The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Conjuring up in hallucinatory detail the hamlet where he was born, Bruno staged a philosophical farce, designed to show that divine providence, at least as popularly understood, is rubbish. The details were all deliberately trivial but the stakes were extremely high: to mock Jesus’ claim that the hairs on one’s head are all numbered risked provoking an unpleasant visit from the thought police. Religion was not a laughing matter, at least for the officials assigned to enforce orthodoxy. They did not treat even trivial jokes lightly. In France, a villager named Isambard was arrested for having exclaimed, when a friar announced after mass that he would say a few words about God, “The fewer the better.”20 In Spain, a tailor named Garcia Lopez, coming out of church just after the priest had announced the long schedule of services for the coming week, quipped that “When we were Jews,21 we were bored stiff by one Passover each year, and now each day seems to be a Passover and feast-day.” Garcia Lopez was denounced to the Inquisition.

  But Bruno was in England. Despite the vigorous efforts that Thomas More made, during his time as chancellor, to establish one, England had no Inquisition. Though it was still quite possible to get into serious trouble for unguarded speech, Bruno may have felt more at liberty to speak his mind, or, in this case, to indulge in raucous, wildly subversive laughter. That laughter had a philosophical point: once you take seriously the claim that God’s providence extends to the fall of a sparrow and the number of hairs on your head, there is virtually no limit, from the agitated dust motes in a beam of sunlight to the planetary conjunctions that are occurring in the heavens above. “O Mercury,” Sofia says pityingly. “You have a lot to do.”

  Sofia grasps that it would take billions of tongues to describe all that must happen even in a single moment in a tiny village in the Campagna. At this rate, no one could envy poor Jove. But then Mercury admits that the whole thing does not work that way: there is no artificer god standing outside the universe, barking commands, meting out rewards and punishments, determining everything. The whole idea is absurd. There is an order in the universe, but it is one built into the nature of things, into the matter that composes everything, from stars to men to bedbugs. Nature is not an abstract capacity, but a generative mother, bringing forth everything that exists. We have, in other words, entered the Lucretian universe.

  That universe was not for Bruno a place of melancholy disenchantment. On the contrary, he found it thrilling to realize that the world has no limits in either space or time, that the grandest things are made of the smallest, that atoms, the building blocks of all that exists, link the one and the infinite. “The world is fine22 as it is,” he wrote, sweeping away as if they were so many cobwebs innumerable sermons on anguish, guilt, and repentance. It was pointless to search for divinity in the bruised and battered body of the Son and pointless to dream of finding the Father in some far-off heaven. “We have the knowledge,” he wrote, “not to search for divinity removed from us if we have it near; it is within us more than we ourselves are.” And his philosophical cheerfulness extended to his everyday life. He was, a Florentine contemporary observed, “a delightful companion23 at the table, much given to the Epicurean life.”

  Like Lucretius, Bruno warned against focusing all of one’s capacity for love and longing on a single object of obsessive desire. It was perfectly good, he thought, to satisfy the body’s sexual cravings, but absurd to confuse those cravings with the search for ultimate truths, the truths that only philosophy—the Nolan philosophy, of course—could provide. It is not that those truths were abstract and bodiless. On the contrary, Bruno might have been the first person in more than a millennium to grasp the full force, at once philosophical and erotic, of Lucretius’ hymn to Venus. The universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction and regeneration, is inherently sexual.

  Bruno found the militant Protestantism he encountered in England and elsewhere as bigoted and narrow-minded as the Counter-Reformation Catholicism from which he had fled. The whole phenomenon of sectarian hatred filled him with contempt. What he prized was the courage to stand up for the truth against the belligerent idiots who were always prepared to shout down what they could not understand. That courage he found preeminently in the astronomer Copernicus, who was, as he put it, “ordained by the gods24 to be the dawn which must precede the rising of the sun of the ancient and true philosophy, for so many centuries entombed in the dark caverns of blind, spiteful, arrogant, and envious ignorance.”

  Copernicus’s assertion that the earth was not the fixed point at the center of the universe but a planet in orbit around the sun was still, when Bruno championed it, a scandalous idea, anathema both to the Church and to the academic establishment. And Bruno managed to push the scandal of Copernicanism still further: there was no center to the universe at all, he argued, neither earth nor sun. Instead, he wrote, quoting Lucretius, there were multiple worlds,25 where the seeds of things, in their infinite numbers, would certainly combine to form other races of men, other creatures. Each of the fixed stars observed in the sky is a sun, scattered through limitless space. Many of these are accompanied by satellites that revolve around them as the earth revolves around our sun. The universe is not all about us, about our behavior and our destiny; we are only a tiny piece of something inconceivably larger. And that should not make us shrink in fear. Rather, we should embrace the world in wonder and gratitude and awe.

  These were extremely dangerous views, every one of them, and it did not improve matters when Bruno, pressed to reconcile his cosmology with Scripture, wrote that the Bible was a better guide to morality than to charting the heavens. Many people may have quietly agreed, but it was not prudent to say so in public, let alone in print.

  Bruno was hardly the only brilliant scientific mind at work in Europe, rethinking the nature of things: in London he would almost certainly have met Thomas Harriot,26 who constructed the largest telescope in England, observed sun spots, sketched the lunar surface, observed the satellites of planets, proposed that planets moved not in perfect circles but in elliptical orbits, worked on mathematical cartography, discovered the sine law of refraction, and achieved major breakthroughs in algebra. Many of these discoveries anticipated ones for which Galileo, Descartes, and others became famous. But Harriot is not credited with any of them: they were found only recently in the mass of unpublished papers he left at his death. Among those papers was a careful list that Harriot, an atomist, kept of the attacks upon him as a purported atheist. He knew that the attacks would only intensify if he published any of his findings, and he preferred life to fame. Who can blame him?

  Bruno, however, could not remain silent. “By the light of his senses27 and reason,” he wrote about himself, “he opened those cloisters of truth which it is possible for us to open with the key of most diligent inquiry, he laid bare covered and veiled nature, gave eyes to the moles and light to the blind … he loosed the tongues of the dumb who could not and dared not express their entangled opinions.” As a child, he recalled in On the Immense and the Numberless, a Latin poem modeled on Lucretius, he had believed that there was nothing beyond Vesuvius, since his eye could not see beyond the volcano. Now he knew that he was part of an infinite world, and he could not enclose himself once again in the narrow mental cell his culture insisted that he inhabit.

  Perhaps if he had stayed in England—or in Frankfurt or Zurich, Prague or Wittenberg, where he had also wandered—he could, though it would have been difficult, have found a way to remain at liberty. But in 1591 he made a fateful decision to return to Italy, to what seemed to him the safety of famously independent Padua and Venice. The safety proved illusory: denounced by his patron to the Inquisition, Bruno was arrested in Venice and then extradited to Rome, where he was imprisoned in a cell of the Holy Office near St. Peter’s Basilica.

  Bruno’s interrogation and trial lasted for eight years, much of his time spent endlessly replying to charges of heresy, reiterating his philosophical vision, rebutting wild accusations, and drawing on his prodig
ious memory to delineate his precise beliefs again and again. Finally threatened with torture, he denied the right of the inquisitors to dictate what was heresy and what was orthodox belief. That challenge was the last straw. The Holy Office acknowledged no limits to its supreme jurisdiction—no limits of territory and, apart from the pope and the cardinals, no limits of person. It claimed the right to judge and, if necessary, to persecute anyone, anywhere. It was the final arbiter of orthodoxy.

  Before an audience of spectators, Bruno was forced to his knees and sentenced as “an impenitent, pernicious, and obstinate heretic.” He was no Stoic; he was clearly terrified by the grisly fate that awaited him. But one of the spectators, a German Catholic, jotted down strange words that the obstinate heretic had spoken at the moment of his conviction and excommunication: “He made no other reply than, in a menacing tone, ‘You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.’”

  On February 17, 1600, the defrocked Dominican, his head shaved, was mounted on a donkey and led out to the stake that had been erected in the Campo dei Fiori. He had steadfastly refused to repent during the innumerable hours in which he had been harangued by teams of friars, and he refused to repent or simply to fall silent now at the end. His words are unrecorded, but they must have unnerved the authorities, since they ordered that his tongue be bridled. They meant it literally: according to one account, a pin was driven into his cheek, through his tongue, and out the other side; another pin sealed his lips, forming a cross. When a crucifix was held up to his face, he turned his head away. The fire was lit and did its work. After he was burned alive, his remaining bones were broken into pieces and his ashes—the tiny particles that would, he believed, reenter the great, joyous, eternal circulation of matter—were scattered.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AFTERLIVES

  SILENCING BRUNO PROVED far easier than returning On the Nature of Things to the darkness. The problem was that, once Lucretius’ poem reentered the world, the words of this visionary poet of human experience began to resonate powerfully in the works of Renaissance writers and artists, many of whom thought of themselves as pious Christians. This resonance—the trace of an encounter in painting or in epic romance—was less immediately disturbing to the authorities than it was in the writings of scientists or philosophers. The ecclesiastical thought police were only rarely called to investigate1 works of art for their heretical implications. But just as Lucretius’ gifts as a poet had helped to diffuse his radical ideas, so too those ideas were transmitted, in ways extremely difficult to control, by artists who were in contact directly or indirectly with Italian humanist circles: painters like Sandro Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, and Leonardo da Vinci; poets like Matteo Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. And before long the ideas surfaced as well far from Florence and Rome.

  On the London stage in the mid-1590s, Mercutio teased Romeo with a fantastical description of Queen Mab:

  She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

  In shape no bigger than an agate stone

  On the forefinger of an alderman,

  Drawn with a team of little atomi

  Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep …

  (Romeo and Juliet, I.iv.55–59)

  “… a team of little atomi”: Shakespeare expected then that his popular audience would immediately understand that Mercutio was comically conjuring up an unimaginably small object. That is interesting in itself, and still more interesting in the context of a tragedy that broods upon the compulsive power of desire in a world whose main characters conspicuously abjure any prospect of life after death:

  Here, here will I remain

  With worms that are thy chambermaids. O, here

  Will I set up my everlasting rest …

  (V.iii.108–10)

  Bruno’s years in England had not been in vain. The author of Romeo and Juliet shared his interest in Lucretian materialism with Spenser, Donne, Bacon, and others. Though Shakespeare had not attended either Oxford or Cambridge, his Latin was good enough to have enabled him to read Lucretius’ poem for himself. In any case, he seems to have personally known John Florio, Bruno’s friend, and he could also have discussed Lucretius with his fellow playwright Ben Jonson, whose own signed copy2 of On the Nature of Things has survived and is today in the Houghton Library at Harvard.

  Shakespeare would certainly have encountered Lucretius from one of his favorite books: Montaigne’s Essays. The Essays, first published in French in 1580 and translated into English by Florio in 1603, contains almost a hundred direct quotations from On the Nature of Things. It is not a matter of quotations alone: there is a profound affinity between Lucretius and Montaigne, an affinity that goes beyond any particular passage.

  Montaigne shared Lucretius’ contempt for a morality enforced by nightmares of the afterlife; he clung to the importance of his own senses and the evidence of the material world; he intensely disliked ascetic self-punishment and violence against the flesh; he treasured inward freedom and content. In grappling with the fear of death, he was influenced by Stoicism as well as Lucretian materialism, but it is the latter that proves the dominant guide, leading him toward a celebration of bodily pleasure.

  Lucretius’ impersonal philosophical epic offered no guidance at all in Montaigne’s great project of representing the particular twists and turns of his physical and mental being:

  I am not excessively fond3 of either salads or fruits, except melons. My father hated all kinds of sauces; I love them all…. There are changes that take place in us, irregular and unknown. Radishes, for example, I first found to agree with me, and then to disagree, now to agree again.

  But this sublimely eccentric attempt to get his whole self into his text is built upon the vision of the material cosmos that Poggio awoke from dormancy in 1417.

  “The world is but a perennial movement,” Montaigne writes in “Of Repentance,”

  All things in it are in constant motion—the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt—both with the common motion and with their own. Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion. (610)

  And humans, however much they may think they choose whether to move or to stand still, are no exception: “Our ordinary practice,” Montaigne reflects in an essay on “The Inconsistency of our actions,” “is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circumstance carries us.”

  As if that way of putting things still gives humans too much control, he goes on to emphasize, with a quotation from Lucretius, the entirely random nature of human swerves: “We do not go; we are carried away, like floating objects, now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm: ‘Do we not see all humans unaware/Of what they want, and always searching everywhere,/And changing place, as if to drop the load they bear?’” (240). And the volatile intellectual life in which his essays participate is no different: “Of one subject we make a thousand, and, multiplying and subdividing, fall back into Epicurus’ infinity of atoms” (817). Better than anyone—including Lucretius himself—Montaigne articulates what it feels like from the inside to think, write, live in an Epicurean universe.

  In doing so, Montaigne found that he had to abandon altogether one of Lucretius’ most cherished dreams: the dream of standing in tranquil security on land and looking down at a shipwreck befalling others. There was, he grasped, no stable cliff on which to stand; he was already on board the ship. Montaigne fully shared Lucretius’ Epicurean skepticism about the restless striving for fame, power, and riches, and he cherished his own withdrawal from the world into the privacy of his book-lined study in the tower of his château. But the withdrawal seems only to have intensified his awareness of the perpetual motion, the instability of forms, the plurality of worlds, the random swerves to which he himself was as fully prone as everyone else.

  Montaigne’s skeptical temper kept him from the dogmatic certainty of Epicureanism. But his immersion in On the
Nature of Things, in its style as well as its ideas, helped him to account for his experience of lived life and to describe that experience, along with the fruits of his reading and reflection, as faithfully as he could. It helped him articulate his rejection of pious fear, his focus on this world and not on the afterlife, his contempt for religious fanaticism, his fascination with supposedly primitive societies, his admiration for the simple and the natural, his loathing of cruelty, his deep understanding of humans as animals and his correspondingly deep sympathy with other species of animals.

  It was in the spirit of Lucretius that Montaigne wrote, in “Of Cruelty,” that he willingly resigned “that imaginary kingship4 that people give us over the other creatures,” admitted that he could barely watch the wringing of a chicken’s neck, and confessed that he “cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.” It is in the same spirit in “Apology for Raymond Sebond” that he mocked the fantasy that humans are the center of the universe:

  Why shall a gosling5 not say thus: “All the parts of the universe have me in view; the earth serve for me to walk on, the sun to give me light, the stars to breathe their influences into me; I gain this advantage from the winds, that from the waters; there is nothing that the heavenly vault regards so favorably as me; I am the darling of nature.”

  And when Montaigne reflected on the noble end of Socrates, it was in the spirit of Lucretius that he focused on the most implausible—and the most Epicurean—of details, as in “Of Cruelty,” “the quiver of pleasure”6 that Socrates felt “in scratching his leg after the irons were off.”