Farinata degli Uberti addresses Dante, engraving by Gustave Doré

“The people who are lying in the sepulchers, could they be seen? For all the covers are lifted, and no one is standing guard.”

And he said to me: “All will be closed from Jehoshapat, they return with the bodies they left up there.

Epicurus and his followers have their cemetery in this part, who make the soul die within the body.”

Dante’s descriptions of heretics in the 10^th Canto start with this question from Dante. He asks Virgil why the covers of the sarcophagi are lifted, a strange detail of their punishment. Virgil’s answer sheds more light on the Last Judgement which has been discussed in past Cantos, as he describes that the covers will be closed after their inhabitants return from Jehoshapat, the site of the Last Judgement. From there these souls will return with their bodies from above, and seal themselves in their tombs for eternity.

This description furthers the dialogue between Dante and Virgil regarding the future fate of the damned. In the 3^rd Circle, Virgil mentions how the sinners will be reunited with their bodies following the Last Judgement, and that their punishments now are less severe compared to the reunification of body and soul. Prior to the Comedy, there were two ideas about the nature of humanity. Plato believed that human nature was complete with the soul, and that the body was a fall from the “perfect.” Aristotle believed that the form of the soul was the body, and leaned toward the impossibility of eternal life because when the body died, so did the soul. The medieval perspective was an adaptation of Aristotle’s perspective, which identified that the soul and body were separate, but that the unification of the two was the “perfect” human nature. Because the souls of the damned are only punished through the soul, after the Last Judgement and the unification of soul and body their punishment will be total. Their suffering will be complete because of the punishment of soul and body.

Another important detail of this terzina is Virgil’s description of Epicurus, a heretic. He says that Epicurus and his followers “make the soul die within the body,” relating the medieval-Aristotle perspective on the soul to the sins of heretics. Through perversion of of the mind, heretics violate a facet of human nature in much the same way that murder or other acts of violence violate the body.