At the time when Dante constructed his Devine Comedy, the vice of avarice was understood to be, if not the worst, then at least the most prolific of the seven deadly sins.[1] In Inferno, the avaricious and prodigal justly receive their desire through a selfish and aimless wasting away- shoving burdens forward to opposite sides in the “fourth hollow.”[2] Justice continues its contrapasso in Purgatorio as well, as the aim and will of those avaricious but repentant undergo their purification in the most difficult and most populated terrace of this topography.[3] Dante’s understanding of Avarice extended beyond the mere hording of wealth. Instead, the vice becomes the lesser materialization of the Christian promise, which can only be remedied through a reestablishment of Justice and reordering of the perverted desire bent to “wordily” possession.
Avarice is personified in both Inferno and Purgatorio as the wolf Plutus. This wolf appears as the third and final of three beasts that bar Dante’s first attempt to scale Purgatory. Avarice as a wolf is “all hide and bones” and charges him with “the appetites that have made many live in wretchedness.”[4] It is this same wolf with a bottomless appetite who Dante rebukes in Purgatorio: “When will he come from whom the wolf shall flee?”[5] The image of an eternally hungry carnivorous beast-demon captured for Dante’s audience what Augustine of Hippo meant when he extended the vice of avarice beyond “the love of money” to encompass “all things which are desired immoderately, whenever someone wants absolutely more than is enough.”[6] Avarice is the vice that seeks access to fill a never fillable void; the avaricious accumulates earthy possessions to secure oneself, when in this Christian model, the parable ends with Christ saying, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded of you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”[7]
Thomas Aquinas combined Plutus the wolf-as-avarice, with Mammon, the demon of wealth to describe Avarice as Mammon being carried up from hell by a wolf, coming to “inflame the human heart with greed.”[8] In personifying this vice, the ancients conceptualize the vice for what it was: a turning of the human heart from a particular worship -God, shifting this due attention towards another. The vice of avarice- the love of possessions- was understood to be a particular opposite to Christ and his teachings, where one must choose, not what, but who to serve: God or mammon.[9] Moreover, when Dante and Virgil begin circling this fifth terrace, they are met with the words “my soul cleaves to the earth,”[10] which Hollander sees as the avaricious’ lament that their sight or rather desire is turned towards earthly things. Their purification in purgatory takes place through embodying their posture of material allegiance: “I saw people on it lying face down on the ground and weeping.”[11]
In book one of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the demon, Mammon fully combines this model of avarice as a fallen vision: an angel given over to a focus on what is less than the ideal.
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From heaven, for even in heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of heaven’s pavement, trodden gold
Then ought divine or holy else enjoyed[12]
This downward focus or vision therefore perverted the desire to less than Christ: the selfish accumulation to oneself that which is desired. If what is desired is Christ, then the act is a journey of the individual towards him. But if the vision is to a materialistic, lesser God of wealth, it becomes the eternal hoarding to oneself of what is below. This plays out in Milton as Mammon constructs the fallen angel’s hellish palace:
[...] With impious hands
Rifled the bowls of their mother earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound
And digged out ribs of Gold.[13]
In Inferno, the lost souls, “with great shouts” from opposite sides shove burdens forwards into each other.[14] In one sense it is a scene of chaos, in another it is a scene of commerce and consumption- an obsessive rat race combined with Sisyphus’ rock. Both hellish scenes capture a modern rape of the earth through the obsessive hording to oneself of resources at the expense of others and the environment. St. Ambrose accused the affluent of Milan of laying “claim to the earth as their exclusive property.” This highlights how the vice “turns upside-down the common topos:” products of nature are no longer the common goods of all humankind and instead through avarice, the very “elements themselves are treated as private property.”[15] This excessive desire for more than what is one’s own and obsessive possession of the material destroys community by excluding its own species from sharing what is there for all to use.[16]
Dante has three of the most extensive dialogues in the Comedy within the terrace of Avarice: Pope Adrian- a spiritual leader; king Hugh Capet- and secular ruler of people, and Stasius - an artist and poet. All three represent figures of avarice- repentant yes, but avaricious too, and whose avarice they admit affected those in their keep. Pope Adrian describes avarice to Dante as having “quenched out love of worthy things” and “wasting our chance to do good works.”[17] Hugh Capet defines himself as, “The root of the evil tree that casts its shadow over all the Christian lands so that good fruit is rarely gathered there.”[18] This image shows the consequences of avarice as far beyond self-protection against the world through wealth accumulation, but connects that vice directly with the impoverishing of others. [19]
It is thus ultimately important to understand the undoing or reversal of this vice as necessary but only possible through the antidote of justice.[20] The same beatitude is sung in the terraces of the Gluttonous and the Avarice: hunger and thirst for righteousness.[21] Righteousness is often interchangeable in translations with justice. The prophet Amos most clearly links justice as an instrument of social reform in his famously quoted vision. “But let justice role down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”[22] The idea of mīspāt (justice), translates loosely to “correct ordering.”[23] Hollander connects the vice with the “golden mean,” an ethics debate of what is too much or too little desire for wealth.[24] It is fitting that the solution to return from the spectrum’s extremes is through this intensive reordering of mīspāt.
So, where in Inferno the souls punish themselves by literally “getting what they want” – an eternally frantic and meaningless pursuit, the purgatorial contrapasso entirely restrains them into an embodiment of their fallen desire and reversed posture, to a point where they desire nothing more than to be released and continue upwards. Stasius confirms this to Dante, “Holy Justice sets the soul’s desire against its will, and as it once longed to sin, it now seek penance.”[25]
Moreover, Statius reminds the reader of the purpose of the purgatorial trials through similes of the death and resurrection. Hugh Capet compares Christ on the cross to the violent acts of his descendants: “I see him mocked a second time. I see renewed the vinegar and gall- between two living thieves I see him slain.”[26] Indeed, Christ is the most fitting model of the abolition of avarice: eradicating a bent desire by being emptied of self-desire. The figures bound on the ground imitate a pseudo-crucifixion of their will in imitation of this selfless act for the sake of human salvation. An act undergone because of the need for justice and atonement for transgression.
Thus, justice fulfilled or met resulted in the resurrection: an earthquake and the rising out of the ground- the material into the eternal- not unlike what takes place in the figure of Stasius. “The mountains holy law does not allow anything disordered or that violates its rule [injustice]. Here nothing ever changes,” unless when God determines that justice has been satisfied and the soul is freed.”[27] Indeed, Stasius is bound and disciplined until his vision is fully reversed: “And I, who have been prostrate in this pain five hundred years and more, just now felt my freed will seek a better threshold.”[28] Stasius as reborn or resurrected from his state of broken vision is further extended as Dante compares meeting him to the scene of the Emmaus story. “As Luke sets down for us that Christ, just risen from the cave that was his sepulcher, revealed himself to two he walked with on the road, there appeared a shade, coming up behind us. [...] and said: ‘O my brothers, may God grant you peace.”[29] Stasius is the soul justified or vindicated. Through five hundred years of atonement and discipline his vision was slowly, painfully turn around and upwards. He was released from his posture of protecting his selfish will through a material focus, to the addressing of these fellow travellers/strangers as brothers in Christ.
In each terrace of the Purgatory journey, just such a self-renewal plays out in each painful purification. It is the crucifixion, resurrection, and hope of Christ in miniature, participated upon by this community of penitent souls. But it is on this terrace of avarice where there is no movement because of a vice that is dominated by a frantic scramble of resources. Avarice is a vise personified as predatory, eternally starving beast, or an angel so consumed by desire that he is hunched from gazing at heavens golden walkways. They display the lure of wealth stripped of the illusion of finery: merely an empty ugly hole that devours and is never filled. No matter how many poor, how much land, or how many resources are fed to Greed, it is never satiated. thus it can only be satisfied though the discipline of the terrace: the wolf must be starved to death, until all that remains is the cry of souls saying that blessed are those who hunger and thirst for Righteousness, for they shall be filled.
[1] Newhauser, Richard. The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature (New York: Cambridge university Press, 2000), 69. ; Canto 20 footnote 4-9. [2] Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno, translated by Robert Hollander and Joan Hollander (New York: First Anchor Books, 2002), Canto 7, lines 16-21. [3] Alighieri, Dante. Purgatorio, translated by Robert Hollander and Joan Hollander (New York: First Anchor Books, 2004), Canto 19, lines 115-117. [4] Dante, Inferno, 1.49-54. [5] Dante, Purgatorio, 20.15. [6] Scott, John. “Avarice in Dante and His Age,” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, John Hopkins University Press, 2014, No. 132, pp.1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43490512 [7] Luke 12:20 NRSV. [8] Aquinas, Thomas, “Summa Theologica,” Christian Classics Ethereal Library: Bringing Christian Classic Books to Life. Ed. Tim Perrine. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.SS_Q32_A7.html accessed Nov 20, 2022. [9] Matthew 6:24 NRSV [10] Dante, Purgatorio, 19.73. [11] Dante, Purgatorio, 19.71-72. [12] Milton, John. Paradise Lost, Ed. Alastair Fowler (Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited, 1997) Book 1, Line 679-683. [13] Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.686-690. [14] Dante, Inferno, 7.25-27. [15] Newhauser, The Early History of Greed, 71-72. [16] Newhauser, The Early History of Greed, 72. [17] Dante, Purgatorio, 19.121-122. [18] Dante, Purgatorio, 20.43-45. [19] St. Basil summarizes this conception of avarice in his famous quote: “The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage chests belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver that you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to the one in need.” Newhauser, The Early History of Greed 70-71. [20] Scott. “Avarice in Dante and His Age,” Dante Studies, 17. [21] Dante, Purgatorio, 22.4-5; 24.151-154. [22] Amos 5:24 NRSV [23] Ed. Arnold, Bill T., Williamson, H.G.M. “Justice.” In Dictionary of the Old Testament Historical Books (USA: InterVarsity Press, 2005) 825. [24] Dante, Inferno, Canto 7, footnote 25-30. [25] Dante, Purgatorio, 21.64-65. [26] Dante, Purgatorio, 20.88-90. [27] Dante, Purgatorio, 21.41-43. [28] Dante, Purgatorio, 21.67-69. [29] Dante, Purgatorio, 21.7-13.
Comments