The Swerve

Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve is a highly readable, probing account of how the modern world was influenced by a book that was thought to be lost. Lucretius, a Roman poet, wrote a poem called On the Nature of Things. In it, he espoused the ideas of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Like many Roman documents, it was thought to be lost, until a Florentine book-hunter, Poggio Bracciolini, found a copy in a German monastery in 1417. As Greenblatt so eloquently puts it, Poggio had no idea that the work would change his entire world.

I am scandalously under-educated in the works of ancient scholars and philosophers, so it came as a surprise to me that even back then, thinkers theorized that the universe was made up of building blocks: "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 these invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be divided any further: atoms."

That's kind of mind-blowing, considering they didn't have microscopes. Further, Epicureans believed that the highest goal in life was to pursue pleasure, or at least the avoidance of pain. "A philosophical claim life's ultimate goal is pleasure--even if that pleasure was defined in the most restrained and reasonable terms--was a scandal, both for pagans and for their adversaries, the Jews and later the Christians. Pleasure as the highest good? What about worshipping the gods and ancestors? Serving the family, the city, and the state? Scrupulously observing the laws and commandments? Pursuing virtue or a vision of the divine?"

Instead, Lucretius, in interpreting Epicurus, held that belief in the supernatural was childish. "In a universe so constructed, Lucretius argued, there is no reason to think that the earth or its inhabitants occupy a central place, no reason to set humans apart from all other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the gods, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no justification for dreams of limitless power or perfect security, no rationale for wars of conquest of self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature, no escape from the constant making and unmaking and remaking of forms." He also maintained that the universe has no creator. All of this centuries before Copernicus and Galileo.

Of course, this did not last. Greenblatt details how the early Christians changed all this--suffering became more desirable than pleasure. He goes into grisly detail of how monks and nuns and others, all the way up to Sir Thomas More in England, inflicted pain upon themselves. He writes about how progressive thinkers, like Jan Hus or Brother Bruno, ended up paying for their enlightened beliefs by being burned at the stake, their bones broken up and thrown in a river.

But Poggio's discovery slowly infiltrated modern thought. Greenblatt, successfully I think, links Lucretius to many more modern thinkers, ranging from Machiavelli to Jefferson. The "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence is straight from Lucretius, and Greenblatt quotes Jefferson as saying, "I am an Epicurean."

This is a short but rich book. Greenblatt gives us a detailed biography of Poggio, who was a type of secretary for several popes, including the original John XXIII, who was cast out. This was at a time when there were three men claiming to be Pope, and the selection of them was crassly political. "The pope was a thug, but he was a learned thug, who appreciated the company of fine scholars and expected court business to be conducted in high humanist style." This pope was removed from office, and his number expunged, not to be used again for five hundred years, when the official John XXIII came to office in the 1950s.

There are other wonderful side trips, such as the reign of Savanarola in Florence, who conducted the bonfire of the vanities, but ended up burned to death on the same exact spot. There is also a detailed discussion of how the Christian church resisted Lucretius' ideas, but, especially because of the Guttenberg printing press, it became impossible to stop them.

Greenblatt is saying, in essence, that the Renaissance had its seeds sewn by an obscure book-hunter, and the monks who copied things out, even if they didn't believe in them.