"
(XVII, 55.)
Lightened of the third P the poet passes from the circle of the wrathful
up the fourth stairway. Here he takes the opportunity to engage Virgil
in conversation regarding love as the seed of the capital sins. These
sins, it may be remarked in passing, are not always mortal sins, though
many Dantian editors make the mistake of so classifying them. It is to
be observed that on all the stairways of Purgatory there is a conference
between the two poets on things likely to be of interest to Dante, in
the matter of his salvation. At the end of the present conference Dante
falls into slumber, from which he is aroused by the racing activity of
the souls of the slothful, shouting instances of zeal and energy.
Sloth is defined by St. Thomas Aquinas as sadness and torpor in the face
of some spiritual good which one has to achieve, and a preacher of our
day modernizes that definition to mean, the "don't-care-feeling" in the
presence of duty. The sin is unlisted in modern treatises on Ethics,
the writers of which see in its symptoms only indications of
melancholia, neurasthenia or pellagra. But according to the scholastic
classification still followed in this matter by the Catholic Church,
sloth is to be considered as a specific vice opposed to the great
commandment to love God with our whole heart.
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