THE SWERVE

highlights

PREFACE

Lucretius’ words therefore rang out with a terrible clarity: “Death is nothing to us.” To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. loc: 174

The stuff of the universe, Lucretius proposed, is an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process. loc: 184

There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design. loc: 189

What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world. loc: 199

the scientific vision of the world—a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—was in its origins imbued with a poet’s sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on gods and demons and the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live our lives. loc: 224

CHAPTER ONE THE BOOK HUNTER loc: 306

The pope who had called himself John XXIII no longer existed; the man who had borne that title was now once again what he had been christened, Baldassare Cossa. And Poggio was now a masterless man. loc: 401

CHAPTER TWO THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY loc: 436

the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory on himself in the 1330s by piecing together Livy’s monumental History of Rome and finding forgotten masterpieces by Cicero, Propertius, and others. loc: 439

The prime hunting grounds for Poggio and his fellow book hunters were the libraries of old monasteries, and for good reason: for long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books. loc: 453

all monks were expected to know how to read. loc: 460

Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books. loc: 519

In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed. loc: 520

monastic rules necessitated that monks learn the laborious art of making parchment and salvaging existing parchment. loc: 524

Poggio also possessed considerable personal charm. He was a marvelous raconteur, a sly gossip, and an indefatigable teller of jokes, loc: 564

He was a superbly well-trained scribe, with exceptionally fine handwriting, great powers of concentration, and a high degree of accuracy. loc: 577

What this meant was that he could not only inveigle his way into the monastery and nose out the precious manuscripts of lost works, but also that he could borrow them, copy them quickly, and send the results back to humanists waiting eagerly at home in Italy. loc: 587

To assemble a modest number of books, in the long centuries before the invention of the printing press forever changed the equation, meant the eventual establishment of what were called scriptoria, workshops where monks would be trained to sit for long hours making copies. loc: 678

insofar as the copying was a form of discipline—an exercise in humility and a willing embrace of pain—distaste or simple incomprehension might be preferable to engagement. Curiosity was to be avoided at all costs. loc: 716

recovering reasonably accurate traces of the ancient past depended heavily on this subordination. An engaged reader, Poggio knew, was prone to alter his text in order to get it to make sense, loc: 721

Between the sixth century and the middle of the eighth century, Greek and Latin classics virtually ceased to be copied at all. loc: 734

the discovery of a work still more ancient than any of the others that he had found. One of the manuscripts consisted of a long text written around 50 BCE by a poet and philosopher named Titus Lucretius Carus. The text’s title, De rerum natura—On the Nature of Things—was loc: 841

CHAPTER THREE IN SEARCH OF LUCRETIUS loc: 853

Lucretius had accomplished a near-perfect integration of intellectual distinction and aesthetic mastery. loc: 865

But even as Rome’s legions steadily established military dominance over Greece, Greek culture just as steadily began to colonize the minds of the conquerors. loc: 985

our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derive precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago. loc: 1034

By the first century ce there were distinctive signs of the emergence of what we think of as a “literary culture.” loc: 1041

they were an elite, living at the center of the world’s greatest power, and one of their most cherished privileges was the cultivation of the life of the mind. Romans of the late republic were remarkably tenacious about this privilege, which they clung to in circumstances that would have made others quail and run for cover. For them it seemed to function as a sign that their world was still intact or at least that they were secure in their innermost lives. loc: 1107

Humans, Aristotle wrote, are social animals: to realize one’s nature as a human then was to participate in a group activity. And the activity of choice, for cultivated Romans, as for the Greeks before them, was discourse. loc: 1137

“Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.” loc: 1169

in Lucretius’ view, Epicurus, who had died more than two centuries earlier, was nothing less than the saviour. When “human life lay groveling ignominiously in the dust, crushed beneath the grinding weight of superstition,” Lucretius wrote, one supremely brave man arose and became “the first who ventured to confront it boldly.” loc: 1190

Democritus’ conception of an infinite number of atoms that have no qualities except size, figure, and weight—particles then that are not miniature versions of what we see but rather form what we see by combining with each other in an inexhaustible variety of shapes—was loc: 1214

In constant motion, atoms collide with each other, Epicurus reasoned, and in certain circumstances, they form larger and larger bodies. loc: 1222

Heavenly bodies are not divine beings who shape our destiny for good or ill, nor do they move through the void under the guidance of gods: they are simply part of the natural order, enormous structures of atoms subject to the same principles of creation and destruction that govern everything that exists. loc: 1225

it is nonetheless possible to understand something of its basic constitutive elements and its universal laws. Indeed, such understanding is one of human life’s deepest pleasures. loc: 1227

This pleasure is perhaps the key to comprehending the powerful impact of Epicurus’ philosophy; loc: 1228

you needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence—atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else—your life will change. loc: 1235

you will be freed from a terrible affliction—what Hamlet, many centuries later, described as “the dread of something after death,/The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns.” loc: 1239

What the Greek philosopher offered was not help in dying but help in living. Liberated from superstition, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure. loc: 1255

A philosophical claim that life’s ultimate goal is pleasure—even if that pleasure was defined in the most restrained and responsible terms—was a scandal, both for pagans and for their adversaries, the Jews and later the Christians. loc: 1289

a half-hidden fear that to maximize pleasure and to avoid pain were in fact appealing goals and might plausibly serve as the rational organizing principles of human life. If they succeeded in doing so, a whole set of time-honored alternative principles—sacrifice, ambition, social status, discipline, piety—would be challenged, along with the institutions that such principles served. loc: 1296

CHAPTER FOUR THE TEETH OF TIME loc: 1316

After the downfall of the Serapeon, a pagan poet, Palladas, expressed his mood of devastation: Is it not true that we are dead, and living only in appearance, We Hellenes, fallen on disaster, Likening life to a dream, since we remain alive while Our way of life is dead and gone? loc: 1468

Platonism contributed to Christianity its model of the soul; Aristotelianism its Prime Mover; Stoicism its model of Providence. loc: 1557

The knights of renunciation, as in a popular romance, were almost always glamorous figures who cast off the greatest symbol of their status—their intimate access to an elite education—for the sake of the religion they loved. loc: 1561

Only in the sixth century did Christians venture to celebrate as heroes those who dispensed entirely with education, loc: 1564

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 nor its destroyers, utterly indifferent to the doings of any beings other than themselves, they were deaf to our prayers or our rituals. loc: 1583

If you grant Epicurus his claim that the soul is mortal, wrote Tertullian, the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels. For Epicurus, human suffering is always finite: loc: 1633

“Epicurus utterly destroys religion,” loc: 1636

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. loc: 1640

In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure. loc: 1669

Early Christians, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, the sinfulness of mankind, and the anger of a just Father, found the attempt to cultivate pleasure manifestly absurd and dangerous. loc: 1686

humans were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them; they needed to be punished; they had coming to them an endless diet of pain. loc: 1695

The most ardent early believers in this doctrine, those fired by an explosive mix of fear, hope, and fierce enthusiasm, were determined to make the pain to which all humankind was condemned their active choice. loc: 1698

the atonement that would, if they were successful, enable them to recover in the afterlife the happiness that Adam and Eve had lost. loc: 1704

By the year 600 there were over three hundred monasteries and convents in Italy and Gaul. loc: 1705

the experience of pain was not only punishment; it was a form of pious emulation. loc: 1719

What was once in effect a radical counterculture insisted with remarkable success that it represented the core values of all believing Christians. loc: 1751

Pleasure seeking had come to seem philosophically indefensible. loc: 1757

CHAPTER FIVE BIRTH AND REBIRTH loc: 1765

a shared mania, one whose origin can be traced back to Petrarch, who, a generation before Poggio’s birth, had made the recovery of the cultural heritage of classical Rome a collective obsession. loc: 1863

Petrarch began to search for ancient texts that had been forgotten. He was not the first to do so, but he managed to invest this search with a new, almost erotic urgency and pleasure, superior to all other treasure seeking: loc: 1901

The early humanists felt themselves, with mingled pride, wonder, and fear, to be involved in an epochal movement. loc: 1918

Once one recognized what was gone, once one had mourned the tragic loss, it was possible to prepare the way for what lay on the other side of death: nothing less than resurrection. loc: 1928

To prove its worth, Petrarch and Salutati both insisted, the whole enterprise of humanism had not merely to generate passable imitations of the classical style but to serve a larger ethical end. And to do so it needed to live fully and vibrantly in the present. loc: 1981

the decisive factor was the study of ancient Greek, made possible when in 1397 Salutati invited the preeminent Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysolaras to reside in Florence and give classes in a language that had been almost completely forgotten. loc: 2007

Niccoli had brought back into the world the idea of the public library. loc: 2089

the friends bonded in their shared insistence on the superiority of all things ancient—setting aside matters of faith—over anything that followed. The astonishing literary ambition and creativity characteristic of Petrarch had largely shriveled up in them, as had the patriotic zeal and the passion for liberty that had fueled Salutati’s humanism. What took their place was something far less expansive in spirit, something harder and more punishing: a cult of imitation and a craving for exactitude. loc: 2092

they dreamed only of calling back to life something old. This dream, narrow and arid in spirit, was doomed to failure; but, all the same, it had surprising results. loc: 2097

CHAPTER SIX IN THE LIE FACTORY loc: 2142

Poggio had established himself at the very center of what he called “the Bugiale,” the Lie Factory. There, in a room at the court, the papal secretaries would regularly gather to exchange stories and jokes. loc: 2253

The problem was not only a matter of this or that difficult personality; it was structural. The papal court had, to serve its own needs, brought into being a class of rootless, ironic intellectuals. These intellectuals were committed to pleasing their masters, on whose patronage they utterly depended, but they were cynical and unhappy. loc: 2325

It indicates that the Church, though it could and did respond violently to what it perceived as doctrinal or institutional challenges, was willing to tolerate extremely sharp critiques from within, loc: 2370

The greatest and most consequential work in this critical spirit was written by Poggio’s bitter enemy, Lorenzo Valla. Valla famously used his brilliant command of Latin philology to demonstrate that the “Donation of Constantine,” the document in which the Roman emperor purportedly gave possession of the Western Empire to the pope, was a forgery. loc: 2373

What saved him was an obsessive craving, his book mania. loc: 2413

CHAPTER SEVEN A PIT TO CATCH FOXES loc: 2453

Baldassare Cossa—Pope John XXIII, as he called himself—was a master of intrigue. Poggio would have been involved in controlling access to the pontiff, digesting and passing along key information, taking notes, articulating policies that had only been roughly sketched, crafting the Latin missives sent to princes and potentates. loc: 2459

the question with which Poggio and others in Rome grappled was how they could retain even the shreds of a moral sensibility while living and working in the court of this particular pope. loc: 2495

it was obvious that he did not have a trace of a spiritual vocation. loc: 2524

perhaps it seemed to them that Cossa, only forty years old, had the skills needed to end the disgraceful schism in the Church and to defeat the rival claims by the doggedly inflexible Spaniard Pedro de Luna, who styled himself Pope Benedict XIII, and the intransigent Venetian Angelo Correr, who styled himself Pope Gregory XII. loc: 2528

the “Way of Council,” called for the convening of the bishops of all of the Catholic world who would, by formal vote in an ecumenical assembly, have the final authority to resolve the dispute. loc: 2543

The pope was a thug, but he was a learned thug, who appreciated the company of fine scholars and expected court business to be conducted in high humanist style. loc: 2573

Ending the schism was the council’s most important item of business, but it was not the only one. Two other major issues were the reform of ecclesiastical government—that was also not happy news for John XXIII—and the repression of heresy. loc: 2614

Forty-four-year-old Jan Hus, a Czech priest and religious reformer, had been for some years a thorn in the side of the Church. loc: 2619

He urged his congregants not to put their faith in the Virgin, the cult of the saints, the Church, or the pope, but in God alone. loc: 2622

He argued that the state had the right and the duty to supervise the Church. Laymen could and should judge their spiritual leaders. loc: 2625

The safe-conduct, bearing the large imperial seal, promised “protection and safeguard” and requested that Hus be allowed “freely and securely” to “pass, sojourn, stop, and return.” loc: 2644

Notwithstanding the assurances that the pope, the council, and the emperor had given him, Hus was almost immediately vilified and denied the opportunity to speak in public. On November 28, barely three weeks after he arrived, he was arrested on order of the cardinals and taken to the prison of a Dominican monastery on the banks of the Rhine. loc: 2654

the emperor chose not to intervene. loc: 2659

under great pressure from the emperor, Cossa’s principal protector gave over his unwelcome guest, and the world had the edifying spectacle of a pope put under guard as a criminal. loc: 2692

On May 29, 1415, he was formally deposed. loc: 2699

when, some months later, Hus’s associate, Jerome of Prague, was also put on trial for heresy, Poggio was not able to remain silent. loc: 2719

the rashness might have been provoked by the trauma of what he had just seen: his letter is dated May 30, 1416, which is the day that Jerome was executed. Poggio was writing in the wake of witnessing something particularly horrible, loc: 2733

Poggio believed he glimpsed for a moment the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. loc: 2776

When he wrote these words, the world around Poggio was falling to pieces, but his response to chaos and fear was always to redouble his immersion in books. loc: 2788

monastery of St. Gall, about twenty miles from Constance. loc: 2793

the tension between the bureaucrat who worked for the sinister John XXIII and the humanist who longed for the freer, clearer air, as he imagined it, of the ancient Roman Republic. loc: 2804

Back in Constance his money worries deepened, as he found himself dangling, without work and without clear prospects. loc: 2829

He had no idea what he would find; he only knew that if it was something ancient and written in elegant Latin, then it was worth rescuing at all costs. loc: 2837

for him these were not manuscripts but human voices. loc: 2840

CHAPTER EIGHT THE WAY THINGS ARE loc: 2855

the random swerve of elementary particles is responsible for the existence of free will. loc: 2968

though an outside force may strike against a man, that man may deliberately hold himself back loc: 2975

Nature ceaselessly experiments. loc: 2977

All living beings, from plants and insects to the higher mammals and man, have evolved through a long, complex process of trial and error. loc: 2978

Creatures whose combination of organs enables them to adapt and to reproduce will succeed in establishing themselves, until changing circumstances make it impossible for them any longer to survive. loc: 2980

The successful adaptations, like the failures, are the result of a fantastic number of combinations that are constantly being generated (and reproduced or discarded) over an unlimited expanse of time. loc: 2983

The universe was not created for or about humans. loc: 2988

over the infinite expanses of time, some species grow, others disappear, generated and destroyed in the ceaseless process of change. There were other forms of life before us, which no longer exist; there will be other forms of life after us, when our kind has vanished. loc: 2996

Humans are not unique. loc: 2999

We are made of the same stuff that everything else is made of. loc: 3001

We have only to look attentively at the world around us to grasp that many of the most intense and poignant experiences of our lives are not exclusive to our species. loc: 3005

Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival. loc: 3007

the ability to form bonds and to live in communities governed by settled customs developed slowly. loc: 3012

humans, who like other animals used inarticulate cries and gestures in various situations, slowly arrived at shared sounds to designate the same things. loc: 3016

The soul dies. loc: 3025

The human soul is made of the same material as the human body. loc: 3026

There is no afterlife. loc: 3032

once you grasp that your soul dies along with your body, you also grasp that there can be no posthumous punishments or rewards. Life on this earth is all that human beings have. loc: 3036

Death is nothing to us. loc: 3038

When you are dead—when the particles that have been linked together, to create and sustain you, have come apart—there will be neither pleasure nor pain, longing nor fear. loc: 3039

“You will not care, because you will not exist.” loc: 3041

All organized religions are superstitious delusions. loc: 3043

The delusions are based on deeply rooted longings, fears, and ignorance. Humans project images of the power and beauty and perfect security that they would like to possess. Fashioning their gods accordingly, they become enslaved to their own dreams. loc: 3043

There are entirely natural explanations for such phenomena as lightning and earthquakes—Lucretius spells them out—but terrified humans instinctively respond with religious fear and start praying. loc: 3049

Religions are invariably cruel. loc: 3052

Religions always promise hope and love, but their deep, underlying structure is cruelty. loc: 3052

The quintessential emblem of religion—and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core—is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. loc: 3053

he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son. loc: 3059

There are no angels, demons, or ghosts. loc: 3061

Immaterial spirits of any kind do not exist. loc: 3061

The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. loc: 3064

There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitating this pursuit for oneself and one’s fellow creatures. loc: 3065

Man’s natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more. loc: 3068   • Delete this highlight

Note: This is why I started with Thoreau. I thought I could br Mr. Natural and gdt by on a lot less, and, hance, accomplish a lot more. What koolaid was I drinking? And yet, would I have had it any different?

But, as it is difficult to resist fears of the gods and the afterlife, so too it is difficult to resist the compulsive sense that security, for oneself and one’s community, can somehow be enhanced through exploits of passionate acquisitiveness and conquest. These exploits, however, only decrease the possibility of happiness loc: 3072

nothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way of life, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank, and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure power. loc: 3080

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. loc: 3084

The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear. loc: 3084

why are humans so unhappy? The answer, Lucretius thought, had to do with the power of the imagination. Though they are finite and mortal, humans are gripped by illusions of the infinite—infinite pleasure and infinite pain. loc: 3090

The fantasy of infinite pain helps to account for their proneness to religion: in the misguided belief that their souls are immortal and hence potentially subject to an eternity of suffering, humans imagine that they can somehow negotiate with the gods for a better outcome, an eternity of pleasure in paradise. loc: 3092

The fantasy of infinite pleasure helps to account for their proneness to romantic love: in the misguided belief that their happiness depends upon the absolute possession of some single object of limitless desire, humans are seized by a feverish, unappeasable hunger and thirst that can only bring anguish instead of happiness. loc: 3094

note of the element of unsated appetite that haunts even the fulfillment of desire. loc: 3107

Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder. loc: 3129

grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance—the fact that it is not all about us and our fate—is, Lucretius insisted, the good news. loc: 3132

Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason. loc: 3136

All speculation—all science, all morality, all attempts to fashion a life worth living—must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of things: atoms and the void and nothing else. loc: 3139

in Lucretius’ account the process is something like the reverse: it is knowing the way things are that awakens the deepest wonder. loc: 3144

while we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially erotic. loc: 3161

CHAPTER NINE THE RETURN loc: 3211

Released from the confinement of Niccoli’s rooms, On the Nature of Things slowly made its way once again into the hands of readers, about a thousand years after it had dropped out of sight. loc: 3315

The remuneration was generous and the prestige high. Florence conferred upon its humanist chancellors all the marks of respect and honor that the buoyant, self-loving city felt were its own due. loc: 3416

Poggio served as chancellor of Florence for five years. The chancellorship evidently did not function entirely smoothly under his leadership; loc: 3420

I have found no one who seemed in any way happy to himself, who did not bemoan that life as harmful, disquieting, anxious, oppressed with many cares.” loc: 3427

CHAPTER TEN SWERVES loc: 3454

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. loc: 3474

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. loc: 3490

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. loc: 3493

“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.” loc: 3530

A very small number of people may have fully embraced radical Epicureanism, loc: 3550

Thomas More took the engagement with Epicureanism much further in his most famous work, Utopia (1516). loc: 3595

His speculative daring and his relentless intelligence enabled him to grasp the force of what had surged back from the ancient world loc: 3598

he brilliantly explored the hidden tensions in the identity to which he himself subscribed: “Christian humanist.” loc: 3600

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. loc: 3606

a radical idea that, if taken seriously, would change everything. loc: 3610

their power derived as much from their distance as their eloquent lucidity. loc: 3628

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 circumstances. loc: 3630

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. loc: 3634

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. loc: 3637

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. loc: 3645

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. loc: 3650

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. loc: 3663

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. loc: 3666

Without these imaginary supplements the social order would inevitably collapse, with each individual attempting to fulfill his wishes: loc: 3671

there are many indications that De rerum natura had unsettled and transformed Bruno’s whole world. loc: 3685

then Mercury admits that the whole thing does not work that way: there is no artificer god standing outside the universe, barking commands, meting out rewards and punishments, determining everything. The whole idea is absurd. There is an order in the universe, but it is one built into the nature of things, into the matter that composes everything, from stars to men to bedbugs. Nature is not an abstract capacity, but a generative mother, bringing forth everything that exists. loc: 3732

That universe was not for Bruno a place of melancholy disenchantment. On the contrary, he found it thrilling to realize that the world has no limits in either space or time, that the grandest things are made of the smallest, that atoms, the building blocks of all that exists, link the one and the infinite. loc: 3736

Bruno might have been the first person in more than a millennium to grasp the full force, at once philosophical and erotic, of Lucretius’ hymn to Venus. The universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction and regeneration, is inherently sexual. loc: 3747

The universe is not all about us, about our behavior and our destiny; we are only a tiny piece of something inconceivably larger. And that should not make us shrink in fear. Rather, we should embrace the world in wonder and gratitude and awe. loc: 3761

CHAPTER ELEVEN AFTERLIVES loc: 3802

there is a profound affinity between Lucretius and Montaigne, loc: 3836

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. loc: 3837

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. loc: 3839

“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. loc: 3848

Better than anyone—including Lucretius himself—Montaigne articulates what it feels like from the inside to think, write, live in an Epicurean universe. loc: 3860

Montaigne fully shared Lucretius’ Epicurean skepticism about the restless striving for fame, power, and riches, and he cherished his own withdrawal from the world into the privacy of his book-lined study in the tower of his château. But the withdrawal seems only to have intensified his awareness of the perpetual motion, the instability of forms, the plurality of worlds, the random swerves to which he himself was as fully prone as everyone else. loc: 3863

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. loc: 3903

“Go out of this world,” 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. loc: 3911

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. loc: 3918

Above all, he noted again and again, the soul is corporeal: “The soul is bodily” loc: 3930

Why should atoms in the High Renaissance have come to seem, in some quarters at least, so threatening? loc: 3966

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. loc: 3968

Council of Trent: 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. loc: 3982

Atomism absolutely denied the key distinction between substance and accidents, and therefore threatened the whole magnificent intellectual edifice resting on Aristotelian foundations. loc: 3990

“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.” loc: 3998

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. loc: 4005

On August 1, 1632, the Society of Jesus strictly prohibited and condemned the doctrine of atoms. loc: 4015

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. loc: 4026

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. loc: 4027

Note: I'm not quite getting this. How is atomism a contradiction of the eucharist?

But by the seventeenth century the pressure of the new science, growing intellectual speculation, and the lure of the great poem itself became too great to contain. loc: 4047

Edmund Spenser had written an ecstatic and strikingly Lucretian hymn to Venus; Francis Bacon had ventured that “In nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies”; Thomas Hobbes had reflected wryly on the relationship between fear and religious delusions. loc: 4110

In England, as elsewhere in Europe, it had proved possible, though quite difficult, to retain a belief in God as the creator of atoms in the first place. Thus Isaac Newton, in what has been called one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of science, declared himself an atomist, making what appears to be a direct allusion to the title of Lucretius’ poem. loc: 4113

Lucretius’ materialism helped to generate and support the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic, devastating disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other Enlightenment figures. loc: 4125

he had given a momentous political document, at the founding of a new republic, a distinctly Lucretian turn. The turn was toward a government whose end was not only to secure the lives and the liberties of its citizens but also to serve “the pursuit of Happiness.” The atoms of Lucretius had left their traces on the Declaration of Independence. loc: 4143

“I am,” Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, “an Epicurean.” loc: 4154