Canto XVII. Dante and Virgil leave the cloud around the wrathful. Dante has a vision of the bridle of purgatory, examples of those who gave in to wrath, including Haman whose story is told in the book of Esther. The angel of the cornice wipes a further ‘P’ from Dante’s brow and directs the poets to the pass. On their ascending to the next cornice, night falls, and they can no longer move (see Canto VII). Virgil explains to Dante the principle by which the cornices of purgatory are ordered.

A child might say ‘I love ice-cream’. A man might say ‘I love you’ to his wife. At the baptism of Christ the voice from the cloud said ‘this is my beloved son’. We might hesitate to say that the verb ‘to love’ is used the same way in all three cases. But we would also hesistate before saying the uses are quite unconnected. The sense in which they are the same is what St Thomas Aquinas calls analogy. My will, the faculty by which I seek something perceived as good, is the seat of love, although it is also directed by the mind (which makes the evaluation). So my pursuit of some good is a love. (This must mean something different in God, since my seeing and loving something is a change in me).

Virgil explains that no-one can truly hate themselves (since they cannot will anything other than a good for themselves) nor can they truly hate God (who is their origin). Therefore the lowest of the sins are loves of others’ harm. The proud do so because they see their neighbour’s diminshment as their own advancement. The envious wish ill to their neighbours out of fear of what they might lose themselves. The wrathful desire other’s harm in an irrational emotional response to some hurt they receive themselves. These are the cornices already visited. Dante and Virgil have just reached the cornice where the souls have been inadequately zealous in the pursuit of good loves (the slothfull). On higher terraces are found those whose pursuit of loves has been excessive.

We have already noted that Dante’s strong systematizing of sin, while poetically necessary, and perhaps didactically necessary, needs to be treated with caution (Canto X) since sin is intrinsically disordered. Nonetheless, behind any sin is a love of some good, not wrong in its-self, but wrong when not subordinated to other goods: the worship due to God, the goods of our neighbour and the community, our own true flourishing. Our final goal is a loss of the attachments that disordered loves have created in us. This is only achieved by the love of God himself, Charity. As we discover near the end of Purgatorio, Dante himself held that intimations of that love were possible in the love of another person.

The angel of peace shows Dante and Virgil the pass to the cornice of the slothful.

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