The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began

by Stephen Greenblatt

art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.

When you look up at the night sky and, feeling unaccountably moved, marvel at the numberless stars, you are not seeing the handiwork of the gods or a crystalline sphere detached from our transient world. You are seeing the same material world of which you are a part and from whose elements you are made.

What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.

a world not rendered insignificant but made more beautiful by its transience, its erotic energy, and its ceaseless change.

to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling

Humans, Aristotle wrote, are social animals: to realize one’s nature as a human then was to participate in a group activity. And the activity of choice, for cultivated Romans, as for the Greeks before them, was discourse. There is, Cicero remarked at the beginning of a typical philosophical work, a wide diversity of opinion about the most important religious questions. “This has often struck me,”25 Cicero wrote, but it did so with especial force on one occasion, when the topic of the immortal gods was made the subject of a very searching and thorough discussion at the house of my friend Gaius Cotta. It was the Latin Festival, and I had come at Cotta’s express invitation to pay him a visit. I found him sitting in an alcove, engaged in debate with Gaius Velleius, a Member of the Senate, accounted by the Epicureans as their chief Roman adherent at the time. With them was Quintus Lucilius Balbus, who was so accomplished a student of Stoicism as to rank with the leading Greek exponents of that system. Cicero does not want to present his thoughts to his readers as a tract composed after solitary reflection; he wants to present them as an exchange of views among social and intellectual equals, a conversation in which he himself plays only a small part and in which there will be no clear victor. The end of this dialogue—a long work that would have filled several sizable papyrus rolls—is characteristically inconclusive: “Here the conversation ended,26 and we parted, Velleius thinki...

It reflects as well something extraordinary about the mental or spiritual world they inhabited, something noted in one of his letters by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: “Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.”

It was only Epicurus, Lucretius wrote, who could cure the miserable condition of the man who, bored to death at home, rushes off frantically to his country villa only to find that he is just as oppressed in spirit. Indeed, in Lucretius’ view, Epicurus, who had died more than two centuries earlier, was nothing less than the saviour. When “human life29 lay groveling ignominiously in the dust, crushed beneath the grinding weight of superstition,” Lucretius wrote, one supremely brave man arose and became “the first who ventured to confront it boldly.” (1.62ff.) This hero—one strikingly at odds with a Roman culture that traditionally prided itself on toughness, pragmatism, and military virtue—was a Greek who triumphed not through the force of arms but through the power of intellect.

The core of this vision may be traced back to a single incandescent idea: that everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructible building blocks, irreducibly small in size, unimaginably vast in number. The Greeks had a word for these invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be divided any further: atoms.

So much for the alleged abundance of his table. And he urged a comparable frugality on his students. The motto carved over the door to Epicurus’ garden urged the stranger to linger, for “here our highest good is pleasure.”

“Men suffer the worst evils36 for the sake of the most alien desires,” wrote his disciple Philodemus, in one of the books found in the library at Herculaneum, and “they neglect the most necessary appetites as if they were the most alien to nature.”

What are these necessary appetites that lead to pleasure? It is impossible to live pleasurably, Philodemus continued, “without living prudently and honourably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic.”

fame actually brought heightened insecurity,

“Against other things39 it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city”

abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure.

The fate of the books in all their vast numbers is epitomized in the fate of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library located not in Italy but in Alexandria,16 the capital of Egypt and the commercial hub of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Alexandrian library was not associated with a particular doctrine or philosophical school; its scope was the entire range of intellectual inquiry. It represented a global cosmopolitanism, a determination to assemble17 the accumulated knowledge of the whole world and to perfect and add to this knowledge.

Even more than the theory that the world consisted only of atoms and void, the main problem was the core ethical idea: that the highest good is the pursuit of pleasure and the diminution of pain. What had to be undertaken was the difficult project of making what appeared simply sane and natural—the ordinary impulses of all sentient creatures—seem like the enemy of the truth.

Florence was an oligarchy, and the small coterie of the wealthy and wellborn were the people who counted. Wealth lay in banking and landowning, as it usually does,

“In the name of God5 and of profit.”

project that linked the creation of something new with a search for something ancient.

“I much prefer13 that my own style be my own,” Petrarch wrote, “uncultivated and rude, but made to fit, as a garment, to the measure of my mind, rather than to someone else’s, which may be more elegant, ambitious, and adorned, but one that, deriving from a greater genius, continually slips off, unfitted to the humble proportions of my intellect.”

cannily remarked a century later, like a dagger.

Niccoli did not want to see the work of his lifetime suffer a similar fate. He drew up a will in which he called for the manuscripts to be kept together, forbade their sale or dispersion, prescribed strict rules for loans and returns, appointed a committee of trustees, and left a sum of money to build a library. The building would be constructed and the collection housed in a monastery; but Niccoli emphatically did not want this to be a monastic library, closed off to the world and reserved for the monks. He specified that the books26 would be available not for the religious alone but for all learned citizens, omnes cives studiosi.

remunerative

schism

But that freedom—the plunging back into the ancient past—appears always to have heightened his alienation from the present.

hangers-on of all types.

Everything is made of invisible particles.

Immutable, indivisible, invisible, and infinite in number, they are constantly in motion, clashing with one another, coming together to form new shapes, coming apart, recombining again, enduring.

The elementary particles of matter—“the seeds of the things”—are eternal.

The invisible particles from which the entire universe is made, from the stars to the lowliest insect, are indestructible and immortal, though any partic...

The Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana called this idea—the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances—“the greatest thought2 that mankind has ever hit upon.”

The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.

All particles are in motion in an infinite void.

The universe has no creator or designer.

The patterns of order and disorder in the world are not the product of any divine scheme. Providence is a fantasy.

But because throughout the universe3 from time everlasting countless numbers of them, buffeted and impelled by blows, have shifted in countless ways, experimentation with every kind of movement and combination has at last resulted in arrangements such as those that created and compose our world.

There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.

Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve.

“at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course, to a degree that could be described as no more than a shift of movement.” (2.218–20)

The swerve is the source of free will.

For if all of motion were one long5 predetermined chain, there would be no possibility of freedom. Cause would follow cause from eternity, as the fates decreed. Instead, we wrest free will from the fates.

Nature ceaselessly experiments.

It is difficult to grasp this point, Lucretius acknowledged, but “what has been created gives rise to its own function.” (4.835) That is, he explained, “Sight did not exist before the birth of the eyes, nor speech before the creation of the tongue.” (4.836–37) These organs were not created in order to fulfill a purposed end; their usefulness gradually enabled the creatures in whom they emerged to survive and to reproduce their kind.

The universe was not created for or about humans.

The fate of the entire species (let alone that of any individual) is not the pole around which everything revolves.

There were other forms of life before us, which no longer exist; there will be other forms of life after us, when our kind has vanished.

Humans are not unique.

We are made of the same stuff that everything else is made of.