Dante explicitly associates himself with the sin of pride (Purg. xiii, 133–38), and scholars have emphasised, in particular, the temptation to pride in the composition of the Commedia itself.Footnote ¹ By contrast, Dante makes no such explicit association between himself and the sin of sloth. Sloth might seem a strange sin to ascribe to the poet whose magnum opus, he informs us, had made him for many years lean (Par. xxv, 3).The terrace of sloth, nonetheless, is privileged by Dante: structurally, it is at the literal centre of Purgatorio and thus of the poem as a whole; narratively, it is midway (nel mezzo del cammin) both through Purgatory (the fourth of seven terraces) and through the afterlife (the fourth day on the pilgrim’s seven-day journey); thematically, it includes the discourses on ordered and disordered love as the Christian principles of moral good and evil respectively. Moreover, the very first group of souls whom Dante encounters on his journey through Hell (the ‘wretched souls’ of Inferno iii, 35) are partly characterised by sloth, as are the ‘sad souls’ (tristi) who emit the ‘accidioso fumo’ of Inferno viii.Footnote ² Sloth dominates the moral colour of Ante-Purgatory (Purgatorio i–viii), a region invented by Dante and occupied specifically by those who delayed, albeit in different ways, their conversions to the path of Christian holiness and penitence.Footnote ³ Likewise, sloth is associated with the very first group of blessed souls whom Dante-character encounters in Paradise, the ‘slowest sphere’ of the Moon (Par. iii, 30). In each of the three canticles, therefore, the first group of souls is characterised – at least in part – by the vice of sloth. Moreover, after his Christian conversion, sloth was the dominant sin – we learn in Purgatory – of the poet Statius, one of the important autobiographical ‘cyphers’ for Dante in the Commedia. Most significantly, there is good reason to believe, as I shall argue, that sloth is Dante-character’s first sin in the dark wood of Inferno i, and a key to his dramatic confession to Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise.

Critics have nonetheless paid very little attention to sloth in Dante’s moral vision and, with few exceptions, have ruled out the possibility that Dante might have considered himself as guilty of this sin.Footnote ⁴ Why this comparative lack of critical attention? A first reason is that Dante’s terrace of sloth (Purg. xvii, 79–139 – xix, 1–69) has rarely been considered as a narrative unit. This is, in part, a familiar consequence of the ‘lectura Dantis’ canto-by-canto interpretative tradition (the terrace spans three cantos).Footnote ⁵ But, it is also because this central section of Dante’s poem is typically read in terms of the ‘four doctrinal cantos’ (Purgatorio xv, xvi, xvii, and xviii) – a grouping that detaches the ‘doctrine’ from the ‘narrative’ of the terrace of sloth, and reinforces a prevalent interpretation of its final section, the dream of the Siren (Purgatorio xix, 1–69), as an afterthought or a mere transition episode.Footnote ⁶ This perspective is especially problematic because, of the seven terraces of Purgatory, Dante devotes the least number of lines (278) to the terrace of sloth, with less than a quarter of these (68) being devoted to the encounter with the slothful souls who rush past in a flash (Purg. xviii, 76–139).Footnote ⁷ Only one slothful soul, the Abbot of San Zeno, is identified, and his speech lasts just fourteen lines (Purg. xviii, 112–26). Detach the ‘doctrinal passages’ and the dream of the Siren from the terrace of sloth, and very little is left. A second reason for the lack of scholarly discussion of sloth, then, is that critics summarily pass over Dante’s extremely terse description of the slothful souls precisely due to its brevity.

This chapter is, therefore, a reappraisal of Dante’s treatment of sloth. I start by demonstrating how Dante’s poetic representation of sloth is profoundly influenced by Peraldus’s treatise ‘De acedia’.Footnote ⁸ Using Peraldus as a gloss, I first reinterpret the encounter with the slothful souls (xviii, 88–138), whose ‘acute fervour’ for God impels them to run swiftly around the terrace and past Dante-character and Virgil. Second, I show that the slothful souls’ physical movement and liturgical cries (xviii, 88–138) interrupt the other (but typically overlooked) narrative drama of the terrace: namely, Dante-character’s intellectual movement from ignorance to knowledge, a quest for wisdom in tension with his severe physical and mental exhaustion (xvii, 73–xviii, 87; and xviii, 139–xix, 69).Footnote ⁹ Third, I argue that the dream of the Siren (xviii, 139–xix, 69) represents symbolically and poetically the doctrinal content of Virgil’s three lectures in the first part of the terrace (xvii, 73–xviii, 87). Finally, I consider the recurring presence of sloth in Dante’s moral vision as a whole, in particular with regard to Dante-character’s first sin and the alleged sloth of the ‘Christian’ Statius.

Reading Peraldus on Sloth

In addressing Dante’s reliance on Peraldus, Wenzel points out ‘that Dante’s son Pietro, in commenting upon Purgatorio xvii, quoted Peraldus’s rationale, though without acknowledging the author’.Footnote ¹⁰ Wenzel proceeds to present the apposite passages from Peraldus’s treatise and Pietro’s commentary side-by-side, adequately substantiating his claim that ‘the verbal similarities between the two texts are so great as to cancel any doubt that Pietro’s was derived from Peraldus’.Footnote ¹¹ Somewhat surprisingly, in turning to Dante’s poetic depiction of sloth in his magisterial study The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature, Wenzel does not explore further correlations with Peraldus in any detail.Footnote ¹² Moreover, Wenzel does not make the connection between Dante’s rationale occurring in the terrace of sloth and Peraldus’s rationale occurring in a passage immediately following on from his own treatment of sloth.Footnote ¹³ Most significantly, Wenzel relies exclusively on the first of three versions of Pietro d’Aligheri’s commentary for his influential account.Footnote ¹⁴

The first version (dated to 1340–42) and the second version (dated to 1344–55) of Pietro’s commentary are almost identical in their treatment of sloth.Footnote ¹⁵ But Pietro’s third version (dated to 1359–64) is much longer than the previous two in general and strikingly different in its treatment of sloth.Footnote ¹⁶ In the first two versions, Pietro provides an extremely brief introduction to the terrace of sloth.Footnote ¹⁷ In versions 1 and 2, he then proceeds to explicate Virgil’s doctrinal lecture through Peraldus’s rationale – albeit, in Wenzel’s words, reducing ‘the redundant and clumsy phrasing of Peraldus’s scholastic Latin to a more classical elegance’.Footnote ¹⁸ By contrast, in his third version, Pietro opens his commentary on the terrace of sloth by directly quoting a series of passages from Peraldus’s treatise on the vice.Footnote ¹⁹ Notably, Pietro [3] names ten of the seventeen vices of sloth in exactly the same order as Peraldus: ‘tepiditas, mollities, somnolentia, otiositas, dilatio, tarditas, negligentia, [imperfectio sive imperseverantia, remissio, dissolutio, incuria], ignavia, [indevotio], tristitia, taedium vitae, [desperatio]’.Footnote ²⁰ Like Peraldus, Pietro [3] also highlights that the first species of sloth is ‘tepidity’, noting that all the other vices of sloth flow from tepidity, as from a root, (‘tepiditas prima species radix dicitur accidiae, et ex ea nascuntur omnia praemissa vitia’).Footnote ²¹

Even stronger proof that Pietro [3] is following Peraldus more closely, however, appears in the next part of his commentary. Having defined tepidity as insufficient love of the good (‘tepiditas est parvus amor boni’), Peraldus emphasises that tepidity provokes the ‘vomit’ of God, as he has already demonstrated (‘primo Deo vomitum provocat, ut prius ostensum est’).Footnote ²² In his commentary, Pietro [3] defines tepidity as ‘amor parvus boni magni’ and then supplies, with only very slight changes, the earlier section of Peraldus’s treatise referred to (the beginning of part II, chapter 3):

These ‘verbal similarities’ between Peraldus and Pietro [3] with regard to sloth, like those identified by Wenzel between Peraldus and Pietro [1] with regard to the rationale, are ‘so great as to cancel any doubt that Pietro’s was derived from Peraldus’.Footnote ²⁵

If this suggests that Dante himself was following Peraldus’s text closely, his own poetic treatment – as we shall see – would seem to confirm it. Remarkably, thirteen of the seventeen vices of sloth delineated by Peraldus may be identified – whether as directly named, substantial allusions or verbal echoes – in Dante’s terrace of sloth, alongside the opposing vice of indiscreet fervour: tepiditas (Purg. xviii, 108); mollities (xviii, 136–37); somnolentia (xvii, 87–88); otiositas (xviii, 101–2); dilatio (xvii, 90); tarditas (xvii, 87); negligentia (xviii, 107); imperfectio sive imperseverantia (xviii,137); remissio, dissolutio (xvi, 73 and xviii, 124–25); incuria (xviii, 85–86); ignavia, indevotio, tristitia (xviii, 123); taedium vitae (xviii, 121); and desperatio (xviii, 120).Footnote ²⁶ The cumulative impression is that Peraldus’s preaching material provides the key resource for Dante’s poetic treatment. A comparative examination of Peraldus’s treatise and Dante’s terrace of sloth suggests, then, possible interpretative solutions to passages, lines, and individual words in these cantos which have puzzled scholars in the critical tradition. Just as significantly, it opens up the depth and breadth of the contemporary understandings of acedia that informed Dante’s thinking, enabling us to understand sloth as a scholar’s and a poet’s sin.

Purging Sloth

Arriving at the terrace of sloth as night falls, Virgil informs Dante-character that here the souls, in penance, make up for lost time, plying and plying again the badly slowed oar (‘il mal tardato remo’; xvii, 87). Slothful in life, the souls had been like oarsmen who had known where they were heading (their goal) but had lacked due energy and care. More technically, Virgil defines the quiddity of sloth as ‘l’amor del bene, scemo / del suo dover’ [the love of the good falling short of its proper duty] (85–86). In a second definition, he makes more explicit that this good is God, while emphasising again the metaphor of speed – their love, in being deficient, is slow: ‘lento amore a lui veder vi tira / o a lui acquistar’ [slow love draws you to see him [God] or to acquire him] (130–31). Sometime later, when the group of penitent souls rush past Virgil and Dante-character, it comes as no surprise, then, that they cry out:

Thus, like Peraldus, Dante describes and defines the genus acedia by its primary species – namely, tepidity or lukewarmedness, the insufficient love of a great good (amor parvus boni magni).Footnote ²⁷ Following Peraldus, Dante also treats tepidity as the root of the other vices of sloth, as is evident from Virgil’s address to the penitent slothful:

Virgil understands the slothful souls’ negligence (‘negligenza’; 107) and delay (‘indugio’; 107) to have arisen from their tepidity (‘tepidezza’; 108), while the souls themselves acknowledge that their previous time-wasting (‘il tempo non si perda’; 103) occurred because of a lack of love (‘per poco amor’; 104).

The souls expiate their sloth by first urging each other to value and conserve time (103). From a Christian perspective, as Peraldus emphasises, time is a precious gift from God that must be used well to provide for the eternal life that awaits: a person ‘sows eternity from time, that it may be harvested in the future’.Footnote ²⁸ Christians, then, are debtors to God for their time on Earth and will be called to account for how they have used it.Footnote ²⁹ Dante’s visualised eschatology itself preaches two of Peraldus’s reasons for conserving time: that there is a place (Hell) in which one hour for doing penitence would be loved more than all the world’s gold, and that in just one hour (on Earth) a man may merit the remission of his eternal punishment, of all his sins, and – with God’s grace – eternal glory.Footnote ³⁰ Dante’s parallel representation of Guido and Buonconte da Montefeltro (Inferno xxvii and Purgatorio v) is, of course, just the most obvious instance of him driving this message home.

As the souls purging sloth make clear, their ‘conservation of time’ (103) has a purpose: they are eager to do well (‘studio di ben far’; 105), so as to make up for their previous ‘indugio’ [delay] (106). This highlights the importance of the offshoot vice of ‘negligence’ (107): its opposing virtue is not ‘activity’ per se, but rather diligence or ‘doing well’. As Peraldus notes, the negligent man does not care how well his work is done (whether good or bad), but just wants to get it out of the way.Footnote ³¹ The diligent person, by contrast, strives for excellence in the work that he has begun.Footnote ³² Thus, the slothful souls’ ‘studio di ben far’ (105; 108) translates Peraldus’s definition of ‘diligence’ (‘studeat ut opus inchoatum bene fiat’) and corrects, as Virgil rightly notes, their previous negligence (‘negligenza’; 107).Footnote ³³

Where diligence is the corresponding virtue to the subordinate slothful vice of negligence, the corresponding virtue to tepidity is zeal. At the vanguard of the crowd of penitent slothful, two ‘weeping’ souls cry out two examples of zeal:

Notably, in his treatment of zeal, Peraldus gives examples both of those saintly men and women who loved God, and of those noble pagans who loved the world.Footnote ³⁴ In the first category, we find Dante’s Biblical example: Mary’s haste in going to visit her cousin Elizabeth.Footnote ³⁵ Dante’s second example, Julius Caesar, corresponds to Peraldus’s second category: the extraordinary accomplishments of pagans out of love for the world (qui amant mundum) serve to upbraid Christians who, in their sloth, accomplish so little through their love of God despite the promise of eternal bliss.Footnote ³⁶ Glossing Matthew 11:12, Peraldus comments that whereas the Christian martyrs assault the kingdom of Heaven with their virtue, the same cannot be said of the lazy and slothful (‘acediosi et pigri’); moreover, he warns the Christian that if he is slothful in this life, he will lose a place in heaven.Footnote ³⁷ Dante will turn to precisely this passage in the heaven of Justice (‘Regnum celorum vïolenza pate’ [The kingdom of Heaven suffers violence]; Par. xx, 94) to warn that many Christians who will cry ‘Christ, Christ’ at the final judgement will be less close to Him than a man who does not know Christ at all; in this way, the Ethiopian (pagan) will damn the Christian (Par. xix, 106–11).Footnote ³⁸ The driving force of this encounter in the terrace of sloth, therefore, is the souls’ ‘fervore’ [fervour] (106) – their unrelenting speed to make up for lost time, as reflected in the temporal adverbs ‘subitamente’ [suddenly] (89), ‘tosto’ [at once] (97), and ‘ratto, ratto’ [quickly, quickly] (103), and the triple repetition of the verb ‘to run’ (‘correndo … corse … corse’; 97, 100, 102).

In the context of Peraldus’s treatise, Virgil’s qualifying reference to the souls’ ‘fervore’ [fervour] as ‘aguto’ [ardent or acute] (106) is, however, significant. For Peraldus, the two capital vices of avarice and sloth have opposing vices of excess: prodigality is a reckless giving away of goods, whereas indiscreet fervour is an exaggerated zeal.Footnote ³⁹ Dante’s equine metaphor – ‘falca […] cui buon volere e giusto amor cavalca’ [gallop those whose good will and righteous love ride them] (94–96) ? is used by Peraldus to describe ‘indiscreet fervour’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Highlighting the danger of this indiscreet haste (‘ista [indiscreta] festinatio’), especially in novices (‘in novitiis’), Peraldus notes that he who vexes his horse too much in the morning does not make a good diet in the day: the soul must have a bridle as well as a spur, and the body is not to be broken but rather to be ruled (‘corpus non frangendum sed regendum est’).Footnote ⁴¹ It is then doubly significant, as with the qualifier ‘aguto’ [ardent] in ‘fervore aguto’ [ardent fervour], that Dante employs the adjectives ‘buon’ [good] and ‘giusto’ [just] to qualify the ‘volere’ [will] and ‘amor’ [love] that ride the penitent soul (96). Similarly, Mary runs (‘corse’) with haste (‘con fretta’, translating the Latin vulgate ‘festinatio’), but not – it should be underlined – with indiscreet haste (‘festinatio indiscreta’).Footnote ⁴²

Peraldus’s chapter on indiscreet fervour may even underly a further, peculiar description of the penitent souls’ movement:

Citing the interlinear gloss on Ecclesiastes, ‘Noli esse iustus multum’ [Be not just to excess], Peraldus notes that there are some ‘who do not in any way want to condescend to the demands of the flesh’, of whom ‘justice is a great injustice’ (‘iustitia magna iniustitia est’).Footnote ⁴³ The Abbot of San Zeno is similarly concerned lest the souls’ justice (‘nostra giustizia’; 117) will seem villainous to Dante and Virgil, because they do not pause in their journey.

The first part of the encounter concerns the whole group of slothful souls (xviii, 88–117), spans ten terzine, and includes the two exempla of virtue (97–105). The second part concerns just three penitents: the Abbot of San Zeno and two other souls ‘behind all the others’ (‘di retro a tutti’; 133); it spans seven terzine, and includes the two exempla of vice (130–38). Whereas the first part concerns the vice of sloth in general, the second part’s theme is arguably more specific: the way in which sloth particularly afflicts contemplatives. This narrative structure may itself have been suggested by the order of Peraldus’s treatise, in which the chapter on conserving time is immediately followed by a section on how sloth corrupts the most beautiful part of the church (‘ipsa inquinat pulchriorem partem Ecclesiae’), which is the contemplatives (‘scilicet viros contemplativos’).Footnote ⁴⁴ Moreover, having treated the seventeen species of sloth in seventeen chapters, Peraldus inserts an extra chapter specifically on the sloth of the cloistered religious (‘de acedia claustralium’).Footnote ⁴⁵

Scholars have puzzled about the actual identity of the Abbot of San Zeno, and questioned why Dante did not choose a more infamous cleric to counter-balance Hugh Capet (the founder of the Capetian dynasty) in the terrace of avarice.Footnote ⁴⁶ Dante appears to present the Abbot of San Zeno (Purg. xviii, 118) as the only interlocutor to emphasise just how many religious leaders succumb to the vice of acedia, as pars pro toto.Footnote ⁴⁷ This is certainly the interpretation of Dante’s son, Pietro [3], whose discussion of sloth in contemplatives is taken verbatim from Peraldus.Footnote ⁴⁸ Peraldus has scathing words for religious men and women who day and night consume the king’s food (the word of God) but are unrestored by it, and who converse with God but do not open their hearts’ eyes to see with whom they are speaking.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is a marvel (‘est mirum quod’) that those – the contemplatives – are the most slothful who least ought to be so (‘illi sunt magis acediosi qui minus esse debuerunt’).Footnote ⁵⁰

Peraldus highlights an even stranger feature (‘satis admirandum est’) of the contemplatives: when they should be most fervent (‘quod ferventiores esse deberent’) and full of zeal – that is, when closest to death, judgement, and eternal damnation or salvation – they become colder (‘frigidiores’) and more slothful.Footnote ⁵¹ In illustrating this puzzling back-sliding of religious (Peraldus is speaking only of ‘the religious’ in the sense of those in a religious order; i.e., as opposed to the laity) even when near to reaching their goal, Peraldus uses the example of the Israelites (‘sicut accidit filiis Israel’) who erred for thirty-eight years in the desert and, when they believed themselves closest to the promised land, moved farther from it.Footnote ⁵² This is precisely Dante’s Biblical example of sloth, cried aloud by the last two slothful penitents:Footnote ⁵³

The two descriptive clauses of Dante’s second example of sloth – those followers of Aeneas who, weary of his mission to found Rome, are left behind in Sicily – reflect three further aspects of Peraldus’s treatment:

The impatience of hardship (‘che l’affanno non sofferse’; 136) is the quiddity of the sub-vice of mollitia [weakness]: ‘mollis est ille qui cedit duris, idest, tribulationibus secumbit’.Footnote ⁵⁴ This leads, in turn, to the further vice of inconsummatio or imperseverantia [imperseverance]: the failure to complete a task to the end (‘fino a la fine’; xviii, 137).Footnote ⁵⁵ Notably, Peraldus associates ‘mollitia’ with an effeminate weakness, an insinuation Dante picks up by explicitly blaming the Trojan women (‘quella’; 136).Footnote ⁵⁶ The second descriptive clause, ‘sé stessa a vita sanza gloria offerse!’ [they chose a life without glory]’ (138),Footnote ⁵⁷ reflects Peraldus’s admonition that sloth takes the goods of glory away, because these are promised only to the strenuous and the vigilant (‘Bona gloriae aufert, quia illa promittuntur solis strenuis et vigilantibus’).Footnote ⁵⁸

We have seen how Dante’s description of the slothful souls closely follows the theoretical exposition of Peraldus’s treatise. We are now in a position to summarise some key features: Dante defines sloth as tepidity (an insufficient love for God), and sees this lukewarmedness as the root of a whole series of other offshoot vices; his treatment highlights the importance of conserving time, of diligence, and of zeal (albeit not to the excess of indiscreet fervour). Dante perceives sloth as a particularly strong temptation in the contemplative life, and he sees the back-sliding of sloth as endangering one’s salvation (the journey to the promised land) and any hope of the good of glory. With these points in mind, let us turn to Dante-character’s zealous intellectual movement from ignorance to knowledge on the terrace (Purg. xvii, 73–xviii, 87), which the slothful souls’ sudden appearance (xviii, 88–138) briefly interrupts.

Pursuing Wisdom

Where Virgil does not have a body and, therefore, is not subject to physical tiredness, Dante-character’s soul is still embodied (he travels alive through the land of the dead!). Consequently, when he reaches the terrace of sloth at nightfall (Purg. xvii, 70–72), he is so tired that he literally cannot move his feet:

Dante’s peculiar use of the Latinism deliquescere (‘ti dilegue’; 73) evokes how tiredness, although not in itself a sin, can lead to sloth.Footnote ⁵⁹ The etymological sense of the verb – to liquify – suggests the weakness (mollitia) of sloth: ‘the weak man’, Peraldus notes, ‘is like a snowman who, in the fire of tribulation, liquifies and is turned into nothing’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, the meaning – Dante’s strength dissolves – evokes the vice of ‘dissolutio’:

This is precisely the situation of Dante and Virgil here, who are compared to a beached ship (‘ed eravamo affissi / pur come nave ch’a la piaggia arriva’; 77–78). Moreover, Virgil’s language alludes to the two specifically temporal sub-vices of sloth: tarditas [slowness] (87) and dilatio [delay] (90).

Despite knowing full well that Dante is absolutely exhausted, Virgil decides to digress, and to deliver an extremely long scholastic lecture – so long, in fact, that it spans two cantos (Purg. xvii, 88–xviii, 75). The psychological drama, then, is that Dante-character is caught between tiredness and the desire to make good use of his time through growth in wisdom. Dante, in other words, is struggling against sloth because, as Peraldus (citing Matthew 26) comments, ‘to stay awake with the Lord’ (‘cum Domino vigilare’) means to beware of the drowsiness of sloth following His example.Footnote ⁶¹ Virgil’s doctrinal speeches are not, therefore, parenthetical to the terrace of sloth. As Peraldus highlights, wisdom (‘sapientia’) is to a man’s laziness (‘pigritia’) as a goad (‘stimulus’) is to a horse’s slowness (‘tarditas’), urging him to do good (‘verba sapientum … excitant hominen ad bonum’).Footnote ⁶² Even more significantly, Peraldus argues that in the order of the church, the light of wisdom (‘lumen sapientiae’) is to be preferred to the cross of penitence (‘crux penitentiae’).Footnote ⁶³ This confirms how Dante-character’s doctrinal lesson should itself be understood as correcting sloth, and it helps explain the apparent lack of an external punishment inflicted on the slothful penitents in this terrace. It is their own wills which lead them to move physically, just as it is Dante-character’s desire for knowledge (embodied in his questions to Virgil) which leads him to move forward intellectually.

It is a remarkable testament to his virtuous zeal that, even when forced to wait, Dante-character is eager for time not to be wasted: ‘Se i piè si stanno, non stea tuo sermone’ [Although our feet stand still, let not your speech do so] (xvii, 84). Moreover, it is his ‘thirst’ for wisdom (xviii, 4) that keeps him alert and awake. Dante emphasises that only after he has taken in Virgil’s responses to his questions does he again become sleepy:

In this way, Dante shows that he has not fallen into the slothful vice of carelessness (‘de vitio incuriae’) which Peraldus specifically associates with the acquisition and conservation of knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁴ Rather, exhibiting the opposing virtue of ‘industria’, Dante has harvested ‘some good fruit’ (alcun buon frutto) from Virgil’s lecture.Footnote ⁶⁵

Notably, Dante’s somnolence – a term repeated twice in two lines (‘stava com’ om che sonnolento vana / Ma questa sonnolenza; 87–88) – occurs after this strenuous intellectual activity, and after a vigil prolonged by Virgil’s lectures and by the arrival of the slothful penitents.Footnote ⁶⁶ Dante’s sleep is clearly motivated by bodily necessity; this is Peraldus’s only valid justification for sleep, which otherwise would be considered a waste of time (‘somnus absque necessitate est temporis amissio’).Footnote ⁶⁷ The Christian anxiety about the moral dissolution consequent upon sleep, even when following strenuous work, is evident from Peraldus’s warnings about the many evils that may arise during slumber. Peraldus’s first three examples all concern a man being murdered or delivered to death by a woman in his sleep (Jael killed Sisara; Dalila delivered Samson to his enemies; Judith murdered Holofernes). In Dante-character’s own dream, he is affronted by the Siren, the ‘ancient witch’ (antica strega), and saved from her clutches only by Virgil’s awakening of him (Purg. xix, 34–36). Given Dante’s extreme tiredness up to this point, the dream of the Siren (1–15) is clearly not an afterthought at all; rather, it is the narrative climax of Dante-character’s ‘intellectual drama’.

Virgil’s Doctrine and the Dream of the Siren

This reappraisal of the terrace of sloth brings out two narrative dramas: the acute fervour of the penitent slothful and, framing this, Dante-character’s intellectual zeal for knowledge. With a ternary structure in mind, we can see that the dream of the Siren (in Purgatorio xix) is the second major stage of Dante’s intellectual drama. In so doing, we discover that Virgil’s three doctrinal lectures in the first part (xvii, 73–xviii, 87) – on the moral structure of Purgatory, on the nature of love, and on free will and moral responsibility – are represented symbolically by the dream of the Siren in the second part (xviii, 130–45 and xix, 1–69).

Virgil’s first lecture (Purg. xvii, 91–139) expounds on love and its disorder as the very foundation of the moral structure of Purgatory. Virgil states that the soul’s love can be disordered in two main ways: the love of an evil (‘per male obietto’) or the unmeasured love of a good (‘o per troppo o per poco di vigore’). Virgil then categorises pride, envy, and anger as three ways by which we come to love the evil of our neighbour; sloth as the deficient love of God; and avarice, gluttony, and lust as three forms of excessive love for lesser goods. The first triad of vices concerns internal spiritual blindness, which sets man off on the wrong course and leads him to hatred of his neighbour. This internal blindness is corrected on the three corresponding terraces: proud eyes are bent low, envious eyes stitched up, and wrathful eyes plunged into impenetrable darkness (‘buio d’inferno’). The second triad of vices concerns disordered attraction of external, sensible things: the avaricious seek to possess all they see; the gluttons are possessed by the taste of foods and drinks; and the lustful constantly seek the touch of sexual pleasure. The Siren arguably embodies this transition from the two triads of vices, from the ‘internal’ to the ‘external’, from the ‘spiritual’ to the ‘carnal’: she does not just distract man from his true course or entice him to slow his oar (the specific vice of sloth), but also seduces him to follow unworthy worldly cares and distractions.Footnote ⁶⁸ In classical illustrations of the Siren, her closed arms may depict avarice; her fish’s tail gluttony; and her virginal face lust.Footnote ⁶⁹ Virgil emphasises that the ‘antica strega’ (the Siren) is the only thing wept for on the three final terraces of the mountain.

Virgil’s first lecture leads Dante-character to question him about the nature of love: ‘that you expound love for me, to which you refer every good action and its contrary’ (‘Però ti prego, dolce padre caro, / che mi dimostri amore, a cui reduci / ogne buono operare, e ’l suo contraro’; xviii, 14–15). Virgil’s second scholastic discourse (xviii, 19–39), appealing directly to Dante’s intellect (16–18), is both a constructive explication of ‘rational love’ (‘d’animo’) and how it may err, and a refutation of the opposing thesis that ‘every love in itself [is] a praiseworthy thing’ (‘ciascun amore in sé laudabil cosa’; 35–36), ‘the error of the blind who claim to lead’ (‘l’error de’ ciechi che si fanno duci’; 18).Footnote ⁷⁰ As a qualification of the courtly love rhetoric of Francesca da Rimini (Inf. v), Virgil’s discourse situates Dante’s views on love as a mean between those of the two Guidos (‘l’uno e l’altro Guido’) referenced on the terrace of pride (Purg. xi, 97–99).Footnote ⁷¹ For Guido Cavalcanti, love is a passion which ultimately impedes man from the perfect good of philosophical contemplation; in contrast, Guinizelli indiscriminately exalts love as the source of perfection. Dante, however, both defends love as leading man to the highest good (contra Calvalcanti) and shows how particular loves may lead to evil as well as to good (contra Guinizelli). Dante-character presents himself as being corrected, then, of this counter-thesis.Footnote ⁷²

Virgil first explains the basic psychology of love to Dante. The underlying premise is that, created by God, the human soul is naturally disposed to love (xviii, 19). The mind’s first movement passes through two stages: first the mind is stimulated (‘awakened into act’) by the pleasure given by the perception of a desirable object (21), and then it naturally inclines towards this object (20). In more scholastic terminology (22–24), the power of perception (‘vostra apprensiva’) presents the image (‘intenzione’) of an external object to the mind; if the object is pleasure-giving, the mind naturally inclines towards it (‘sì che l’animo ad essa volger face’). Where the first movement is a natural inclination (a ‘turning’), Virgil here reserves the term ‘love’ to specify a second ‘spiritual movement’ (‘moto spiritale’), the bending (‘piegar’) of the mind towards this object: ‘if, having turned [first movement], the mind bends towards it [second movement], that bending is love’ (‘e se rivolto inver’ di lei si piega / quell piegare è amor’; 25–26). As the captured mind enters into desire (‘l’animo preso entra in disire’; 31), it cannot rest until it possesses the desired object. In this way, Virgil refutes the thesis that ‘every love is itself a praiseworthy thing’. Although the natural disposition to love (the wax) is always good, the mind may choose to bend towards a pleasure-giving object (a seal), which, for an individual, may be an apparent but not an actual good.Footnote ⁷³

Dante’s dream of the Siren, in its first phase (Purg. xix, 1–24), enacts the way in which the mind may bend in love towards this kind of delectable but ultimately false object. Indeed, the string of five adjectival phrases describing the Siren embodies the five kinds of false earthly happiness delineated by Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy:

On this interpretation, ‘balba’ (stuttering) indicates the vanity of fame or human glory (gloria) which exists on the stuttering tongues of men; ‘ne li occhi guercia’ [cross-eyed] denotes the imperfection of honours (dignitates) which stand before men’s eyes; ‘sovra i piè distorta’ [crooked on her feet] indicates that men walk unsafely and unstably on riches (divitiae); ‘le man monche’ [the stunted hands] represent the imperfection of the works committed through temporal authority over lands (regna); and ‘di colore scialba’ [pallid colour] represents the vanity of sensual pleasures (voluptates) which rest only in appearance (as colour is only an accidental property of a substance).Footnote ⁷⁴ That Dante is the object of the main clause (‘mi venne’) reflects that the Siren, as yet an unnamed subject ‘una femmina’ [female], is presented to him, initially, as she is.

In the next terzina, by contrast, the subject–object relationship is inverted:

As Dante, the subject, actively gazes on her, the Siren is transformed: his gaze, like the sun warming cold limbs, gives colour to her face, loosens her tongue, and straightens her distorted features. Through Dante’s gaze and seconded by the movement of love (‘com’ amor vuol’), the ‘femina balba’ (a stuttering, ugly, pallid, female) is transformed into the ‘dolce serena’ (the sweet, blushing, rosy Siren). This sequence may reflect how the five kinds of false earthly happiness represented by the ‘femina’ come to appear delectable because of man’s false estimation: men believe, mistakenly, that fleeting glory (gloria) will not stutter, but bring lasting renown (celebritas); honours, not imperfect, will bring reverence (reverentia); wealth (divitiae) will bring not danger, but rather the security of sufficiency (sufficientia); lands (regna) will bring not the frustration of governance in inefficiency, compromise, and corruption, but rather true authority and power (potentia); and pleasures (voluptates) will produce not vanity and emptiness, but joy (laetitia).Footnote ⁷⁵ The Siren so captivates men that any drawn to her rarely leave (‘e qual meco s’ausa / rado sen parte’; 23–24); at an allegorical level, whoever falls in love with imperfect worldly goods becomes enchanted by, or habituated to, them. The transformation of the ‘femina balba’ into the ‘dolce serena’, thereby renders poetically Virgil’s second doctrinal discourse on the nature of love, and how a person may love an ultimately false good (Purg. xviii, 19–39).

Virgil’s third discourse (xviii, 46–74) is rendered poetically, then, in the second stage of the Siren episode (xix, 25–33). This doctrinal lecture responds to Dante’s question that, if love comes from outside the soul (‘s’amore è di fuori a noi offerto’; xviii, 43), and the soul follows only this attraction (‘e l’anima non va con altro piede’; 44), how is the soul to blame for following good or evil? (‘se dritta o torta va non è suo merto’; 45). Virgil clarifies that our first appetites are determined (just as a bee is made to make honey) and, therefore, this first desire deserves neither praise nor blame (‘e questa prima voglia / merto di lode o di biasmo non cape’; 59–60) – a doctrine reiterating the central discourse on love in Purgatorio xvii (‘Lo naturale è sempre sanza errore’; 94). Nevertheless, Virgil again emphasises that, aside from these natural desires, man has reason which counsels, giving or withholding assent to the desire (‘la virtù che consiglia / e de l’assenso de’ tener la soglia’; 62–63). Finally, man has free will (‘la nobile virtù … lo libero arbitrio’; 73–74) which enables him to act upon what reason counsels. Even, therefore, if all desires arose through necessity (‘di necessitate / surga ogne amor’; 70–71), man – with reason and free will – has the power and, therefore, the responsibility of moral action. This conclusion also echoes, of course, Marco Lombardo’s discourse in Purgatorio xvi (‘in voi è la cagione’; 83).

Now consider the second phase of the Siren episode. Immediately after Dante is seduced by the Siren’s speech, a lady prompts Virgil to rip the Siren’s clothes and expose her belly (‘il ventre’):

In light of the parallels with the doctrinal discourse in Purgatorio xviii (which Virgil emphasises is according to reason; ‘quanto ragion qui vede / dir ti poss’ io’; 46–47) and the Boethian echoes in the Siren episode thus far, it does seem natural to identify ‘la donna … santa e presta’ (xix, 26) as Lady Philosophy.Footnote ⁷⁶ In Dantean allegory, the lady’s eyes represent the demonstrations of her science. Here, Lady Philosophy’s doctrine (and, perhaps, specifically the text of Boethius’s Consolation) demonstrates to reason the baseness and trickery of the five false earthly goals represented by the Siren. The lady asks Virgil who the Siren is (‘chi è questa?’; 28); that is, she compels Dante-character to consider intellectually the Siren’s essence (her quiddity) and not how she may appear through accidental properties which are subject to change (as the pallid ‘femmina balba’, through Dante’s desire, becomes the blushing ‘dolce serena’). Exposed for what she truly is, the Siren vanishes as Dante is awoken from his dream by her foul stench (‘col puzzo che n’uscia’; 33).Footnote ⁷⁷

The dream of the Siren continues to weigh on Dante’s mind until Virgil’s final rebuke in which he names her not as the ‘femmina balba’ (as she first appears to Dante in his dream) or the ‘dolce serena’ (as she presents herself), but rather as the ‘antica strega’: ‘antica’ (ancient) because she existed from the beginning of the world, and ‘strega’ (witch) because she still succeeds in enticing people to follow her temptations. The exasperation of Dante’s early commentators, let alone Virgil, on this point is evident: even though wise authorities from antiquity have warned against the false kinds of earthly happiness, people continue to be seduced by the Siren’s song.Footnote ⁷⁸ Therefore, when Virgil says ‘vedesti come l’uom da lei si slega’ [you have seen how one frees oneself from her] (xix, 60), this may refer both to the poetical episode of the Siren in the first half of Purgatorio xix and to Virgil’s doctrinal passages in Purgatorio xviii.

Looking back retrospectively, it is clear that the Siren was present implicitly throughout the terrace of sloth. The nautical image comparing Dante and Virgil to a beached ship on their arrival at the terrace is reinforced through the two examples of sloth: those Trojan women who burnt Aeneas’s ships and chose to remain on Sicily’s shores, and the Israelites who crossed the Red Sea but, complaining, hearkened back to life in Egypt (a life of sin).Footnote ⁷⁹ The actual appearance of the Siren in Dante’s dream, therefore, simply makes explicit her powerful presence in, or even influence over, the terrace of sloth as a whole.

Sloth As Dante’s First Sin in Inferno I

If we consider that Virgil’s three doctrinal lectures in the terrace of sloth embody, for Dante, the very structure of the Christian moral life in terms of ordered and disordered love, this may suggest – beyond the terrace itself – a heightened autobiographical and poetical significance for the vice of sloth. Could sloth, in fact, be the very first sin of Dante-character on his moral journey?Footnote ⁸⁰ This is not to suggest another symbolic interpretation of the leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf. Rather, even before he encounters the three beasts, Dante-character had attempted (and failed) to leave the wooded valley behind him and to ascend the high mountain of virtue.Footnote ⁸¹ What sin caused, then, this failure?

On the terrace of sloth, Virgil upbraids Dante, informing him that the soul walks not only by love, but also ‘with the other foot’ (‘con altro piede’) of the intellect (Purg. xviii, 44).Footnote ⁸² The stationary foot (‘’l piè fermo’; Inf. i, 30), then, is the pes affectus. At the beginning of his ascent up the mountain, Dante-character’s love is deficient, holding him back from pursuing the upwards path of holiness directed by his intellect (the pes intellectus).Footnote ⁸³ Dante exhibits, in other words, the vice of tepidity, the ‘love of the good’ that falls ‘short of its proper duty’.

More precisely, we may identify Dante’s first sin as the sub-species ‘ignavia’, the slothful vice of the person who chooses to remain in great misery rather than to undertake the work necessary to escape it.Footnote ⁸⁴ Peraldus’s description of the ‘ignavi’ captures, in my view, Dante’s exact moral predicament at this early stage in his journey:

It is only after this failure, therefore, that Dante-character is assailed by the other vices (the ‘three beasts’), turning back to the ‘dark wood’ or ‘perilous sea’ of sin. As Peraldus notes, the ‘ignavi’ choose their own death (the ‘sea of Hell’) through the waters of riches and other snares, rather than journeying to the door of life through ‘the dry earth of poverty’ – imagery directly picked up by Dante in his poetic treatment.Footnote ⁸⁶

What remedy, then, is there for those in Dante-character’s predicament? Peraldus’s second and third remedies against sloth are the consideration of future pain (consideratio poenae futurae) and of eternal reward (consideratio aeternae praemii). He tells an anecdote from the Life of the Desert Fathers in which the abbot counsels both these remedies to a monk struggling with sloth:

In response to Dante’s cry for help, Virgil first upbraids him for not climbing the mountain, as he should:

Virgil then presents precisely the abbot’s remedy: he shows Dante the desperate cries (‘le disperate strida’) of the damned, those content in the fire of Purgatory, and the blessed people (‘le beate genti’) in heaven (Inf. i, 115–20).

The retellings of the opening scene through the eyes of Virgil, Beatrice, and Lucia in Inferno ii reinforce this interpretation. Appealing to Beatrice, Lucia says that Dante loved her so much that he left the vulgar herd (‘t’amò tanto / c’uscì te de la volgare schiera’; Inf. ii, 104–5), which Guido da Pisa glosses as the wise man abandoning the study of secular sciences and turning, instead, to sacred theology that leads to beatitude:

Dante’s spiritual model, of course, is St Augustine, whose desire for God ultimately surpassed all other desires, whether in his early sensual life, or in his study of ‘worldly’ rhetoric and philosophy.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a vivid description of the procrastination, delaying, and back-sliding characteristic of sloth, Virgil suggests it was ‘viltade’ [pusillanimity] (45) or ‘tema’ [fear] (49) that turned Dante – marred by ‘other thoughts’ (37–42) – from his ‘honourable undertaking’, leading him to see a ‘beast’ where there was only a shadow (40). This is why, returning to the ‘lost road’ of holiness (the via munditiae) at the shore of Purgatory, all other journeying seems to Dante in vain.Footnote ⁹⁰

It is notable, in this respect, that the first groups of souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise dramatize, in different ways, this laggardness towards the religious life. The ‘wretched souls’ of Inferno iii who live ‘without praise or blame’ allude to the Biblical topos (Revelation 3. 15–16) of those who are ‘neither cold nor hot’, and whom Christ will therefore ‘vomit out of my mouth’. Peraldus – as we have seen – directly associates this passage with tepidity: ‘tepidity is the only sin that provokes God to vomit’.Footnote ⁹¹ The unnamed cleric, Pope Celestine V, by abdicating, failed in the most dramatic way to follow his call from God to lead the faithful in the religious life. Dante’s original realm of Ante-Purgatory is peopled by those who delayed the religious life of penance; as a punishment for delaying, they must wait for the purifying fire (the poena corrigens) of Purgatory. The two souls we encounter in the slowest sphere of the Moon were contemplative sisters (of the order of St Clare) who, upon being forcibly removed from their cloister, failed to insist (even unto martyrdom) on their religious vocation, instead assenting (albeit against their desire) to a worldly life. In Dante’s moral vision, the fourth terrace of sloth is halfway between God (in the Empyrean) and Satan (in the depths of Hell): the sin of sloth is arguably the nexus, then, between the call to ‘belong to God’ and to ‘belong to the world’ (1 John 4).

The Sloth of Statius, Dante’s Autobiographical Cypher

Given these moral and meta-poetic levels, it is striking that Dante delineates ‘sloth’ as, alongside prodigality, the dominant sin of his autobiographical cypher, the poet-scholar Statius:Footnote ⁹²

Statius did 500 years in Purgatory for prodigality (xxi, 68) and 400 years for sloth (xxii, 92), leaving a little more than 300 years for his stints in Ante-Purgatory and the terraces of pride, envy, and wrath combined (Statius died in 96 AD, and the date of the poem is 1300). Dante presents Statius as passing through two conversions. The first is moral: a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid showed Statius the error of his prodigal ways (xxii, 37–54). The second is spiritual: Virgil’s prophetic fourth Eclogue, resonating with the ‘new preachers’ of the gospel, converted him from paganism to Christianity.Footnote ⁹³ Crucially, prodigality was Statius’s dominant sin when he was still a pagan, whereas ‘sloth’ was his dominant sin after his second conversion to Christianity. Sloth is, therefore, the sin of Statius as a Christian.

What was the consequence of sloth for the poet-scholar Statius? And why might this be particularly relevant to Dante? Statius’s tepidity (he was a ‘closed Christian’) suggests that an implied Christian sense must be read out of Statius’s otherwise ‘closed’ Thebaid. Thus, in a medieval allegorical interpretation, the seven assailants who enter the gates of Thebes may represent the seven deadly sins who enter the seven apertures of humanity, while the compassionate intervention of Theseus in establishing the altar of mercy may foreshadow the saving work of Christ.Footnote ⁹⁴ Dante, in turn, must surpass the model of Statius, and make God the explicit goal of his moral life and his poetry: his own Christian faith should not be veiled as in the Vita Nova but explicit as in the Commedia. But there is also a more pressing warning for Statius’s fellow scholar-poet, as is evident from Statius’ own self-presentation:

The insinuation, passed over in the scholarship, is that Statius left his second major work the Achilleid incomplete due to his sloth (and not simply due to his death).Footnote ⁹⁵ The poet Statius, as Dante knew well, liked to play on the meaning (and puns) of proper names: here, the circumlocution ‘Statius people back there call me still’ is, as with the famous case of Ciacco, a nod to the nomen significans rei [the name signifies the thing]: Statius is a delayer, one who stayed (from the Latin status).Footnote ⁹⁶ Statius, therefore, failed to complete the journey of his second poem ‘fino a la fine’ (the slothful vice of inconsummatio); he failed to carry the ‘burden’ of his poem (imperseverantia). In consequence, a part of his potential glory is taken away. That Statius is a cypher for Dante is undisputed, so clear are the autobiographical parallels.Footnote ⁹⁷ It is surely no accident that Dante – at the halfway mark of Purgatorio and the Commedia as a whole – should draw attention to his own battle against the vice of sloth – a battle necessary for him to carry, unlike Statius, his own burden (the ‘ponderoso tema’; Par. xxiii, 64; DVE ii, 4) to completion.Footnote ⁹⁸

As an early illustration of Peraldus’s treatise suggests, the virtuous life may be envisaged and framed, first of all, as a lifelong battle against the vices.Footnote ⁹⁹ In the terrace of sloth, Dante represents his own pursuit of wisdom as in continual conflict with the dragging pull of sloth. Moreover, the very beginning of his afterlife journey (and his poetic masterpiece) is driven by a remedy against tepidity (and its offshoots of ignavia and pusillanimity). Dante’s extraordinary achievements – as a poet, statesman, philosopher, and theologian – do not undermine the importance of sloth in his life (and in his Christian moral vision as a whole), but rather enforce and provide evidence for it. As a contemplative poet-scholar especially, Dante’s life was a heroic battle with the vice of sloth, a battle in which – at least in relation to the Commedia – he was victorious, completing his magnum opus shortly before his own death in 1321.