In 1416, somewhere in southern Germany, an Italian scholar found a manuscript in the library of a monastery. Stephen Greenblatt makes a case that this find was a major inflection point (or “swerve”) in the history of western civilization. It’s a provocative claim, and for all I know it may be true. The scholar was Poggio Bracciolini, and he had come north with his employer, Pope John XXIII, to a church conference to decide who deserved to be Pope—there were three contenders. Poggio’s guy lost, which gave this busy administrator some free time to indulge his hobby—looking for ancient manuscripts in monastic libraries.
The “lost masterpiece” trope is irresistable—well, it is to me, and I suspect it is to a lot of people. I remember an episode from the novel Lost Horizon where someone plays an unknown work by Chopin on the piano. I remember Henry James’ The Aspern Papers where the protagonist is trying to lay hands on a lost manuscript by a famous deceased author. I avidly consume news about actual lost or withheld manuscripts by the likes of Kafka and Salinger.
In the case of The Swerve, not only is a manuscript found after being lost for over a thousand years, that manuscript turns out to be the wedge that drives open the Renaissance. Or at least one of the wedges. The manuscript is De rerum natura—On the Nature of Things—written by the Roman poet Lucretius in the first century BC. Lucretius was an adherent of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Epicurean philosophy starts with an hypothesis about the natural world:
[E]verything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructable building blocks, irreduceably small in size, unimaginably vast in number. The Greeks had a word for these invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be divided any further: atoms.
From this hypothesis come some rather radical notions: if the universe is made out of physical stuff, then where are the gods who control the affairs of men, and where exactly do we go after we die? (Lucretius didn’t actually deny the existence of gods, he just denied that they had any interest in or influence on the affairs of men.) Epicurean philosophy is materialist—there is no point in accumulating karma points during our time on earth, because there is no heaven or hell where our account can be told. To quote Peggy Lee, “if that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing/Let’s break out booze and have a ball.“ The highest good is pleasure, not in the sense of indulgence, but in the sense of avoiding pain: both for ourselves and for others.
The early Church fathers found Epicureanism much more threatening than pagan religions, because they feared that without the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell, people would be inclined to dispense with order and authority:
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.
This is why today the word “Epicure” today connotes “a person who is self-indulgent in their fondness for sensuous luxury.” Give the early Church fathers their due—they understood PR.
But this single acorn that Poggio Bracciolini planted in the fertile soil of early 15th-century Florence grew into a stout and flourishing tree. Among its fruits were Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Giordano Bruno, and Montaigne, among others. I’m reminded of Black Sea, by Neal Ascherson, only instead of charting an inspired course through the geography of a particular region, Greenblatt charts his course through time. It’s his talent to make the people and events that he connects to Lucretius seem essential and inevitable, a central narrative of western civilization. The skeptic in me wonders whether other, equally talented writers might not be able to detect other such sequences and make equivalent claims for them. But Greenblatt has an ace in the hole, that singular lynchpin, the last suriviving copy of a masterwork lost for a thousand years.
