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| Epicurus |
The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) anticipated much of the scientific worldview 3 centuries before Christ. Following his teacher Democritus (460-370 BC), he was a materialist and an atomist, believing the world to be composed of tiny, invisible, indivisible particles in constant motion, combining in various ways to form all substances. With astonishing intuitive insight in the face of scant evidence, he concluded that all things come to be through random deviation, and that living beings had evolved through a long process of trial and error. The universe was not created for humans, he concluded. Rather, we are just another creature of the world different from the others only in degree, not in kind.
Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve tells the story of how the philosophy of Epicurus managed to cross the sea of time to impregnate the modern world. Like so many important events, it was an unlikely fluke. The vehicle of the voyage was a long poem called De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) by the Roman Epicurean Lucretius (99-55 BC) which, in a 9th century copy, happened to wash up in a German monastery where it chanced to be discovered in 1417 by a Florentine book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini. Recognizing it as a rare find, Poggio, an exceptionally talented scribe, immediately copied the manuscript and sent it back to Florence where it was recopied and began to circulate among the leading humanists of the day.
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| Lucretius |
The survival of Lucretius’ poem was a miracle in the 1st place because, given the chaos of the collapse of the Roman Empire and the attendant rampages of illiterate barbarians, it is miraculous that any literature of the ancient world survived. But then came the rampages of a Christian orthodoxy bent upon rooting out and destroying any nonconforming text, and De Rerum Natura was not merely nonconforming, it was heretical down to its bones, because it posited pleasure as the highest good, whereas for the Church the highest good was suffering and pain. There was no place in De Rerum Natura for notions of Christian Providence, no place for a creator or designer. Instead it held that human society began in a brutal struggle for survival. The soul died along with the body; there was no afterlife. Organized religions were superstitious delusions. There were no angels, demons, or ghosts. Such fallacies were considered the greatest obstacles to happiness, which was the goal of Epicurus’ philosophy.
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| Poggio Bracciolini |
Recognizing the threat, Christianity attempted to stamp out Epicureanism, yet somehow Lucretius’ manuscript survived. Perhaps the elegance and grace of his Latin had something to do with it, or maybe it was just pure chance, but not long after it was rediscovered Gutenberg came along with the printing press (1440) and then there was no stopping it. Soon there were just too many copies for the Christian thought police to find and destroy them all. In the centuries since their rediscovery these ideas informed the Enlightenment and shaped the modern world. Isaac Newton, Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi tried to reconcile Epicureanism and Christianity, but later figures of the Enlightenment (Diderot, et al.) realized the two were antipodal and came down on the Epicurean side, because it had been validated by science and passed the test of Occam’s Razor. Subsequently Thomas Jefferson seeded the founding document of our country with the Epicurean concept of the pursuit of happiness.
Today people are still loath to give up the ideas of divinity and the afterlife, but otherwise in practical terms they increasingly live their lives as Epicureans, pursuing happiness, seeking to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. When you consider the amazing insights Epicurus had so long ago, it’s difficult to avoid feeling that in the form of Christianity a Levantine mysticism overwhelmed Grecian clarity and clouded the collective consciousness of the West for 1500 years, and the result was a long, dark, and fruitless detour in our intellectual history. You have to wonder where we might have been by now had we not taken that fateful turn into darkness and superstition.
