Purgatory: Canto XVIII -- The Slothful, The Whip and Rein

In entering the fourth cornice, on which race those who were slothful in their purpose of God's good, the poet's continue their discussion about the nature of love begun in the medial cantos on love (the discussion serving as a foil to the nature of the third cornice on wrath and anger -- what in hell, we'd have called hate, which is the name of the River Styx). Virgil explains love as a movement towards that which pleases the soul, and he does this on the ledge of sloth for a very specific reason -- sloth is the spinner, the division between the cornices below on which was purged a deficit in love and the cornices above on which will be purged an excess of misdirected love. The question, though, is fairly simple -- what's the relationship between love and free will? The answer, as far as human reason can tell, is equally as simple, "All love . . . / that burns in [us], springs from necessity;/ but [we] still have the power to check its sway" (70-2). We can't not love because it's in our nature to "move toward" that which pleases us, but we can regulate through our reason how we deal with the passions toward which we move. Ultimately, that which should please us most and toward which we should appropriately turn is God's love both reflected and shining in each one of us so that when we look upon community, we look upon the face of God.



That we're all indelibly tied -- not just humanity with humanity, but also all of creation with all of creation -- is very important to our understanding that man has a specific role and a purpose within the cosmos, within the great chain of being. As Pope writes in his third epistle, "All served, all serving: nothing stands alone;/ The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown." That man's purpose is to be a conduit of love for creation as it relates to the creator is manifest in our having been given both free will and love prior to our having been told to subdue the earth in God's name.

No sooner does Dante resign himself to sleep than does the train of the slothful come rushing by, moving so fast in their new-found zeal that they hardly have the time to address Virgil's question about where the next stairway might be. They move at a pace that makes them seem to cry "Leave grief to us; the path of tears is ours" (La Vita Nuova, XXII, 15), so quickly that in the same canto we see both the whip and rein pass by. Like Sylvester of Assisi who developed his zeal for God's work only after he felt guilt at demanding more money for the stones he sold to St. Francis and then spent the rest of his life as a member of St. Francis's order, these penitent atone for their neglect by racing as fast as they might around the ledge.

There are two things to notice, by the way, about this canto. First, that in the past cornices, the whip and the rein were outside of the penitent, either on movie screens or radio broadcasts or holographic apparitions. Here, the whip and the rein are the penitent themselves -- they prod themselves on to perfection because such is necessary for their own salvation. Second, that Dante discovered dream psychoanalysis six hundred years before Freud -- Freud's main idea was that the dreams we have are made up of non-contiguous events in our own lives that are trying to work themselves out so that our dreamscape is really a tapestry of our concerns and experiences. Dante's last lines -- "I closed my eyes and all that tangled theme/ was instantly transformed into a dream" (145-6) -- are another instance of Dante's prescience when it comes to the nature of our minds.

S.