What It Is
Over the gate of Hell there is an inscription in dark-colored words, speaking in the first person: through it one goes to the dolent city, to eternal pain, to the lost people. Dante reads it in Canto III of Inferno and says its meaning is hard for him. The inscription gives the cause of itself: justice moved its high maker, power, wisdom and primal love made it; it states that before it only eternal things existed, and that it itself endures eternal; and it ends by bidding all hope to be abandoned. The same logic of the gate repeats twice further on: the gate of Dis, in Canto VIII of Inferno, which more than a thousand fallen from heaven close against Virgil, and the gate opened with a wand by an envoy from on high, in Canto IX of Inferno.
Where It Appears
In Canto III of Inferno, Dante reads the inscription and Virgil answers with a gesture rather than an explanation: he takes his hand and leads him in with a cheerful face.
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore; / fecemi la divina podestate, / la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore. / Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create / se non etterne, e io etterno duro. / Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate, justice moved my high maker; the divine power made me, the supreme wisdom and the primal love. Before me no things were created except eternal ones, and I endure eternal. Abandon all hope, you who enter.
Otto Maria Carpeaux reads, in the last verse of the inscription, one of the gravest judgments ever pronounced against humanity, and he quotes it:
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi Che entrate!
In Canto VIII of Inferno, before the city of Dis, the poem denies Virgil for the first time what he asks: the guardians of the gates do not yield, and he returns with downcast eyes, saying that he will win the contest.
Li occhi a la terra e le ciglia avea rase / d’ogne baldanza, e dicea ne’ sospiri: / «Chi m’ha negate le dolenti case!». / E a me disse: «Tu, perch’ io m’adiri, / non sbigottir, ch’io vincerò la prova, / qual ch’a la difension dentro s’aggiri, he had his eyes on the ground and his brows stripped of all boldness, and he said in his sighs: who has denied me the dolent houses! And to me he said: you, because I am angered, do not be dismayed, for I shall win the contest, whatever may stir within to defend it.
Virgil himself reminds Dante, in that scene, that this insolence is not new, because it was already used at a less secret gate, the one still without a bolt, over which Dante saw the dead inscription. In Canto IX of Inferno, the angel who crosses the Styx opens the gate of Dis with a wand and speaks to the demons from the top of the threshold.
Che giova ne le fata dar di cozzo? / Cerbero vostro, se ben vi ricorda, / ne porta ancor pelato il mento e ’l gozzo, what good is it to butt against the fates? Your Cerberus, if you remember well, still bears the chin and the throat stripped bare for it.
What It Means
The gate of Canto III of Inferno is the only one in the poem that speaks, and it speaks the way Hell sees itself: as the work of justice, power, wisdom and primal love, which the common reading associates with the Trinity. The inscription does not threaten, it declares, and the final verse is addressed to whoever enters. The gate of Dis does the same thing in reverse: Virgil, who crossed the first without help, does not cross the second without someone from above.
The two gates measure Virgil's authority. At the first he answers an inscription with a gesture and that is enough; at the second he is held back, and what makes him pass is no longer his own argument but an envoy who opens without resistance. The dead inscription of which he speaks in Canto VIII of Inferno is the proof that, at both, what sustains the entrance is the will that the poem calls high.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Justice and law, Sin.
- Themes of the work: Justice and law, Sin.
- Characters: Dante, Virgil.
- Neighboring symbols: Medusa, which comes right after the opening of the gate of Dis.