In writing the intro I came across a diary documenting a felow Kossack's conversion, one would say journey, from belief to atheism. You can read it here. I certainly sympathize with the diarist, and love the comment someone made, that the diarist traded a God for a cat. Good trade. But what I also find notable about the diary is how unpredictable it is, what finally makes us reject the comfort of religion and a predetermined belief in a heirarchical universe for what is perhaps the more freethinking option of doubt or non-belief. I don't think anyone could predict it beforehand
I might actually call it a swerve.
Which leads us to a book that should (and I hope) will change many people's lives, not just mine: The Swerve, by Steven Greenblatt. It is about the re-discovery of a long poem that literally changed the world. And, I like to think, humanity awoke from a long nightmare filled with superstitious dreads, to the morning of reason and rational thought. It was finally morning in Christendom
Join me below the fold
in 1417 a disgraced apostolic secretary named Poggio Bracciolini arrived at the door of an obscure monastery in Southern Germany with a request that would seem utterly daffy today, and probably bizarre even back then. He wanted to copy manuscripts. Not recycle them, that people did so they could re-sell the parchment. Certainly not take them; they might have hanged him for a thief. No, he wanted to copy them, to preserve what they said and circulate it, and bring a world to life.
The world he wanted to bring back was not that of the monastery. Nothing interesting went on there; the monks copied manuscripts out of duty or penance, not learning - bright people didn't go into monasteries; they served the nobles or the church where the jobs, money and prestige were. No, Poggio didn't even care to bring back the time hundreds of years prior when Europe was in the dark age. He wanted to bring back the glory and grandeur of the Roman empire, when there was civilization, enlightenment and people cared about learning.
So he comes up with this manuscript, likely in hard to read condition, and using his beautiful handwritten Latin copies out the majestic poem "De Rerum Natura" Roughly 'On the Nature of Things' by the poet Titus Lucretious Carus, written sometime in the first century BCE, or, according to Bracciolini's chronology, almost fifteen hundred years ago (which would make it over two millenia today. The poem is an Epicurean hymn and masterful explanation on, well, the way things are. You might call Lucretius the original two-thousand year old man). Once it got into circulation it had an incalculable influence on the renaissance, the enlightment, the re-discovery of the scientific method, the humanities and arts, and thus indirectly on a new country founded on the principles of the enlightenment, with its Declaration of Independance written by a man who kept five copies of "De Rerum" on his bookshelves and proudly declared "I am an Epicurean". I refer of course, to Thomas Jefferson.
In a way, this is going to be an easy to write diary, because the author himself wrote an engaging and erudite article about his engaging and erudite book. It appeared in the New Yorker last year, with a title I might not have chosen: The Answer Man In it, Profesor Greenblatt (who is a humanities professor at Harvard and wrote one of the best Shakespeare books I have ever read "Will in the World - How Shakespeare became Shakespeare) and described his book obviously way better than I could
there was a line from this work to modernity, though not a direct one: nothing is ever so simple. There were innumerable forgettings, disappearances, recoveries, and dismissals. The poem was lost, apparently irrevocably, and then found. This retrieval, after many centuries, is something one is tempted to call a miracle. But the author of the poem in question did not believe in miracles. He thought that nothing could violate the laws of nature. He posited instead what he called a “swerve”—Lucretius’ principal word for it was clinamen—an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter.
Further
The recovery of “On the Nature of Things” is a story of how the world swerved in a new direction. The agent of change was not a revolution, an implacable army at the gates, or landfall on an unknown continent. When it occurred, nearly six hundred years ago, the key event was muffled and almost invisible, tucked away behind walls in a remote place. A short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties reached out one day, took a very old manuscript off a shelf, and saw with excitement what he had discovered. That was all; but it was enough.
It is possible not only for great civilizations to crumble, but for culture, literacy and enlightened thinking to crumble as well. Literacy was probably not high in the Roman empire to begin with and after 400 AD it rapidly fell. Typical of the fall is what happened in Alexandria, formerly a center of learning with the worlds at the time greatest library. Eventually that all crumbled away; There is a moving description in Greeenblatt's book about the mob murder of Alexandria's resident female scholar Hypatia, which capped an intellectual extinguishing of the city it never regained. Typically, the Christian Patriarch of the city, Cyril, who incited the mob was eventually canonized.
The idea of pleasure and beauty that the work advanced was forgotten with it. Theology provided an explanation for the chaos of the Dark Ages: human beings were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them. God cared about human beings, just as a father cared about his wayward children, and the sign of that care was anger. It was only through pain and punishment that a small number could find the narrow gate to salvation. A hatred of pleasure-seeking, a vision of God’s providential rage, and an obsession with the afterlife: these were death knells of everything Lucretius represented.
And, I can't resist adding, everything I loathe about religion. In fact I'll just flat out state that "The Swerve" is one of those very few, very completely 'me' books. I mentally write in the margins of nearly every page 'That is what I have always thought', and, though I am careful about revealing too much of myself online, this is the book I would want to write, if I was only smarter and more industrious. Like Poggio Bracciolini himself, who ultimately, after releasing 'De Rerum', and having only the faintest idea of its eventual importance - he was by no means an atheist, let alone an Epicurean - died a wealthy and very respected scholar in Florence
* * * * * *
There is an NPR segment about the author and the book which is how I first heard of it. It also explains the book, the author and who Bracciolini was. How fitting it is that this is on NPR; the same repository of enlightened information that one of the parties wants to defund. You know, that party (R) - the party that doesn't like reason or science, but does like whipping up the illiterate mob. Striking how little changes over the centuries.
There are many many examples of the author's dazzling erudition in the book; like Isaac Asimov he makes it accessible, easy to read, and in a neolgism I am fond of 'ensmartened'. Take this passage, on epicureanism:
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 or 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 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?. . .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
I am not going to fully explicate the 'De Rerum Natura' itself, that would be the subject of five or six future diaries, and I worry that I do run on. Besides, you can read both the book and the online version. But I will quote once form the poem; it is the begining. Here is a version quoted in the New Yorker aricle
The Roman poet begins his work (in Martin Ferguson Smith’s careful rendering) with an ardent hymn to Venus:
First, goddess, the birds of the air, pierced to the heart with your powerful shafts, signal your entry. Next wild creatures and cattle bound over rich pastures and swim rushing rivers: so surely are they all captivated by your charm and eagerly follow your lead. Then you inject seductive love into the heart of every creature that lives in the seas and mountains and river torrents and bird-haunted thickets, implanting in it the passionate urge to reproduce its kind.
And here is the same passage in a new translation by Frank O. Copley, worth paying for:
For soon as the year has bared her springtime face
and bars are down for the breeze of growth and birth
in heaven the birds first mark your passage, Lady,
and you; your power pulses in their hearts.
Then wild beasts, too, leap over rich lush lands
and swim swift streams; so prisoned by your charms
they follow lustily where you lead them on.
Last, over sean and hill and greedy river,
through leaf-clad homes of birds, through fresh green fields,
in every creature you sink sink love's tingling dart,
luring them lustily to create their kind.
I guess I would conclude with a quote from the site:
The Swerve is one of those brilliant works of non-fiction that's so jam-packed with ideas and stories it literally boggles the mind. But throughout this profusion of riches, it seems to me, a moral emerges: something about the fragility of cultural inheritance and how it needs to be consciously safeguarded. Greenblatt, of course, doesn't preach, but, instead, as a master storyteller, he transports his readers deep into the ancient and late medieval past; he makes us shiver at his recreation of that crucial moment in a German monastery when modern civilization, as we've come to know it, depended on a swerve of the Poggio's grasping fingers.
And I would add, how passionately those of us who cherish its ideals need to fight to keep them. The two-thousand year old man, if he could, would tell us how little changes; those little bits of matter we are all made of are indeed immortal, and Professor Greenblatt has shown us what we so need to keep relearning.
The Newt is always at the door.