Venus effectively depicts the opening scene of Lucretius’s poem. Giordano Bruno went to the stake, with his mouth pinned shut to silence his heresies, for quoting Lucretius on the recombination of atoms and the awe with which we should embrace the idea that human beings are not the purpose of the universe. Galileo’s Lucretian atomism, as well as his Copernican heliocentrism, was used against him at his trial. Indeed, the historian of science Catherine Wilson has argued that the whole of seventeenth-century empiricism, started by Pierre Gassendi in opposition to Descartes, and taken up by the most influential thinkers of the age, including Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz and Bishop Berkeley, was fuelled to a remarkable extent by the sudden popularity of Lucretius.
As Lucretian ideas percolated, the physicists were the first to see where they led. Isaac Newton became acquainted with Epicurean atomism as a student at Cambridge, when he read a book by Walter Charleton expounding Gassendi’s interpretation of Lucretius. Later he acquired a Latin edition of De Rerum Natura itself, which survives from his library and shows signs of heavy use. He echoed Lucretian ideas about voids between atoms throughout his books, especially the Opticks.
Newton was by no means the first modern thinker to banish a skyhook, but he was one of the best. He explained the orbits of the planets and the falling of apples by gravity, not God. In doing so, he did away with the need for perpetual divine interference and supervision by an overworked creator. Gravity kept the earth orbiting the sun without having to be told. Jehovah might have kicked the ball, but it rolled down the hill of its own accord.
Yet Newton’s disenthralment was distinctly limited. He was furious with anybody who read into this that God might not be in ultimate charge, let alone not exist. He asserted firmly that: ‘This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.’ His reasoning was that, according to his calculations, the solar system would eventually spin off into chaos. Since it apparently did not, God must be intervening periodically to nudge the planets back into their orbits. Jehovah has a job after all, just a part-time one.
The swerve
That’s that then. A skyhook still exists, just out of sight. Again and again this was the pattern of the Enlightenment: gain a yard of ground from God, but then insist he still holds the field beyond and always will. It did not matter how many skyhooks were found to be illusory, the next one was always going to prove real. Indeed, so common is the habit of suddenly seeing design, after all the hard work has been done to show that emergence is more plausible, that I shall borrow a name for it – the swerve. Lucretius himself was the first to swerve. In a world composed of atoms whose motions were predictable, Lucretius (channelling Democritus and Epicurus) could not explain the apparent human capacity for free will. In order to do so, he suggested, arbitrarily, that atoms must occasionally swerve unpredictably, because the gods make them do so. This failure of nerve on the part of the poet has been known since as the Lucretian swerve, but I intend to use the same phrase more generally for each occasion on which I catch a philosopher swerving to explain something he struggles to understand, and positing an arbitrary skyhook. Watch out, in the pages that follow, for many Lucretian swerves.
Newton’s rival, Gottfried Leibniz, in his 1710 treatise on theodicy, attempted a sort of mathematical proof that God existed. Evil stalked the world, he concluded, the better to bring out the best in people. God was always calculating carefully how to minimise evil, if necessary by allowing disasters to occur that killed more bad people than good. Voltaire mocked Leibniz’s ‘optimism’, a word that then meant almost the opposite of what it means today: that the world was perfect and unimprovable (‘optimal’), because God had made it. After 60,000 people died in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, on the morning of All Saints’ Day when the churches were full, theologians followed Leibniz in explaining helpfully that Lisbon had earned its punishment by sinning. This was too much for Voltaire, who asked sardonically in a poem: ‘Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found/Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?’
Newton’s French follower Pierre-Louis Maupertuis went to Swedish Lapland to prove that the earth was flattened towards the poles, as Newtonian mechanics predicted. He then moved on from Newton by rejecting other arguments for the existence of God founded on the wonders of nature, or the regularity of the solar system. But having gone thus far, he suddenly stopped (his Lucretian swerve), concluding that his own ‘least action’ principle to explain motion displayed such wisdom on the part of nature that it must be the product of a wise creator. Or, to paraphrase Maupertuis, if God’s as clever as me, he must exist. A blazing non sequitur.
Voltaire, perhaps irritated by the fact that his mathematically gifted mistress Emilie, Marquise du Châtelet had slept with Maupertuis and had written in defence of Leibniz, then based his character Dr Pangloss in his novel Candide on an amalgam of Leibniz and Maupertuis. Pangloss remains blissfully persuaded – and convinces the naïve Candide – that this is the best of all possible worlds, even as they both experience syphilis, shipwreck, earthquake, fire, slavery and being hanged. Voltaire’s contempt for theodicy derived directly and explicitly from Lucretius, whose arguments he borrowed throughout life, styling himself at one point the ‘latter-day Lucretius’.
Pasta or worms?
Voltaire was by no means the first poet or prose stylist to draw upon Lucretius, nor would he be the last. Thomas More tried to reconcile Lucretian pleasure with faith in Utopia. Montaigne quoted Lucretius frequently, and echoed him in saying ‘the world is but a perennial movement … all things in it are in constant motion’; he recommended that we ‘fall back into Epicurus’ infinity of atoms’. Britain’s Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne and Francis Bacon, all play with themes of explicit materialism and atomism that came either directly or indirectly from Lucretius. Ben Jonson heavily annotated his Dutch edition of Lucretius. Machiavelli copied out De Rerum Natura in his youth. Molière, Dryden and John Evelyn translated it; John Milton and Alexander Pope emulated, echoed and attempted to rebut it.
Thomas Jefferson, who collected five Latin versions of De Rerum Natura along with translations into three languages, declared himself an Epicurean, and perhaps deliberately echoed Lucretius in his phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’. The poet and physician Erasmus Darwin, who helped inspire not just his evolutionary grandson but many of the Romantic poets too, wrote his epic, erotic, evolutionary, philosophical poems in conscious imitation of Lucretius. His last poem, The Temple of Nature, was intended as his version of De Rerum Natura.
The influence of this great Roman materialist culminates rather neatly in the moment when Mary Shelley had the idea for Frankenstein. She had her epiphany after listening to her husband Percy discuss with George, Lord Byron, the coming alive of ‘vermicelli’ that had been left to ferment, in experiments of ‘Dr Darwin’. Given that Shelley, Byron and Erasmus Darwin were all enthusiastic Lucretians, perhaps she misheard and, rather than debating the resurrection of pasta, they were actually quoting the passage in De Rerum Natura (and Darwin’s experimental imitation of it) where Lucretius discusses spontaneous generation of little worms in rotting vegetable matter – ‘vermiculos’. Here is the history of Western thought in a single incident: a Classical writer, rediscovered in the Renaissance, who inspired the Enlightenment and influenced the Romantic movement, then sparks the most famous Gothic novel, whose villain becomes a recurring star of modern cinema.
Lucretius haunted philosophers of the Enlightenment, daring free thinkers further down the path that leads away from creationist thinking. Pierre Bayle, in his Thoughts on the Comet of 1680, closely followed Lucretius’s Book 5 in suggesting that the power of religion derived from fear. Montesquieu channelled Lucretius in the very first sentence of The Spirit of the Laws (1748): ‘Laws in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things’ (my
