The Spiritual Harm of Loving Money
How Miserliness and Prodigality will Ruin your Soul
What if how you handled money was a mirror for your soul?
In the fourth circle of hell, Dante shows you the spiritual harm of avarice (greed).
The architecture of Dante’s hell is pedagogical—it contains a lesson. Through the grotesque guardian of the fourth circle and the hidden image amongst the damned therein, he reveals how a disordered love of money can fracture God’s call for your life.
The question of avarice is not reducible to how you relate to wealth. It also asks how you see yourself within the cosmos, within God’s Providence.
The choice is yours.
Will avarice render you irrational, an imbecile?
Or will you steward what God has entrusted to you according to reason?
Choose wisely and ascend.
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The Structure of Hell as a Lesson
The architecture of hell is pedagogical. It is here to teach you a lesson—and the location of avarice is no exception.
Avarice (also called greed) is one of the seven deadly vices. It is a disordered love of money and material goods, classically expressed as an inordinate desire to acquire and hoard riches. Dante the Poet places avarice in upper hell, which punishes sins of incontinence—an inability of the soul to bridle its desire of some good. Sins of incontinence include lust (circle two), gluttony (circle three), avarice (circle four), and wrath (circle five). It is distinct from lower hell, which punishes the malicious sins of violence and fraud.
Dante’s hell shows you that avarice is a sin of incontinence that is worse than lust or gluttony but less serious than wrath and the sins of malice—for the lower you are in hell the more severe the sin. And Dante’s architecture of hell has many other lessons, as discussed elsewhere.
But the fourth circle has several surprises.
It has a guardian.
It has more than one type of sinner.
And it makes a secret image.
The Surprising Guardian of the Avaricious
Upon arriving in the fourth circle of hell, Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil run into the esoteric guardian of the avaricious: Plutus. In Greek mythology, he is the ancient god of riches, bountiful harvests, and material abundance, often depicted carrying a cornucopia. He is often conflated, even in ancient mythology, with Hades (in Greek mythology) and Pluto (in Roman mythology), the god of the underworld. Dante the Poet may arguably be playing here with this conflation or mythological overlap.
The guardian being Plutus makes sense, as he’s a minor god of material abundance; but to the degree this figure also represents Pluto, the pagan god of the underworld, you would think he would have a more prominent role in a poem about hell. So, what makes Pluto (Hades) a good image of avarice?
The first clue comes with Virgil calling Plutus the “cursed Wolf of hell,” which is a reference back to the she-wolf that blocked Dante the Pilgrim’s way in the first canto of the poem—the she-wolf represents incontinence, an insatiable desire that consumes the soul. To wit, Plutus is an image of incontinence.
But how would Hades or Pluto, the god of the underworld, represent avarice?
It is because being the god of the underworld also makes Pluto the god of what comes from the ground: wealth. He represents the gold, silver, and jewels that the avaricious crave; thus, whether it is Plutus, Pluto, or some mixture thereof, this bizarre figure represents a full picture of material goods—both on the earth and under the earth.
Yet, even more odd, Dante presents this mythological creature as an imbecile. He is not the glorious god of Hades from Greek myth, but a witless creature that speaks incoherently.
Why does Dante the Poet do this?
Plutus represents the love of money, and Dante the Poet is showing you that the love of money (or of material things, wealth) renders you imbecilic. All sin is irrational, and all sin leads to irrationality. Man is a rational animal, but sin makes man act contrary to his own nature. In sin, man becomes idiotic.
Here, the glorious god of Hades is reduced to a witless, impotent being that is dismissed easily by Virgil—who represents the best of human reason. In other words, ordered reason sees this irrational love of money for what it is—degrading and embarrassing.
Again, Dante the Poet shows you the truth.
But, it is not simply the structure of hell or the guardian of hell that carries a lesson—the very punishment of the avaricious does as well.
And this punishment forms a subtle image, a quiet lesson about your soul and how avarice will fracture God’s call for your life within the cosmos.
