Summary
Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern begins by recounting Greenblatt’s chance discovery, while he was still in college, of a translation of De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), a poem by the Roman philosopher Lucretius. He immediately found the work fascinating, especially its focus on the fear of death, a fear that had dominated Greenblatt’s life until then. His mother had been terrified of dying, and her terror had shaped her young son’s life. Lucretius, however, taught that fearing death was foolish since the universe consisted of nothing but atoms, ceaselessly arranging and rearranging themselves in different patterns. For Lucretius, there is no God, no pattern, and no purpose, merely atoms in flux. Everything is ultimately subject to change—a fact that should make us appreciate whatever beauty we encounter and which should also make us unafraid of dying. No living thing escapes death, but nothing—neither pleasure nor pain—lies beyond it except further atomic change.
The impact of Lucretius’s ideas (Greenblatt began to believe) helped explain a period of human history—the “Renaissance”—that seemed especially devoted to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure. During the Renaissance, people began to move away from supernatural explanations and began, more and more, to see the universe as consisting of matter. In other words, they began to think like Lucretius. This change of thought was due in great measure to the Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), a frequent secretary to various popes. In 1417, Bracciolini discovered, in an obscure German monastery, an extremely rare surviving copy of De rerum natura. The book, widely known and highly influential during the later classical period, had been lost for roughly a thousand years. Bracciolini’s discovery of the text suddenly renewed its life and revived its potential influence.
The Renaissance, of course, had been well under way by the time Poggio made his find. Poggio himself, with his love of ancient Greek and Roman texts and his eagerness to seek them out, might accurately be called a kind of “Renaissance man,” like his great predecessor Francesco Petrarca, or “Petrarch” (1304-1374). But the rediscovery of De rerum natura, at least according to Greenblatt, pushed the Renaissance even more toward secularism and a focus on the present material world. Lucretius’s poem helped give new attention and new attractiveness to the palpable beauties and pleasures of the here-and-now as opposed to the consolations or terrors of a mysterious hereafter.
Lucretius’s ideas had been strongly affected by those of Epicurus, an even more ancient thinker. Born in Greece, Epicurus had done much to formulate and advocate atomism, which did away with gods, superstitions, the supernatural, and the fear of death, replacing them instead (at least according to his followers) with rational thought, peace of mind, and the highest of all pleasures—the pleasures of the intellect. Epicureanism was not merely a scientific view but an entire philosophy of life. Although few of Epicurus’s own words survive, his ideas had an enormous impact, inspiring both fervent belief and equally fervent opposition. Opponents associated such thinking with mere hedonism and material self-indulgence; advocates and defenders (such as Lucretius in De rerum natura) emphasized the liberating potential of Epicurean thought.
According to Epicurus and Lucretius, atoms, and the space between them, have always existed. No creator made them. The objects formed of atoms (including people) may dissolve, but atoms do not. They simply recombine into different objects. The ways atoms connect and dissolve can be rationally studied and rationally understood, but no designer—no God—is needed to explain any of this. Instead, by pure chance the particles sometimes...
(This entire section contains 1527 words.)
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“swerve” from their ordinarily straight paths and thus collide and link. All material objects in the universe larger than atoms themselves result from such collisions and linkings. And, just as atoms can swerve from apparently predetermined paths, so can humans exercise free will.
According to Epicureans such as Lucretius, everything in nature (or at least everything larger than atoms) results from chance and evolution. Atoms combine purely by accident, and successful combinations survive by adapting to their environments. Yet those environments themselves may someday change. This fortuitous universe was not designed to accommodate humans (since it was not “designed” at all). It is less our home than simply the place where we happen to find ourselves. We are made of the same matter of which everything else consists. The existence of everything living is, and always has been, a struggle for survival—a struggle to adapt to particular environments. Even the human soul itself consists of extremely tiny particles. It pervades the body and dissipates, at death, like perfume into the air. There is no afterlife, and there are no rewards or punishments after death. After death, there is no pain, no longing, no fear, in fact no consciousness at all. Therefore death should not cause terror but should be calmly accepted.
Religions (according to Lucretius’s Epicurean philosophy) prey on irrational fears and desires. In this way and many others they are cruel, especially since they so often emphasize punishment and sacrifice. But there is no point in religion since there are no supernatural beings to placate or fear. The chief purpose of human life is to be happy, which partly means satisfying humanity’s fairly simple material needs and recognizing one’s human limitations. True pleasure results, in part, from stepping outside the rat-races in which other humans engage. Pleasure results, in large part, from having moderate, reasonable desires. Pain usually results from irrational desires and irrational fears. Both kinds of desire are delusions, and the power of both diminishes when they are recognized as such. Pain and fear are symptoms of being unreasonable, of imagining the universe as a different kind of place than it really is. Appreciating the true nature of the universe results in wonder, especially when we realize that all the beauty and order it contains result from pure chance.
Poggio’s discovery of the manuscript containing these revolutionary ideas was largely fortuitous. Soon, however, multiple copies of the manuscript had been made, including one by Machiavelli. And, once the text was printed, its influence expanded even more rapidly. Many Christians immediately recognized the numerous threats it posed to orthodox religion. Printed copies were therefore often preceded by explanations and cautions. Lucretius’s ideas were sometimes mocked and attacked, but this fact in itself is evidence that they were also becoming widely known. One prominent intellectual wrote a lengthy commentary on De rerum natura but eventually decided that it would be prudent to burn his treatise. No one, at first, openly embraced or defended Lucretian views, and some claimed to admire the poem simply as poetry. Others claimed to satirize the subversive concepts that their very satire thereby helped publicize. In 1516, the book was banned from Florentine schools, and printing of it in Italy temporarily ceased. But by then it was too late to completely suppress either the book or the ideas it contained. Even the Catholic Church rejected calls that the text should be banned, deciding instead that it should merely be treated as a compilation of fables.
Greenblatt detects the influence of Lucretian thinking in the works of such later writers as Sir Thomas More, Giordano Bruno, Thomas Harriot, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, and also Montaigne and Moliere. Some writers deeply familiar with Lucretius’s poem, such as its English translator Lucy Hutchinson, eventually rejected its philosophy, but within two hundred years of the manuscript’s rediscovery by Poggio, the book’s impact could no longer be denied or suppressed. If so many of its ideas strike so many people today as mere common sense, that reaction was by no means always typical when the poem at first reappeared.
Greenblatt’s own volume, however, is not simply concerned with Lucretian ideas. Instead, he contextualizes all the historical moments when those ideas flourished, as well as the means and men by which they circulated. He outlines the life and times of Poggio himself as well as the life and circumstances of Epicurus and Lucretius and Greco-Roman culture. He explains the production and storage of books both in the classical period and in the early middle ages, and he explores the complexities of international and ecclesiastical politics in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Vivid characters populate his own volume, including a variety of popes, politicians, and humanist scholars.
The era we call “the Renaissance” was, according to Greenblatt, a period that broke free from many of the intellectual and social confines that had existed during the middle ages, when the church had been so dominant and when believers were taught to feel a kind of contempt for the world, for the here-and-now, and to focus instead on fearing hell and achieving eternal happiness in heaven. The rediscovery of Lucretius’s De rerum natura was, he thinks, both a symptom and a partial cause of a massive change in ways that humans could think about themselves and the universe. The rediscovery of an old book helped inaugurate new views of literally everything.
