The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Wrapped in the traditional philosopher’s cloak, called a tribon, and moving about the city in a chariot, Hypatia was one of Alexandria’s most visible public figures. Women in the ancient world often lived sequestered lives, but not she. “Such was her self-possession24 and ease of manner, arising from the refinement and cultivation of her mind,” writes a contemporary, “that she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates.” Her easy access to the ruling elite did not mean that she constantly meddled in politics. At the time of the earlier attacks on the cult images, she and her followers evidently held themselves aloof, telling themselves perhaps that the smashing of inanimate statues left intact what really mattered. But with the agitation against the Jews it must have become clear that the flames of fanaticism were not going to die down.

  Hypatia’s support for Orestes’ refusal to expel the city’s Jewish population may help to explain what happened next. Rumors began to circulate25 that her absorption in astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy—so strange, after all, in a woman—was sinister: she must be a witch, practicing black magic. In March 415 the crowd, whipped into a frenzy by one of Cyril’s henchmen, erupted. Returning to her house, Hypatia was pulled from her chariot and taken to a church that was formerly a temple to the emperor. (The setting was no accident: it signified the transformation of paganism into the one true faith.) There, after she was stripped of her clothing, her skin was flayed off with broken bits of pottery. The mob then dragged her corpse outside the city walls and burned it. Their hero Cyril was eventually made a saint.

  The murder of Hypatia signified more than the end of one remarkable person; it effectively marked the downfall of Alexandrian intellectual life and was the death knell26 for the whole intellectual tradition that underlay the text that Poggio recovered so many centuries later. The Museum, with its dream of assembling all texts, all schools, all ideas, was no longer at the protected center of civil society. In the years that followed the library virtually ceased to be mentioned, as if its great collections, virtually the sum of classical culture, had vanished without a trace. They had almost certainly not disappeared all at once—such a momentous act of destruction would have been recorded. But if one asks, Where did all the books go? the answer lies not only in the quick work of the soldiers’ flames and the long, slow, secret labor of the bookworm. It lies, symbolically at least, in the fate of Hypatia.

  The other libraries of the ancient world fared no better. A survey of Rome in the early fourth century listed twenty-eight public libraries, in addition to the unnumbered private collections in aristocratic mansions. Near the century’s end, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus complained that Romans had virtually abandoned serious reading. Ammianus was not lamenting barbarian raids or Christian fanaticism. No doubt these were at work, somewhere in the background of the phenomena that struck him. But what he observed, as the empire slowly crumbled, was a loss of cultural moorings, a descent into febrile triviality. “In place of the philosopher27 the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages.” Moreover, he noted sourly, people were driving their chariots at lunatic speed through the crowded streets.

  When, after a long, slow death agony, the Roman Empire in the West finally collapsed—the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, quietly resigned in 476 CE—the Germanic tribes that seized one province after another had no tradition of literacy. The barbarians who broke into the public buildings and seized the villas may not have been actively hostile to learning, but they certainly had no interest in preserving its material traces. The former owners of the villas, dragged off to slavery on some remote farmstead, would have had more important household goods to salvage and take with them than books. And, since the conquerors were for the most part Christians, those among them who learned to read and write had no incentive to study the works of the classical pagan authors. Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

  But a prestigious cultural tradition that has shaped the inner lives of the elite does not disappear easily, even in those who welcome its burial. In a letter written in 384 CE, Jerome—the scholarly saint to whom we owe the story of Lucretius’ madness and suicide—described an inner struggle. Ten years earlier, he recalled, he was on his way from Rome to Jerusalem, where he planned to withdraw from all worldly entanglements, but still he took his prized classical library with him. He was committed to disciplining his body and saving his soul, but he could not forgo the addictive pleasures of his mind: “I would fast,28 only to read Cicero afterwards. I would spend many nights in vigil, I would shed bitter tears called from my inmost heart by the remembrance of my past sins; and then I would take up Plautus again.” Cicero, Jerome understood, was a pagan who argued for a thoroughgoing skepticism toward all dogmatic claims, including the claims of religion, but the elegance of his prose seemed irresistible. Plautus was, if anything, worse: his comedies were populated by pimps, whores, and hangers-on, but their zany wit was delicious. Delicious but poisonous: whenever Jerome turned from these literary delights to the Scriptures, the holy texts seemed crude and uncultivated. His love for the beauty and elegance of Latin was such that when he determined to learn Hebrew, he initially found the experience almost physically repellant: “From the judicious precepts29 of Quintilian, the rich and fluent eloquence of Cicero, the graver style of Fronto, and the smoothness of Pliny,” he wrote in 411, “I turned to this language of hissing and broken-winded words.”

  What saved him, Jerome wrote, was a nightmare. He had fallen gravely ill, and in his delirium, he dreamed that he had been dragged before God’s judgment seat. Asked to state his condition, he replied that he was a Christian. But the Judge sternly replied, “You lie;30 you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian” (Ciceronianus es, non Christianus). These terrible words might have signaled his eternal damnation, but the Lord, in his mercy, instead ordered that Jerome merely be whipped. The sinner was pardoned, “on the understanding that the extreme of torture should be inflicted on me if ever I read again the works of Gentile authors.” When he awoke, Jerome found that his shoulders were black and blue.

  Jerome went on to settle in Bethlehem, where he established two monasteries, one for himself and his fellow monks, the other for the pious women who had accompanied him. There he lived for thirty-six years, studying, engaging in vehement theological controversies, and, most importantly, translating Hebrew Scriptures into Latin and revising the Latin translation of the New Testament. His achievement, the great Latin Bible translation known as the Vulgate, was in the sixteenth century declared by the Catholic Church to be “more authentic” than the original.

  There is, as Jerome’s nightmare suggests, a distinctly destructive element in his piety. Or rather, from the perspective of his piety, his intense pleasure in pagan literature was destroying him. It was not a matter merely of spending more of his time with Christian texts but of giving up the pagan texts altogether. He bound himself with a solemn oath: “O Lord, if ever31 again I possess worldly books or read them, I have denied thee.” This renunciation of the authors he loved was a personal affair: he had in effect to cure himself of a dangerous addiction in order to save his soul. But the addiction—and hence the need for renunciation—was not his alone. What he found so alluring32 was what kept many others like him in thrall to pagan authors. He therefore had to persuade others to make the sacrifice he had made. “What has Horace33 to do with the Psalter,” he wrote to one of his followers, “Virgil with the Gospels and Cicero with Paul?”

  For many generations, learned Christians remained steeped, as Jerome was, in a culture whose values had been shaped by the pagan classics. Platonism contributed to Christianity its model of the soul; Aristotelianism its Prime Mover; Stoicism its model of Providence. All the more reason why those Christians repeated to themselves exemplary stories of renunciation. Through
the telling of these stories, they acted out, as in a dream, the abandonment of the rich cultural soil in which they, their parents, and their grandparents were nurtured, until one day they awoke to find that they actually had abandoned it.

  The knights of renunciation, as in a popular romance, were almost always glamorous figures who cast off the greatest symbol of their status—their intimate access to an elite education—for the sake of the religion they loved. The moment of renunciation came after rigorous training in grammar and rhetoric, engagement with the literary masterpieces, immersion in the myths. Only in the sixth century did Christians venture to celebrate as heroes those who dispensed entirely with education, and even then one can observe a certain hesitation or compromise. Here is Gregory the Great’s celebration of St. Benedict:

  He was born in the district34 of Norcia of distinguished parents, who sent him to Rome for a liberal education. But when he saw many of his fellow students falling headlong into vice, he stepped back from the threshold of the world in which he had just set foot. For he was afraid that if he acquired any of its learning he, too, would later plunge, body and soul, into the dread abyss. In his desire to please God alone, he turned his back on further studies, gave up home and inheritance and resolved to embrace the religious life. He took this step, well aware of his ignorance, yet wise, uneducated though he was.

  What flickers through such moments of abdication is a fear of being laughed at. The threat was not persecution—the official religion of the empire by this time was Christian—but ridicule. A fate no doubt preferable to being thrown to the lions, laughter in the ancient world nonetheless had very sharp teeth. 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.

  When Christianity had completely secured its position, it managed to destroy most of the expressions of this hostile laughter. A few traces, however, survive in the quotations and summaries of Christian apologists. Some of the jibes were common to all of Christianity’s polemical enemies—Jesus was born in adultery, his father was a nobody, and any claims to divine dignity are manifestly disproved by his poverty and his shameful end—but others bring us closer to the specific strain of mockery that surged up from Epicurean circles, when they encountered the messianic religion from Palestine. That mockery and the particular challenge it posed for early Christians set the stage for the subsequent disappearance of the whole Epicurean school of thought: Plato and Aristotle,35 pagans who believed in the immortality of the soul, could ultimately be accommodated by a triumphant Christianity; Epicureanism could not.

  Epicurus did not deny the existence of gods. Rather, he thought that if the concept of divinity made any sense at all, the gods could not possibly be concerned with anything but their own pleasures. Neither creators of the universe nor its destroyers, utterly indifferent to the doings of any beings other than themselves, they were deaf to our prayers or our rituals. The Incarnation, Epicureans scoffed, was a particularly absurd idea. Why should the humans think of themselves as so superior to bees, elephants, ants, or any of the available species, now or in eons to come, that god should take their form and not another? And why then, among all the varieties of humans, should he have taken the form of a Jew? Why should anyone with any sense credit the idea of Providence, a childish idea contradicted by any rational adult’s experience and observation? Christians are like a council of frogs in a pond, croaking at the top of their lungs, “For our sakes was the world created.”

  Christians could try, of course, to reverse the mockery. If such doctrines as the Incarnation and the resurrection of the body seemed absurd—“figments of diseased imagination,”36 as one pagan put it, “and the futile fairy-tales invented by poets’ fancy”—what about the tales that pagans profess to believe:

  Vulcan is lame and crippled; Apollo after years and years still beardless … Neptune has sea-green eyes; Minerva grey, like a cat’s, Juno those of an ox … Janus has two faces, ready to walk backwards; Diana is sometimes short-kilted for the hunt, while at Ephesus she is figured with many breasts and paps.

  But there is, of course, something uncomfortable about the “back-to-you” strategy, since the alleged ridiculousness of one set of beliefs hardly shores up the validity of another.

  Christians knew, moreover, that many pagans did not believe in the literal truth of their own myths and that there were some—Epicureans prominent among them—who called into question virtually all religious systems and promises. Such enemies of faith found the doctrine of bodily resurrection particularly risible, since it was contradicted both by their scientific theory of atoms and by the evidence of their own senses: the rotting corpses that testified with nauseating eloquence to the dissolution of the flesh.

  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. He knew all too well the responses he would get from the doubters:

  What will be the use37 of the hands themselves and the feet and all the working parts of the body, when even trouble about food will cease? What will be the use of the kidneys … and of the other genital organs of both sexes and the dwelling places of the foetus and the streams from the nurse’s breasts, when sexual intercourse and conception and upbringing alike will cease to be? Finally, what use will the whole body be, which will of course have absolutely nothing to do?

  “The crowd mocks,” Tertullian wrote, “judging that nothing is left over after death,” but they will not have the last laugh: “I will rather laugh at the crowd at the time when they are cruelly burning up themselves.” On the Day of Judgment, each man will be brought forth before the heavenly tribunal, not a piece of him, not a shadow, not a symbolic token, but rather the whole of him, as he lived on the earth. And that means teeth and intestines and genitals, whether or not their mortal functions have ceased forever. “Yes!” Tertullian addressed38 his pagan listeners. “We too in our day laughed at this. We are from among yourselves. Christians are made, not born!”

  Some critics pointed out with a derisory smile that many features of the Christian vision were stolen from much more ancient pagan stories: a tribunal in which souls are judged, fire used for punishment in an underground prison house, a divinely beautiful paradise reserved for the spirits of the holy. But Christians replied that these ancient beliefs were all distorted reflections of the true Christian mysteries. The eventual success of this argumentative strategy is suggested by the very word we have been using for those who clung to the old polytheistic faith. Believers in Jupiter, Minerva, and Mars did not think of themselves as “pagans”: the word, which appeared in the late fourth century, is etymologically related to the word “peasant.” It is an insult, then, a sign that the laughter at rustic ignorance had decisively reversed direction.

  The charge of doctrinal plagiarism was easier for Christians to deal with than the charge of absurdity. Pythagoreans who believed in bodily resurrection had the right general idea; it was simply an idea that needed correction. But Epicureans who said that the whole idea of resurrection was a grotesque violation of everything that we know about the physical universe could not be so easily corrected. It made some sense to argue with the former, but the latter were best simply silenced.

  Though early Christians,39 Tertullian among them, found certain features in Epicureanism admirable—the celebration of friendship, the emphasis on charity and forgiveness, a suspicion of worldly ambition—by the early fourth century, the task had become clear: the atomists had to disappear. The followers of Epicurus had already aroused considerable enmity outside the Christian community. When the emperor known as Julian the Apostate (c. 331–363), who attempted to revive paganism against the mounting Christian onslaught, drew up a list of works that it was important for pagan priests to
read, he also noted some titles that he explicitly wished to exclude: “Let us not,”40 he wrote, “admit discourses by Epicureans.” Jews, likewise, termed anyone who departed from the rabbinic tradition apikoros, an Epicurean.41

  But Christians particularly found Epicureanism a noxious threat. If you grant Epicurus42 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 destroys43 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 comparably made over.

  But it was not enough to blacken the reputations of Epicurus and Lucretius, to repeat endlessly that they were stupid, swinishly self-indulgent, insane, and, finally, suicidal. It was not enough even, by this means, to suppress the reading of their works, to humiliate anyone who might express interest in them, to discourage copies from ever being made. Even more than the theory that the world consisted only of atoms and void, the main problem was the core ethical idea: that the highest good is the pursuit of pleasure and the diminution of pain. What had to be undertaken was the difficult project of making what appeared simply sane and natural—the ordinary impulses of all sentient creatures—seem like the enemy of the truth.