ABSTRACT

Dante Alighieri's dualistic vision is radical and — as early reception of his works indicates — opens to charges of heresy. In part because of this, much of twentieth-century Dante scholarship has been concerned to distance the Commedia from the heterodox dualism foregrounded in the Convivio and the Monarchia. Dante's partial defence of Epicureanism is therefore also a defence of the noble secular unbeliever. The Epicurean doctrine of mortalism refutes the spiritual dimension of man's hybrid nature and thus the very foundation of Dante's dualistic theory. Moreover, mortalism explicitly undermines Dante's Christian belief and the very existence of Hell or an afterlife at all. In a further indication of the significance of Epicureanism, Dante marshals his highest poetical and theatrical craft in Inferno X. Through the depiction of the Roman heroes who populate the verdant lawns of Limbo and the 'filosofica famiglia' surrounding Aristotle, Dante presents an image of the secular felicity proper to man's earthly life.