The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Above all, Lucretius’ fingerprints are all over Montaigne’s reflections on two of his favorite subjects: sex and death.7 Recalling that “the courtesan Flora used to say that she had never lain with Pompey without making him carry away the marks of her bites,” Montaigne immediately recalls lines from Lucretius: “They hurt the longed-for body with their viselike grip,/And with their teeth they lacerate the tender lip” (“That our desire is increased by difficulty”). Urging those whose sexual passion is too powerful to “disperse it,” Montaigne in “Of Diversion” quotes Lucretius’ scabrous advice—“Eject the gathered sperm in anything at all”—and then adds, “I have often tried it with profit.” And attempting to conquer any bashfulness and capture the actual experience of intercourse, he finds that no description ever written is more wonderful—more ravishing, as he puts it—than Lucretius’ lines on Venus and Mars cited in “On some verses of Virgil”:

  He who rules the savage things

  Of war, the mighty Mars, oft on thy bosom flings

  Himself; the eternal wound of love drains all his powers

  Wide-mouthed, with greedy eyes thy person he devours,

  Head back, his very soul upon thy lips suspended:

  Take him in thy embrace, goddess, let him be blended

  With thy holy body as he lies; let sweet words pour

  Out of thy mouth.

  Citing the Latin, Montaigne does not attempt to match this description in his own French; he simply stops to savor its perfection, “so alive, so profound.”

  There are moments, rare and powerful, in which a writer, long vanished from the face of the earth, seems to stand in your presence and speak to you directly, as if he bore a message meant for you above all others. Montaigne seems to have felt this intimate link with Lucretius, a link that helped him come to terms with the prospect of his own extinction. He once saw a man die, he recalled, who complained bitterly in his last moments that destiny was preventing him from finishing the book he was writing. The absurdity of the regret, in Montaigne’s view, is best conveyed by lines from Lucretius: “But this they fail to add: that after you expire/Not one of all these things will fill you with desire.” As for himself, Montaigne wrote, “I want death8 to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden” (“That to philosophize is to learn to die”).

  To die “careless of death,” Montaigne understood, was a far more difficult goal than it sounded: he had to marshal all of the resources of his capacious mind in order to hear and to obey what he took to be the voice of Nature. And that voice, he understood, spoke above all others the words of Lucretius. “Go out of this world,”9 Montaigne imagined Nature to say,

  as you entered it. The same passage that you made from death to life, without feeling or fright, make it again from life to death. Your death is part of the order of the universe; it is part of the life of the world.

  Our lives we borrow from each other …

  And men, like runners, pass along the torch of life. (Lucretius)

  (“That to philosophize”)

  Lucretius was for Montaigne the surest guide to understanding the nature of things and to fashioning the self to live life with pleasure and to meet death with dignity.

  In 1989, Paul Quarrie, then the librarian at Eton College, bought a copy of the splendid 1563 De rerum natura, edited by Denys Lambin, at auction for £250. The catalogue entry noted that the endpapers of the copy were covered with notes and that there were many marginalia in both Latin and French, but the owner’s name was lost. Scholars quickly10 confirmed what Quarrie suspected, as soon as he had the book in his hands: this was Montaigne’s personal copy of Lucretius, bearing the direct marks of the essayist’s passionate engagement with the poem. Montaigne’s name on his copy of Lucretius was overwritten—that is why it took so long to realize who had owned it. But in a wildly heterodox comment penned in Latin on the verso of the third flyleaf, he did leave an odd proof that the book was his. “Since the movements of the atoms11 are so varied,” he wrote, “it is not unbelievable that the atoms once came together in this way, or that in the future they will come together like this again, giving birth to another Montaigne.”

  Montaigne took pains to mark the many passages in the poem that seemed to him “against religion” in denying the fundamental Christian principles of creation ex nihilo, divine providence, and judgment after death. Fear of death, he wrote in the margin, is the cause of all our vices. Above all, he noted again and again, the soul is corporeal: “The soul is bodily” (296); “The soul and the body have an extreme conjunction” (302); “the soul is mortal” (306); “The soul, like the foot, is part of the body” (310); “the body and the soul are inseparably joined.” (311) These are reading notes, not assertions of his own. But they suggest a fascination with the most radical conclusions to be drawn from Lucretian materialism. And though it was prudent to keep that fascination hidden, it is clear that Montaigne’s response was by no means his alone.

  Even in Spain, where the vigilance of the Inquisition was high, Lucretius’ poem was being read, in printed copies carried across the border from Italy and France and in manuscripts that quietly passed from hand to hand. In the early seventeenth century Alonso de Olivera, doctor to Princess Isabel de Borbón, owned a French edition printed in 1565. At a book sale in 1625,12 the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo acquired a manuscript copy of the work for only one real. The writer and antiquary Rodrigo Caro, from Seville, had two copies, printed in Antwerp in 1566, in his library inventoried in 1647; and in the monastery of Guadalupe an edition of Lucretius, printed in Amsterdam in 1663, was kept in his cell, it would appear, by Padre Zamora. As Thomas More discovered when he tried to buy up and burn Protestant translations of the Bible, the printing press had made it maddeningly difficult to kill a book. And to suppress a set of ideas that were vitally important in enabling new scientific advances in physics and astronomy proved to be even more difficult.

  It was not for want of trying. Here is an attempt from the seventeenth century to accomplish what the killing of Bruno had failed to do:

  Nothing comes from atoms.13

  All the bodies of the world shine with the beauty of their forms.

  Without these the globe would only be an immense chaos.

  In the beginning God made all things, so that they might generate something.

  Consider to be nothing that from which nothing can come.

  You, O Democritus, form nothing different starting from atoms.

  Atoms produce nothing; therefore, atoms are nothing.

  These are the words of a Latin prayer that young Jesuits at the University of Pisa were assigned to recite every day to ward off what their superiors regarded as a particularly noxious temptation. The aim of the prayer was to exorcise atomism and to claim the form, structure, and beauty of things as the work of God. The atomists had found joy and wonder in the way things are: Lucretius saw the universe as a constant, intensely erotic hymn to Venus. But the obedient young Jesuit was to tell himself every day that the only alternative to the divine order he could see celebrated all around him in the extravagance of Baroque art was a cold, sterile, chaotic world of meaningless atoms.

  Why did it matter? As More’s Utopia had made clear, divine providence and the soul’s postmortem rewards and punishments were non-negotiable beliefs, even in playful fantasies about non-Christian peoples at the edge of the known world. But the Utopians did not base their doctrinal insistence on their understanding of physics. Why would the Jesuits, at once the most militant and the most intellectually sophisticated Catholic order in this period, commit themselves to the thankless task of trying to eradicate atoms? After all, the notion of the invisible seeds of things had never completely vanished during the Middle Ages. The core idea of the universe’s basic material building blocks—atoms—had survived the loss of the ancient texts. Atoms could even be spoken of without substantial risk, provided that they were said to be set in motion and ordered by divin
e providence. And there remained within the highest reaches of the Catholic Church daring speculative minds eager to grapple with the new science. Why should atoms in the High Renaissance have come to seem, in some quarters at least, so threatening?

  The short answer is that the recovery and recirculation of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things had succeeded in linking the very idea of atoms, as the ultimate substrate of all that exists, with a host of other, dangerous claims. Detached from any context, the idea that all things might consist of innumerable invisible particles did not seem particularly disturbing. After all, the world had to consist of something. But Lucretius’ poem restored to atoms their missing context, and the implications—for morality, politics, ethics, and theology—were deeply upsetting.

  Those implications were not immediately apparent to everyone. Savonarola may have mocked the pointy-headed intellectuals who thought the world was made up out of invisible particles, but on this issue at least he was playing for laughs, not yet calling for an auto-da-fé. Catholics like Erasmus and More could, as we have seen, think seriously about how to integrate elements of Epicureanism with the Christian faith. And in 1509, when Raphael painted the School of Athens in the Vatican—his magnificent vision of Greek philosophy—he seems to have been sublimely confident that the whole classical inheritance, not simply the work of a select few, could live in harmony with the Christian doctrine being earnestly debated by the theologians depicted on the opposite wall. Plato and Aristotle have pride of place in Raphael’s luminous scene, but there is room under the capacious arch for all of the major thinkers, including—if traditional identifications are correct—Hypatia of Alexandria and Epicurus.

  But by midcentury, this confidence was no longer possible. In 1551 the theologians at the Council of Trent had, to their satisfaction at least, resolved once and for all the debates that had swirled around the precise nature of the central Christian mystery. They had confirmed as Church dogma the subtle arguments with which Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, drawing on Aristotle, had attempted to reconcile transubstantiation—the metamorphosis of the consecrated water and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ—with the laws of physics. Aristotle’s distinction between the “accidents” and the “substance” of matter made it possible to explain how something that looked and smelled and tasted exactly like a piece of bread could actually (and not merely symbolically) be Christ’s flesh. What the human senses experienced was merely the accidents of bread; the substance of the consecrated wafer was God.

  The theologians at Trent presented these ingenious arguments not as a theory but as the truth, a truth utterly incompatible with Epicurus and Lucretius. The problem with Epicurus and Lucretius was not their paganism—after all, Aristotle too was a pagan—but rather their physics. Atomism absolutely denied the key distinction between substance and accidents, and therefore threatened the whole magnificent intellectual edifice resting on Aristotelian foundations. And this threat came at exactly the moment when Protestants had mounted their most serious assault on Catholic doctrine. That assault did not depend on atomism—Luther and Zwingli and Calvin were not Epicureans, any more than Wycliffe and Hus had been—but for the militant, embattled forces of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church, it was as if the resurgence of ancient materialism had opened a dangerous second front. Indeed, atomism seemed to offer the Reformers access to an intellectual weapon of mass destruction. The Church was determined not to allow anyone to lay hands on this weapon, and its ideological arm, the Inquisition, was alerted to detect the telltale signs of proliferation.

  “Faith must take first place14 among all the other laws of philosophy,” declared a Jesuit spokesman in 1624, “so that what, by established authority, is the word of God may not be exposed to falsity.” The words were a clear warning to curb unacceptable speculation: “The only thing necessary to the Philosopher, in order to know the truth, which is one and simple, is to oppose whatever is contrary to Faith and to accept that which is contained in Faith.” The Jesuit did not specify a specific target of this warning, but contemporaries would have easily understood that his words were particularly directed at the writer of a recently published scientific work called The Assayer. That writer was Galileo Galilei.

  Galileo had already been in trouble for using his astronomical observations to support the Copernican claim that the earth was in orbit around the sun. Under pressure from the Inquisition, he had pledged not to continue to advance this claim. But The Assayer, published in 1623, demonstrated that the scientist was continuing to tread on extremely dangerous ground. Like Lucretius, Galileo defended the oneness of the celestial and terrestrial world: there was no essential difference, he claimed, between the nature of the sun and the planets and the nature of the earth and its inhabitants. Like Lucretius, he believed that everything in the universe could be understood through the same disciplined use of observation and reason. Like Lucretius, he insisted on the testimony of the senses, against, if necessary, the orthodox claims of authority. Like Lucretius, he sought to work through this testimony toward a rational comprehension of the hidden structures of all things. And like Lucretius, he was convinced that these structures were by nature constituted by what he called “minims” or minimal particles, that is, constituted by a limited repertory of atoms combined in innumerable ways.

  Galileo had friends in the highest places: The Assayer was dedicated to none other than the enlightened new pope, Urban VIII, who as Cardinal Maffeo Barbarini had warmly supported the great scientist’s research. As long as the pope was willing to protect him, Galileo could hope to get away with the expression of his views and with the scientific investigations that they helped to generate. But the pope himself was under growing pressure to suppress what many in the Church, the Jesuits above all, regarded as particularly noxious heresies. On August 1, 1632, the Society of Jesus strictly prohibited and condemned the doctrine of atoms. That prohibition in itself could not have precipitated a move against Galileo, since The Assayer had been cleared eight years earlier for publication. But Galileo’s publication, also in 1632, of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems gave his enemies the opportunity that they had been looking for: they promptly denounced him to the Congregation of the Holy Office, as the Inquisition was called.

  On June 22, 1633, the Inquisition delivered its verdict: “We say, sentence, and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of the evidence arrived at in the trial, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy.” Still protected by powerful friends and hence spared torture and execution, the convicted scientist15 was sentenced to life imprisonment, under house arrest. The heresy officially specified in the verdict was “having believed and held the doctrine, false and contrary to sacred and divine Scripture, that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world.” But in 1982 an Italian scholar, Pietro Redondi, uncovered a document in the archives of the Holy Office that altered the picture. The document was a memorandum detailing heresies found in The Assayer. Specifically, the inquisitor found evidence of atomism. Atomism, explained the inquisitor, is incompatible with the second canon of the thirteenth session of the Council of Trent, the session that spelled out the dogma of the Eucharist. If you accept Signor Galileo Galilei’s theory, the document observes, then when you find in the Most Holy Sacrament “the objects of touch, sight, taste, etc.,” characteristic of bread and wine, you will also have to say, according to the same theory, that these characteristics are produced on our senses by “very tiny particles.” And from this you will have to conclude “that in the Sacrament there must be substantial parts of bread and wine,” a conclusion that is flat-out heresy. Thirty-three years after the execution of Bruno, atomism remained a belief that the vigilant forces of orthodoxy were determined to suppress.

  If complete suppression proved impossible, there was some consolation for the enemies of Lucr
etius in the fact that most printed editions carried disclaimers. One of the most interesting of these is in the text used by Montaigne,16 the 1563 edition annotated by Denys Lambin. It is true, Lambin concedes, that Lucretius denies the immortality of the soul, rejects divine providence, and claims that pleasure is the highest good. But “even though the poem itself is alien to our religion because of its beliefs,” Lambin writes, “it is no less a poem.” Once the distinction has been drawn between the work’s beliefs and its artistic merit, the full force of that merit can be safely acknowledged: “Merely a poem? Rather it is an elegant poem, a magnificent poem, a poem highlighted, recognized and praised by all wise men.” What about the content of the poem, “these insane and frenzied ideas of Epicurus, those absurdities about a fortuitous conjunction of atoms, about innumerable worlds, and so on”? Secure in their faith, Lambin writes, good Christians do not have to worry: “neither is it difficult for us to refute them, nor indeed is it necessary, certainly when they are most easily disproved by the voice of truth itself or by everyone remaining silent about them.” Disavowal shades into a reassurance subtly conjoined with a warning: sing the praises of the poem, but remain silent about its ideas.

  The aesthetic appreciation of Lucretius depended on the possession of very good Latin, and hence the poem’s circulation was limited to a relatively small, elite group. Everyone grasped that any attempt to make it more broadly accessible to the literate public would arouse the deepest suspicion and hostility from the authorities. More than two hundred years apparently passed, after Poggio’s discovery in 1417, before an attempt was actually made.