Contradiction

His evidence for this is literary realism: the Virgil in the Divine Comedy exhibits contradictions, nuance, subtlety, quirks, and stable psychology that exceed extrapolation from the Aeneid alone.

Jiang treats Virgil's response as pedagogically suspicious because a teacher who says both 'the world is different now' and 'ask someone else' has not actually faced the contradiction being raised.

Jiang endorses the student's diagnosis that Virgil is coping and dodging the contradiction rather than genuinely resolving it.

Jiang introduces a rule of hell for this discussion: when damned souls address Dante and Virgil directly, their words are supposed to be true, which creates a contradiction when this sinner appears to lie.

The black cherub's logic is that absolution cannot cancel a sin a person is still in the act of willing, because repentance and intention to keep sinning contradict each other.

A student hypothesis is that the contradiction turns on the nature of repentance itself: some deeper law prevents Saint Francis's apparent agreement from overriding the sinner's unresolved will.

Jiang tentatively allows that Lucifer may have been a head servant with enough free will to screw up, but the class immediately objects that this would contradict the premise that angels lack free will and even consciousness.

Students keep the contradiction alive by insisting that if Lucifer could decide to betray, then some kind of decision-making capacity must have existed despite the no-free-will premise.