TIM POTTS: I'm Tim Potts,
director of the Getty Museum.
And it's a great pleasure
to welcome you here tonight
for this, which is the seventh
of the annual Villa Presents
lectures.
These are lectures supported
by the Getty Villa Council.
And the purpose of
them is to promote
a dialogue on the influence
and relevance of antiquity
and its continuing
relevance and importance
to our understanding of culture,
and art, and literature today.
It's a very important
function that it serves.
And, indeed, the interest
of our collections
is very much related
to how we can continue
to interpret them, and make
them interesting and meaningful
to the culture that
we ourselves live in.
There could be no more
appropriate lecturer
to celebrate this theme than
Stephen Greenblatt, today's
speaker.
If you, as it were, sat down
with a blank piece of paper
and said, well, let's
invent a person who
does the sort of work that
makes the ancient world
and its interpretation of
later ages come to life
and be relevant.
And let's imagine that
he writes a book that
does that related to
a particular object
or group of objects.
You would invent
Stephen Greenblatt,
and you would invent The Swerve
as the topic of his lecture.
So we're delighted that we
didn't have to invent him.
He already exists, and we
were able to invite him here
tonight.
His talk will take
us back in time.
But starting not with antiquity
in the way our collections do,
but in a sense, in reverse
with a Italian humanist
who discovers a
wonderful manuscript
in the early 15th century,
the early modern period--
which had indeed been
copied and recopied
from antiquity--
which takes us back
to the Rome of the 1st century
BC when Lucretius lived.
And, indeed, takes us back
in a way to this building
or, at least the
one just over there,
which is the recreation of
the Villa of the Papyri.
Since it was in that
villa, that many
of the documents that relate
to the philosophical tradition
of Epicureanism and in which
Lucretius worked were found.
So the appropriateness
of the lecture
is not only this approach
to the subject, but indeed,
to the very place in which many
of these documents were found
and from which
this story unfolds.
So we're delighted to
have him with us here
tonight to lecture.
Just a few words on his
very distinguished career.
He is the Cogan
University professor
of the humanities at
Harvard University.
He's been the author of some
12 books, including, of course,
The Swerve How the
World Became Modern,
and Shakespeare's Freedom,
and Will in the World
How Shakespeare Became
Shakespeare, which
was in The New York
Times bestseller
list for some nine weeks.
And, of course, as well as being
a student of the ancient world,
he is perhaps best
known as a scholar
on Shakespeare and the
late Renaissance literature
generally.
Other books include
Hamlet in Purgatory,
Marvelous Possessions, and
Renaissance Self-Fashioning.
He's been the general editor of
the Norton Anthology of English
Literature, and of the
Norton Shakespeare,
and has edited seven
collections of criticism,
and is a founding editor of
the journal Representations.
He, of course, recently was
awarded the 2012 Pulitzer
Prize and the 2011 National
Book Award for The Swerve.
Many other accolades which
I won't mention, but perhaps
pick out just a few.
Harvard University's
Cabot fellowship,
the Distinguished Humanist Award
from the Mellon Foundation,
Yale's Wilbur Cross Medal,
the William Shakespeare
Award for Classical Theater,
the Erasmus Institute
Prize, et cetera, et cetera,
and the list does go on.
He's held, of course, many
distinguished visiting
professorships,
has been president
of the Modern Language
Association of America,
and a permanent fellow
of the Institute
for Advanced Study in
Berlin, and, of course,
the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, et cetera, et cetera.
And beyond that sort of litany,
if you like, of achievements,
he's been, even
more importantly,
a major figure in
the development
of a new way of approaching
literature and history--
what's summed up
all too blandly,
but under the rubric
of the new historicism.
But it has set in
train a whole new way
of thinking about the
relationship between literature
and history, and
how they interact,
which has been one of
the major developments
in the most inventive
and innovative research
in these fields in recent years.
So we hugely look forward
to his talk tonight--
it's not on the
screen anymore, but it
will be in a
second-- on Lucretius
and the toleration
of intolerable ideas.
Professor Greenblatt.
STEPHEN GREENBLATT: Thank
you so much to the director,
to Potts, to the Getty Council
for this wonderful invitation,
to you all for being
willing to come in out
of this exquisite, luminous
evening into a dark room.
And to talk about
the intolerable,
it is a particular pleasure to
do so in this special context,
as Tim has already explained.
Because we are in this fantastic
recreation of the place
where this story, in some ways
that I have to tell, centers.
Which is that something
was set off in effect
in and around the first century
before the Christian era
in the Bay of Naples.
Particularly, not only there
but in the Bay of Naples,
a kind of resurgence-- a
very powerful resurgence--
in the waning days of
the Roman Republic,
of the philosophy
of Epicureanism.
We know much about this,
because in the site,
not nearly so
beautiful as the villa
that you're in now
which is the recreation.
But in the site of
Herculaneum, there
were a set of discoveries
made in the 18th century that
took the world back deeply
into that lost world,
the world that was represented
by these weird-looking objects
which are carbonized
papyrus rolls.
Though it was first
assumed that they
might be charcoal briquettes.
And what was discovered was
a set of philosophical works
by a philosopher
named Philodemus.
They're hoping to find
something by more illustrious
philosophers, but they found
an Epicurean philosopher who
was either collected
or perhaps lived
for a while in this villa--
perhaps to teach in the
villa, to instruct the very
wealthy people who owned it.
And that philosophy
of Epicureanism
is what I'm going
to talk about today.
The villa, as you
probably know, is only
very partially excavated.
Here's a rather blurry slide
of current excavations going on
in Herculaneum.
And it's quite possible
that in that the extension
of the rooms where the
papyruses were found,
there'll be more discoveries
of manuscripts of lost
works from the ancient world.
So we're only really beginning
only a very small part
of the enormous area around
the villa of the papyruses
and, indeed, of Herculaneum
has been excavated.
So it's possible
that we'll find more
that will enable us to
recover, to get back
in touch with the particular
form of intense intelligence
that we can perhaps
glimpse, or at least
imagine we glimpse,
in some of the faces
that we see in the works of
art that have been recovered
from Herculaneum and that
grace the museums in the world.
And above all, grace this
particular magnificent
collection in the Getty Villa.
But what I want to talk about
today is how what came back
with the recovery
of Epicureanism--
and the particular recovery
that we'll look at a little bit
later in the 15th century--
how it came back managed
to get through at all.
Because all cultures, not
just medieval culture,
but all cultures,
including our own,
develop ways of
stabilizing themselves
by not allowing the most
disturbing ideas to penetrate.
And, as I'll have occasion
to try to explain,
late antique and
medieval culture
developed very
powerful mechanisms
to push off, as if a
disease or an infection
to push away ideas that
were too disturbing.
I looked today, thanks to one
of the members of the Getty
Council, at a remarkable
image that you
can see for yourself
here of the head of Venus
with a cross incised in it
and the eyes gouged out.
And that will actually
be a perfect introduction
to the problem that I
want to begin with today.
I'll begin here with one of
the master builders, the master
builder of Christian
orthodoxy, St. Augustine.
"What death is worse for
the soul," Augustine wrote,
"than the freedom to
err," to make a mistake.
Among these powerful
figures, the people
who formed Christianity in
the 4th century and onward,
there was little
tolerance for anything
that we would call toleration.
Though they themselves had been
persecuted, of course, once
in power, Christians
moved as quickly
as they could to suppress
rival forms of worship.
And in doing so,
they, in effect,
confirmed the
charges that had led
to the persecutions against
them in the first place.
That is to say,
Pagan intellectuals
had said that Christians
could not be tolerated--
couldn't be treated in the same
way that the state authorities
in the Roman Republic,
and later the Empire,
had ordinarily treated
newly-encountered religions--
because Christianity
wouldn't be assimilated.
It wouldn't allow
its reigning divinity
to be aligned with the existing
panoply of the Pagan gods.
Not only was Christianity
monotheistic,
and hence unwilling
to acknowledge
the existence of other
gods, it was also Catholic,
in the sense of universal.
And hence, committed
to urging everyone
to abandon time-honored
religious practices.
A succession of
Christian emperors,
beginning with
Theodocius the Great
in 391 of the Christian
era, issued edicts
forbidding public
sacrifices and, one
after the other,
closing cultic sites.
So the state had embarked on
the destruction of Paganism.
"Is it not true
that we are dead?"
writes one of the Pagan poets
in the wake of the destruction
of the Serapeum in Alexandria.
"We're living a life
that's like a dream,
since we remain alive while our
way of life is dead and gone."
Palladas had intuited
that his world was sliding
into the strange state
of suspended animation,
of living death.
That is the fate
of cultural relics
in most of our collections.
Where they represent
something beautiful perhaps,
but something that is
fundamentally dead,
whose life world
has passed away.
To its monotheism
and its universalism,
Christianity
conjoined a commitment
to a single, absolute,
doctrinal coherence,
or to a dream of
coherence, that was
alien to both Pagan
and Jewish traditions.
The ancient rabbis,
as you probably know,
hurled fierce charges
against each other.
They love to fight.
But the rabbis never
were able, at least not
until Maimonides,
the rabbis were never
able to even imagine a
coherent philosophical system,
the possibility of a resolution.
The resolution that was
the dream, in effect,
of the most ambitious
Christian theologians.
The spirit of the
Talmud is obviously
quite distinct from the spirit
of Pagan religious speculation,
of the kind that you find
in works like Cicero's
on the nature of the gods.
But, in both, you find a
sense that there'll always
be multiple competing schools
that will be fighting it out.
Augustine, and
above all Augustine,
set in motion the search,
which he understood
would never be complete
until the end of time,
for a theology that was
not fragile, or revisable,
or diverse, but was unshakable,
unchangeable, and coherent.
And the motivation
was not only a thing
a certain kind of philosophical
ambition, though it
was philosophical ambition--
plenty of it on
Augustine's part--
but also a particular concern
for the state of the soul.
Christian orthodoxy could
not tolerate false belief,
for the same reason
that the state,
as Thomas Moore put
it centuries later,
the state could not tolerate
the sale of poisoned bread.
You can't this.
You can't allow
this kind of harm
to come to the unsuspecting.
And, hence that question
with which we began,
what death is worse for the
soul and the freedom to err?
The question was posed as the
title of Augustine's work.
It suggests, in the
context of the debate
with a particular heretical
group called the Donatists,
and it directs us to a crucial
feature of Christian orthodoxy
in those early centuries.
Particularly, intense
prosecutorial attention
was paid not to the relics
of vanquished beliefs
and not even to rival faiths,
but to deviations often quite
subtle within the
one true faith.
The word heresy derives from
the Greek term hairesis, which
signifies precisely choice.
And it's precisely
choice and the idea
that there might be multiple
competing positions,
among which you could choose,
that theological absolutism
decisively rejected.
In its place, there
was at least the dream
of finding a single
truth and a determination
to weed out all false
beliefs to protect people
from harm to their souls.
For Augustine, the
key biblical text.
And Augustine knew
that he was trying
to affect a radical change from
the culture in which he had
been raised, the culture in
which there were competing
positions, in which you
could walk from one school
to the other.
And, here, the stoics
argue with the Epicureans,
the Epicureans with the
academics and so forth.
Augustine turned to a biblical
text to justify his view.
And the text was the parable
of the wheat and the tares.
I confess to you
I had to look up
what tares were when I saw
it, meaning noxious weed
like darnel or vetch.
From Matthew book 13,
"The kingdom of heaven
is like unto a man which
sowed good seed in his field.
But while men slept, his
enemy came and sowed tares
among the wheat
and went his way.
But when the blade was sprung
up and also brought forth fruit,
then appeared the tares also."
Well, that's the problem,
and the parallel goes on.
"The servants of the householder
came and said unto him,
'Sir, didst thou not sow
good seed in thy field?
From whencethen had the tares?'
He said unto them, 'an
enemy hath done this.'
The servant said unto him 'Wilt
thou then that we go and gather
them up?'
But he said, 'Nay, less while
you gather up the tares,
you root up also the
wheat with them.'"
Now, this would seem like
the least likely text
in support of a program
of vigorous persecution
of heretics.
But Augustine doesn't
see it that way.
It's true that the
tares in this text
didn't spring up naturally.
They were planted by the enemy.
Their very existence
calls into question
the goodness of the seed.
It's true that the master
tells the servants not
to pull up the weeds, for
fear of destroying the wheat.
And the argument would
seem to be, therefore,
in favor of something like
toleration of the kind
that Milton proposed in the 17th
century in the Areopagitica.
Milton thought you
had to tolerate lies
to be circulated, because that's
the only way to find the truth.
But Augustine doesn't
see it that way.
And in a very influential
interpretive move,
of the kind that intellectuals
are good at in general--
and Augustine, as the
greatest of all intellectuals,
was tremendously good at--
he argues against what
seems to be the surface
implication of Jesus' words.
That the parable
properly understood
licenses and, in fact,
requires heresy hunting.
Augustine writes that the only
reason that the master left
the tares to grow
until the harvest was
fear that uprooting them
sooner would harm the grain.
When this fear does not
exist, because it's evident
which is the good seed
and which is the wheat.
When someone's crime is
notorious and so execrable
that it's
indefensible, then it's
right to use severe
discipline against it.
For the more perversity
is corrected,
the more carefully
charity is safeguarded.
So the violent extirpation
of false beliefs
has to be understood as
in the service of charity.
And I think that is very
much what Augustine believed,
for the parables' cautionary
words applied only
to the period before the
seed had ripened and grown.
Now, we know decisively
which is the wheat
and which is the weed.
That's the point
of having doctrine.
It's appropriate
to act precisely
as the closing words of
Jesus' parable proposed.
And now, under this move
that Augustine makes,
the closing words
of Jesus' parable
begin to have a
slightly chilling ring.
"Let both grow together
till the harvest.
And at the time of harvest,
I'll say to the reapers,
gather ye together
first the tares
and bind them in
bundles to burn them.
But gather the
wheat into my barn."
I think we can be
reasonably sure Jesus is not
imagining people burned
at the stake here.
But it is, in effect, what the
interpretation of the parable
seems to license
Augustine to counsel.
And after Augustine,
centuries of people
interested in saving
humans from grievous error.
When the full power of
the state was mobilized
in support of the fateful
conjunction of monotheism,
and universalism, and
doctrinal absolutism,
the consequence was a
programmatic principled
and, on occasion,
murderous intolerance.
Now, the fact is that in
everyday life, men and women
for long periods of time,
all through late antiquity
in the Middle Ages, managed to
find some way of getting along
with their neighbors and
with their family members.
The differences
could, on occasion,
erupt into conflict,
even violent conflict.
But, for the most part, they
simmered quietly and uneasily.
But the principle,
at least, was clear.
Heresy was classified
as a capital crime,
as Aquinas puts it,
worse than forgery
and justifying not only
excommunication but death.
There are conflicting
accounts of the process
through which the world
escaped from this nightmare,
insofar as it did escape it.
And the Renaissance clearly
played an important role
through the process of
the reevaluation of Pagan
antiquity, through the
unsettling impact of new world
discoveries, through
the slow growth
of philosophical skepticism,
and the widespread popular
revulsion in the wake
of the religious wars,
and the determination
of secular rulers
to achieve some kind
of pragmatic solution
to popular disorder
to quiet things down.
But the issues were by no means
quickly or decisively resolved.
John Locke's celebrated
letter concerning toleration,
which was first
published anonymously
in Latin in the
Netherlands in 1689,
declared flatly that the
care of every man's soul
belongs unto himself and
is to be left to himself.
But even here, 1689,
must by anyone's account
be the extreme outer end, the
far end of the Renaissance,
very few of his
contemporaries agreed.
Or, at least, were
willing publicly
to declare that they agreed
with this simple prescription.
That's why it was
published anonymously
in Latin and in the Netherlands.
Belief in one
religion or another,
Locke argued, could
not be compelled.
"And dissent from one
religion or another
shouldn't be punished,
for all the life
and power of true
religion consists
in the inward and full
persuasion of the mind,"
he wrote.
"And faith is not faith
without believing."
The church has to be free
and voluntary, he thought.
"I may grow rich by an art
that I take not delight in.
I may be cured of some disease
by remedies that I have not
faith in," he wrote anticipating
many remedies that we all
choose for ourselves,
not fully having faith
in but hoping that
we'll be cured.
"But I cannot be saved by
a religion that I distrust
and by a worship that I abhor."
"And, as for
orthodoxy," Locke wrote
in one of my favorite
formulations,
"everyone is
orthodox to himself."
Now, it's very important
to realize that,
even in late 17th century
Protestant England--
and these are highly
Protestan propositions--
these views were
widely and vehemently
attacked by
everyone, Protestants
as well, as far beyond the
pale of what was acceptable.
And that Locke
himself articulated
a significant exception.
"Those are not at all to
be tolerated," he wrote,
"who deny the being of a God."
Why?
Why, if religion consists of
the inward and full persuasion
of the mind, as he
himself has put it,
should toleration
not extend to those
whose minds are unpersuaded?
"Because," he says, "promises,
covenants, and oaths,
which are the bonds
of human society,
can have no hold
upon an atheist."
That is to say, as
you will notice,
the argument doesn't
focus on the afterlife,
on the saving of the soul.
It's on the here and now.
How do you get
along with people?
How do you trust people?
And you can't trust them
in ordinary human society,
in all matters of
ordinary human bonds,
if they don't at least have
a minimal belief in God.
"The taking away of God, though
but even in thought," he says,
"dissolves all."
Though but even in thought.
Here, at the very end of this
period, 1689, the very late
17th century, we
find in the work
of one of the most daring and
enlightened minds of all time,
a clear limit to what
can be tolerated--
what it can be allowed through.
And it's a limit that
strikingly echoes
the position that
was articulated
150 years before Locke, at the
very beginning of the English
Renaissance, by another
daring and enlightened mind,
the Catholic Thomas Moore.
Utopus, who was the founder
of the commonwealth that
bears his name, Utopia, had
ruled absolutely astonishingly
from the point of view
of Moore's Europe,
that it should be
lawful for every man
to follow the religion
of his choice.
You should understand that
utopia means no place.
No place in the
early 16th century
would have actually embraced
formally such a notion
that everyone should
be free to follow
the religion of his
choice, as long as he
isn't too vehement in trying to
persuade others Utopus rights.
But one position is not only
discouraged but is prohibited.
The ruler Utopus conscientiously
and strictly gave injunction
that no one should fall
so far below the dignity
of human nature as to
believe that souls likewise
perish with the body,
or that the world is
the mere sport of
chance and not governed
by any divine Providence.
So Moore gets as close to
understanding specifically
what the minimal
belief test would be.
You have to believe
that the world is not
the sport of chance.
It's not the product
of randomness.
It's created by a designer,
and that there is an afterlife
of punishments and rewards.
Why?
"Because who can
doubt," Moore says,
"that anyone who does
not have these principles
will strive either to evade
by craft the public laws
of this 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.
So that question
conjures up the specter
that haunts even the most
radical Renaissance defenses
of toleration and More's
Utopia and Locke's Letter
and Toleration are
the most radical.
We've reached the limit case.
The point at which the earliest
Renaissance moment in England
and the latest have conjoined
in this strange mystic marriage
of the implacable Catholic Saint
and the Protestant philosopher
of the Liberal
Enlightenment, who
both agree this is intolerable.
We can't allow that set of
positions to get through.
OK, that's a quick picture
of what the problem is.
And here's what happened.
The loss of almost
the entire corpus
of materialist
philosophy, the school
of Democritus,
Leucippus, and Epicurus.
The school that
believed that there
was no providential creator and
that there was no afterlife.
That loss was not
completely accidental.
Somewhat accidental,
but not completely.
Paganism, Judaism,
and Christianity
found a great deal to admire
in Plato and Aristotle.
And they had significant
motives, therefore,
for preserving at least
some of their works.
Atomism invited no
comparable accommodation.
When there was an attempt
to revive Paganism,
in the earlier 4th Century
under someone named
Julian the Apostate, and
they drew up a list of things
that Pagan priests
should read, to try
to learn how to be
Pagans again, they
excluded the works
of Epicureans.
They said that
wasn't appropriate.
Jews, likewise, called
people who don't believe,
people who are atheists,
[INAUDIBLE],, Epicureans.
And Christians similarly
condemned Epicureanism
as the enemy of religion.
All the works of Democritus
and Leucippus have vanished.
Almost all of the works
of Epicurus are gone.
And it's all the
more surprising then
that a single magnificent,
astonishing, long work
of this philosophical
school got through--
the work called, On the Nature
of Things, De Rerum Natura,
by Lucretius.
That it survived
depended almost entirely
on the vagaries of the
monastic scriptorium.
Someone, we don't know
whom, was assigned
the task in a monastery,
sometime probably
in the 8th century, to copy all
7,400 lines of Lucretius poem
and save it from rotting away.
It probably happened
once or twice.
The key principle in general
is that if, as far as material
texts, is that if it got
copied in the 8th century,
it stood a very good chance
of making it through.
If it didn't get copied
in the 8th century,
it was curtains for the text.
Because the stuff
doesn't last that long.
It lasts a long time,
but not that long.
It has to be copied.
OK, two moments are crucial.
There's this moment of the monk.
And there was a moment
again, fortuitous,
let's say this was in the
8th century, possibly late
7th, 8th century, there
was the moment in 1417,
in which the man whose
handwriting you see here,
signs himself Poggio
de Florentijn.
He was a book hunter
and a papal bureaucrat.
And he found the manuscript
of De Rerum Natura.
Had a copy made and sent
it to his friend and fellow
humanist, Niccolo Niccoli
in Florence, to be copied.
And that's Niccolo
Niccoli's copy,
which is in the Laurentian
library in Florence.
And I've held this in
my trembling hands.
Since I've written a book about
this moment of the discovery
in 1417, and how this
transmission got through,
I will not dwell
on it here, except
to say that this is the
moment in which it comes back
in this strange way, one
huge lump of antiquity that
was recovered.
The central proposition
of Lucretius great poem,
that the universe consists
of atoms and emptiness,
was not the dominant view
of Poggio's world in 1417,
but it wouldn't have come
as a complete surprise.
People always knew that the
world was made of something.
And they also
understood that you
could cut up the something
in smaller and smaller bits.
So there were people in the
monasteries of the Middle Ages,
who had notions that there was
a theory in the ancient world
of Atomism, that the
universe was put together out
of tiny indivisible substances.
But no one was prepared
for the full implications
of the interlocking argument
that Lucretius' work brought
back.
It was one thing to
think that the world is
made up out of atoms.
It's another thing
to understand what
that means, philosophically.
For Lucretius argued not only
that the world is made up
out of an infinite number of
indestructible tiny particles--
he called them first beginnings,
or the seeds of things--
but also that nothing else
existed, no other forms
of being, and thus no immaterial
demons, or angels, or ghosts,
and no bottomless
immortal soul, souls
that are not made of matter.
And what followed from this
was a textbook succession
of unacceptable, intolerable
propositions of the kind that
gave More and Locke,
along with just
about everyone else,
very, very bad dreams.
So I'll very quickly rehearse
some of the propositions,
because it's crucial that you
know what was coming suddenly
back against this
very tight mesh, that
was meant to block the
circulation precisely
of these thoughts.
First of all, the universe
has no creator or designer.
The particles themselves have
not been made and cannot be
destroyed.
And the problem here is not
only that the universe was
uncreated and immortal,
because that thought, actually,
in a way, European
philosophy had already
grappled with in the
thought of Aristotle,
but it was also that it
happened without any design,
without any divine control.
That it was without the help
of the gods, [INAUDIBLE],,
spontaneously it happens,
not because anyone
is making it happen.
And then nature ceaselessly
and randomly experiments.
Scripture understood--
was understood
to mean that God had
created all the species that
existed in the first six days.
Mutations were
observed, of course,
but they were not part of an
ongoing, evolving life process.
And a strong bias toward design,
toward thinking that things
had to been made, made
it extremely difficult
to understand what Lucretius
was getting at when he was--
or to take in, to tolerate
what he was getting at,
when he said that the
universe was constantly nature
was constantly throwing
up weird, mutant forms,
hermaphrodites, things with
strange physical features,
and so forth and so on.
And that these things were
not happening on purpose.
They were happening
spontaneously.
Nothing is born in us simply
in order that we may use it,
but that which is born,
he wrote, creates the use.
That's actually an
extremely tricky thought,
one that is difficult for--
I think still quite
difficult to take
in, including the
notion, as he puts it,
that there was no sight
before the eyes were born,
no speaking of words
before the tongue.
The eye didn't evolve
in order to let you see.
It doesn't happen that way.
No one is planning
things in that form.
This notion was bizarre
and incomprehensible really
to most people, until Darwin.
And even now it's very
hard to get hold of.
And then, the world was not
created for or about humans.
There was, Lucretius thought,
no original paradisal state
designed to make
humans feel at home.
As a species, we make our way
through an environment that's
hostile and we're
very vulnerable.
He writes in a famous passage,
asking you to contemplate
a baby thrown up against--
into the shores
of light, wailing,
speechless, utterly helpless.
Early humans, and we'll
come back to this notion,
he thought were
extremely primitive.
He had absolutely no
patience for the idea
that there was an original
golden age, in which humans
were perfect, and then
devolved from that.
He thought humans
must have originated
in the brutish form, and
very, very slowly moved
toward anything that
resembled civility.
He didn't think
they'd got very far.
He wasn't a huge fan
of his own world.
But they had definitely
made progress.
And they'd made progress
with the limited things
that they had.
They weren't very well made.
He has-- Lucretius has
a sense, how shall we
say, the principle of the
prostate, that the humans
aren't all that well designed.
If there were a
designer, the designer
had failed in several
crucial respects.
The fate of the
entire species is not
the pole around which
everything revolves.
Indeed, there's no
reason, he thought,
to believe that our
species would last forever.
Things are always
coming into being.
He thought there were
creatures, other species
before humans existed.
There would be other species
after humans ceased to exist.
In the world, things would
constantly get thrown up.
And because humans are
not, he thought, unique.
He thought they were not
unique, not only as a species,
but they were not unique
in what they were made of.
It sounds good that we're all
sprung from celestial seed,
as he puts it.
But what he means by that
is that we're made up
out of the same atoms that
everything else is made up out
of, that water is
made up out of,
this table is made up out of.
It's just all a certain
limited repertory
of atoms that are coming
together in different forms.
There's nothing-- there's
no special human atoms that
make us significantly unique.
Our lives can be analyzed
in the same terms,
he thought, that could be used
to analyze all other creatures
that forage for
food or experience
the drive to
reproduce their kind.
And then he thought
that the soul dies.
He thought the soul dies because
the soul was made of matter.
And he thought-- we'll
come back to this too.
It was a bit of a problem.
He thought this was good news.
Death, he says,
is nothing to us.
We don't have anything
to worry about.
We didn't worry about
things before we were alive
and we won't worry about
things after we're dead.
We don't have to be
concerned that anything
is going to happen to
us in an afterlife.
And therefore, he thought
all organized religions
are superstitious delusions.
He thought that humans
projected desires and fears
onto certain
imaginary creatures.
And they get trapped
up in false beliefs.
Lucretius believed, as
the philosopher Vico also
believed in the 18th century,
that lightning and thunder play
an important part in
the origins of religion.
He thought that humans
respond instinctively
to very loud noises
by starting to pray.
And the trouble is that
praying, he thought, was futile.
The horrors that are
imagined in the afterlife
are only things that
we do in this life,
because religions are
part of a system that
actually is quite cruel.
They promise love and hope,
but their deep underlying
structure, he thought, was based
on anxiety and retribution.
The quintessential
emblem for Lucretius
of what was wrong with
religion was the sacrifice.
He thought religions
always came back
to stories of the sacrifice
of a child by its parent.
It's actually a
very peculiar thing.
I think it's
doubtful that he knew
the story of Abraham and Isaac.
He certainly didn't-- he's
writing in the year 50,
before the Christian era, at
the time of Julius Caesar.
He certainly didn't
know the story
that was going to be told in 50
years time by the Christians.
But he did know the story
of Agamemnon and Iphigenia.
And it's probably that
that is his focus here,
the sacrifice of a child by a
parent in the name of religion.
He thought that the
solution, insofar
as there was a solution,
was not to attribute
the miseries of the world
to punishments by God
and to torture oneself
and religious belief,
but rather to pursue pleasure
and to try to reduce pain
for oneself and others.
There is no higher ethical
purpose than that, he thought.
This is the ultimate good.
All other claims, the
service of the state,
the glorification of the
gods, or the glorification
of the ruler, the
arduous pursuit of virtue
through self-sacrifice,
such as the stoics
would have believed, all
of the other values that
was so important, actually,
in 1st century BC Rome,
he thought when
misguided or fraudulent.
Militarism and the
taste of violent sports
that characterized so
much of Roman culture
seemed to Lucretius
in the deepest sense,
perverse and unnatural.
By pursuit of
pleasure, he didn't
think that you needed to live
in the Villa of the Papyri,
though it would have been nice.
He thought what you needed
was very, very little.
You don't feel better,
he says, if you
have a fever if you have a
very expensive blanket on you
then if you have a
less expensive blanket.
You just need a blanket.
That's the general picture.
Now, almost all of
these propositions,
virtually all of them,
would have seemed scandalous
to the early 15th century.
The early 15th century that was
the heir to a rich centuries
old culture that worshipped
an omnipotent, omniscient,
creator God, that celebrated
spiritual transcendence, that
longed for the redemption of the
soul, that constantly reminded
itself of the atoning value
of pain, of suffering,
and of renunciation.
And the fact that
Lucretius' poem
and the whole Epicurean
philosophical discourse
in which it participated had
virtually completely dropped
from view for centuries,
before it came back in 1417--
I mean, almost no mention of it.
Tiny glimpses of it
in the 8th century,
in the 9th century, and
then silence for centuries,
until it suddenly comes back.
The fact that it
came back so suddenly
made it all the more shocking.
Because important texts
by ancient philosophers,
by Plato, Aristotle,
by Cicero and others,
were also recovered
during this period.
But their reception
was conditioned
by a long process of commentary
and of appropriation,
so that by the time, certainly
by early 15th century,
Aristotle had in effect, through
the work of Thomas Aquinas,
become a Christian philosopher.
There was no such
tradition for Lucretius.
After 1,000 years,
the better part
of 1,000 years of
virtual silence,
his return was, in the deepest
sense, uncanny, [INAUDIBLE]..
He spoke with supreme eloquence,
but much of what he said
seemed to a very few,
to all but a very few
of Poggio's
contemporaries, insofar
as they could take it in at all,
as monstrous, or perhaps simply
incomprehensible.
As a young man, the most
brilliant philosopher
of the 15th century in
Italy, Marsilio Ficino,
began to write a commentary
on Lucretius' De Rerum Natura.
But seeing where
it was leading him,
he burned it and spent the rest
of his life trying to reconcile
Plato to Christianity.
The return of De Rerum
Natura was the Renaissance
at its most radical.
Not a decorous sedate recovery
of classical harmonies,
but a weird, unnerving
challenge to everything
that right thinking people
believed to be true.
A few odd forays--
a few odd figures made forays
into the strange territory
and decided to stay for a while.
But for the most part--
but for the most part, people
stayed away, all but a few.
The most interesting,
perhaps, of those
in the very early years
who ventured close,
were those who
don't speak to us,
but rather who paint for us.
This is a painting by that
remarkable and very weird
figure Piero di Cosimo,
Florentine painter
of the 15th century,
early 16th century, who
did a series of
works for a group
in Florence, who evidently were
interested in certain aspects,
at least, of Lucretius' poem.
This is a painting called
A Forest Fire, that
is very clearly based on
a reading of a passage
from Lucretius,
precisely in which
he's saying that
humans originated--
how did human life as we know
it originate-- it originated
in slow development of
primitive peoples out
of the mastery of
certain natural features,
such as the mastery of fire.
When a branch and tree
struck by wind swaying
and tossed about, lean on
the branches of a tree,
fire is pressed out by the
great force of the friction.
And we can see fire coming out
on a clear day in this form.
And we're watching
an early stage
as those who read
Lucretius understood
him to be saying of the origins
of human life as we know it.
Or here, another painting--
I'm sorry, it's not
a very good slide--
of a hunt, of
again, very closely
based on a passage in Lucretius
about early humans as hunters,
fighting beasts with
ponderous clubs.
And you can notice not only
these are early humans,
but they're also strange mutant
types as well, or halfway
between humans--
and they're-- of course, Piero
di Cosimo could represent this,
if you were asked, as a Seder.
But these figures, these
strange, odd figures
with strange faces and
shapes are almost certainly
those metamorphosed,
those mutant figures,
that Lucretius was
imagining, other kinds
of what we would call
hominids in the world
before humans emerged.
The point about this-- and I'll
come back to this in a bit--
is that this could
be an exception
to the mechanism, formal
and informal, of aversion
and repression.
It could be a
mechanism-- it could
be a way of escaping an
exception to those mechanisms,
because though paintings don't
get a free ride, completely,
basically the Inquisition
is not called very often
to investigate painters.
Because painters don't
speak out in the same way.
You can play games,
and you can imagine
what-- as I say already, you can
imagine what if he was asked.
Piero di Cosimo what
was a very strange man.
He lived the end of his life
only on hard boiled eggs,
which he cooked 50 at a time.
He was a very, very
weird character,
so people would just
probably have shrugged
and thought he was weird.
But if asked, he
could have had things
to say, to explain how he
and the circle of people
he was painting
for at this point
would have understood
these things, that
would have enabled them to,
as it were, escape the net.
The simple existence of
bad ideas from the past
was not the problem.
The question was how
close you could get
to them in this seductive form.
For the better
part two centuries,
the reception of
Lucretius was fugitive,
in a way that its fugitive
in a painting like this.
It wasn't until the
late 16th century,
almost 200 years after
Poggio recovered the text,
that Giordano Bruno
ventured to propose
is his own belief,
the infinite universe,
the ceaseless
recombination of matter,
the absence of
providential design,
the origination of human life
in barbarous primitive states,
and other distinctly
Lucretian features.
And for his efforts, Bruno was
imprisoned, and interrogated,
and tortured, and finally likely
to stake in the Campo di Fiori,
where his statue now stands
in the middle of the fruit
and vegetable market
that many of you
will have been to at some point.
So the roughly 200 year time
lag between the discovery
of the text, 1417, and
Bruno's fatal public advocacy
of the central principles,
marks the historical conundrum
that's my topic tonight.
And it extends really beyond,
as we saw from Locke, even
beyond that 200 year period.
Because for decades
and decades, no one
could come forward
safely and say
I think the world is made
up out of atoms and void,
that in body and soul
we're only fantastically
complex structures
of atoms that are
destined one day to come apart.
And no respectable
citizen could say
the soul dies with the body.
There's no judgment after death.
The universe wasn't created
for us by divine power.
The whole notion of an afterlife
is a superstitious fantasy.
And we're not tainted
with original sin.
No one who wished to live in
peace could stand up in public
and say that preachers
have been lying to us,
God has no interest
in our actions.
And though nature is
beautiful, and its intricate,
it's not the product of an
overarching intelligent design.
For that matter, no
one could stand up
and hope to win public
office in the United States
and say those things.
So the propositions were for
the entirety of the Renaissance,
the Intolerable.
And the poem,
nonetheless survived
and was allowed to circulate.
And the question
is, why was that?
How was the
Intolerable tolerated?
And there are three answers
that I want to propose, quickly,
in closing.
And the first has to do with
what we could call really
strategies of avoidance.
This is a copy, it
happens, of Lucretius--
it was owned by Ben Johnson,
Shakespeare's friend.
It's in the Houghton
Library at Harvard.
Ben Johnson was a
notorious drunkard.
And he probably spilled
ink and acid on his pages
and messed it up.
But his comments are
scribbled on the book.
And indeed, you can study,
as people have studied,
the jottings, the
underlining, the asterisks,
the little drawings
that pointed fingers
in the margins of
both the manuscripts
and the printed
copies of Lucretius
to see how people
were reading the text.
And what people who
have studied, above all,
a young historian
named Ada Palmer, who's
gone through the
annotations in 54
surviving manuscripts, as
well as the first four printed
editions, have found is
that Renaissance readers
tended not to make any
marks in the margins
next to any of the
stuff that I showed you.
None of the passages that I
quoted before, earlier tonight,
have almost anything
written in the margins
next to them in the text,
no underlinings, nothing.
So what's that about?
There were comments
in the margins.
Readers made
philological comments.
They comment on Latin
and Greek vocabulary.
They speculate on
Scansion, how you
count the syllables
in the hexameters,
they take notes on natural
history and on Roman culture.
Perhaps people were being very
careful not to call attention
to the really--
what Eric Idle calls the
naughty bits in the poem.
Or perhaps, their eyes
simply slipped over
those passages in unconscious
aversion to something
that they considered
disagreeable,
or weird, or merely foolish.
And the second answer
is related to the first,
and also related to what you're
seeing, which is a printed
edition of the text.
And it has to do
with scholarship.
Scholarship turns
out to play a role
in the history of toleration.
Scholars set to
work on what they
took to be a poem whose
core vision of the world
was in effect dead.
They didn't wish to call that
world back into existence.
In that since, they
weren't interested in what
we call the Renaissance, in
the literal sense of rebirth.
But they wanted to prolong the
existence of the dead work.
They wanted to use
it as a school text.
They wanted to use it as
a text with commentary.
They wanted to make
it accessible to those
who now contemplated it from the
shores of the revealed truth.
They wanted to create the
kind of artificial homeostasis
for the text, to surround it.
And that's what
you are looking at.
This is two lines
of Lucretius poem.
And the rest of this
is just commentary,
scholarly commentary
on the poem.
And it goes like that
all the way through.
So what they do is to create
a kind of support system
that completely surrounds
the body of the text,
at once sustaining it,
but also containing it.
With their assistance, De
Rerum Natura was on its way
to becoming what this is,
which is a school text,
a staple in the curriculum.
And it was only in December
of 1516, almost a full century
after Poggio discovered the
text that the Florentine synod,
which was the influential group
of clergymen that determined
the syllabus in
Florentine schools,
decided that this kind
of homeostatic survival
was a very bad idea.
So they prohibited the reading
of Lucretius in schools.
They said the Latin
was very nice,
but the work should be banned
as lascivious and wicked work,
in which every effort
is used to demonstrate
the mortality of the soul.
And violators of the
edict were threatened
with eternal damnation
and a fine of 10 ducats.
The prohibition did in
fact restrict circulation.
And it bankrupted the
poor guy who printed
this quite expensive edition.
But it was too late
to close the door.
Scholarly editions had already
appeared in Bologna, in Paris,
in Venice, in Florence.
And it's very, very--
they were moving about.
And they're very,
very difficult-- once,
as many people have discovered,
once works get into print--
now we have other
ways, other suffering
this unpleasant news--
once things get in print,
it's almost impossible
to drive them out.
It was much easier in the old
days of manuscript culture.
You could burn a few manuscripts
and kill a few scribes,
and you could actually
get things under control.
But it was much more difficult
to do with the printing press.
If complete suppression
proved impossible,
there was some
consolation in the fact
that many editions
came with kind
of disclaimers of the
sort, of don't try this
at home disclaimers.
Understand, says the
great French edition,
of the 16th century,
by Denis Lambin,
understand that it's a poem.
It's a great poem.
It's an elegant,
magnificent poem, a poem
that all wise men will praise.
But understand that it
is that, it's a poem.
Once you understand that
that's what it's for then
the full force of that poetic
merit can be acknowledged.
It's a magnificent poem.
And you can separate that
sense from the ideas.
As for those insane ideas.
It's not difficult for us to
refute them, nor in truth,
is it necessary to do so,
certainly when they're
most easily disproved by
the voice of truth itself,
meaning scripture, or
by everyone remaining
silent about them--
everyone remaining
silent about them.
It's a kind of subtle warning.
Sing the praises
of the poem, but
remain silent about its ideas.
At least one of the
readers of Lambin's edition
was unable to, or
unwilling to remain silent
about the ideas in the poem.
And that is the person
who owned this edition.
That's the edition
I've been quoting from.
And this is his copy.
And that person is the French
essayist Michel de Montaigne,
whose copy of
Lucretius survives.
And it's covered,
as you can see,
with hundreds, thousands, of
comments, all over the text,
and over the dangerous
bits as well as the less
dangerous bits.
Montaigne's work is
full of quotations.
Montaigne's actually full of
quotations from Lucretius.
Clear fascination on the
ceaseless movement of matter
and the pursuit of pleasure.
And Montaigne carefully
marked in the copy
all of the places in
the text that were,
as he puts it in the margin--
contra religion--
against religion.
In what spirit is not
clear, genuinely not clear.
And there's a debate among
students of Montaigne
about whether he's
warning himself or just
remarking with glee that
something is against belief.
It's very hard to tell.
What we can't tell
is, first of all,
that his reception
was much, much
more active than what I
was talking about earlier,
about this sort of blankness.
And also, that when he
directly addresses Lucretius,
he directly addresses
Lucretius' merits
in terms that would not
have frightened Denis Lambin
or the others in his world.
What he directly
addresses is how
fantastic Lucretius' Latin is.
Montaigne was a great Latinist.
Actually, Latin was
Montaigne's first language,
because of his slightly
strange upbringing.
And Montaigne had
absolutely superb ability
to understand what
is magnificent
in Lucretius' language.
And then the great,
remarkable essay by Montaigne
with a very dull title,
on some versus of Virgil,
but it's an essay
that should have been
called On Sexual Intercourse.
It's Montaigne's
great essay on sex.
He turns to Lucretius, who
wrote what the poet Yates
calls the greatest description
of sexual intercourse ever
written.
And adores it, but he
adores it for its Latin.
When I ruminate that rejicit,
pascit, inhians, molli, fovet,
mellas, labefacta,
pendet, percucrrit
and that noble circumfusa,
mother of the pretty infusus,
I despise everything that
everyone else is doing there.
The aesthetic
appreciation of Lucretius,
in fact the whole ability
to grapple with Lucretius
depended on the possession
of very good Latin.
And thus, the
circulation of the poem
was limited to a very
small, elite group.
Everyone grasped that an
attempt to make it more broadly
accessible to the
literate public
would arouse deep suspicion and
hostility from the authorities.
So more than 200 years
passed before an attempt
was actually made after
the recovery of Lucretius
to translate Lucretius
into vernaculars.
And that's another sign
of the ways in which
the intolerable was contained.
But by the 17th century, it
was impossible to contain
any longer.
The philosopher
Gassendi in France
had a student
translate Lucretius.
His student happened to be
Moliere, the great playwright.
Unfortunately, the
translation is lost.
There was an
Italian translation,
which the Catholic authorities,
the church authorities
kept out of print for decades,
but was circulating privately.
And in England, first
there was a translation
of a single book
of Lucretius' poem.
And then in 1682, a complete
translation of Lucretius
was in print from this
man, Thomas Creech.
But first of all,
take in the fact
that between 1417
and 1682, there
was no translation of
work available in England,
in English.
This is a good slide,
but not maybe good enough
to enable you to see that,
in this beam of sunlight,
there are thousands of little
atoms coming down on that
philosopher.
Creech's translation was greeted
as an amazing achievement
when it first appeared.
But, in fact, an
English translation
of almost the entire
poem in couplets
was already in very
limited circulation
and from a very
surprising source.
And this will lead us
toward our third point.
The translation which
wasn't published
until the 20th century was by
this woman, the Puritan Lucy
Hutchinson.
She doesn't look like
she's in the grip
of a mad pursuit of pleasure.
She was the wife of Colonel
John Hutchinson, who was
a parliamentarian [INAUDIBLE].
And what's most
striking, in a way,
about her amazing translation
of the work, is that by the time
she presented the text to
the Earl of Anglesey in 1675,
she claimed that she detested
every one of its principles
and hoped that they would vanish
from the face of the earth.
So the question was
why, when she earnestly
hopes that the wickedness
will disappear,
did she painstakingly
prepare the verse translation
and pay a professional scribe to
write out the first five books,
and copy out the sixth book
in her own hand, and so forth.
And her answer is a
very revealing one.
She says she did it out of
curiosity, youthful curiosity,
to understand things I had
heard so much discourse
of at second hand.
So we get a sudden glimpse
of the quiet conversations
of which we have no record, of
course, that were happening,
as it were, in the other
room, among the men.
And Lucy Hutchinson, who
was brilliant, and serious,
and wanted to know what
they were talking about,
set out to find out.
And then, she does not
pretend that she was not
interested in the project.
She didn't suppress what
she found out in the work.
She tells us that she
turned it into English
in a room where my
children practice
the several qualities they
were taught with their tutors.
That means, the children
were learning Latin
while she was
translating the poem.
They were learning
their other subjects.
And I number the syllables
of my translation
by the threads of the canvas
I wrought in and set them down
with a pen and ink
that stood by me.
What you'll notice here is that
many women in the 17th century
were very shy about admitting
that they were writers,
wanting--
it was a very complicated issue
all through the Renaissance,
how much women were
willing to come forth
as writers on their own.
She makes it very clear
that she is a woman
and that she is
doing domestic tasks,
and at the same time is
translating this very difficult
Latin poem into verse.
And why is she not embarrassed?
She says that a masculine
wit, John Evelyn, presented
only a single book of
the poem to the public,
thought it was worth printing
his head in a Laurel crown.
And now she's presenting
the whole thing to use.
She's extremely
proud of the fact
that she is a poet, a poet
who deserves a Laurel crown.
And that crown is
the key element
to the survival and
transmission of what
was perceived by Hutchison
herself, and virtually everyone
else, to be intolerable.
As we already saw,
the thought police
were not called very often
to investigate paintings.
But it wasn't only a matter
of formal censorship.
Artists, most of whom thought of
themselves as good Christians,
were able as artists, as
painters, and as poets,
to explore in their
work what would not--
what they wouldn't
have found palatable
as philosophical or
ethical propositions.
And the interesting thing--
it's really the key
point I want to make--
that an unexpected and
surprising conjunction
between toleration,
dangerous ideas, in this case
scientific ideas,
and works of art.
We don't necessarily
think of works of art.
We should think
of them more often
as carrying an enormous,
cognitive weight
in our world, of enabling things
to happen, thoughts to happen.
But this is exactly
what happened here.
And Lucretius
himself anticipated,
strangely enough,
precisely this effect.
I told you already that very
little of Epicurus survives.
One of the very few things
of Epicurus that survives
is a saying that's in
so-called Vatican maxims,
I spit on poetry.
Epicurus thought that philosophy
should be written in prose.
He very much disapproved
of Empedocles.
A pre-sorcratic philosopher
who wrote in poetry.
He thought philosophy
was a prose medium.
And Lucretius wrote his
Epicurean philosophy in poetry.
Why?
Because, he says,
that as physicians,
when they seek to give young
boys the noisiest Wormwood,
the disgusting tasting
medicine, first you
touch the brim around the cup
with a sweet juice and yellow
of the honey in order that
the thoughtless age of boyhood
be cajoled as far as the lips,
and meanwhile swallow down
the Wormwood's bitter draft.
So I am presenting
my work in poetry.
Art is linked to
survival, to being
able to take in, to swallow what
would otherwise be unpalatable.
The survival points to a further
power in Lucretius' art--
the realization that
the universe consists
of atoms, and the
void, and nothing else,
that the world was not made for
us by a providential creator,
that we're not the
center of the universe,
that our emotional
lives are no more
distinct than our
physical lives from those
of all other creatures,
that our souls are
as material and
mortal as our bodies.
The realization of
the nature of things,
Lucretius thought,
shouldn't bring with it
a sense of cold emptiness,
as if the universe
had been robbed of its magic.
He knew that people would say
exactly what they did say, when
he came to them and said, your
soul will die with your body
and that's good news.
He knew that they would
reject that thought.
The origin of
philosophy, he thought,
should be the
enhancement of pleasure
and the enhancement of wonder.
And that process
should be linked
to the way in which human beings
experience pleasure and wonder.
And one of those ways is
through art, through painting,
and in his case, through poetry.
The poetic greatness
of Lucretius' work
is not incidental to
his visionary project.
He didn't think that
the tellers of truth
should not be allowed to tell
truth in a beautiful way.
He didn't think that only
the tellers of fables
should be able to
speak beautiful words,
or have beautiful works of
art, or beautiful buildings.
With the aid of poetry,
the actual nature
of things, an infinite number
of indestructible particles
swirling around, linking
together, coming to life,
coming apart, reproducing
and dying, and recreating
themselves, forming an
astonishing constantly
changing, erotic universe can be
depicted in its true splendor.
He thought that that endless
world making and unmaking
was the work of erotic
energy, the energy of matter.
And that belief, that
force of that belief,
you can feel in strange
places, appropriated
where you least expect it.
As here, not exactly
by Leonardo DiCaprio,
but by Mercutio in Romeo
and Juliet, who says
I see Queen Mab
hath been with you.
She's 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
atomies, little atomies.
In the play, in which the
young lovers have no hope
beyond this life, and must
consecrate all their energies
into making a world of
love in the here and now.
It's in this spirit, perhaps,
that Lucretius himself did
something very
strange, something
that appears to violate his
conviction that the gods are
deaf to human petitions,
namely his poem
opens with a hymn,
a prayer, to Venus.
We don't know how the German
monks who copied these verses
and kept them from
destruction responded.
We don't know whether
they had the impulse
to carve in the poem the
equivalent of that cross that
was carved onto the head
of Venus in the Getty.
Nor do we know what
Poggio Bracciolini, who
must at least have
glanced at the poem
thought that those
versus to Venus meant.
Certainly, as I've
said, almost every one
of the poems basic
principles was anathema
to all right thinking people.
But the poetry was compellingly
in seductively beautiful.
And we can see with
hallucinatory vividness what
at least one great
English poet, a poet
of impeccable Protestant
credentials, made of them.
This is Spencer in the
Fairy Queen, translating.
This is only one of--
a succession of stanzas--
in which he
translates literally,
incorporates into his poem
Lucretius' great hymn to Venus.
Great Venus, queen of
beauty and of grace, the joy
of gods and men, that under
sky does fairest shine and most
adorn they place,
that with they smiling
look does pacify the raging seas
and makes the storms the fly.
Thee goddess, thee-- the
winds, the clouds do fear.
And when thou spreads
thy mantel forth, on high
the waters play
and pleasant lands
appear, and heavens
laugh, and all the world
shows joyous cheer.
This is not an expression
of toleration in any sense
that Thomas More or John
Locke would have understood.
As I hope we've seen,
toleration, only
feebly present in this
period, would not in any case
have been extended to
any of the key ideas that
re-entered circulation with
On the Nature of Things.
What occurred, instead of
toleration in the Renaissance,
was art.
That power, the
power of art was made
possible by what I've called
this homeostatic prolongation
of the ancient work provided
by humanist scholarship,
that heart-lung machine
that they invented.
But in the scholarly edition,
the work with cadaverous,
silent, still.
It came alive, truly
alive, only in moments
such as the one
we've just glimpsed
in Spencer, a brilliant
stitching of the alien thing
into the new body.
A piece of the
ancient pagan poem
was cut out, and kept
alive, and incorporated
into a living work of.
Art the great
Renaissance creators,
the Spencer of
this hymn to Venus,
the Shakespeare of
Romeo and Juliet,
the great essayist
Montaigne, or the Botticelli
of the Primavera,
were the masters
not of toleration, but
of this other thing,
of idea saving, life saving,
an enduring artistic rebirth.
And it's that that we celebrate
in the Getty villa today.
It's that we celebrate
in the Renaissance.
It's that we celebrate in
what came back into the world.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Could
you please tell us
a few words about how this
philosophy came through,
between Epicurus and Lucretius,
and who surrounded Lucretius
in his world?
STEPHEN GREENBLATT: Well, the
question, the first question,
of how it gets from Epicurus
to Lucretius is, in a way,
not so complicated.
Because as you may know,
at a certain moment,
the Romans went mad for
Greek, all things Greek.
They sent-- not only did they
import into Rome, especially,
of course, after the
conquest of Greece,
not only is they import
wholesale enormous amounts
of Greek art, but they also
did something that was in--
some Roman thought
a fatal mistake,
which was that they sent their
children to Greek schools
to study.
And they also, as in the case
of someone like Philodemus,
they had Greek teachers come--
they paid Greek teachers to
come and teach children in Rome.
And those teachers
carried all of
the Greek, basic Greek
philosophical schools
into the Roman world.
And you can see from works
like Cicero's Conspectus
of Philosophy,
you can see Cicero
weighing one essentially
Greek philosophical school
against another.
Cicero doesn't
like Epicureanism.
But he grapples
with Epicureanism.
It's clearly-- in
the 1st century,
before the Christian era,
when Lucretius is writing,
it's clearly one of the
philosophical schools.
Hence, the discovery
in Herculaneum
in the Villa of the Papyri,
of the works of Philodemus,
and possibly even a
Norwegian papyrologist
named [INAUDIBLE] who
believed even the discovery
of some fragments of
Lucretius' poem itself.
The question of who surrounded
Lucretius is a harder one.
We don't know really.
What we know is that several of
Lucretius' most sophisticated
contemporaries were astonished
by the power of his poem.
Cicero himself, as I said, had
no patience with Epicureanism,
but thought the
poem was remarkable.
And thought it was astonishing
in combining poetry
with science.
And then Ovid and Virgil.
If you were going to choose
three people to admire
your work, that's not bad.
So we know at least
those three people.
But beyond that, we
know very little about--
what we think is the case, and
largely on peculiar evidence,
I think probably quite
distorting evidence
of what survived the volcanic
eruption of Vesuvius,
what seems to be the case is
that people in their villas,
in the--
how shall we say--
Southern California landscape
of the Bay of Naples,
seem to have a taste
for Epicureanism,
for the pursuit of pleasure.
Because that's where
the traces of this are.
But beyond that, we don't--
actually, we just don't know.
Lucretius is a very
mysterious character.
We don't know almost
anything about him.
AUDIENCE: What do you
make of the [INAUDIBLE]
STEPHEN GREENBLATT: It
probably would be-- yeah,
because people in the
back could hear you.
AUDIENCE: What do
you what do you
make of the rather gory,
abrupt ending of the poem?
Do you think that's
how he meant to end it,
or something was lost?
STEPHEN GREENBLATT:
Yes, that the question
refers to the famous
problem in the poem.
The poem-- there's
some evidence--
I'm no great Latinist--
and I don't want to--
the world of this
poem is a world
of absolute 30 second
degree lunatic Latinists.
And I'm not one.
I wish I were.
So the game is played
at a very high level.
And it involves noticing
certain extremely tiny features
that seem to indicate that the
poem wasn't entirely finished.
There are certain
lines that are repeated
certain hypermetrical lines.
People have noticed
for several centuries
that there are some
signs that the poem might
have been left unfinished.
And in one of the
larger areas of debate
is the end of the poem.
Because the poem,
which is after all,
about the pursuit of pleasure,
and the erotic nature
of the universe
and so forth, ends
with a horrendous account
of the plague in Athens,
a horrible account.
As you say, grim and gruesome,
of how the plague works,
how it takes over a city,
how bodies rot in the street
and so forth and so on.
So there are basically
two different arguments.
One is he meant to
have a nicer ending
and he just didn't get
around to doing it.
It was thought that he
might've committed suicide.
That was what the
Christians thought.
Or alternatively, as I guess
I believe, but don't trust me
on this one, because as I say--
I don't want to pretend to
knowledge I don't have--
I believe or I want to
believe that he sets up
a test at the end of the poem
as to how much you've actually
got this, which is that
it's not a soft philosophy.
It's not about just
taking it easy.
It's about understanding.
It's, first of all, a
poem written at a time
that Rome was falling
into basically civil war.
The people who are enjoying
the poem in the Bay of Naples
have escaped for a moment
from the impending civil war
to their villas.
But they see what's happening.
And this philosophy, if
it works, will carry you
through the worst thing, will
carry you through the fact
that it's not only going to
be moments of sexual delight,
but moments at which
it's all coming apart.
And I think that's
the force of it.
But it lead to something else.
So as not to be too sentimental
about Lucretius, I want to say,
which is that it's
very hard-- and one
of the things that I
don't like in Lucretius
is that it's very hard to
see why life, why being alive
is better than not being
alive in this philosophy.
This is not, in that
sense a philosophy--
certainly while you're
alive, the philosophy
is you should pursue pleasure.
So that is clear.
But it's not clear
why being alive
is a particularly important
or attractive thing,
why it's better than being
a rock or anything else,
any other conjunction of atoms.
At the very center
of this philosophy,
which I find incredibly
beautiful and appealing
is something rather, to me,
quite cold and frightening.
And I think that Lucretius keeps
coming back to this problem.
I think he, in
effect, comes back
to the problem at the end of
the poem, in a rather harsh way.
Yes--
AUDIENCE: That was
wonderful, thank you.
You may have just
answered my question,
but I want you to be a
bit of a philosopher.
Why is it so important,
do you think,
in a world that has a fair
amount of material success,
like the Renaissance,
to not believe
that love and connection
can trump temporality?
STEPHEN GREENBLATT:
Well, I would have said--
I mean, that's a very
interesting question.
I don't know if I have
a quick answer to it.
I would have said that the--
several things.
First of all, the Renaissance
is a big, complicated period.
It's a world of Michelangelo
or Piero di Cosimo,
but it's also a
world of Savonarola,
who thought that
you should throw
these things in the bonfire.
That it has already, in its
own internal structures,
very deep contradictions
and tensions,
that are actually
intensifying all
through the 15th
and 16th century.
And I think what
happened is that--
I'm no philosopher--
but from my perspective,
certain things that were
intentioned all through--
actually starting in
the late Middle Ages,
and that were getting
increasingly locked
in with each other,
that into that world
came this extremely
strange thing, a thing that
couldn't be quite assimilated.
As I said, I'm not pretending
that the poem suddenly
swept the field from 1417.
It didn't.
It took centuries for even
to whisper enough about it.
But something started to happen.
And what started to happen,
from my point of view,
was a disaggregation
of the things that had
been locked in that tension.
The belief in the absolute
atrocious objection of humans,
lump of sin, and
the glory of humans.
The peculiar
doubleness with which
the late medieval Christian
world had passed along--
centuries of brooding
and meditation
about human suffering--
to the artists of
the 16th century.
And I think, from my
perspective, what happened,
what lies in the--
the importance of
Lucretius is not
what it did for the Renaissance.
As I say, it weirdly passes
through the Renaissance.
That it passes
through is amazing.
It passes through in
these surreptitious ways,
in works of art.
But what lies on
the other side, even
on the other side of Locke--
he was still trying
to hold it back.
But what lies on the other
side is Darwin, and Freud,
and Marx, and Einstein.
And I might turn the question
back on you, and say,
is that good for us?
I think it is.
Because I think it's
closer to what I take,
because of who I am,
to be not the truth,
but closer to the truth.
But is it actually good for us?
We can't ask that question.
We have to embrace the
truth as we think we see it,
we understand it.
And I think that is the
work that this poem did
thanks to the Renaissance
passing it along.
