The Swerve (32 page)

One might have expected Valla simply to turn the charge around and point out that it was after all Poggio who returned Lucretius to circulation. That Valla failed to do so suggests that Poggio had been successful in keeping a discreet distance from the implications of his own discovery. But it may suggest as well how limited the early circulation of
On the Nature of Things
was. When, in the early 1430s, in a work called
On Pleasure
(
De voluptate
), Valla was penning the praises of drink and sex that Poggio professed to find so shocking, the manuscript of Lucretius’ poem
⁶
was still being guarded by Niccoli. The fact of its existence, which had been gleefully announced in letters among the humanists, may have helped to stimulate a resurgent interest in Epicureanism, but Valla probably had to rely on other sources and on his own fertile imagination to construct his praise of pleasure.

Interest in a pagan philosophy radically at odds with fundamental Christian principles had its risks, as Poggio’s attack suggests. Valla’s reply to this attack allows us to glimpse a third type of response to the Epicurean ferment of the fifteenth century. The strategy is what might be called “dialogical disavowal.” The ideas Poggio condemns were present in
On Pleasure
, Valla conceded, but they were not his own ideas but rather those of a spokesman for Epicureanism
⁷
in a literary dialogue. At the dialogue’s end, it is not Epicureanism but rather Christian orthodoxy, voiced by the monk Antonio Raudense, that is declared
the
clear victor: “When Antonio Raudense
⁸
had thus concluded his speech, we did not get up immediately. We were caught in immense admiration for such pious and religious words.”

And yet. At the center of his dialogue, Valla constructs a remarkably vigorous and sustained defense of key Epicurean principles: the wisdom of withdrawing from competitive striving into the tranquil garden of philosophy (“From the shore you shall laugh in safety at the waves, or rather at those who are wave-tossed”), the primacy of bodily pleasure, the advantages of moderation, the perverse unnaturalness of sexual abstinence, the denial of any afterlife. “It is plain,”
⁹
the Epicurean states, “that there are no rewards for the dead, certainly there are no punishments either.” And lest this formulation allow an ambiguity, still setting human souls apart from all other created things, he returns to the point to render it unequivocal:

According to my Epicurus … nothing remains after the dissolution of the living being, and in the term “living being” he included man just as much as he did the lion, the wolf, the dog, and all other things that breathe. With all this I agree. They eat, we eat; they drink, we drink; they sleep, and so do we. They engender, conceive, give birth, and nourish their young in no way different from ours. They possess some part of reason and memory, some more than others, and we a little more than they. We are like them in almost everything; finally, they die and we die—both of us completely.

If we grasp this end clearly—“finally, they die and we die—both of us completely”—then our determination should be equally clear: “Therefore,
¹⁰
for as long as possible (would that it were longer!) let us not allow those bodily pleasures to slip away that cannot be doubted and cannot be recovered in another life.”

It is possible to argue that Valla wrote these words only to
show
them crushed by the sober admonitions of the monkish Raudense:

If you were to see
¹¹
the form of any angel next to your beloved, the beloved would seem so horrible and uncouth that you would turn away from her as from the countenance of a cadaver and direct all your attention to the angel’s beauty—a beauty, I say, that does not inflame but extinguishes lust, and infuses a most sanctified religious awe.

If this interpretation is true, then
On Pleasure
is an attempt to contain subversion.
¹²
Aware that he and his contemporaries had been exposed to the toxic allure of Lucretius, Valla decided not to suppress the contamination, as Ficino had tried to do, but to lance the imposthume by exposing Epicurean arguments to the purifying air of Christian faith.

But Valla’s enemy Poggio reached the opposite conclusion: the Christian framework and the dialogic form of
On Pleasure
was, in his view, only a convenient cover to permit Valla to make public his scandalous and subversive assault on Christian doctrine. And if Poggio’s venomous hatred calls this interpretation in question, Valla’s celebrated proof of the fraudulence of the so-called “Donation of Constantine” suggests that he was by no means a safely orthodox thinker.
On Pleasure
would, from this perspective, be a comparably radical and subversive text, wearing a fig leaf designed to give its author, a priest who continued to jockey for the post of apostolic secretary that he eventually obtained, some protection.

How can the conflict between these two sharply opposed interpretations be resolved? Which is it: subversion or containment? It is exceedingly unlikely that at this distance anyone will discover the evidence that might definitively answer this
question
—if such evidence ever existed. The question itself implies
¹³
a programmatic certainty and clarity that may bear little relation to the actual situation of intellectuals in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A very small number of people may have fully embraced radical Epicureanism, as far as they understood it, in its entirety. Thus, for example, in 1484 the Florentine poet Luigi Pulci was denied Christian burial for denying miracles and describing the soul as “no more than a pine nut
¹⁴
in hot white bread.” But for many of the most daring speculative minds of the Renaissance, the ideas that surged up in 1417, with the recovery of Lucretius’ poem and the renewed interest in Epicureanism, did not constitute a fully formed philosophical or ideological system. Couched in its beautiful, seductive poetry, the Lucretian vision was a profound intellectual and creative challenge.

What mattered was not adherence but mobility—the renewed mobility of a poem that had been resting untouched in one or at most two monastic libraries for many centuries, the mobility of Epicurean arguments that had been silenced first by hostile pagans and then by hostile Christians, the mobility of daydreams, half-formed speculations, whispered doubts, dangerous thoughts.

Poggio may have distanced himself from the content of
On the Nature of Things
, but he took the crucial first step in pulling the poem off the shelf, having it copied, and sending the copy to his friends in Florence. Once it began to circulate again, the difficulty was not in reading the poem (provided, of course, one had adequate Latin) but in discussing its content openly or taking its ideas seriously. Valla found a way to take one central Epicurean argument—the praise of pleasure as the ultimate good—and give it sympathetic articulation in a dialogue. That argument is detached from the full philosophical structure that gave it its original weight and finally repudiated. But the dialogue’s
Epicurean
speaks in defense of pleasure with an energy, subtlety, and persuasiveness that had not been heard for more than a millennium.

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 Epicurean
¹⁵
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 over
¹⁶
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.