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Part of the book: Dante and Epicurus

George Corbett

Italian Perspectives 25

Legenda

MedievalItalianTheologyPhilosophyPoetryopen

Abstract.  In line with Marcus Tullius Cicero's treatment in De finibus, Dante Alighieri elects the noble Roman Torquatus as the advocate for Epicureanism in his prose works, the Convivio and the Monarchia. Guido Cavalcanti, as Dante implies in Inferno X, was infected by his father's notorious Epicureanism. An Epicurean-inspired secularism implies a human-centred rather than a God-directed life. There are some men, negligent of their divine nature and explicitly denying faith in an eternal goal, which nonetheless pursue their ethical goal and secular happiness as homines naturales: it is these men for whom Dante reserves the Epicurean appellation. Dante's correct depiction of Epicureans — as noble but heretical — therefore endorses an autonomous and secular ethical standard, and testifies to the life of reason as the only kind of life worthy of being called human. Marco distinguishes the secular hemisphere of human affairs from the spiritual hemisphere: the 'two sun.

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