The center of the center is love. Readers of Dante have long noticed that this Canto falls in the middle of the Purgatorio, which is itself the middle of the poem as a whole. And that in this Canto Virgil begins his speech on the nature of love. Love, then, is the very center of Divine Comedy. Virgil will begin to tell Dante that all sin is a distorted attempt at love. We either love too little, or we love the wrong things, or we love lesser things too much. What Purgatory does is realign, purify and redirect our love. It is love which gives rise to all our actions, and indeed (as Dante quotes Boethius at the end of the Paradiso) it is love "which moves the sun and the other stars".
In order to walk with Dante and Virgil in this and the following Cantos, it might be necessary for us to put aside our own definitions of the word "love", and try to grasp what the poet means when he uses the word. This is no easy task. We use the word almost too freely. Our contemporary definitions or ideas about "love" may be quite foreign to Dante's world. But at least trying to grasp what Dante means is needed in order to climb further up the Mountain, and come closer to the entrance to the Paradiso.
In the story of the poem, Dante and Virgil emerge from the smoky fog of the Wrathful, and the sun begins to set. They can climb no further on Mount Purgatory: without the Sun (God), there is no ascent. Just as the sun begins its descent, Dante experiences 3 visions of wrath. These visions are internal. Dante tells the reader that he sees these things "in my imagination" (XVII.19); "into my soaring fantasy" (.25); "in my imagination" (.34). Now it may also be the case that we need to rethink what is meant by "imagination". Dante, who draws heavily on some of Augustine's themes of journey and pilgrimage from the Confessions, may well have in mind Augustine's use of the term imagination from book X of that work. Imagination is not merely "daydreaming", nor is it restricted to "creativity". Rather, for Augustine, imagination is that power of the mind to think, or in some sense even be (ok, let's go for Aristotle here) pure potentiality. It is a greater power and scope of the human mind than what we normally think of when we use the term "imagination". Again, it is worth noting that these visions, these images, are within Dante. They are not external to him. The movement is from outward things to inward things.
Once they have been forced to stop by the setting sun, Dante asks Virgil about the next level (the Slothful) which they are just reaching. This gives Virgil an opportunity to begin his speech on the nature of love, which will continue into Canto XVIII.
Neither Creator nor his creatures ever
my son, lacked love. There are, as you well know
two kinds: the natural love, the rational.Natural love may never be at fault;
the other may: by choosing the wrong goal,
by insufficient or excessive zeal.While it is fixed on the Eternal Good,
and observes temperance loving worldly goods,
it cannot be the cause of sinful joys;but when it turns toward evil or pursues
some good with not enough or too much zeal-
the creature turns on his Creator then.XVII.91ff
What else is sin but a failure, or misdirection, of love? Our problem, explains Virgil, is found in the structure of the Purgatorio. There are sins which are the result of loving the wrong things (the lower levels); sins of loving too little (the middle levels); and then sins of loving too much, or to put it another way, loving good things out of proportion to our love for God. The Slothful, whom they will encounter next, are an example of those who "love too little"; the Lustful, whom they will meet later on, are an example of those who "love too much", so to speak.
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