Dante in the Knowledge Society

“Maestro mio, il senso l’or m’è duro.”

In Canto 3 of the Inferno, the introduction to the first book of Dante’s Commedia, the pilgrim Dante stops with his guide Virgil at the Gates of Hell. “Abandon every hope, you who enter,” ("Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’intrate" (III 9)), reads the inscription on the stone. And Dante shrinks back, saying, “Maestro, il senso lor m’è duro”, or “Master, its meaning is hard.”

This is a doubling of meaning, a play on words, as the stone rhymes are taken to be both a literally hard (as in stone) representation, and a metaphorically hard (as in difficult) one. Dante’s journey from the outset thus challenges him to distinguish mere seeing from vision, or reading from interpretation. And as the pilgrim Dante turns his sights of sinners, politicians and poets into visions of justice, government and divine love, so our own reading of his poem becomes a critical interpretation.

For as Dante stands ambivalently at the gates of Hell, so he also is positioning the medieval reader to enter his poem with care. A medieval manuscript, as the literary critic John Freccero points out in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, would not have had the gate text set off from the poem as a modern book would (through quotation marks, block letters or italics). Medieval readers would have had to wait until the 4th tercet until they would realize that the pilgrim has seen the gates that they have read. Illustrations of this section in the Commedia have depicted the words as icons, or the gates and the words as the same things, “as if God has written in hendecasyllables” (Freccero 99). This short-circuiting of reading and seeing points up Dante’s greater motive in the poem: to challenge mere vision, to suggest the moral weight of the act of seeing, to bond seeing with interpretation.

The irony of melding the pilgrim’s seeing with the reader’s reading, that is, turns upon the issue that Dante sets forth in his poem as a whole: notably, that the act of reading (as well as writing) entails a critical and an ethical engagement. In this window (here) you will see two ways in which visual artists have revised this moment at the gates of Hell for their own purposes.

But for the moment let us consider some immediate – although perhaps unacknowledged -- issues of moral ambiguity that emerge by our use of new technology to shape our understanding of older texts. What, after all, could we find to be the difficulty with the computer? On the surface, as we are told, the new technology is a medium which opens us up to vast horizons of interpretation in its “flexible,” “rapid,” “immediate,” “expedient,” “expansive,” and “democratic” qualities.

Can you think of ways that make crossing these horizons a moral issue? That is, what are the “hard,” as in difficult, parts of so much knowledge and freedom? Is there a limit on the new technology's good? Click here to respond or Click here to view all responses