Hoarders, Wasters, and Thieves: The Interactive Sinners

Hoarders, Wasters, and Thieves: The Interactive Sinners

Dante's constructed world of Hell is arranged into different circles moving down into the center with sinners falling into place depending on how they lived their life and how mindful their sins were (moving deeper from incontinence to violence to fraud). All of the punishments have to do directly with their sins, usually in a sort of juxtaposition. Most of the punishments are environmental, like being trapped in a boiling river of blood or being scourged by demons. Two particular groups of sins stand out in that the different sinners directly make for each other's punishment. The hoarders and wasters run back and forth in opposite semi-circles, pushing rocks at each other and shouting for eternity. The thieves are all in a pit together, some in their own human form and some in a reptile form. The reptiles jump the thieves with human form and trade forms with them, continuing into eternity. These two sins are special in meriting an interactive punishment by being fundamentally dependent on like sins.

Virgil introduces the hoarders and wasters to Dante with the phrase, "all the gold that is or ever was beneath the moon could offer rest to even one of these exhausted spirits" (7:64). In earthly life, the two parties of hoarders and wasters lived in opposite relationships with possessions and continue to fight about how to handle possessions into eternity in Hell. However, in Hell they are doing the same things and suffering the same fates as each other. Both the hoarders and the wasters lived in poor handling of possessions. Yet, possessions are not related to their same punishment. Both groups charge each other with rocks, running back and forth and shouting for eternity with no rest.

Even by how we call the hoarders and wasters, we define them by either their excessive accumulation of possessions or their measureless spending. However, the hoarders and wasters do not shout to each other about how their own lifestyles are superior. They actually do not shout about themselves at all. The entire clamor is questioning the past lives of the other camp of sinners, "why do you hoard?" and "why do you squander?" (7:30). In Hell there is obviously no actual hoarding or squandering happening, yet the souls shout at each other in the present tense. Their punishment reaches beyond their approach to possessions to their deeper issue of a perverted self-justification against what they see as their opposite. In the Inferno, there is no difference between hoarding and wasting except which camp the individual souls group with.

The pit of the thieves is comprised of physical mutations between human and reptile forms. Each transformation spans two thieves and is painfully gradual, as a thief prepares and executes a plan to acquire another's possessions. Thieves act as they do because they