The World of Lucretius

Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

   I just finished reading it. As a winner of a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, it has been conspicuously recognized as mega-worthy.¹ Well, after reading it, I agree with that judgment: it’s a very good book, engagingly written. I do have a couple of criticisms, one of commission and another of omission. I’ll explain briefly, but I want to make it clear that these remarks should discourage no one from reading The Swerve.

   Swerving is what atoms do in Lucretius’s Latin poem that expands on the picture of the world put forward by the Greek writings of Epicurus  two and a half centuries earlier;² only fragments survive of Epicurus’s works. The world, to say a sentence about Lucretius, and everything in it is made up of atoms and their swerving consists of the unpredictable motions they make. The main character of the narrative is Poggio, a passionate book hunter, living in the 15^th century, digging up ancient manuscripts in libraries, mostly of them belonging to monasteries. It is he who finds De rerum natura and copies it in the beautiful script for which he was known.

   Poggio’s career is the continuo that holds the book together. In my view, however, that did not call for an elaborate depiction of the establishment of the Vatican, where Poggio was for a time employed, with downright lurid passages about the corruptions of its denizens. I see those passages as a come-on for readers not so interested in the main themes of the book.  As I see it, those “entertaining” pages are an unnecessary diversion.

   My second critique might be considered a “professional” reaction of a long-retired professor of philosophy. Greenblatt’s depiction of the way in which Lucretius’s worldview is “modern,” is to contrast it to the beliefs as to what the world is like at the time of the poem’s “discovery”—in the 15^th century, with a few references to somewhat later thinkers.

   Most of the differences that are spelled out between the world of Lucretius and that of Poggio focus on Christian doctrine or, more specifically, Catholic beliefs at the time just before the Protestant reformation. Lucretius’ atomism will have nothing to do with a separation of body and soul, with the latter living after the death of the flesh. But not only the afterlife, basic to Christianity, is denied, but the conceptions of sin and guilt are wholly undermined. Finally—one might say “last but not least”—On the Nature of Things depicts a universe that is, for practical purposes, without God. That’s not quite true, since Lucretius states that there indeed are gods but that they have nothing to do with us or with the world we live in.  It’s a kind of backhanded lip service to conventional beliefs.

   Now the world that Lucretius rejects, to come to my quasi-professorial comment, is not only depicted in the Christian doctrine that Greenblatt discusses. The atomism, rooted in Epicurus, is also radically distinct from the world that Aristotle depicts and that is adapted to Christianity by Thomas Aquinas (1215-1274) who lived and worked well before Poggio rediscovered Lucretius’ hymn to a world so radically different. Without trying to give an account of this “predecessor” of a world consisting entirely of undifferentiated atoms, let me simply say that this “older” world consists of  countless substances each of which has its own characteristics, related to each other by a great variety of bonds that create a world that one might say is organic, indeed, resembling an organism—a world sharply distinguished from that depicted by Epicurus and Lucretius. One might rightly be critical of my glib characterization of the world of Aristotle and Aquinas, but still recognize that that is a world radically different from a world of undifferentiated atoms swerving in unpredictable ways.

   My criticism: a bit of a discussion of this world within which, so to speak, Christianity functions would have been an appropriate addition to Greenblatt’s admirable book. In the course of such a discussion, the author might also have been both more expansive and specific as to just how, in this way, the world became modern.

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 ¹I may later read some of the many reviews of the book, but at this point I haven’t looked at any of them.

Fyi: Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.  New York, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2011

 ²Epicurus: 241 BCE – 270; Lucretius: 99 BCE – 55.