Canto XXII. After the poets have climbed up to the next terrace, Virgil and Statius converse together. Statius explains that he has spent time on the cornice of avarice, not because of avarice as commonly understood, but because of its opposite: an excessive prodigality. He explains how Virgil’s poetry inspired him to seek out Christian preachers, and how he was therefore converted. After a while the poets come upon souls of the gluttonous, and here the whip of gluttony: which includes an account of Our Lady’s concern for the guests and hosts of the wedding at Cana.

James Thurber’s story of The Bear Who Let it Alone is an account of a drunken bear who becomes a strict teetotaler and temperance lecturer. Neither conditions makes for domestic happiness, so Thurber concludes: 'You might as well fall at on your face than lean over too far backward'. We saw in Canto XVI that vice consists in falling away from virtue, and that this can happen in more than one direction. Statius explains here that, although typically humans depart from proper use of worldy goods by hoarding them for themselves, it is also possible (if less common) to diverge the opposite way, into prodigality. Both sins are purged together.

A Methodist minister I know once preached that, in failing to deal maturely with the fact of our own sinfulness, we typically either become permissive (explaining our sin away) or we become particularly condemnatory of others who fail more spectacularly and/or in different ways from us; ‘at least I’m not as bad as him..’. Perhaps in Lent we should pay attention to our own attitudes. Maybe a corollary of his observation is that we are particularly hot on others’ sins when these diverge from virtue in opposite directions to our own failings.

The poets come upon the tree of the gluttonous.

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/jpegs/holkham/misc/48/1000/04800479.jpg