BOOK REVIEWS Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York and London: Norton, 2011. 356 pages. When you have a light and airy corner office on the top floor of the Academy, you have earned the right to take on large old topics and to paint with a broad brush. Stephen Greenblatt exercised that right in Will in the World, mostly to good effect, reminding us that we do actually know quite a bit about Shakespeare s life and extrapolating in suggestive ways from that knowledge. In The Swerve, Greenblatt starts from a small fact, the discovery by an Italian humanist named Poggio Bracciolini of what seems to have been the sole extant manuscript of Lucretius s philosophical poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). From this single event in the early 15th Century, Greenblatt widens his view until he has presented his readers with a sweeping interpretation of European intellectual history, an explanation of How the World Became Modern. The story is told with panache, creating a book that is at once scholarly and engagingly popular. The book is also quite personal, as Greenblatt makes clear in his Preface, where he tells of his own encounter with Lucretius s poem when he was a young man with a crippling fear of death a fear that is confronted by the great Roman writer. Greenblatt became an adherent of the materialist doctrine championed by Lucretius, and this book is an extended The Ben Jonson Journal 20.1 (2013): 136 154 Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/bjj
Book Reviews 137 argument in its favor by an apologist who consistently rejects out of hand any consideration of the spiritual life. Poggio Bracciolini, as Greenblatt describes him, was a quintessential Renaissance humanist who sought out ancient books in far-flung monasteries and copied them, making them available to others who pursued humanistic studies. He wrote a beautiful hand himself and worked as a scriptor in the Vatican, and eventually as papal secretary, serving no less than eight popes during the tumultuous time of the Great Schism and immediately after. Like other humanists, he cultivated a refined style of writing in the works he composed himself, one learned from the great rhetoricians of old, and like other humanists he tended to look down upon the period between the fall of Rome and his own time, as does Greenblatt. The book describes in rich detail the tightly-knit international community of humanists active in Poggio s time. Petrarch was an early leader of the movement, and his Letter to Cicero is a prime example of the humanists desire to enter into conversation with the great thinkers of the classical era. Coluccio Salutati, the chancellor of Florence, stands as one of the prominent civic humanists, attempting to make use of his learning in service to the state. Salutati was a mentor to the young Poggio, who wrote at his death, We have lost a father. One of Poggio s closest friends was another follower of Salutati, Niccolò Niccoli. However, the humanists did not always get along with each other and were often vying with each other for recognition: Poggio developed a particularly acrimonious competition with Lorenzo Valla. None of this is news to those who have studied the humanist movement, but Greenblatt presents it in such an interesting manner that this knowledge is now likely to be disseminated far more widely. The broader thesis of the book that the rediscovery of Lucretius was a major factor in the creation of the modern worldview is intriguing and plausible, if exaggerated. A more problematic element, however, is Greenblatt s pronounced anti-christian agenda, which permeates the book: Lucretian materialism is the truth; Christian spiritualism is the falsehood that impedes its progress. Early on, Greenblatt asserts that curiosity was said by the Church to be a mortal sin, and he repeats this statement later
138 BEN JONSON JOURNAL in the book, again without documentation. In fact, certain types of curiosity were regarded as sinful, not curiosity as such (see Aquinas s treatment of the question in the Summa). Several pages are given to a description of the terrible destruction of the great ancient library at Alexandria an event about which the historical record is very murky (various historians having blamed the Romans or the Muslims, as well as the Christian emperor). Let us concede that this was a dark moment in the history of Christianity, but Greenblatt implies that what was at work was a profoundly anti-intellectual attitude that was fundamental to Christianity and was responsible for the disappearance of most books written in the classical period. In reality, as he acknowledges momentarily, the loss of learning resulted primarily from the collapse of the Roman Empire and its conquest by the illiterate Germanic tribes. And of course he is well aware that manuscripts such as the De rerum natura would never have survived the centuries after the fall of Rome if it had not been for the monastic scriptoria that copied pagan as well as Christian works. It is true, as Greenblatt charges, that some of the Church Fathers were wary of pagan writings: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Tertullian demanded. Yet Greenblatt ignores the other Fathers Augustine being the most prominent who argued that the pagan philosophers arrived at a goodly measure of truth through the use of reason and that Christian thinkers were to make use of reason in subordination to faith. Not only are Christians anti-intellectual, we learn, but they completely reject the body and all physical pleasure. You have St. Benedict rolling in nettles to overcome lust, for instance, when a wise Epicurean would simply have indulged the desire in a moderate manner. The benighted monks and nuns were driven by the belief that redemption would only come through abasement. This is a caricature of monastic theology, which did indeed value humility and practice mortification of the flesh, but in service of positive aims: prayer, meditation, self-knowledge, and ultimately the love of God. Greenblatt concludes with a grand gesture, In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure. He is so intent on forcing the dichotomy that he does little justice to the
Book Reviews 139 actual teachings of the medieval Church, meanwhile reducing even his own atomist creed to a facile pleasure principle. Contemplating the ruins of the Roman Empire and the way in which medieval churches were built around those ruins, Greenblatt states that the great civilization that left these traces had been destroyed. The remnants could serve as walls to incorporate into new houses, as reminders that all things pass and are forgotten, as mute testimony to the triumph of Christianity over paganism, as literal quarries to be mined for precious stones and metals. Among other things, this statement ignores the fact that Rome was Christian for over a century and a half before it disintegrated into ruins. It was not Christianity that reduced Rome to ruins but the gradual weakening and corruption of the empire, which fell to barbarian invasions. Lucretius argues (in Greenblatt s paraphrase) that Religions always promise hope and love, but their deep, underlying structure is cruelty. For him, religion is finally about fear, abasement, pain, and cruelty, while the enlightened materialist is joyful, happy, and well-adjusted. The only religion that is not cruel is paganism, which offers pluralism and tolerance coincidentally the only virtues recognized by the modern Epicurean humanist. In his eagerness to make Lucretius the keystone of the whole modern edifice, Greenblatt dragoons most Renaissance artists and writers into his camp. Here he mostly argues by assertion, rarely bothering to make his case. For instance, he claims that Sandro Botticelli was heavily influenced by Lucretius. This influence can be intuited by anyone looking at the Primavera, wearetold.ina note, he gives a passage from Lucretius about the coming of spring that does indeed sound quite like the scene in the painting, and he cites sources that make this argument. But this painting has been convincingly interpreted as a neo-platonic icon, with Zephyrus and Flora coming down from the spiritual dimension into the physical world on one side of the painting and Mercury reaching back into the spiritual realm on the other. Though the passage from Lucretius is quite similar, it is a commonplace; the philosophical tenor of the painting is primarily neo-platonic. Even Botticelli s Venus, also mentioned in passing here, is a highly spiritualized and chaste depiction of the goddess.
140 BEN JONSON JOURNAL Similarly, Greenblatt recruits many Renaissance writers to his cause. In one case, More s Utopia, he takes some time to develop his case. He notes that the Utopians tend to believe that no kind of pleasure is forbidden, provided no harm comes of it, a prime Lucretian principle. However, Greenblatt notes with disappointment that More draws back from embracing fully the ideas of Lucretius in requiring that all in Utopia believe in God. This interpretation seems reasonable, but other readers find that More undercuts the rationalistic governance of Utopia more completely yet, for many of the progressive notions outlined (and mentioned approvingly by Greenblatt) such as public housing, universal health care and child care centers are part of a society that is also extremely regimented. For instance, no one may travel without a permit. From the title onward, More seems to suggest that any attempt to create a centrally-planned society is doomed to failure. The great Christian humanist and self-mortifying saint was never tempted by the ideas of Lucretius. One more case is that of Edmund Spenser, who, according to Greenblatt, shared an interest in Lucretian materialism with Donne, Bacon, Shakespeare, and others. These claims are strangely undeveloped and unsupported. Later, Greenblatt mentions briefly that Spenser had written an ecstatic and strikingly Lucretian hymn to Venus. I suppose he must mean Spenser s Hymne in Honour of Love, which extolls and complains of the power of Cupid and Venus over human hearts. Yet this poem is balanced by the Hymn in Honour of Heavenly Love, addressed to the god of Love, high heavens king. Like Botticelli, Spenser is here working out a neo-platonic idea of love and ultimately a Christian one. It is a pleasure to see a famous critic standing on a high peak looking out over all the realms of gold and thinking large thoughts. But it is disappointing to see his horizon foreshortened by a dogmatic adherence to what is, finally, an irrational notion that must be taken on faith by the devout secularist the idea that all the complexity and beauty of the world came about through a random swerve in the atoms. Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr. Grand Valley State University DOI: 10.3366/bjj.2013.0071