Why Do the Slothful Not Have a Prayer?

In Canto 18 of Dante’s Purgatorio, Dante the pilgrim is startled out of his slumber in the middle of the night by a group of frenzied penitents, “who were approaching, / having already rounded the terrace from behind us” (89–90)¹; they are said to resemble a group of Theban bacchanalians (91–93). The crowd arrives quickly, “for the whole frenzied mob was running” (98). Two at the front shout examples of zeal, another answers Virgil’s plea for directions, and two more cry out examples of sloth. Nowhere, whether here or in another canto, is there any indication that the slothful pray a particular prayer.

The fact that the slothful do not recite a prayer specific to their group is a sufficiently dramatic departure from the pattern Dante establishes in Purgatorio that one would expect numerous and extensive commentaries on this lacuna. Instead, we find only brief and sporadic attempts to explain this choice. In this article I will attempt to account for Dante’s decision not to give the slothful a prayer, considering and responding to various other possible explanations along the way.

The most basic, but to my mind most unsatisfactory explanation of the absence of a prayer for the slothful, would be that the omission was accidental on Dante’s part.² I grant that even Homer nods, but to suggest that Dante simply neglected to include this detail is akin to submitting that the poet somehow failed to remember to rhyme three lines within a poem consisting entirely of terza rima. The pattern not only exists but is worked out in such fine detail that it is impossible to believe that Dante merely forgot to sustain it. For the proud, for example, who pray the Pater Noster as part of their penance, Dante has chosen a supremely fitting prayer. The Our Father is the prayer that Jesus himself instructed us to pray, and so praying it is a supreme form of obedience—the very virtue the proud shunned in their self-important and self-sufficient condition while on earth.³ To use just another example, the avaricious pray the fourth section of Psalm 118 (119), which in Dante begins with “Adhaesit pavimento anima mea” (Purg. 19.73) (“My soul hath cleaved to the pavement” [verse 25]),⁴ precisely mirroring the penance they perform on this cornice.⁵ A further, slightly hidden way in which the prayer of the avaricious is fitting is that a few lines later in the Psalm we find a direct reference to the sin of avarice: “Incline my heart into thy testimonies and not to covetousness” (verse 36). In short, as John Sinclair puts it, the cornice of sloth “is the only one of the seven terraces of Purgatory in which there is no prayer or office of the Church, and no reader of Dante will suppose the omission to be accidental.”⁶ Another possibility that we may briefly consider is that Dante could not find an appropriate prayer for the slothful. But two obvious contenders come readily to mind for anyone who has studied the sin of sloth, or acedia (Dante himself uses the Italian word accidïa [Purg. 18.132]), as it was understood in the Middle Ages.⁷ The first is Psalm 90 (91), with its reference to the “noonday devil” (6), which the desert fathers understood to mean acedia.⁸ The second is Psalm 118 (119):28, “My soul has slumbered through heaviness: strengthen thou me in thy words.”⁹ With both options available to Dante, one finds it difficult to believe that this poet of abounding creativity and resourcefulness would omit the prayer of the slothful due to a failure of the imagination.

Equally unsatisfying is the suggestion proffered by Mark Musa that “For some artistic reason, it has seemed appropriate to Dante that no prayer be uttered (or heard) on the Terrace of the Slothful.”¹⁰ The fact that Musa raises the question at all is refreshing, but his short and rather vague explanation leaves much to be desired. The reference to “some” artistic reason...