Note 275 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The commonest form of rationalistic heresy seems to have been unbelief in immortality. Thus Dante in the Inferno estimates that among the heretics there are more than a thousand followers of Epicurus, “who make the soul die with the body,”275 specifying among them the Emperor Frederick II, a cardinal,276 the Ghibelline noble Farinata degli Uberti, and the Guelph Cavalcante Cavalcanti.277 He was thinking, as usual, of the men of his own age; but, as we have seen, this particular heresy had existed in previous centuries, having indeed probably never disappeared from Italy. Other passages in Dante’s works278 show, in any case, that it was much discussed in his time;279 and it is noteworthy that, so far as open avowal went, Italian freethought had got no further two hundred years later. In the period before the papacy had thoroughly established the Inquisition, and diplomacy supervened on the tempestuous strifes of the great factions, there was a certain hardihood of speech on all subjects, which tended to disappear alongside of even a more searching unbelief.