The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Part 6

Nonetheless, in his book-hunting exploits in the early fifteenth century, Poggio had done something amazing. The texts he returned to circulation gave him a claim to a place of honor amidst his more famous Florentine contemporaries: Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Luca della Robbia, Masaccio, Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca. Unlike Brunelleschi's ma.s.sive cupola, the greatest dome constructed since cla.s.sical antiquity, Lucretius' great poem does not stand out against the sky. But its recovery permanently changed the landscape of the world.

CHAPTER TEN.

SWERVES.

MORE THAN FIFTY ma.n.u.scripts of De rerum natura from the fifteenth century survive today-a startlingly large number, though there must have been many more. Once Gutenberg's clever technology was commercially established, printed editions quickly followed. The editions were routinely prefaced with warnings and disavowals.

As the fifteenth century neared its end, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola ruled Florence for several years as a strict "Christian republic." Savonarola's pa.s.sionate, charismatic preaching had provoked large numbers of Florentines, the elite as well as the ma.s.ses, into a short-lived but feverishly intense mood of repentance. Sodomy was prosecuted as a capital crime; bankers and merchant princes were attacked for their extravagant luxuries and their indifference to the poor; gambling was suppressed, along with dancing and singing and other forms of worldly pleasure. The most memorable event of Savonarola's turbulent years was the famous "Bonfire of the Vanities," when the friar's ardent followers went through the streets collecting sinful objects-mirrors, cosmetics, seductive clothing, songbooks, musical instruments, playing cards and other gambling paraphernalia, sculptures and paintings of pagan subjects, the works of ancient poets-and threw them onto an enormous blazing pyre in the Piazza della Signoria.

After a while, the city tired of its puritanical frenzy, and on May 23, 1498, Savonarola himself was hanged in chains, alongside two of his key a.s.sociates, and burned to ashes on the spot where he had staged his cultural bonfire. But when his power was at its height and his words still filled the citizenry with pious fear and loathing, he devoted a series of his Lenten sermons to attacking ancient philosophers, singling out one group in particular for special ridicule. "Listen women," he preached to the crowd, "They say that this world was made of atoms, that is, those tiniest of particles that fly through the air." No doubt savoring the absurdity, he encouraged his listeners to express their derision out loud: "Now laugh, women, at the studies of these learned men."

By the 1490s, then, some sixty or seventy years after Lucretius' poem was returned to circulation, atomism was sufficiently present in Florence to make it worth ridiculing. Its presence did not mean that its positions were openly embraced as true. No prudent person stepped forward and said, "I think that the world is only atoms and void; that, in body and soul, we are only fantastically complex structures of atoms linked for a time and destined one day to come apart." No respectable citizen openly said, "The soul dies with the body. There is no judgment after death. The universe was not created for us by divine power, and the whole notion of the afterlife is a superst.i.tious fantasy." No one who wished to live in peace stood up in public and said, "The preachers who tell us to live in fear and trembling are lying. G.o.d has no interest in our actions, and though nature is beautiful and intricate, there is no evidence of an underlying intelligent design. What should matter to us is the pursuit of pleasure, for pleasure is the highest goal of existence." No one said, "Death is nothing to us and no concern of ours." But these subversive, Lucretian thoughts percolated and surfaced wherever the Renaissance imagination was at its most alive and intense.

At the very time that Savonarola was urging his listeners to mock the foolish atomists, a young Florentine civil servant was quietly copying out for himself the whole of On the Nature of Things. Though its influence may be detected, he did not once mention the work directly in the famous books he went on to write. He was too cunning for that. But the handwriting was conclusively identified in 1961: the copy was made by Niccol Machiavelli. Machiavelli's copy of Lucretius is preserved in the Vatican Library, MS Rossi 884. What better place for the progeny of Poggio, the apostolic secretary? In the wake of Poggio's friend, the humanist pope Nicholas V, cla.s.sical texts had a place of honor in the Vatican Library.

Still, Savonarola's warnings corresponded to authentic concerns: the set of convictions articulated with such poetic power in Lucretius' poem was virtually a textbook-or, better still, an inquisitor's-definition of atheism. Its eruption into Renaissance intellectual life elicited an array of anxious responses precisely from those most powerfully responsive to it. One such response was that of the great mid-fifteenth-century Florentine Marsilio Ficino. In his twenties, Ficino was deeply shaken by On the Nature of Things and undertook to write a learned commentary on the poet he called "our brilliant Lucretius." But, coming to his senses-that is, returning to his faith-Ficino burned this commentary. He attacked those he called the "Lucretiani" and spent much of his life adapting Plato to construct an ingenious philosophical defense of Christianity. A second response was to separate Lucretius' poetic style from his ideas. This separation seems to have been Poggio's own tactic: he took pride in his discovery, as in the others he made, but he never a.s.sociated himself or even grappled openly with Lucretian thought. In their Latin compositions Poggio and close friends like Niccoli could borrow elegant diction and turns of phrase from a wide range of pagan texts, but at the same time hold themselves aloof from their most dangerous ideas. Indeed, later in his career Poggio did not hesitate to accuse his bitter rival, Lorenzo Valla, of a heretical adherence to Lucretius' master, Epicurus. It is one thing to enjoy wine, Poggio wrote, but quite another to sing its praises, as he claims Valla did, in the service of Epicureanism. Valla even went beyond Epicurus himself, Poggio adds, in attacking virginity and praising prost.i.tution. "The stains of your sacrilegious speech will not be cleansed by means of words" Poggio added ominously, "but with fire, from which I hope you will not escape."

One might have expected Valla simply to turn the charge around and point out that it was after all Poggio who returned Lucretius to circulation. That Valla failed to do so suggests that Poggio had been successful in keeping a discreet distance from the implications of his own discovery. But it may suggest as well how limited the early circulation of On the Nature of Things was. When, in the early 1430s, in a work called On Pleasure (De voluptate), Valla was penning the praises of drink and s.e.x that Poggio professed to find so shocking, the ma.n.u.script of Lucretius' poem was still being guarded by Niccoli. The fact of its existence, which had been gleefully announced in letters among the humanists, may have helped to stimulate a resurgent interest in Epicureanism, but Valla probably had to rely on other sources and on his own fertile imagination to construct his praise of pleasure.

Interest in a pagan philosophy radically at odds with fundamental Christian principles had its risks, as Poggio's attack suggests. Valla's reply to this attack allows us to glimpse a third type of response to the Epicurean ferment of the fifteenth century. The strategy is what might be called "dialogical disavowal." The ideas Poggio condemns were present in On Pleasure, Valla conceded, but they were not his own ideas but rather those of a spokesman for Epicureanism in a literary dialogue. At the dialogue's end, it is not Epicureanism but rather Christian orthodoxy, voiced by the monk Antonio Raudense, that is declared the clear victor: "When Antonio Raudense had thus concluded his speech, we did not get up immediately. We were caught in immense admiration for such pious and religious words."

And yet. At the center of his dialogue, Valla constructs a remarkably vigorous and sustained defense of key Epicurean principles: the wisdom of withdrawing from compet.i.tive striving into the tranquil garden of philosophy ("From the sh.o.r.e you shall laugh in safety at the waves, or rather at those who are wave-tossed"), the primacy of bodily pleasure, the advantages of moderation, the perverse unnaturalness of s.e.xual abstinence, the denial of any afterlife. "It is plain," the Epicurean states, "that there are no rewards for the dead, certainly there are no punishments either." And lest this formulation allow an ambiguity, still setting human souls apart from all other created things, he returns to the point to render it unequivocal: According to my Epicurus . . . nothing remains after the dissolution of the living being, and in the term "living being" he included man just as much as he did the lion, the wolf, the dog, and all other things that breathe. With all this I agree. They eat, we eat; they drink, we drink; they sleep, and so do we. They engender, conceive, give birth, and nourish their young in no way different from ours. They possess some part of reason and memory, some more than others, and we a little more than they. We are like them in almost everything; finally, they die and we die-both of us completely.

If we grasp this end clearly-"finally, they die and we die-both of us completely"-then our determination should be equally clear: "Therefore, for as long as possible (would that it were longer!) let us not allow those bodily pleasures to slip away that cannot be doubted and cannot be recovered in another life."

It is possible to argue that Valla wrote these words only to show them crushed by the sober admonitions of the monkish Raudense: If you were to see the form of any angel next to your beloved, the beloved would seem so horrible and uncouth that you would turn away from her as from the countenance of a cadaver and direct all your attention to the angel's beauty-a beauty, I say, that does not inflame but extinguishes l.u.s.t, and infuses a most sanctified religious awe.

If this interpretation is true, then On Pleasure is an attempt to contain subversion. Aware that he and his contemporaries had been exposed to the toxic allure of Lucretius, Valla decided not to suppress the contamination, as Ficino had tried to do, but to lance the imposthume by exposing Epicurean arguments to the purifying air of Christian faith.

But Valla's enemy Poggio reached the opposite conclusion: the Christian framework and the dialogic form of On Pleasure was, in his view, only a convenient cover to permit Valla to make public his scandalous and subversive a.s.sault on Christian doctrine. And if Poggio's venomous hatred calls this interpretation in question, Valla's celebrated proof of the fraudulence of the so-called "Donation of Constantine" suggests that he was by no means a safely orthodox thinker. On Pleasure would, from this perspective, be a comparably radical and subversive text, wearing a fig leaf designed to give its author, a priest who continued to jockey for the post of apostolic secretary that he eventually obtained, some protection.

How can the conflict between these two sharply opposed interpretations be resolved? Which is it: subversion or containment? It is exceedingly unlikely that at this distance anyone will discover the evidence that might definitively answer this question-if such evidence ever existed. The question itself implies a programmatic certainty and clarity that may bear little relation to the actual situation of intellectuals in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A very small number of people may have fully embraced radical Epicureanism, as far as they understood it, in its entirety. Thus, for example, in 1484 the Florentine poet Luigi Pulci was denied Christian burial for denying miracles and describing the soul as "no more than a pine nut in hot white bread." But for many of the most daring speculative minds of the Renaissance, the ideas that surged up in 1417, with the recovery of Lucretius' poem and the renewed interest in Epicureanism, did not const.i.tute a fully formed philosophical or ideological system. Couched in its beautiful, seductive poetry, the Lucretian vision was a profound intellectual and creative challenge.

What mattered was not adherence but mobility-the renewed mobility of a poem that had been resting untouched in one or at most two monastic libraries for many centuries, the mobility of Epicurean arguments that had been silenced first by hostile pagans and then by hostile Christians, the mobility of daydreams, half-formed speculations, whispered doubts, dangerous thoughts.

Poggio may have distanced himself from the content of On the Nature of Things, but he took the crucial first step in pulling the poem off the shelf, having it copied, and sending the copy to his friends in Florence. Once it began to circulate again, the difficulty was not in reading the poem (provided, of course, one had adequate Latin) but in discussing its content openly or taking its ideas seriously. Valla found a way to take one central Epicurean argument-the praise of pleasure as the ultimate good-and give it sympathetic articulation in a dialogue. That argument is detached from the full philosophical structure that gave it its original weight and finally repudiated. But the dialogue's Epicurean speaks in defense of pleasure with an energy, subtlety, and persuasiveness that had not been heard for more than a millennium.

In December 1516-almost a century after Poggio's discovery-the Florentine Synod, an influential group of high-ranking clergymen, prohibited the reading of Lucretius in schools. Its exquisite Latin may have tempted schoolteachers to a.s.sign it to their students, but it should be banned, the clerics said, as "a lascivious and wicked work, in which every effort is used to demonstrate the mortality of the soul." Violators of the edict were threatened with eternal d.a.m.nation and a fine of 10 ducats.

The prohibition might have restricted circulation and it effectively halted the printing of Lucretius in Italy, but it was too late to close the door. An edition had already appeared in Bologna, another in Paris, another, from the great press of Aldus Manutius, in Venice. And in Florence the distinguished publisher Filippo Giunti had brought out an edition edited by the humanist Pier Candido Decembrio, whom Poggio had known well at the court of Nicholas V.

The Giunti edition incorporated emendations proposed by the remarkable soldier, scholar, and poet of Greek origin Michele Tarchaniota Marullo. Marullo, whose portrait was painted by Botticelli, was well known in Italian humanist circles. He had, in the course of a restless career, written beautiful pagan hymns inspired by Lucretius, with whose work he engaged with remarkable intensity. In 1500 he was pondering the textual complexities of On the Nature of Things when, clad in armor, he rode out of Volterra to fight against Cesare Borgia's troops, then ma.s.sing at the coast near Piombino. It was raining heavily, and the peasants advised him not to attempt to ford the swollen Cecina River. He supposedly replied that a gypsy had told him as a child that it was not Neptune but Mars whom he should fear. Halfway across the river, his horse slipped and fell on him, and it was said that he died cursing the G.o.ds. A copy of Lucretius' poem was found in his pocket.

The death of Marullo could be circulated as a cautionary tale-even the broad-minded Erasmus remarked that Marullo wrote as if he were a pagan-but it could not quell interest in Lucretius. And indeed the Church authorities themselves, many of whom had humanist sympathies, were not of one mind on its dangers. In 1549 it was proposed to include On the Nature of Things on the Index of Prohibited Books-the list, only abolished in 1966, of those works that Catholics were forbidden to read-but the proposal was dropped at the request of the powerful Cardinal Marcello Cervini, who was elected pope a few years later. (He served for less than one month, from April 9 to May 1, 1555.) The commissary general of the Inquisition, Michele Ghislieri, also opposed calls for the suppression of On the Nature of Things. He listed Lucretius as the author of one of those pagan books that could be read but only if they were read as fables. Ghislieri, who was himself elected pope in 1566, focused the attention of his pontificate on the struggle against heretics and Jews and did not further pursue the threat posed by pagan poets.

In fact, Catholic intellectuals could and did engage with Lucretian ideas through the medium of fables. Though he complained that Marullo sounded "just like a pagan," Erasmus wrote a fictional dialogue called The Epicurean in which one of the characters, Hedonius, sets out to show that "there are no people more Epicurean than G.o.dly Christians." Christians who fast, bewail their sins, and punish their flesh may look anything but hedonist, but they are seeking to live righteously, and "none live more enjoyably than those who live righteously."

If this paradox seems like little more than a sleight-of-hand, Erasmus' friend Thomas More took the engagement with Epicureanism much further in his most famous work, Utopia (1516). A learned man, deeply immersed in the pagan Greek and Latin texts that Poggio and his contemporaries had returned to circulation, More was also a pious Christian ascetic who wore a hair shirt under his clothes and whipped himself until the blood ran down his flesh. His speculative daring and his relentless intelligence enabled him to grasp the force of what had surged back from the ancient world and at the same time his ardent Catholic convictions led him to demarcate the boundaries beyond which he thought it was dangerous for him or anyone else to go. That is, he brilliantly explored the hidden tensions in the ident.i.ty to which he himself subscribed: "Christian humanist."

Utopia begins with a searing indictment of England as a land where n.o.blemen, living idly off the labor of others, bleed their tenants white by constantly raising their rents, where land enclosures for sheep-raising throw untold thousands of poor people into an existence of starvation or crime, and where the cities are ringed by gibbets on which thieves are hanged by the score without the slightest indication that the draconian punishment deters anyone from committing the same crimes.

That depiction of a ghastly reality-and the sixteenth-century chronicler Holinshed reports that in the reign of Henry VIII, 72,000 thieves were hanged-is set against an imaginary island, Utopia (the name means "No-place" in Greek), whose inhabitants are convinced that "either the whole or the most part of human happiness" lies in the pursuit of pleasure. This central Epicurean tenet, the work makes clear, lies at the heart of the opposition between the good society of the Utopians and the corrupt, vicious society of his own England. That is, More clearly grasped that the pleasure principle-the principle given its most powerful expression in Lucretius' spectacular hymn to Venus-is not a decorative enhancement of routine existence; it is a radical idea that, if taken seriously, would change everything.

More set his Utopia in the remotest part of the world. Its discoverer, More writes at the beginning of the work, was a man who "joined Amerigo Vespucci and was his constant companion in the last three of his four voyages, which are now universally read of, but on the final voyage he did not return with him." He was instead one of those left behind, at his own urging, in a garrison at the farthest point of the explorers' venture into the unknown.

Reading Amerigo Vespucci and reflecting on the newfound lands known, in his honor, as "America," More seized upon one of Vespucci's observations about the peoples he had encountered: "Since their life is so entirely given over to pleasure," Vespucci had written, "I should style it Epicurean." More must have realized with a jolt that he could use the amazing discoveries to explore some of the disturbing ideas that had returned to currency with Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. The link was not entirely surprising: the Florentine Vespucci was a part of the humanist circle in which On the Nature of Things circulated. The Utopians, More wrote, are inclined to believe "that no kind of pleasure is forbidden, provided no harm comes of it." And their behavior is not merely a matter of custom; it is a philosophical position: "They seem to lean more than they should to the school that espouses pleasure as the object by which to define either the whole or the chief part of human happiness." That "school" is the school of Epicurus and Lucretius.

The setting, in the remotest part of the remotest part of the world, enabled More to convey a sense that was extremely difficult for his contemporaries to articulate: that the pagan texts recovered by the humanists were at once compellingly vital and at the same time utterly weird. They had been reinjected into the intellectual bloodstream of Europe after long centuries in which they had been almost entirely forgotten, and they represented not continuity or recovery but rather a deep disturbance. They were in effect voices from another world, a world as different as Vespucci's Brazil was to England, and their power derived as much from their distance as their eloquent lucidity.

The invocation of the New World allowed More to articulate a second key response to the texts that fascinated the humanists. He insisted that these texts be understood not as isolated philosophical ideas but as expressions of a whole way of life lived in particular physical, historical, cultural, and social circ.u.mstances. The description of the Epicureanism of the Utopians only made sense for More in the larger context of an entire existence.

But that existence, More thought, would have to be for everyone. He took seriously the claim, so ardently made in On the Nature of Things, that Epicurus' philosophy would liberate all of mankind from its abject misery. Or rather, More took seriously the universality that is the underlying Greek meaning of the word "catholic." It would not be enough for Epicureanism to enlighten a small elite in a walled garden; it would have to apply to society as a whole. Utopia is a visionary, detailed blueprint for this application, from public housing to universal health care, from child care centers to religious toleration to the six-hour work day. The point of More's celebrated fable is to imagine those conditions that would make it possible for an entire society to make the pursuit of happiness its collective goal.

For More, those conditions would have to begin with the abolition of private property. Otherwise the avidity of human beings, their longing for "n.o.bility, magnificence, splendor and majesty," would inevitably lead to the unequal distribution of wealth that consigns a large portion of the population to lives of misery, resentment, and crime. But communism was not enough. Certain ideas would have to be banned. Specifically, More wrote, the Utopians impose strict punishment, including the harshest form of slavery, on anyone who denies the existence of divine providence or of the afterlife.

The denial of Providence and the denial of the afterlife were the twin pillars of Lucretius' whole poem. Thomas More then at once imaginatively embraced Epicureanism-the most sustained and intelligent embrace since Poggio recovered De rerum natura a century earlier-and carefully cut its heart out. All citizens of his Utopia are encouraged to pursue pleasure; but those who think that the soul dies with the body or who believe that chance rules the universe, More writes, are arrested and enslaved.

This harsh treatment was the only way More could conceive of the pursuit of pleasure actually being realized by more than a tiny privileged group of philosophers who have withdrawn from public life. People would have to believe, at a bare minimum, that there was an overarching providential design-not only in the state but in the very structure of the universe itself-and they would have to believe as well that the norms by which they are meant to regulate their pursuit of pleasure and hence discipline their behavior were reinforced by this providential design. The way that this reinforcement would work would be through a belief in rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Otherwise, in More's view, it would be impossible drastically to reduce, as he wished, both the terrible punishments and the extravagant rewards that kept his own unjust society in order.

By the standards of More's age, the Utopians are amazingly tolerant: they do not prescribe a single official religious doctrine and then apply thumbscrews to those who do not adhere to it. Their citizens are permitted to worship any G.o.d they please and even to share these beliefs with others, provided that they do so in a calm and rational manner. But in Utopia there is no tolerance at all for those who think that their souls will disintegrate at death along with their bodies or who doubt that the G.o.ds, if they exist at all, concern themselves with the doings of mankind. These people are a threat, for what will restrain them from doing anything that they please? Utopians regard such unbelievers, More wrote, as less than human and certainly unfit to remain in the community. For no one, in their view, can be counted "among their citizens whose laws and customs he would treat as worthless if it were not for fear."

"If it were not for fear": fear might be eliminated in the philosopher's garden, among a tiny, enlightened elite, but it cannot be eliminated from an entire society, if that society is to be imagined as inhabited by the range of people who actually exist in the world as it has always been known. Even with the full force of Utopian social conditioning, human nature, More believed, would inevitably lead men to resort to force or fraud in order to get whatever they desire. More's belief was conditioned no doubt by his ardent Catholicism, but in this same period Machiavelli, who was considerably less pious than the saintly More, came to the same conclusion. Laws and customs, the author of The Prince thought, were worthless without fear.

More tried to imagine what it would take not for certain individuals to be enlightened but for a whole commonwealth to do away with cruelty and disorder, share the goods of life equitably, organize itself around the pursuit of pleasure, and tear down the gibbets. The gibbets, all but a few, could be dismantled, More concluded, if and only if people were persuaded to imagine gibbets (and rewards) in another life. Without these imaginary supplements the social order would inevitably collapse, with each individual attempting to fulfill his wishes: "Who can doubt that he will strive either to evade by craft the public laws of his country or to break them by violence in order to serve his private desires when he has nothing to fear but laws and no hope beyond the body?" More was fully prepared to countenance the public execution of anyone who thought and taught otherwise.

More's imaginary Utopians have a practical, instrumental motive for enforcing faith in Providence and in the afterlife: they are convinced that they cannot trust anyone who does not hold these beliefs. But More himself, as a pious Christian, had another motive: Jesus' own words. "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall on the ground without your Father's will," Jesus tells his disciples, adding that "even the hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matthew 10:2930). There is, as Hamlet paraphrased the verse, "a special providence in the fall of a sparrow." Who in Christendom would dare to argue with that?

One answer in the sixteenth century was a diminutive Dominican monk, Giordano Bruno. In the mid-1580s, the thirty-six-year-old Bruno, who had fled from his monastery in Naples and had wandered restlessly through Italy and France, found himself in London. Brilliant, reckless, at once charmingly charismatic and insufferably argumentative, he survived by cobbling together support from patrons, teaching the art of memory, and lecturing on various aspects of what he called the Nolan philosophy, named after the small town near Naples where he was born. That philosophy had several roots, tangled together in an exuberant and often baffling mix, but one of them was Epicureanism. Indeed, there are many indications that De rerum natura had unsettled and transformed Bruno's whole world.

During his stay in England, Bruno wrote and published a flood of strange works. The extraordinary daring of these works may be gauged by taking in the implications of a single pa.s.sage from one of them, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, printed in 1584. The pa.s.sage-quoted here in Ingrid D. Rowland's fine translation-is long, but its length is very much part of the point. Mercury, the herald of the G.o.ds, is recounting to Sofia all the things Jove has a.s.signed him to bring about. He has ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Father Franzino's melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won't be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of Monte Cicala in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that several shall fall to earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms. That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won't burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox two hundred and fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random.

This is by no means all that Mercury has to arrange.

Laurenza, when she combs her hair, shall lose seventeen hairs and break thirteen, and of these, ten shall grow back within three days and seven shall never grow back at all. Antonio Savolino's b.i.t.c.h shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro's dog. In that moment a cuckoo shall be heard from La Starza, cuckooing twelve times, no more and no fewer, whereupon it shall leave and fly to the ruins of Castle Cicala for eleven minutes, and then shall fly off to Scarvaita, and as for what happens next, we'll see to it later.

Mercury's work in this one tiny corner of a tiny corner of the Campagna is still not done.

That the skirt Mastro Danese is cutting on his board shall come out crooked. That twelve bedbugs shall leave the slats of Costantino's bed and head toward the pillow: seven large ones, four small, and one middle-sized, and as for the one who shall survive until this evening's candlelight, we'll see to it. That fifteen minutes thereafter, because of the movement of her tongue, which she has pa.s.sed over her palate four times, the old lady of Fiurulo shall lose the third right molar in her lower jaw, and it shall fall without blood and without pain, because that molar has been loose for seventeen months. That Ambrogio on the one hundred twelfth thrust shall finally have driven home his business with his wife, but shall not impregnate her this time, but rather another, using the sperm into which the cooked leek that he has just eaten with millet and wine sauce shall have been converted. Martinello's son is beginning to grow hair on his chest, and his voice is beginning to crack. That Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants. . . .

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 a.s.signed 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 ma.s.s that he would say a few words about G.o.d, "The fewer the better." 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, we were bored stiff by one Pa.s.sover each year, and now each day seems to be a Pa.s.sover 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce 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 fine 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 companion 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual.

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 G.o.ds 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 a.s.sertion 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, 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 grat.i.tude 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, 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 ma.s.s 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 senses 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, reb.u.t.ting wild accusations, and drawing on his prodigious 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 investigate 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 Ta.s.so. 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.5559) ". . . 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.10810) 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 copy 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 pa.s.sage.

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 fond 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 appet.i.te, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circ.u.mstance 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 chateau. 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 p.r.o.ne 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 kingship 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 gosling 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 n.o.ble 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" that Socrates felt "in scratching his leg after the irons were off."

Above all, Lucretius' fingerprints are all over Montaigne's reflections on two of his favorite subjects: s.e.x and death. 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 s.e.xual pa.s.sion 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, G.o.ddess, 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 death 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," Montaigne imagined Nature to say, as you entered it. The same pa.s.sage 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, pa.s.s 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 quickly 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 pa.s.sionate 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 atoms 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 pa.s.sages 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 a.s.sertions 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 ma.n.u.scripts that quietly pa.s.sed from hand to hand. In the early seventeenth century Alonso de Olivera, doctor to Princess Isabel de Borbon, owned a French edition printed in 1565. At a book sale in 1625, the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo acquired a ma.n.u.script 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.

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 G.o.d 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 a.s.signed 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 G.o.d. 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.