Horrible Minos grunts there [in Hell] like a bull,
weighs all the sins and sends the wicked down
according to how far he winds his tail.
I meant that when one born in evil hour
appears before him, he confesses all,
and then judge Minos, the sin-connoisseur,
Discerns what place in Hell is fit for him.
What struck me about this passage was that Minos is described as a connoisseur of sin. The temptation is to read this simply as a fancy way of saying that Minos knows about sin.
But the reality is more complicated. When I think of a connoisseur, I think of someone who really knows their wines, someone who appreciates tiny details, who makes a careful study of the subject, who appreciates it deeply. This is Minos with sin: Dante is not saying that Minos knows about sin; he's saying that Minos gets it. Minos knows sin inside and out; he pays attention to the little details which make one evil different from another; he loves evil.
When humankind fell in the Garden of Eden, we fell (at least in part) for the sake of the Knowledge of Evil. Surely we already knew Goodness, at least a little. After all, Adam and Eve lived in the Garden and were visited regularly by God; it was because the tree was promised to bestow knowledge of good and evil together that we ate its fruit.
Some people, me included, have a hard time seeing how this was such a bad decision. Don't get me wrong: That our first parents disobeyed God and destroyed the whole human race was obviously not good at all. But still, imagining the human race stuck in a naive, childlike innocence in the Garden of Eden, in perpetuity, is hardly an inspiring vision. In general we consider that knowledge, any knowledge, is better than blind ignorance.
And yet Minos is in Hell. All his knowledge of evil gives him nothing good; in fact, given that Minos's whole purpose in Hell is to judge sinners' misdeeds, his knowledge of evil is a punishment itself.
Perhaps this is why our Father, through Paul, urges us to focus on that which is good, and true, and holy. Whenever we turn back to contemplate the intricacies of sin, we are turning back into Hell. But when we think about that which is Good, we turn towards Heaven. For what it's worth, I rather doubt that the Knowledge of Good will be as dull and uninspiring as we imagine, when we imagine Adam sinless in the Garden. I've been reading The Great Divorce with my Literature class right now, and again and again we come back to the idea that evil is but a twisted form of good; that which is good is the real thing, bigger and stronger. When we contemplate goodness, then, we are thinking about something that is worth thinking about, that can stand up to deep thoughts and hard questions.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that we should never think about evil, or about sad things. When Dante meets Minos, he has another twenty-eight cantos of Hell to travel through. And Purgatory, after that, is no picnic. But his progress through Hell brings him into heaven, which suggests that when we think about evil things, those thoughts should be redemptive. Minos is a connoisseur of sin; sin is where his thoughts start and end. Our thoughts may start with evil, yes, but they should not end there. They should end with goodness.
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