Plutus, the god of wealth, stands at the descent into the fourth circle, uttering a nonsense cry — Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe — which no editor has ever satisfactorily decoded. Virgil silences him with the same formula: this passage is willed on high. They descend into a circle where two great crowds roll enormous weights against each other from opposite sides of the circle, crashing in the middle with a roar, then turning back to push again. They shout at each other: "Why do you hoard?" "Why do you squander?" Two mirror-image sins, equally wrong, equally defined by a disordered relationship to material goods. So many of them are tonsured — priests, cardinals, popes — that Dante notes it bitterly. The Church that should model detachment from wealth is particularly well represented here.
Virgil takes the opportunity, as they stand on the bank of the Styx, to deliver a philosophical meditation on Fortune. Fortune is not random; she is a divine intelligence appointed by God to distribute the goods of the world — wealth, power, reputation — according to a plan that exceeds human wisdom. She moves so fast that human foresight cannot catch her; she is blamed by men for what is in fact Providence. The bliss of the avaricious souls is now compressed into their rolling; all the gold under the moon could not give them rest. The sun, he notes, is directly below them now — it is noon, midnight in Hell.