In December 1516—almost a century after Poggio’s discovery—the Florentine Synod, an influential group of high-ranking clergymen, prohibited the reading of Lucretius in schools. Its exquisite Latin may have tempted schoolteachers to assign it to their students, but it should be banned, the clerics said, as “a lascivious and wicked work, in which every effort is used to demonstrate the mortality of the soul.” Violators of the edict were threatened with eternal damnation and a fine of 10 ducats.
The prohibition might have restricted circulation and it effectively halted the printing of Lucretius in Italy, but it was too late to close the door. An edition had already appeared in Bologna, another in Paris, another, from the great press of Aldus Manutius, in Venice. And in Florence the distinguished publisher Filippo Giunti had brought out an edition edited by the humanist Pier Candido Decembrio, whom Poggio had known well at the court of Nicholas V.
The Giunti edition incorporated emendations proposed by the remarkable soldier, scholar, and poet of Greek origin Michele Tarchaniota Marullo. Marullo, whose portrait was painted by Botticelli, was well known in Italian humanist circles. He had, in the course of a restless career, written beautiful pagan hymns inspired by Lucretius, with whose work he engaged with remarkable intensity. In 1500 he was pondering the textual complexities of On the Nature of Things when, clad in armor, he rode out of Volterra to fight against Cesare Borgia’s troops, then massing at the coast near Piombino. It was raining heavily, and the peasants advised him not to attempt to ford the swollen Cecina River. He supposedly replied that a gypsy had told him as a child that it was not Neptune but Mars whom he should fear. Halfway across the river, his horse slipped and fell on him, and it was said that he died cursing the gods. A copy of Lucretius’ poem was found in his pocket.
The death of Marullo could be circulated as a cautionary tale—even the broad-minded Erasmus remarked that Marullo wrote as if he were a pagan—but it could not quell interest in Lucretius. And indeed the Church authorities themselves, many of whom had humanist sympathies, were not of one mind on its dangers. In 1549 it was proposed to include On the Nature of Things on the Index of Prohibited Books—the list, only abolished in 1966, of those works that Catholics were forbidden to read—but the proposal was dropped at the request of the powerful Cardinal Marcello Cervini, who was elected pope a few years later. (He served for less than one month, from April 9 to May 1, 1555.) The commissary general of the Inquisition, Michele Ghislieri, also opposed calls for the suppression of On the Nature of Things. He listed Lucretius as the author of one of those pagan books that could be read but only if they were read as fables. Ghislieri, who was himself elected pope in 1566, focused the attention of his pontificate on the struggle against heretics and Jews and did not further pursue the threat posed by pagan poets.
In fact, Catholic intellectuals could and did engage with Lucretian ideas through the medium of fables. Though he complained that Marullo sounded “just like a pagan,” Erasmus wrote a fictional dialogue called The Epicurean in which one of the characters, Hedonius, sets out to show that “there are no people more Epicurean15 than godly Christians.” Christians who fast, bewail their sins, and punish their flesh may look anything but hedonist, but they are seeking to live righteously, and “none live more enjoyably than those who live righteously.”
If this paradox seems like little more than a sleight-of-hand, Erasmus’ friend Thomas More took the engagement with Epicureanism much further in his most famous work, Utopia (1516). A learned man, deeply immersed in the pagan Greek and Latin texts that Poggio and his contemporaries had returned to circulation, More was also a pious Christian ascetic who wore a hair shirt under his clothes and whipped himself until the blood ran down his flesh. His speculative daring and his relentless intelligence enabled him to grasp the force of what had surged back from the ancient world and at the same time his ardent Catholic convictions led him to demarcate the boundaries beyond which he thought it was dangerous for him or anyone else to go. That is, he brilliantly explored the hidden tensions in the identity to which he himself subscribed: “Christian humanist.”
Utopia begins with a searing indictment of England as a land where noblemen, living idly off the labor of others, bleed their tenants white by constantly raising their rents, where land enclosures for sheep-raising throw untold thousands of poor people into an existence of starvation or crime, and where the cities are ringed by gibbets on which thieves are hanged by the score without the slightest indication that the draconian punishment deters anyone from committing the same crimes.
That depiction of a ghastly reality—and the sixteenth-century chronicler Holinshed reports that in the reign of Henry VIII, 72,000 thieves were hanged—is set against an imaginary island, Utopia (the name means “No-place” in Greek), whose inhabitants are convinced that “either the whole or the most part of human happiness” lies in the pursuit of pleasure. This central Epicurean tenet, the work makes clear, lies at the heart of the opposition between the good society of the Utopians and the corrupt, vicious society of his own England. That is, More clearly grasped that the pleasure principle—the principle given its most powerful expression in Lucretius’ spectacular hymn to Venus—is not a decorative enhancement of routine existence; it is a radical idea that, if taken seriously, would change everything.
More set his Utopia in the remotest part of the world. Its discoverer, More writes at the beginning of the work, was a man who “joined Amerigo Vespucci and was his constant companion in the last three of his four voyages, which are now universally read of, but on the final voyage he did not return with him.” He was instead one of those left behind, at his own urging, in a garrison at the farthest point of the explorers’ venture into the unknown.
Reading Amerigo Vespucci and reflecting on the newfound lands known, in his honor, as “America,” More seized upon one of Vespucci’s observations about the peoples he had encountered: “Since their life is so entirely given over16 to pleasure,” Vespucci had written, “I should style it Epicurean.” More must have realized with a jolt that he could use the amazing discoveries to explore some of the disturbing ideas that had returned to currency with Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. The link was not entirely surprising: the Florentine Vespucci was a part of the humanist circle in which On the Nature of Things circulated. The Utopians, More wrote, are inclined to believe “that no kind of pleasure is forbidden, provided no harm comes of it.” And their behavior is not merely a matter of custom; it is a philosophical position: “They seem to lean more than they should to the school that espouses pleasure as the object by which to define either the whole or the chief part of human happiness.” That “school” is the school of Epicurus and Lucretius.
The setting, in the remotest part of the remotest part of the world, enabled More to convey a sense that was extremely difficult17 for his contemporaries to articulate: that the pagan texts recovered by the humanists were at once compellingly vital and at the same time utterly weird. They had been reinjected into the intellectual bloodstream of Europe after long centuries in which they had been almost entirely forgotten, and they represented not continuity or recovery but rather a deep disturbance. They were in effect voices from another world, a world as different as Vespucci’s Brazil was to England, and their power derived as much from their distance as their eloquent lucidity.
The invocation of the New World allowed More to articulate a second key response to the texts that fascinated the humanists. He insisted that these texts be understood not as isolated philosophical ideas but as expressions of a whole way of life lived in particular physical, historical, cultural, and social circumstances. The description of the Epicureanism of the Utopians only made sense for More in the larger context of an entire existence.
But that existence, More thought, would have to be for everyone. He took seriously the claim, so ardently made in On the Nature of Things, that Epicurus’ philosophy would liberate all of mankind from its abject misery. Or rather, More took seriously the
universality that is the underlying Greek meaning of the word “catholic.” It would not be enough for Epicureanism to enlighten a small elite in a walled garden; it would have to apply to society as a whole. Utopia is a visionary, detailed blueprint for this application, from public housing to universal health care, from child care centers to religious toleration to the six-hour work day. The point of More’s celebrated fable is to imagine those conditions that would make it possible for an entire society to make the pursuit of happiness its collective goal.
For More, those conditions would have to begin with the abolition of private property. Otherwise the avidity of human beings, their longing for “nobility, magnificence, splendor and majesty,” would inevitably lead to the unequal distribution of wealth that consigns a large portion of the population to lives of misery, resentment, and crime. But communism was not enough. Certain ideas would have to be banned. Specifically, More wrote, the Utopians impose strict punishment, including the harshest form of slavery, on anyone who denies the existence of divine providence or of the afterlife.
The denial of Providence and the denial of the afterlife were the twin pillars of Lucretius’ whole poem. Thomas More then at once imaginatively embraced Epicureanism—the most sustained and intelligent embrace since Poggio recovered De rerum natura a century earlier—and carefully cut its heart out. All citizens of his Utopia are encouraged to pursue pleasure; but those who think that the soul dies with the body or who believe that chance rules the universe, More writes, are arrested and enslaved.
This harsh treatment was the only way More could conceive of the pursuit of pleasure actually being realized by more than a tiny privileged group of philosophers who have withdrawn from public life. People would have to believe, at a bare minimum, that there was an overarching providential design—not only in the state but in the very structure of the universe itself—and they would have to believe as well that the norms by which they are meant to regulate their pursuit of pleasure and hence discipline their behavior were reinforced by this providential design. The way that this reinforcement would work would be through a belief in rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Otherwise, in More’s view, it would be impossible drastically to reduce, as he wished, both the terrible punishments and the extravagant rewards that kept his own unjust society18 in order.
By the standards of More’s age, the Utopians are amazingly tolerant: they do not prescribe a single official religious doctrine and then apply thumbscrews to those who do not adhere to it. Their citizens are permitted to worship any god they please and even to share these beliefs with others, provided that they do so in a calm and rational manner. But in Utopia there is no tolerance at all for those who think that their souls will disintegrate at death along with their bodies or who doubt that the gods, if they exist at all, concern themselves with the doings of mankind. These people are a threat, for what will restrain them from doing anything that they please? Utopians regard such unbelievers, More wrote, as less than human and certainly unfit to remain in the community. For no one, in their view, can be counted “among their citizens whose laws and customs he would treat as worthless if it were not for fear.”
“If it were not for fear”: fear might be eliminated in the philosopher’s garden, among a tiny, enlightened elite, but it cannot be eliminated from an entire society, if that society is to be imagined as inhabited by the range of people who actually exist in the world as it has always been known. Even with the full force of Utopian social conditioning, human nature, More believed, would inevitably lead men to resort to force or fraud in order to get whatever they desire. More’s belief was conditioned no doubt by his ardent Catholicism, but in this same period Machiavelli, who was considerably less pious than the saintly More, came to the same conclusion. Laws and customs, the author of The Prince thought, were worthless without fear.
More tried to imagine what it would take not for certain individuals to be enlightened but for a whole commonwealth to do away with cruelty and disorder, share the goods of life equitably, organize itself around the pursuit of pleasure, and tear down the gibbets. The gibbets, all but a few, could be dismantled, More concluded, if and only if people were persuaded to imagine gibbets (and rewards) in another life. Without these imaginary supplements the social order would inevitably collapse, with each individual attempting to fulfill his wishes: “Who can doubt that he will strive either to evade by craft the public laws of his country or to break them by violence in order to serve his private desires when he has nothing to fear but laws and no hope beyond the body?” More was fully prepared to countenance the public execution of anyone who thought and taught otherwise.
More’s imaginary Utopians have a practical, instrumental motive for enforcing faith in Providence and in the afterlife: they are convinced that they cannot trust anyone who does not hold these beliefs. But More himself, as a pious Christian, had another motive: Jesus’ own words. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall on the ground without your Father’s will,” Jesus tells his disciples, adding that “even the hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10:29–30). There is, as Hamlet paraphrased the verse, “a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” Who in Christendom would dare to argue with that?
One answer in the sixteenth century was a diminutive Dominican monk, Giordano Bruno. In the mid-1580s, the thirty-six-year-old Bruno, who had fled from his monastery in Naples and had wandered restlessly through Italy and France, found himself in London. Brilliant, reckless, at once charmingly charismatic and insufferably argumentative, he survived by cobbling together support from patrons, teaching the art of memory, and lecturing on various aspects of what he called the Nolan philosophy, named after the small town near Naples where he was born. That philosophy had several roots, tangled together in an exuberant and often baffling mix, but one of them was Epicureanism. Indeed, there are many indications that De rerum natura had unsettled and transformed Bruno’s whole world.
During his stay in England, Bruno wrote and published a flood of strange works. The extraordinary daring of these works may be gauged by taking in the implications of a single passage from one of them, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, printed in 1584. The passage—quoted here in Ingrid D. Rowland’s fine translation—is long, but its length is very much part of the point. Mercury, the herald of the gods, is recounting to Sofia all the things Jove has assigned him to bring about. He has ordered
that today at noon19 two of the melons in Father Franzino’s melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won’t be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of Monte Cicala in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that several shall fall to earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms. That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won’t burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox two hundred and fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio’s foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim’s progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random.
This is by no means all that Mercury has to arrange.
Laurenza, when she combs her hair, shall lose seventeen hairs and break thirteen, and of these, ten shall grow back within three days and seven shall never grow back at all. Antonio Savolino’s bitch shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble
Polidoro’s dog. In that moment a cuckoo shall be heard from La Starza, cuckooing twelve times, no more and no fewer, whereupon it shall leave and fly to the ruins of Castle Cicala for eleven minutes, and then shall fly off to Scarvaita, and as for what happens next, we’ll see to it later.
Mercury’s work in this one tiny corner of a tiny corner of the Campagna is still not done.
That the skirt Mastro Danese is cutting on his board shall come out crooked. That twelve bedbugs shall leave the slats of Costantino’s bed and head toward the pillow: seven large ones, four small, and one middlesized, and as for the one who shall survive until this evening’s candlelight, we’ll see to it. That fifteen minutes thereafter, because of the movement of her tongue, which she has passed over her palate four times, the old lady of Fiurulo shall lose the third right molar in her lower jaw, and it shall fall without blood and without pain, because that molar has been loose for seventeen months. That Ambrogio on the one hundred twelfth thrust shall finally have driven home his business with his wife, but shall not impregnate her this time, but rather another, using the sperm into which the cooked leek that he has just eaten with millet and wine sauce shall have been converted. Martinello’s son is beginning to grow hair on his chest, and his voice is beginning to crack. That Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants….
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