take 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.

So Dante estimates it in his scheme of punishment, representing the
souls crying out in their diligence, "Haste, haste, let no time be lost
through little love." These souls are condemned to rush round and round
at the topmost speed, those in front proclaiming instances of alacrity,
viz., how the Blessed Virgin hastened to the hill country to visit
Elizabeth and how Julius Caesar hurried to subdue Lerida. Those in the
rear recall examples of sloth, viz., how the Israelites through
wandering in the desert lost the Promised Land, and how the Trojans who
dallied in Sicily gave themselves up to a life inglorious. Dante's
slothful souls are startlingly swift in their action. One of them, the
Abbot Zeno giving directions for ascent to Virgil and reprobating the
sins of his successors in the monastery is out of hearing as soon as he
speaks: "If more be said or if he was silent I know not, so far already
had he raced beyond us" (XVIII, 127).

The reader will not fail to note that the terrace of the slothful is
the only circle of Purgatory where there is no request for intercessory
prayer and that Dante here never speaks to any of those souls. Is that
because the poet wishes us to understand that his own sentiment is that
they do not deserve to be prayed for who neglected through sloth to pray
for themselves and that his own silence in their presence is indicative
of his disregard for souls so stained?

To foreshow the sins to be treated on the three uppe