The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

112      The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt, W.W. Norton, NY, 2011

PREFACE

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[Swerve defined: an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter.]

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. . . 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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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By the 16^th 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.”

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 . . .

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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.

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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.

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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.

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[re: Botticelli’s painting of Venus]

THE RETURN

CHAPTER NINE

SWERVES

CHAPTER TEN

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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.

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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.

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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.

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[last sentence in the book]  “I am an Epicurean.”  Thomas Jefferson