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Like the paunchy couch potato of a certain age who is happy in the conviction he has the makings of an outstanding baseball manager, more than a few academics share the secret conviction that they contain a bestseller somewhere within, if only time and circumstances allowed. But the feat is not easily managed – even by literary critics, who study what it is that makes writing good. One who has mastered the trick, however, is the distinguished Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt, whose latest book, The Swerve, accomplishes the shift from an academic audience to a less specialized – and more lucrative - readership gracefully enough to make the whole thing look ridiculously easy. The book is a page-turner of epic scope, ranging from Greek philosophers of the fifth century BC to the author’s own youth, stuffed with vivid characters and dramatic discoveries. And, if anyone doubts that Greenblatt has done his homework, there is a 27-page “selected” bibliography to back up his story.
The Swerve’s subtitle, “How the World Became Modern,” is a somewhat misleading description, promising at once too much and too little. The book is an extended associative ramble, here describing the ancient Roman book trade, there analyzing the ruthless politics of the Renaissance Vatican curia, now recounting in gruesome detail the burning of Giordano Bruno during the Inquisition, and later discussing Michel de Montaigne’s reflections on his “favorite subjects: sex and death” (247). What pull this all together are Greenblatt’s two foci: first, the ambitious and cunning humanist scholar Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini and his 1417 discovery of a copy of pre-Christian philosopher Lucretius’s forgotten epic poem, “On the Nature of Things”; and second, the extended underground network of influence that the scandalous ideas elaborated in this poem exerted on thinkers and writers from the 15th century on.
What made “On the Nature of Things” such an outrageous and troubling threat was the radical alternative it offered to the vision of the world sanctioned by the Catholic Church, a view enforced, when necessary, by appalling violence. Lucretius was a philosophical follower of Epicurus, who held that our world is thoroughly materialistic, the result of the perpetual interaction of atomic particles. His views allowed room for neither an immortal soul nor a spiritual afterlife. For the Epicureans, this was an immensely liberating perspective: Freed from a superstitious and oppressive fear of the afterlife, human beings were able to cultivate with pleasure and dignity the good things of this world. Such an interpretation was a far more serious threat to the moral authority of the Catholic Church than any amount of mere sinfulness, since it deprived religion of its very purpose. Bracciolini’s fortuitous discovery thus represented a very great threat to the established order.
It is well to be reminded, at a point in history when it is possible to carry virtually the whole of western literary history in one’s pocket, of the slender thread by which our intellectual heritage once hung. All written texts have a limited lifespan, and before the invention of the printing press their survival depended on the constant copying of manuscripts. Neglect was as effective as active destruction, and if the chain was broken, the loss was irrecoverable. Furthermore, after their hitherto obscure cult had become the official religion of the Roman Empire, Christians had little desire to perpetuate the decaying traces of rival intellectual traditions now properly consigned to oblivion.
Among the most reviled of pagan texts for the Christians were those of the Epicureans. The atomists did not simply set up one conception of the afterlife against another, contesting their opponents’ mysterious doctrines with their own equally mysterious claims. Rather, they scoffed at the notion that the universe was organized for the sake of humanity and that a god should self-sacrifice to provide this particular animal with everlasting life. For the early Christian fathers, writes Greenblatt, the immortality of the soul was indispensible – deny it, and “the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels” (101). According to them, anyone believing such a doctrine must be not simply misguided, but quite obviously insane. In fact, the only biographical reference to Lucretius, by St. Jerome, describes him as a man who was “driven mad by a love-philtre and, having composed between bouts of insanity several books (which Cicero afterwards corrected), committed suicide at the age of 44.” Needless to say, there was little to encourage either the preservation or study of “On the Nature of Things,” and things remained much the same for the next thousand or so years.
Enter Bracciolini – humanist scholar, wily bureaucrat, and book-finder extraordinaire. He had risen rapidly in the duplicitous and cynical inner world of the Vatican, finally landing the coveted position of personal secretary to Pope John XXIII. When his master was deposed and imprisoned, however, Bracciolini fell back on his true love, the pursuit of forgotten manuscripts.
Greenblatt does an excellent job of conjuring up the spirit in which the humanists pursued their quarry. Spending days in a cold library poring over barely legible script may not seem like a very glamorous activity, but the humanists, writes Greenblatt, “managed to invest this search with a new, almost erotic urgency and pleasure, superior to all other treasure seeking” (119). The seekers approached their task with an enthusiasm that touched on the religious – they were, after all, resurrecting a glorious portion of the life of humanity long thought dead. So when Bracciolini, during a visit to a monastic library in southern Germany in January 1417, came across a document no longer believed to exist, it was a pregnant moment. But he couldn’t have known all that would emerge from that pregnancy when he quickly arranged for a copy to be made of the manuscript.
According to Greenblatt, Lucretius’s poem played a profound, if occult, role in shaping Renaissance and early modern thought. While few were prepared to express any public support for the scandalous philosophy it contained, Greenblatt contends that its dangerous ideas “percolated and surfaced wherever the Renaissance imagination was at its most alive and intense” (220).
Greenblatt’s book is lively and informative, but it is also timely. At a grim point in history when religious extremisms of many stripes are again on the march, determined to enforce an intolerant dogmatism that lusts to persecute any hint of enlightened skepticism, The Swerve serves as a reminder that it is possible to accept the reality of mortality and still value life, to recognize the transience of the world and still admire its beauty and grandeur. The topic of Greenblatt’s story may be the fate of a book, but its real theme is death, and its message is that a dignified and fully human life is still possible if we accept with gratitude our limited time on this earth.
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