The Swerve (35 page)

And humans, however much they may think they choose whether to move or to stand still, are no exception: “Our ordinary practice,” Montaigne reflects in an essay on “The Inconsistency of our actions,” “is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circumstance carries us.”

As if that way of putting things still gives humans too much control, he goes on to emphasize, with a quotation from Lucretius, the entirely random nature of human swerves: “We do not go; we are carried away, like floating objects, now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm: ‘Do we not see all humans unaware/Of what they want, and always searching everywhere,/And changing place, as if to drop the load they bear?’” (240). And the volatile intellectual life in which his essays participate is no different: “Of one subject we make a thousand, and, multiplying and subdividing, fall back into Epicurus’ infinity of atoms” (817). Better than anyone—including Lucretius himself—Montaigne articulates what it feels like from the inside to think, write, live in an Epicurean universe.

In doing so, Montaigne found that he had to abandon altogether one of Lucretius’ most cherished dreams: the dream of standing in tranquil security on land and looking down at a shipwreck befalling others. There was, he grasped, no stable cliff on which to stand; he was already on board the ship. Montaigne fully shared Lucretius’ Epicurean skepticism about the restless striving for fame, power, and riches, and he cherished his own withdrawal from the world into the privacy of his book-lined study in the tower of his château. But the withdrawal seems only to have intensified his awareness of the perpetual motion, the instability of forms, the plurality of worlds, the random swerves to which he himself was as fully prone as everyone else.

Montaigne’s skeptical temper kept him from the dogmatic
certainty
of Epicureanism. But his immersion in
On the Nature of Things
, in its style as well as its ideas, helped him to account for his experience of lived life and to describe that experience, along with the fruits of his reading and reflection, as faithfully as he could. It helped him articulate his rejection of pious fear, his focus on this world and not on the afterlife, his contempt for religious fanaticism, his fascination with supposedly primitive societies, his admiration for the simple and the natural, his loathing of cruelty, his deep understanding of humans as animals and his correspondingly deep sympathy with other species of animals.

It was in the spirit of Lucretius that Montaigne wrote, in “Of Cruelty,” that he willingly resigned “that imaginary kingship
⁴
that people give us over the other creatures,” admitted that he could barely watch the wringing of a chicken’s neck, and confessed that he “cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.” It is in the same spirit in “Apology for Raymond Sebond” that he mocked the fantasy that humans are the center of the universe:

Why shall a gosling
⁵
not say thus: “All the parts of the universe have me in view; the earth serve for me to walk on, the sun to give me light, the stars to breathe their influences into me; I gain this advantage from the winds, that from the waters; there is nothing that the heavenly vault regards so favorably as me; I am the darling of nature.”

And when Montaigne reflected on the noble end of Socrates, it was in the spirit of Lucretius that he focused on the most implausible—and the most Epicurean—of details, as in “Of Cruelty,” “the quiver of pleasure”
⁶
that Socrates felt “in scratching his leg after the irons were off.”

Above all, Lucretius’ fingerprints are all over Montaigne’s reflections on two of his favorite subjects: sex and death.
⁷
Recalling that “the courtesan Flora used to say that she had never lain with Pompey without making him carry away the marks of her bites,” Montaigne immediately recalls lines from Lucretius: “They hurt the longed-for body with their viselike grip,/And with their teeth they lacerate the tender lip” (“That our desire is increased by difficulty”). Urging those whose sexual passion is too powerful to “disperse it,” Montaigne in “Of Diversion” quotes Lucretius’ scabrous advice—“Eject the gathered sperm in anything at all”—and then adds, “I have often tried it with profit.” And attempting to conquer any bashfulness and capture the actual experience of intercourse, he finds that no description ever written is more wonderful—more ravishing, as he puts it—than Lucretius’ lines on Venus and Mars cited in “On some verses of Virgil”:

He who rules the savage things

Of war, the mighty Mars, oft on thy bosom flings

Himself; the eternal wound of love drains all his powers

Wide-mouthed, with greedy eyes thy person he devours,

Head back, his very soul upon thy lips suspended:

Take him in thy embrace, goddess, let him be blended

With thy holy body as he lies; let sweet words pour

Out of thy mouth.

Citing the Latin, Montaigne does not attempt to match this description in his own French; he simply stops to savor its perfection, “so alive, so profound.”

There are moments, rare and powerful, in which a writer, long vanished from the face of the earth, seems to stand in your presence and speak to you directly, as if he bore a message meant for you above all others. Montaigne seems to have felt
this
intimate link with Lucretius, a link that helped him come to terms with the prospect of his own extinction. He once saw a man die, he recalled, who complained bitterly in his last moments that destiny was preventing him from finishing the book he was writing. The absurdity of the regret, in Montaigne’s view, is best conveyed by lines from Lucretius: “But this they fail to add: that after you expire/Not one of all these things will fill you with desire.” As for himself, Montaigne wrote, “I want death
⁸
to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden” (“That to philosophize is to learn to die”).

To die “careless of death,” Montaigne understood, was a far more difficult goal than it sounded: he had to marshal all of the resources of his capacious mind in order to hear and to obey what he took to be the voice of Nature. And that voice, he understood, spoke above all others the words of Lucretius. “Go out of this world,”
⁹
Montaigne imagined Nature to say,

as you entered it. The same passage that you made from death to life, without feeling or fright, make it again from life to death. Your death is part of the order of the universe; it is part of the life of the world.

Our lives we borrow from each other …

And men, like runners, pass along the torch of life. (Lucretius)

Lucretius was for Montaigne the surest guide to understanding the nature of things and to fashioning the self to live life with pleasure and to meet death with dignity.

In 1989, Paul Quarrie, then the librarian at Eton College, bought a copy of the splendid 1563
De rerum natura
, edited by
Denys
Lambin, at auction for £250. The catalogue entry noted that the endpapers of the copy were covered with notes and that there were many marginalia in both Latin and French, but the owner’s name was lost. Scholars quickly
¹⁰
confirmed what Quarrie suspected, as soon as he had the book in his hands: this was Montaigne’s personal copy of Lucretius, bearing the direct marks of the essayist’s passionate engagement with the poem. Montaigne’s name on his copy of Lucretius was overwritten—that is why it took so long to realize who had owned it. But in a wildly heterodox comment penned in Latin on the verso of the third flyleaf, he did leave an odd proof that the book was his. “Since the movements of the atoms
¹¹
are so varied,” he wrote, “it is not unbelievable that the atoms once came together in this way, or that in the future they will come together like this again, giving birth to another Montaigne.”

Montaigne took pains to mark the many passages in the poem that seemed to him “against religion” in denying the fundamental Christian principles of creation
ex nihilo
, divine providence, and judgment after death. Fear of death, he wrote in the margin, is the cause of all our vices. Above all, he noted again and again, the soul is corporeal: “The soul is bodily” (296); “The soul and the body have an extreme conjunction” (302); “the soul is mortal” (306); “The soul, like the foot, is part of the body” (310); “the body and the soul are inseparably joined.” (311) These are reading notes, not assertions of his own. But they suggest a fascination with the most radical conclusions to be drawn from Lucretian materialism. And though it was prudent to keep that fascination hidden, it is clear that Montaigne’s response was by no means his alone.

Even in Spain, where the vigilance of the Inquisition was high, Lucretius’ poem was being read, in printed copies carried across the border from Italy and France and in manuscripts that quietly passed from hand to hand. In the early seventeenth
century
Alonso de Olivera, doctor to Princess Isabel de Borbón, owned a French edition printed in 1565. At a book sale in 1625,
¹²
the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo acquired a manuscript copy of the work for only one
real
. The writer and antiquary Rodrigo Caro, from Seville, had two copies, printed in Antwerp in 1566, in his library inventoried in 1647; and in the monastery of Guadalupe an edition of Lucretius, printed in Amsterdam in 1663, was kept in his cell, it would appear, by Padre Zamora. As Thomas More discovered when he tried to buy up and burn Protestant translations of the Bible, the printing press had made it maddeningly difficult to kill a book. And to suppress a set of ideas that were vitally important in enabling new scientific advances in physics and astronomy proved to be even more difficult.

It was not for want of trying. Here is an attempt from the seventeenth century to accomplish what the killing of Bruno had failed to do:

Nothing comes from atoms.
¹³

All the bodies of the world shine with the beauty of their forms.

Without these the globe would only be an immense chaos.

In the beginning God made all things, so that they might generate something.

Consider to be nothing that from which nothing can come.

You, O Democritus, form nothing different starting from atoms.

Atoms produce nothing; therefore, atoms are nothing.

These are the words of a Latin prayer that young Jesuits at the University of Pisa were assigned to recite every day to ward off
what
their superiors regarded as a particularly noxious temptation. The aim of the prayer was to exorcise atomism and to claim the form, structure, and beauty of things as the work of God. The atomists had found joy and wonder in the way things are: Lucretius saw the universe as a constant, intensely erotic hymn to Venus. But the obedient young Jesuit was to tell himself every day that the only alternative to the divine order he could see celebrated all around him in the extravagance of Baroque art was a cold, sterile, chaotic world of meaningless atoms.

Why did it matter? As More’s
Utopia
had made clear, divine providence and the soul’s postmortem rewards and punishments were non-negotiable beliefs, even in playful fantasies about non-Christian peoples at the edge of the known world. But the Utopians did not base their doctrinal insistence on their understanding of physics. Why would the Jesuits, at once the most militant and the most intellectually sophisticated Catholic order in this period, commit themselves to the thankless task of trying to eradicate atoms? After all, the notion of the invisible seeds of things had never completely vanished during the Middle Ages. The core idea of the universe’s basic material building blocks—atoms—had survived the loss of the ancient texts. Atoms could even be spoken of without substantial risk, provided that they were said to be set in motion and ordered by divine providence. And there remained within the highest reaches of the Catholic Church daring speculative minds eager to grapple with the new science. Why should atoms in the High Renaissance have come to seem, in some quarters at least, so threatening?

The short answer is that the recovery and recirculation of Lucretius’
On the Nature of Things
had succeeded in linking the very idea of atoms, as the ultimate substrate of all that exists, with a host of other, dangerous claims. Detached from any context,
the
idea that all things might consist of innumerable invisible particles did not seem particularly disturbing. After all, the world had to consist of
something
. But Lucretius’ poem restored to atoms their missing context, and the implications—for morality, politics, ethics, and theology—were deeply upsetting.

Those implications were not immediately apparent to everyone. Savonarola may have mocked the pointy-headed intellectuals who thought the world was made up out of invisible particles, but on this issue at least he was playing for laughs, not yet calling for an auto-da-fé. Catholics like Erasmus and More could, as we have seen, think seriously about how to integrate elements of Epicureanism with the Christian faith. And in 1509, when Raphael painted the
School of Athens
in the Vatican—his magnificent vision of Greek philosophy—he seems to have been sublimely confident that the whole classical inheritance, not simply the work of a select few, could live in harmony with the Christian doctrine being earnestly debated by the theologians depicted on the opposite wall. Plato and Aristotle have pride of place in Raphael’s luminous scene, but there is room under the capacious arch for all of the major thinkers, including—if traditional identifications are correct—Hypatia of Alexandria and Epicurus.