parallel to the virtuous pagans -- this circle within the walled city is filled with heretics -- those who denied the immortality of the soul. They are here because they had the choice and chose wrongly, which is different from the virtuous pagans who didn't have the choice at all, and different still from the opportunists in the vestibule who had the choice and did not choose. They used their reason, then, inappropriately in coming to a decision about their relationship with G-d, which is why they're inside the walled city. They're a buffer, though, between the sins of upper hell (of bestial incontinence) and lower hell (of violence and fraud), for it is in denying G-d that we commit the first violence against all creation.

S.