Canto XVI. On the cornice of the Wrathful the souls proceed through a dense gritty fog, which mirrors the effect of Wrath whereby the emotion of anger overpowers its reasonable direction. Dante meets the soul of Marco of Lombardy, and asks him a question about free will. Marco answers that, while all people have dispositions (fixed by the stars in Medieval science), they also have reason which should enable them to to make free choices about which dispositions to follow and develop, and which ones to control. Punishment for sin is therefore just. The widespread failure of virtue in Dante’s time can be attributed to bad government. The Emperor does not meet his obligations, and the Church, usurping the Emperor’s place, fails to give the guidance it should (see Canto XIV).

Marco sets out Dante’s account of sin, derived from Aristotle via St Thomas. People have loves, movements of the will towards perceived goods. Their dispositions influence which loves they follow and which ones they shun. Guidance is needed to develop good dispositions. The cornice of the Wrathful is an appropriate place to develop these ideas. Wrath, ira, is not to be confused with anger. Anger is a proper human emotion. It should be directed by our good sense (practical reasonableness). When it is not, we fall into ira.

Now, we can stray from a virtue in various directions, and usually humans stray in one direction more than others (so that, for example, we most commonly divert from virtuous use of food and drink by over-indulgence, rather than by eating insufficient to meet our needs). In the case of anger, however, deviations from virtue in contrasting directions are seen more often. We commonly fall into ira, by ranting, saying things we later regret and so on. But there are also times when we are not angry, although we should be. St Thomas is clear that to fail to be angry when injustice should prompt us to be angry is a failure in living the good life. Anger has its proper place, it should move us to act against whatever injustice causes it. If our emotional capacity for anger has been blunted so that we see injustice, and are passive about it, then we need repentance and detachment from our complacency. The black fog of Dante’s poem is not just an image of irrational violent ira, but also of the darkness we have wrapped ourselves in when we are not moved to proper anger at injustice.

I rather like this image from the Holkham MS. The artist both allows us to see Dante, Virgil and the wrathful but also creates the sense that they are stuck in a gritty smog!

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/jpegs/holkham/misc/48/1000/04800465.jpg