Canto XVIII. While Dante and Virgil sit in the darkness, Dante questions his guide about love. Virgil explains that we have freedom of choice in responding to our loves, and so can be held accountable for how we order them. The moon rises and, as Dante is drifting into sleep, the poets hear an approaching band of the slothful. These are running around the cornice and crying out examples of zeal and sloth. One, a former Abbot, directs the poets to the pass.

It is a happy coincidence that, in 2009, this Canto falls on the feast of the Annunciation. The first example of zeal in the whip of sloth, which the souls themselves call out, is ‘Mary hastened to the hills’. This is a quotation from Luke’s Gospel describing how, immediately after Gabriel’s visit, Mary set out to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Representations of the Annunciation, such as Fra Angelico’s (see link below), generally show Our Lady interrupted in meditation, prayer or reading. Maybe such leisure was unlikely in the life of a poor Palestinian woman in her time. Nonetheless, the artist captures a capacity for meditative openness to God, which was clearly part of Our Lady’s character in the Gospel. The other side of the coin is the haste with which she then sets out to visit Elizabeth, and to stay with her till the birth of John. The link between these two states of her being --- still and receptive at one moment, active and purposeful the next --- is her ‘Fiat’, ‘let it be’, with which she greets the angel’s news.

The vanishing point in Fra Angelico’s perspective draws our eye through a window to the outside world. Our Lady is called to play her part in a story which will lead her into that world, through the uncertainty of pregnancy, the poverty of the stable, the wonder of the Epiphany, the exile in Egypt, the anxiety of the visit to Jerusalem, and to the foot of the cross.

Sloth takes various forms. There is simple idleness, there is ‘accidie’ or hopelessness which paralyses the will, there is the temptation to withdraw into a quieter and easier life. Perhaps it is also a form of sloth to conceal our lack of engagement with the actual demands of faith and life with a pointless business. Mary took on her vocation in hope and faith, despite the uncertainty it brought her, and persisted to the end. This is the example of zeal which the souls in Dante set before themselves, and offer to us this Lent.


Fra Angelico’s Annunciation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fra_Angelico_043.jpg


Dante and Virgil meet the slothful in the Holkham MS.

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/jpegs/holkham/misc/48/1000/04800470.jpg