The Greedy and the Wasteful Clash — Divine Comedy

Hoarders and wasters look like enemies, but both are enslaved to money. Opposite habits turn out to be the same trap. The lesson is not pick a side; it is seeing when an obsession has eaten someone clean enough that you cannot tell who they used to be, and learning that raging at how fortune moves will not buy you rest. Plutus screams about wealth until Virgil shuts him down with a word and the demon collapses. In the fourth circle, souls roll weights and crash while shouting across the ring: why do you hold so tight, why do you throw it away. Virgil says many are churchmen who made avarice their god. Dante hopes to recognise faces. He cannot. The sin has darkened them past knowing. When Dante asks why fortune exists, Virgil describes her as God's minister moving goods between peoples on a schedule humans cannot read. She is blessed and does not answer blame. Not all the gold beneath the moon could buy these souls peace. The stars are falling. They cannot stay and argue with the wheel. They descend into the Styx. On the surface the wrathful tear each other apart. Beneath the bubbles the sullen gurgle that they once carried foul mist in the sweet air. Obsession with things has become obsession with rage. They walk the muddy bank without stopping until they reach the base of a tower, where another threshold waits in the dark.