Dante and Epicurus seem poles apart. Dante, a committed Christian, depicted in the Commedia a vision of the afterlife and Gods divine justice. Epicurus, a pagan philosopher, taught that the soul is mortal and that all religion is vain superstition. And yet Epicurus is, for Dante, not only the quintessential heretic but an ethical ally. The key to this apparent paradox lies in the heterodox dualism between mans two goals of secular felicity and spiritual beatitude at the heart of Dantes ethical, political and theological thought. Corbetts full-length treatment of Dantes reception and polemical representation of Epicurus addresses a major gap in the scholarship. Furthermore the studys focus on fault lines in Dantes vision of the afterlife where the theological tensions implicit in his dualism surface opens a new way to read the Commedia as a whole in dualistic terms. George Corbett is Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College, and affiliated to the Department of Italian, the University of Cambridge.

(Legenda 2013).