Sally opened by conveying the wonder we should feel that Epicurus and others, 400 years before Christ, foretold so completely our modern understanding of “a world not for and about humans”:
Everlasting atoms floating in a void, the building blocks of all else. The world is completely explained through the workings of nature, including evolution (in Epicurean terms, “swerves”). There is no afterlife.
“I discovered while reading that I am an Epicurean.”
Lucretius goal was to make Epicurus accessible through poetry to the end of freeing people from superstition and fear.
Greenblatt seeks to use the idea of “the swerve” to show how the rediscovery of Lucretius helped bring forth the animating ideas and energy of the Renaissance. Bringing the old ideas of pagan literature forward to break the stranglehold of a stultifying, corrupt Church. The corruption was so deep and manifest it caused people to look elsewhere for ideas.
A second reason a swerve was necessary was to make reading a pleasure rather than a sin. From Jerome on, pain was the dominant ethos of the church (Jerome had found pleasure in reading pagan literature).
The rediscovery of Lucretius was part of a general thirst for new ideas and rediscovery of the ancient ideas.
Lucretius and Epicurus were directly antithetical to the idea of God controlling man’s fate, the dominant doctrine of the Church in the Middle Ages. Their threat to the church was in offering an explanation for life and the universe absent any God. From the beginning, the church sought to suppress them. In part, the Church brought on the Renaissance as a reaction against its cruelty and corruption.
DISCUSSION
We may be swerving back. Many Christians believe Joan of Arc is related to Noah.
The book put Epicurus into the flow of history and made him part of a grander story.
Reminds us that humans are insignificant in the scheme of things and that we should enjoy life while we have it.
Eliminating the afterlife does change how people put up, for example, with the plague because they thought there would be an afterlife
The Church made people believe they needed to suffer in order to attain the afterlife
The Church used hope and fear of the afterlife to control an ignorant, illiterate populace.
There are no atheists in the jails. Amazing numbers of people still believe in the afterlife and are moved by both fear and hope of it.
Sir Thomas More was otherwise rational but believed fear of the afterlife was necessary to maintain order here on the earth.
Chinese example of a people creating a story of the divine in order to maintain social order.
Parallels in the Ming Dynasty of the use of the divine to explain life here and to seek to propitiate the divine to make our lives better.
I had a teacher who taught that nobody lives their life without believing that there is something else. Because of that need people end up creating “something else.”
Lucretius apparently wrote because of his distress over the corruption and and chaos at the end of the Roman Republic. The cynics and Stoics (Cicero) accused the Epicureans of being overly dogmatic. As a story of “how the world became modern” it has a “just so” quality. Because the world turns out to look a lot like Lucretius forecast, “he must have played a role.” There is considerable credit by association in the book. At its conclusion, the book points to Jefferson as a paragon of Epicureanism, yet Jefferson did not accept the Epicurean view of religion nor of the counsel to withdraw from public life.
You almost need to ignore the last chapter. He had this thing about the Declaration of Independence (pursuit of happiness) but the provenance of that is in fact disputed. In the first draft, it was “pursuit of property” or some such line from John Locke. How it got changed is unclear.
Jefferson did love wine and the good life. Yes, he did believe in the ethos of Epicureanism, just not all of its aspects including some of its important aspects.
Irish Catholics do believe it is okay to pursue many things as long as you take no pleasure in them. Lucretius is not very persuasive in undermining that. Bogus to believe that the rediscovery of Lucretius helped launch the Renaissance. Lots of other things going on before the rediscovery of Lucretius. Releasing the chokehold of belief on scientific thought did not require Lucretius.
Lucretius needs a creation story. (General disagreement.)
And…Sally sleeps with Herodotus….