The Swerve (36 page)

But by midcentury, this confidence was no longer possible. In 1551 the theologians at the Council of Trent had, to their satisfaction at least, resolved once and for all the debates that had swirled around the precise nature of the central Christian mystery. They had confirmed as Church dogma the subtle arguments with which Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, drawing on Aristotle, had attempted to reconcile transubstantiation—the metamorphosis of the consecrated water and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ—with the laws of physics. Aristotle’s distinction between the “accidents” and the “substance” of matter made it possible to explain
how
something that looked and smelled and tasted exactly like a piece of bread could actually (and not merely symbolically) be Christ’s flesh. What the human senses experienced was merely the accidents of bread; the substance of the consecrated wafer was God.

The theologians at Trent presented these ingenious arguments not as a theory but as the truth, a truth utterly incompatible with Epicurus and Lucretius. The problem with Epicurus and Lucretius was not their paganism—after all, Aristotle too was a pagan—but rather their physics. Atomism absolutely denied the key distinction between substance and accidents, and therefore threatened the whole magnificent intellectual edifice resting on Aristotelian foundations. And this threat came at exactly the moment when Protestants had mounted their most serious assault on Catholic doctrine. That assault did not depend on atomism—Luther and Zwingli and Calvin were not Epicureans, any more than Wycliffe and Hus had been—but for the militant, embattled forces of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church, it was as if the resurgence of ancient materialism had opened a dangerous second front. Indeed, atomism seemed to offer the Reformers access to an intellectual weapon of mass destruction. The Church was determined not to allow anyone to lay hands on this weapon, and its ideological arm, the Inquisition, was alerted to detect the telltale signs of proliferation.

“Faith must take first place
¹⁴
among all the other laws of philosophy,” declared a Jesuit spokesman in 1624, “so that what, by established authority, is the word of God may not be exposed to falsity.” The words were a clear warning to curb unacceptable speculation: “The only thing necessary to the Philosopher, in order to know the truth, which is one and simple, is to oppose whatever is contrary to Faith and to accept that which is contained in Faith.” The Jesuit did not specify a specific target of this warning, but contemporaries would have easily understood
that
his words were particularly directed at the writer of a recently published scientific work called
The Assayer
. That writer was Galileo Galilei.

Galileo had already been in trouble for using his astronomical observations to support the Copernican claim that the earth was in orbit around the sun. Under pressure from the Inquisition, he had pledged not to continue to advance this claim. But
The Assayer
, published in 1623, demonstrated that the scientist was continuing to tread on extremely dangerous ground. Like Lucretius, Galileo defended the oneness of the celestial and terrestrial world: there was no essential difference, he claimed, between the nature of the sun and the planets and the nature of the earth and its inhabitants. Like Lucretius, he believed that everything in the universe could be understood through the same disciplined use of observation and reason. Like Lucretius, he insisted on the testimony of the senses, against, if necessary, the orthodox claims of authority. Like Lucretius, he sought to work through this testimony toward a rational comprehension of the hidden structures of all things. And like Lucretius, he was convinced that these structures were by nature constituted by what he called “minims” or minimal particles, that is, constituted by a limited repertory of atoms combined in innumerable ways.

Galileo had friends in the highest places:
The Assayer
was dedicated to none other than the enlightened new pope, Urban VIII, who as Cardinal Maffeo Barbarini had warmly supported the great scientist’s research. As long as the pope was willing to protect him, Galileo could hope to get away with the expression of his views and with the scientific investigations that they helped to generate. But the pope himself was under growing pressure to suppress what many in the Church, the Jesuits above all, regarded as particularly noxious heresies. On August 1, 1632, the Society of Jesus strictly prohibited and condemned
the
doctrine of atoms. That prohibition in itself could not have precipitated a move against Galileo, since
The Assayer
had been cleared eight years earlier for publication. But Galileo’s publication, also in 1632, of the
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
gave his enemies the opportunity that they had been looking for: they promptly denounced him to the Congregation of the Holy Office, as the Inquisition was called.

On June 22, 1633, the Inquisition delivered its verdict: “We say, sentence, and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of the evidence arrived at in the trial, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy.” Still protected by powerful friends and hence spared torture and execution, the convicted scientist
¹⁵
was sentenced to life imprisonment, under house arrest. The heresy officially specified in the verdict was “having believed and held the doctrine, false and contrary to sacred and divine Scripture, that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world.” But in 1982 an Italian scholar, Pietro Redondi, uncovered a document in the archives of the Holy Office that altered the picture. The document was a memorandum detailing heresies found in
The Assayer
. Specifically, the inquisitor found evidence of atomism. Atomism, explained the inquisitor, is incompatible with the second canon of the thirteenth session of the Council of Trent, the session that spelled out the dogma of the Eucharist. If you accept Signor Galileo Galilei’s theory, the document observes, then when you find in the Most Holy Sacrament “the objects of touch, sight, taste, etc.,” characteristic of bread and wine, you will also have to say, according to the same theory, that these characteristics are produced on our senses by “very tiny particles.” And from this you will have to conclude “that in the Sacrament there must be substantial parts of bread and wine,” a conclusion that is flat-out
heresy
. Thirty-three years after the execution of Bruno, atomism remained a belief that the vigilant forces of orthodoxy were determined to suppress.

If complete suppression proved impossible, there was some consolation for the enemies of Lucretius in the fact that most printed editions carried disclaimers. One of the most interesting of these is in the text used by Montaigne,
¹⁶
the 1563 edition annotated by Denys Lambin. It is true, Lambin concedes, that Lucretius denies the immortality of the soul, rejects divine providence, and claims that pleasure is the highest good. But “even though the poem itself is alien to our religion because of its beliefs,” Lambin writes, “it is no less a poem.” Once the distinction has been drawn between the work’s beliefs and its artistic merit, the full force of that merit can be safely acknowledged: “Merely a poem? Rather it is an elegant poem, a magnificent poem, a poem highlighted, recognized and praised by all wise men.” What about the content of the poem, “these insane and frenzied ideas of Epicurus, those absurdities about a fortuitous conjunction of atoms, about innumerable worlds, and so on”? Secure in their faith, Lambin writes, good Christians do not have to worry: “neither is it difficult for us to refute them, nor indeed is it necessary, certainly when they are most easily disproved by the voice of truth itself or by everyone remaining silent about them.” Disavowal shades into a reassurance subtly conjoined with a warning: sing the praises of the poem, but remain silent about its ideas.

The aesthetic appreciation of Lucretius depended on the possession of very good Latin, and hence the poem’s circulation was limited to a relatively small, elite group. Everyone grasped that any attempt to make it more broadly accessible to the literate public would arouse the deepest suspicion and hostility from the authorities. More than two hundred years apparently passed, after Poggio’s discovery in 1417, before an attempt was actually made.

But by the seventeenth century the pressure of the new science, growing intellectual speculation, and the lure of the great poem itself became too great to contain. The brilliant French astronomer, philosopher, and priest Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) devoted himself to an ambitious attempt to reconcile Epicureanism and Christianity, and one of his most remarkable students, the playwright Molière (1622–1673), undertook to produce a verse translation (which does not, unfortunately, survive) of
De rerum natura
. Lucretius had already appeared in a prose translation in French by the abbé Michel de Marolles (1600–1681). Not long afterwards, an Italian translation by the mathematician Alessandro Marchetti (1633–1714) began to circulate in manuscript, to the dismay of the Roman Church, which successfully banned it from print for decades. In England, the wealthy diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706) translated the first book of Lucretius’ poem; a complete version in heroic couplets was published in 1682 by the young Oxford-educated scholar Thomas Creech.

Creech’s Lucretius was greeted as an astonishing achievement when it appeared in print, but an English translation of almost the entire poem, also in couplets, was already in very limited circulation, and from a surprising source. This translation, which was not printed until the twentieth century, was by the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of Colonel John Hutchinson, parliamentarian and regicide. What is most striking perhaps about this remarkable accomplishment is that, by the time the learned translator presented the text to Arthur Annesley, first Earl of Anglesey, on June 11, 1675, she had come to detest its central principles—or so she claimed—and to hope that they would vanish from the face of the earth.

She would certainly have consigned these verses to the fire, she wrote in her autograph dedicatory letter, “had they not by misfortune
¹⁷
been gone out of my hands in one lost copy.” This sounds, of course, like the familiar gesture of feminine modesty. It is a gesture she reinforces by refusing to translate
several
hundred sexually explicit lines in book 4, noting in the margin that “much here was left out for a midwife to translate whose obscene art it would better become than a nicer pen.” But in fact Hutchinson made no apology for what she called her “aspiring Muse.”
¹⁸
Rather, she abhorred “all the atheism and impieties” in Lucretius’ work.

The “lunatic” Lucretius, as Hutchinson called him, is no better than the other pagan philosophers and poets routinely commended to pupils by their tutors, an educational practice that is “one great means
¹⁹
of debauching the learned world, at least of confirming them in that debauchery of soul, which their first sin led them into, and of hindering their recovery, while they puddle all the streams of Truth, that flow down to them from divine grace, with this pagan mud.” It is a lamentation and a horror, Hutchinson wrote, that now, in these days of the Gospel, men should study Lucretius and adhere to his “ridiculous, impious, execrable doctrines, reviving the foppish, casual dance of atoms.”

Why, then, when she earnestly hopes that this wickedness will disappear, did she painstakingly prepare a verse translation, pay a professional scribe to write out the first five books, and carefully copy out book 6, along with the Arguments and the marginalia, in her own hand?

Her answer is a revealing one. She had not initially realized, she confessed, how dangerous Lucretius was. She undertook the translation “out of youthful
²⁰
curiosity, to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand.” We have, through this remark, a glimpse of those quiet conversations, conducted not in the lecture hall or from the pulpit, but away from the prying ears of the authorities, in which Lucretius’ ideas were weighed and debated. This gifted, learned woman wanted to know for herself what the men in her world were arguing about.

When her religious convictions matured, Hutchinson wrote, when she “grew in Light and Love,” this curiosity and the pride she felt and in some sense continued to feel in her accomplishment began to sour:

The little glory
²¹
I had among some few of my intimate friends, for understanding this crabbed poet, became my shame, and I found I never understood him till I learned to abhor him, and dread a wanton dalliance with impious books.

But why, in that case, should she have wished to make this wanton dalliance available to others?

Hutchinson said that she was simply obeying Anglesey, who had asked to see this book that she now beseeched him to conceal. To conceal, not to destroy. Something restrained her from urging that it be consigned to the fire, something more than the copy that had already gone out of her hands—for why should that have held her back?—and more even than her pride in her own accomplishment. An ardent Puritan, she echoed Milton’s principled opposition to censorship. She had, after all, “reaped some profit
²²
by it, for it showed me that senseless superstitions drive carnal reason into atheism.” That is, she learned from Lucretius that childish “fables” meant to enhance piety have the effect of leading rational intelligence toward disbelief.