heresy

Used here for Adam's challenge to the idea of an eternally fixed Christian language and unchanged divine naming.

The charge that, in Jiang's account, could get a medieval writer killed, forcing Dante's theological disagreement into subtle and indirect form.

In Jiang's explanation, not mere disagreement with the Church but refusal to accept Church authority and claiming superior scriptural interpretation.

Epicureanism is treated here as the belief that there is no soul, heaven, or hell, so one should simply maximize pleasure while alive.

Jiang says lust, wrath, greed, and gluttony are outside the capital city because they primarily harm the self, whereas heresy and fraud are punished more severely because they express malice toward others.

Jiang frames the last cantos as being written when Dante is near death, exiled from Florence, stripped of property, and uncertain whether posterity will honor the Divine Comedy or condemn it as heresy.

Jiang says the next two cantos, and effectively the Divine Comedy at this point, are pure heresy from the standpoint of a Catholic priest reading them in 1321.

Jiang uses cognitive dissonance to explain how Church readers could treat Dante as pious on the surface while missing or tolerating his deeper anti-Church implications.

Jiang presents Dante's procedure as revolutionary because it invites logical and imaginative questioning about faith rather than treating questioning itself as Satanic.

Jiang argues that what makes Dante revolutionary is that he refuses the priestly reflex of treating theological questions as satanic and instead insists on using logic and imagination to work through them.

He argues that for the Catholic Church the problem is not the phrase 'one God' but the fact that Dante does not simply recite the required doctrinal formula and instead says 'God is love.'