The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
112 The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt, W.W. Norton,
NY, 2011
PREFACE
7
[Swerve
defined: an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter.]
10
.
. . when you look in Siena at Duccio’s painting of the enthroned Virgin, the Maesta, and then in Florence at
Botticelli’s Primaven, a painting
that, not coincidentally, was influenced by On
the Nature of Things.
THE BOOK HUNTER
CHAPTER ONE
THE MOMENT OF
DISCOVERY
CHAPTER TWO
IN SEARCH OF
LUCRETIUS
CHAPTER THREE
67
In
the years leading up to the assassination of Julius Caesar, philosophical
speculation was hardly the only available response to social stress. Religious cults originating in far-off places
like Persia, Syria, and Palestine began to make their way to the capital, where
they6 aroused wild fears and expectations, particularly among the plebs. A handful of the elite, those more insecure
or simply curious, may have attended with something other than contempt to the
prophecies from the east, prophecies of a savior born of obscure parentage who
would be brought low, suffer terribly, and yet ultimately triumph. But most would have regarded such tales as
the overheated fantasies of a sect of stiff-necked Jews.
73
That
Lucretius and many others did more than simply associate themselves with
Epicurus, that they celebrated him as godlike in his wisdom and courage,
depended not on his social credentials but upon what they took to be the saving
power of his vision. The core of this
vision may be traced back to a single incandescent idea: that everything that
has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of
indestructible building blocks, irreducibly small in size, unimaginably vast in
number. The Greeks had a word for these
invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be
divided any further: atoms.
THE TEETH OF
TIME
CHAPTER FOUR
97
What
was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan,
was not only its language, the crude style of the Gospels’ Greek resting on the
barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic, but also its exaltation of divine
humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism.
98
Epicurus
did not deny the existence of gods.
Rather, he thought that if the concept of divinity make any sense at
all, the gods could not possible by concerned with anything but their own
pleasures.
99
The
early Church Father Tertullian vehemently insisted that, despite all
appearances, everything would come back in the afterlife, down to the last
details of the mortal body.
101-102
But
Christians particularly found Epicureanism a noxious threat. If you grant Epicurus his claim that the soul
is mortal, wrote Tertullian, the whole fabric of Christian morality
unravels. For Epicurus, human suffering
is always finite: “if it is slight, he [Epicurus] says, you may despise it, if
it is great it will not be long.” But to
be Christian, Tertullian countered, is to believe that torture and pain last
forever: “Epicurus utterly destroys
religion,” wrote another Church Father; take Providence away, and “confusion
and disorder will overtake life.”
Christian
polemicists had to find a way to turn the current of mockery against Epicurus
and his followers. Ridiculing the pagan
pantheon did not work in this case, since Epicureanism eloquently dismantled
the whole sacrificial worship of the gods and dismissed the ancient
stories. What had to be done was to
refashion the account of the founder Epicurus so that he appeared no longer as
an apostle of moderation in the service of reasonable pleasure but instead as a
Falstaffian figure of riotous excess. He
was a fool, a pig, a madman. And his
principal Roman disciple, Lucretius, had to be comparable made over.
103
A
hatred of pleasure-seeking and a vision of God’s providential rage: these were
death knells of Epicureanism, henceforward branded by the faithful as “insane.” Lucretius had urged the person who felt the
prompting of sexual desire to satisfy it: “a dash of gentle pleasure sooths the
sting.” Christianity, as a story
rehearsed by Gregory demonstrates, pointed in a different direction. The pious Benedict found himself thinking of
a woman he had once seen, and, before he knew what was happening, his desires
were aroused.
He
then noticed a think patch of nettles and briers next to him. Throwing his garment aside he flung himself
into the sharp thorns and stinging nettles.
There he rolled and tossed until his whole body was in pain and covered
with blood. Yet, once he had conquered
pleasure through suffering, his torn and bleeding skin served to drain the
poison of temptation from his body.
Before long, the pain that was burning his whole body had put out the
fires of evil in his heart. It was by
exchanging these two fires that he gained the victory over sin.
What
worked for the saint in the early sixth century would, as monastic rules made
clear, work for others. In one of the
great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain
triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.
109
Pleasure
seeking had come to seem philosophically indefensible. Epicurus was dead and buried, almost all of
his works destroyed. And after St.
Jerome in the fourth century briefly noted that Lucretius had committed
suicide, there were no attacks on Epicurus’ great Roman disciple. He was forgotten.
The
survival of the disciple’s once celebrated poem was left to fortune. It was by chance that a copy of On the Nature of Things made it into the
library of a handful of monasteries, places that had buried, seemingly forever,
the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure. It
was by chance that a monk laboring in a scriptorium somewhere or other in the
ninth century copies the poem before it moldered away forever. And it was by chance that his copy escaped
fire and flood and the teeth of time for some five hundred years until, one day
in 1417, it came into the hands of the humanist who proudly called himself Poggius Florentinus, Poggio the
Florentine.
BIRTH AND
REBIRTH
CHAPTER FIVE
118-19
Petrarch
was a devout Christian, and throughout his life he reflected with ardent
seriousness on his spiritual condition.
And yet he was, over the course of a complex career of restless
journeying, diplomacy, soul-searching, and compulsive writing, a man held in
the grip of a fascination with pagan antiquity that he himself could never
completely fathom. Though he was for
long periods of his life a relatively solitary figure, Petrarch did not keep
his fascination to himself. He insisted with
missionary zeal on the expressive power, the beauty, and the challenge of all
that lay broken and buried beneath the crushing weight of neglect.
A
gifted scholar, Petrarch began to search for ancient texts that had been
forgotten. He was not the first to do
so, but he managed to invest this search with a new, almost erotic urgency and
pleasure, superior to all other treasure seeking:
Gold,
silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious
paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable
and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one’s
bones. They speak to us, consult with
us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.
Copying,
comparing, and correcting the ancient Latin texts that he found, Petrarch
returned them to circulation by sharing them with a vast network of
correspondents to whom, often rising at mid night to sit at his desk, he wrote
with manic energy. And he responded to
the ancient writers as if they were somehow a living part of this network,
intimate friends and family with whom he could share his thoughts. When he found a great cache of Cicero’s
private letters to his wealthy friend Atticus, candid letters filled with
glimpses of egotism, ambition, and resentment, Petrarch did not hesitate to
write a letter to Cicero, reproaching him for failing to live up to his own
high principles.
120
The
early humanists felt themselves, with mingled pride, wonder, and fear, to be
involved in an epochal movement. In part
the movement involved recognizing that something that had seemed alive was
really dead. For centuries, princes and
prelates had claimed that they were continuing the living traditions of the
classical world and had appropriated, in some form or other, the symbols
Petrarch and those he inspired insisted that this easy appropriation was a lie:
The Roman Empire did not actually exist in Aachen, where the ruler who called
himself the :Holy Roman Emperor” was crowned: the institutions and ideas that
had defined the world of Cicero and Virgil had been torn to pieces, and the
Latin written by the philosophers and theologians of the past six or seven
hundred years was an ugly and distorted image, life that reflected in a badly
made mirror, of what had once been so beautifully eloquent. It was better not to pretend any longer, but
to acknowledge that there was no continuity.
Instead, there was a corpse, long buried and by now disintegrated, under
one’s feet.
124
At
the center of Florence’s cramped urban landscape of fortified towers and walled
monasteries was the Palazzo della Signoria, the political heart of the
republic. It was here for Salutati that
the city’s glory resided. The
independence of Florence, the fact that it was not a client of another state,
that it was not dependent on the papacy, and that it was not ruled by a king, a
tyrant, or a prelate but governed by a body of its own citizens, was for
Salutati what most mattered in the world.
IN THE LIE
FACTORY
CHAPTER SIX
135
For
an ambitious provincial upstart like Poggio, the swirling, swollen orbit of the
pope was the principal magnet, but Rome held out other opportunities. The powerful Roman noble families, most
prominently, the Colonna or the Orsini, could always find some way to make use
of someone endowed with excellent Latin and exquisite handwriting. Still more, the bishops and cardinals
residing in Rome had their own smaller courts, in which a notary’s ability to
draft and pen legal documents was a sought-after skill. Upon his arrival, Poggio found a place in one
of these courts, that of the cardinal of Bari.
But this was only a brief halt on the way to the higher goal of papal
service, whether in the palace (the palatium)
or the court (the Curia). Before the
year was out, the staunchly republican Salutati had pulled enough strings at
the court of the reigning pope, Boniface IX, to help his prized pupil get what
he most wanted, the coveted position of scribe, apostolic scriptor.
140
The
curia, the friends agree, is a great place not only for serious study but also
for lighter amusements such as gaming, horsemanship, and hunting. Kist think of the dinner parties at the papal
court, witty gossip, along with fantastic food and drink served by beautiful,
young, hairless boys. And for those
whose tastes do not run in the direction of Ganymede, there are the abundant
pleasures of Venus. Mistresses, adulterous matrons, courtesans of all
descriptions occupy a central place in the curia, and appropriately so, since
the delights they offer have such a central place in human happiness. Lewd songs, naked breasts, kissing, fondling,
with small white lapdogs trained to lick around your groin to excite desire,
and all for remarkably low prices.
142
Poggio
had established himself at the very center of what he called “the Bugiale,” the
Lie Factory. There, in a room at the
court, the papal secretaries would regularly gather to exchange stories and
jokes. “Nobody was spared,” Poggio
wrote, in a phrase echoed by Lapo, “and whatever met with our disapprobation
was freely censured; oftentimes the Pope himself was the first subject-matter
of our criticism.” The chatter, trivial,
mendacious, sly, slanderous, often obscene, was the kind of speech that is
almost forgotten before its sound fades away, but Poggio seems not to have
forgotten any of it. He went back to his
desk and, in his best Latin, fashioned the conversations he had had in the Lie
Factory into something he entitled the Facetiae.
144
By
the 16th century, the Catholic hierarchy, deeply alarmed by the
Protestant Reformation, would attempt to stamp out within its own ranks this
current of subversive humor. Poggio’s Facetiae was on a list, alongside books
by Boccaccio, Erasmus, and Machiavelli, that the Church wished to burn. But in the world Poggio inhabited, it was
still permissible, even fashionable, to reveal what was, in any case, widely
understood. Poggio could write of the
institution where he spent most of his working life that “there is seldom room
for talent or honesty; everything is obtained through intrigue or luck, not to
mention money, which seems to hold supreme sway over the world.”
153-54
Poggio
was highly self-conscious about these letters, and expected them to circulate,
but his book mania, expressed again and again, seems unguarded, candid, and
authentic. It was the key to a feeling
singularly inappropriate to a papal bureaucrat: freedom. “Your Poggio,” he wrote, “is content with
very little and you shall see this for yourself; sometimes I am free for
reading, free from all care about public affairs which I leave to my
superiors. I live free as much as I
can.” Freedom here has nothing to do
with political liberty or a notion of rights or the license to say whatever he
wished or the ability to go wherever he chose.
It is rather the experience of withdrawing inwardly from the press of
the world, in which he himself was so ambitiously engaged, and ensphering
himself in a space apart. For Poggio,
that experience was what it meant to immerse himself in an ancient book: “I am free for reading.”
Poggio
savored the feeling of freedom at those times when the usual Italian political
disorder became particularly acute or when the papal court was in an uproar or
when his own personal ambitions were thwarted or, perhaps equally threatening,
when those ambitions were realized.
Hence it was a feeling to which he must have clung with particular
intensity when sometime after 1410, having amply displayed his gifts as a
humanist scribe, a learned writer, and a court insider, he accepted the most
prestigious and most dangerous appointment of his career, the post of apostolic secretary to the sinister, sly,
and ruthless Baldassare Cossa, who had been elected pope.
A PIT TO CATCH
FOXES
Chapter Seven
157
The
relics of the fallen greatness only made the experience of the present more
melancholy. In the company of his
humanist friends, Poggio could try to conjure up what it all must once have
look like: “Cast your eyes on the Palatine hill, and seek, among the shapeless
and enormous fragments, the marble theatre, the obelisks, the colossal statues,
the porticoes of Nero’s palace.” But it
was to the shattered present that, after his brief imaginary excursions into
antiquity, the papal bureaucrat always had to return.
157-58
The
present, in the turbulent years that Rome was ruled by John XXIII, must have
threatened not only to extinguish the occasional “freedom” Poggio prized but
also to drag him into cynicism so deep that there could be no escape. For the question with which Poggio and others
in Rome grappled was how they could retain even the shreds of a moral
sensibility while living and working with this particular pope. A decade older than his apostolic secretary
Poggio, Baldassare Cossa had been born on the small volcanic island of Procida,
near Naples. His noble family held the
island as its personal possession, the hidden coves and well-defended fortress
evidently well suited to the principal family occupation, piracy.
165-66
The
correspondence that the secretaries copied out for their pope attempted to turn
the focus away from the schism and from papal corruption and toward someone
whose name Poggio must have begun to write in official documents again and
again.
Forty-four-year-old
Jan Hus, a Czech priest and religious reformer, had been for some years a thorn
in the side of the Church. From his
pulpit and in his writings, he vehemently attacked the abuses of clerics,
condemning their widespread greed, hypocrisy, and sexual immorality. He denounced the selling of indulgences as a
racket, a shameless attempt to profit from the fears of the faithful. He urged his congregants not to put their
faith in the Virgin, the cult of the saints, the Church, or the pope, but in
God alone. In all matters of doctrine he
preached that Holy Scripture was the ultimate authority.
170-71
Seventy
charges were formally read out against him [Cossa]. Fearing their effect on public opinion, the
council decided to suppress the sixteen most scandalous charges, never
subsequently revealed, and accused the pontiff only of simony, sodomy, rape,
incest, torture, and murder. He was
charged with poising his predecessor, along with his physician and others. Worst of all, at least among the charges that
were made public, was one that his accusers dredged up from the ancient
struggle against Epicureanism: the pope was said to have maintained stubbornly,
before reputable persons, that there was no future life or resurrection, and
that the souls of men perish with their bodies, like brutes.
On
May 29, 1415, he was formally deposed.
Stricken from the roster of official popes, the name John XXIII was once
again available, though it took more than five hundred years for another pope,
the remarkable Angelo Roncalli, to be courageous enough in 1958 to adopt the
name for himself.
176
He
is describing the scenes at the baths, he tells his friend, “so that you may
understand from a few examples what a great center of the Epicurean way of
thinking this is.”
With
his contrasting vision of anxious, work-obsessed, overly disciplined Italians
and happy-go-lucky, carefree Germans, Poggio believed he glimpsed for a moment
the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. He knew perfectly well that this pursuit ran
counter to Christian orthodoxy. But in
Baden it was as if he found himself on the threshold of a mental world in which
Christian rules no longer applied.
In
his reading, Poggio had frequently stood on that threshold. He never ceased to occupy himself with the
pursuit of lost classical texts. Judging
from a remark by Niccoli, he spent some of his time in Constance looking
through the library collections, there in the monastery of St. Mark he evidently
found a copy of an ancient commentary on Virgil. In the early summer of 1415, probably just
after his master had been formally deposed and he found himself definitively
out of work, he made his way to Cluny, in France, where he found a codex with
seven orations by Cicero, two of which had been unknown. He sent this precious manuscript to his
friends in Florence and also made a copy in his own hand . . .
179-81
The
expedition to the monastery was expensive, and Poggio was perennially short of
money: such was the consequence of his decision not to take the profitable
route of priesthood. Back in Constance
his money worries deepened, as he found himself dangling, without work and
without clear prospects. His deposed
master, Baldassare Cossa, was desperately negotiating a quiet retirement for
himself. After spending three years in
prison, he eventually bought his release and was made a cardinal in Florence,
where he died in 1419, his elegant tomb by Donatello erected in the baptistery
of the Duomo. A other pope Poggio had
earlier worked for, the deposed Gregory XII, died during this same period. The last thing he said was “I have not
understood the world, and the world has not understood me.”
It
was high time for a prudent, highly trained bureaucrat, almost forty years old,
to look out for himself and find some stable means of support. But Poggio did nothing of the kind. Instead, a few months after his return from
St. Gall, he left Constance again, this time apparently without
companions. His craving to discover and
to liberate whatever noble beings were hidden in the prison house had evidently
only intensified. He had no idea what he
would find; he only knew that if it was something ancient and written in
elegant Latin, then it was worth rescuing at all costs. The ignorant, indolent monks, he was
convinced, were locking away traces of a civilization far greater than anything
the world had known for more than a thousand years.
Of
course, all Poggio could hope to find were pieces of parchment, and not even
very ancient ones. But for him these
were not manuscripts but human voices.
What emerged from the obscurity of the library was not a link in a long
chain of texts, one copies from the other, but rather the thing itself, wearing
borrowed garments, or even the author himself, wrapped in gravecloths and
stumbling into the light
“We
accept Aesculapius as belonging among the gods because he called back
Hippolytus, as well as others from the underworld,” Francesco Barbaro wrote to
Poggio after hearing of his discoveries;
If
people, nations, and provinces have dedicated shrines to him, what might I
think ought to be done for you, if that custom had not already been
forgotten? You have revived so many
illustrious men and such wise men, who were dead for eternity, through whose
minds and teachings not only we but our descendants will be able to live well
and honourable.
Books
that had fallen out of circulation and were sitting in German libraries were
thus transformed into wise men who had died and whose souls had been imprisoned
in the underworld; Poggio, the cynical papal secretary in the service of the
famously corrupt pope, was viewed by his friends as a culture hero, a magical
healer who reassembled and reanimated the torn and mangled body of antiquity.
Thus
it was that in January 1417, Poggio found himself once again in a monastic
library, probably Fulda. There he took
from the self a long poem whose author he may have recalled seeing mentioned in
Quintilian or in the chronicle compiled by St. Jerome: T. LUCRETI CARI DE RERUM NATURA.
THE WAY THINGS
ARE
CHAPTER EIGHT
194
Almost
all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have
actually made it real. Lucretius had in
mind the sacrifice of Iphegenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have
been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near
Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of
course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate
the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the
endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.
199
The
exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to
everyone. What is needed is to refuse
the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and
calmly at the true nature of things. All
speculation, all science, all morality, all attempts to fashion a life worth
living, must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of
things: atoms and the void and nothing else.
It
might seem at first that this comprehension would inevitably bring with it a
sense of cold emptiness, as if the universe had been robbed of its magic. But being liberated from harmful illusions is
not the same as disillusionment. The
origin of philosophy, it was often said in the ancient world, was wonder:
surprise and bafflement led to a desire to know, and knowledge in turn laid the
wonder to rest. But in Lucretius’
account the process is something like the reverse: it is knowing the way things
are that awakens the deepest wonder.
200
On the Nature of
Things
is that rarest of accomplishments: a great work of philosophy that is also a
great poem. Inevitably, compiling a list
of propositions, as I have done, obscures Lucretius’ astonishing poetic power,
a power he himself downplayed when he compared his verses to honey smeared
around the lip of a cup containing medicine that a sick man might otherwise
refuse to drink. The downplaying is not
altogether surprising: his philosophical master and guide, Epicurus, was
suspicious of eloquence and thought that the truth should be uttered in plain,
unadorned prose.
.
. . the poetic greatness of Lucretius’ work is not incidental to his visionary
project, his attempt to wrest the truth away from illusion-mongerers. Why should the tellers of fables, he thought,
possess the pleasure and beauty of the world?
Without those means, the world we inhabit runs the risk of seeming
inhospitable, and for their comfort people will prefer to embrace fantasies, if
those fantasies are destructive. With
the aid of poetry, however, the actual nature of things, an infinite number of
indestructible particles swerving into one another, hooking together, coming to
life, coming apart, reproducing, dying, recreating themselves, forming an
astonishing, constantly changing universe, can be depicted in its true
splendor.
202
[re:
Botticelli’s painting of Venus]
THE RETURN
CHAPTER NINE
SWERVES
CHAPTER TEN
220
By
the 1490s, then, some sixty or seventy years after Lucretius’ poem was returned
to circulation, atomism was sufficiently present in Florence to make it worth
ridiculing. Its presence did not mean that
its positions were openly embraced as true.
No prudent person stepped forward and said, “I think that the world is
only atoms and void; that, in body and soul, we are only fantastically complex
structures of atoms linked for a time and destined one day to come apart.” No respectable citizen openly said, “The soul
dies with the body. There is no judgment
after death. The universe was not
created for us by divine power, and the whole notion of the afterlife is a
superstitious fantasy.” No one who wished
to live in peace stood up in public and said, “The preachers who tell us to
live in fear and trembling are lying.
God has no interest in our actions, and though nature is beautiful and
intricate, there is no evidence of an underlying intelligent design. What should matter to us is the pursuit of
pleasure, for pleasure is the highest goal of existence.” No one said, “Death is nothing to us and no
concern of our.” But these subversive,
Lucretian thoughts percolated and surfaced wherever the Renaissance imagination
was at its most alive and intense.
225
What
mattered was not adherence but mobility, the renewed mobility of a poem that
had been resting untouched in one or a most two monastic libraries for many
centuries, the mobility of Epicurean arguments that had been silenced first by
hostile pagans and then by hostile Christians, the mobility of daydreams,
half-formed speculations, whispered doubts, dangerous thoughts.
225-26
Valla
found a way to take one central Epicurean argument, the praise of pleasure as
the ultimate good, and give it sympathetic articulation in a dialogue. That argument is detached from the full
philosophical structure that gave it its original weight and finally
repudiated. But the dialogue’s Epicurean
speaks in defense of pleasure with an energy, subtlety, and persuasiveness that
had not been heard for more than a millennium.
263
[last
sentence in the book] “I am an
Epicurean.” Thomas Jefferson
