The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book—the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age—fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science, Religion, Audiobook, Renaissance

356 pages, Hardcover

First published September 26, 2011

About the author

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a Pulitzer Prize winning American literary critic, theorist and scholar.

Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for nine weeks.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When we say...that pleasure is the end and aim of life, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not by an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry, not by sexual lust, nor the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul." ---Epicurus

I haven't read a book in a long time that has introduced me to so many historical figures to admire. Some of that is born out of my own ignorance, but the wonderful thing about ignorance is I have the means to dismiss it. I have heard of Hypatia and last year even watched a movie based on her life called Agora starring the lovely Rachel Weisz. I have brushed up against Epicurus and Lucretius, but they are mere footnotes on other files logged sporadically in the dim halls of my memories.


Epicurus


Lucretius

I had no reference to tell me what colossal figures they are, bearing brilliant ideas that give footing to my own paltry concepts of my own life philosophy.

If I were to dig out my time machine that I was tinkering with way back during a Stephen King review http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... and decide to take a trip back to 1417; invariably, as we know despite my best efforts something would go wrong and I would be stuck there. I could only hope I could find Poggio Bracciolini and tag along with him as he "became a midwife to modernity". Poggio in 1417 finds himself unemployed. Most recently he had been Apostolic Scriptor for the pope. His boss had been defrocked and thrown in jail and given the circumstances had no more need of his services.

Poggio short on funds, but long on bibliophilic desire is searching for lost books. He is a charmer and he has to be to convince monks to allow him to poke among the dusty remains of ancient texts in their libraries. Luckily there was a time when Christians were curious about the world beyond the bible and had copied and preserved even those texts that they found to be contrary to their own beliefs. That time is past and in the 1400s those texts had not been recopied and were vulnerable to bugs, damp, and abuse. Poggio in one such monastery finds a book that was so dangerous that it had been nearly eradicated. On the Nature of Things by Lucretius expounded the views of Epicurus in an epic poem so lovely that even St. Jerome despite it's views so counter to his struggling beliefs could not resist reading it. If the monastery had really know what it was and that they were the protectorate of such a book I'm sure they would have used it to light a hot fire under the next heretic.

To give you an example of where Christian thinking was at the time. Saint Benedict wandering along a path thinking pious thoughts one day suddenly had the image of a desirable woman intrude upon his heavenly internal discourse and found himself aroused. Oh my what to do what to do.

He then noticed a thick patch of nettles and briers next to him. Throwing his garment aside he flung himself into the sharp thorns and stinging nettles. There he rolled and tossed until his whole body was in pain and covered with blood. Yet, once he had conquered pleasure through suffering, his torn and bleeding skin served to drain the poison of temptation from his body. Before long, the pain that was burning his whole body had put out the fires of evil in his heart. It was by exchanging these two fires that he gained the victory over sin.

In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.

It leaves little doubt why women get such a bad shake in Christian religion given that the natural desire that a man may feel for a woman is considered EVIL. Let's see the Epicurean table is right over there excuse me. I'm with those guys.

The Way Things Are. If you are like me and have not read Lucretius do not let that keep you from reading this book. Greenblatt provides a list of the principle components addressed in the book with further explanation than what I'm providing in this review.

*Everything is made of invisible particles.
*The elementary particles of matter-"the seeds of things"-are eternal.
*The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.
*All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
*Everything comes into being as a result of the swerve.
*Nature ceaselessly experiments.
*The universe was not created for or about humans.
*Humans are not unique.
*Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
*The soul dies...(ehh gads that will get you a quick trip to the flaming wood pile.)
*There is no afterlife...(they can only burn you once.)
*Death is nothing to us.
*All organized religions are superstitious delusions.
*Religions are invariably cruel.
*There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
*The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. (avoid nettles and briers for example.)
*The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
*Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder.

Now after skimming this list either you are looking for the dislike button, which luckily for us poor reviewers is not available, or you are intrigued and want to read more. I would suggest that even if you do find some of the ideas on this list abhorrent still read this book. My brain was churning like a frozen Margarita mixer in a Mexican bar on a Friday night while reading this book. It is okay to read about things that you disagree with. It is okay to doubt your beliefs or reformat your thoughts or even change your mind. My father-in-law, Texas Baptist, refused to read The Da Vinci Code, but he called my wife to ask her what it was about. His beliefs are obviously so fragile he cannot take the chance that a fiction writer of dubious talent might create doubt.

I had sticky notes stuck to other sticky notes filled with sketchy bits of my handwriting (Poggio would be appalled at the state of my handwriting.) with wonderful quotes that I had fully intended to share with my goodreads friends, but the book is only 263 pages and I literally had notes for nearly every page that would have ballooned this review beyond anybody's patience level. Besides you are going to read this book right?


Poggio Bracciolini

I'm going to end with a book curse that Greenblatt shared that I intend to tuck into every book I lend out to "friends" from now on.

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.

That ought to get their attention.

I leave you fair friends to return to my ivory tower, the walls thick with books, a Royals baseball game playing in the background. My pursuit of pleasure has begun.

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[Riku Sayuj · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Anti-Climactic Swerve

Greenblatt is a good story-teller and delivers good entertainment value here, but not much informative or educational value, except as an enticing short introductory to Lucretius, Bruno and Montaigne.

As Greenblatt acknowledges, there is no single explanation for the emergence of the Renaissance and the release of the forces that have shaped our own world. Despite this awareness, he has tried to trace out The Swerve - “of how the world swerved in a new direction” by telling a little known but exemplary Renaissance story - the story of Poggio Bracciolini’s recovery of Lucretius’s poem, ‘ On the Nature of Things ’ (De rerum natura). This one poem by itself was certainly not responsible for an entire intellectual, moral, and social transformation—no single work was. But, Greenblatt tells us, this particular ancient book, suddenly returning to view, made a difference.

Majority of the book is given over to the ‘dramatic’ search for old documents, by a Poggio who suddenly found himself with a lot of free time. But, to me, that is not the ‘enlightenment’. The enlightenment is what followed afterwards. Of course, these book-hunters deserve to be lionized for their sacrifice and great service, but they were pursuing an obsession and most of them never played with the ball tossed by the ideas they uncovered.

To me the really exciting part of renaissance is what happened once these millennia old, forgotten, but radical ideas were injected into a culture that was held to the whip by militant power-hungry Christianity — liberating humanity from the crushing weight of being the center of the universe, the human mind from the chains of the fear of a future torment that is bound to follow any original thought (original = blasphemous).

That is when the real alchemy happened - when different brilliant thinkers tried hard to reconcile their fervent theology to the irresistible intellectual and poetic force of the ancient arguments; when the few truly free thinkers found the best sort of patrons, the ancients, to support their cause; and when all these elements reacted against each other and created something new and wonderful - just like Lucretius’s reviled atoms.

That is the truly exciting story. That is only touched on by Greenblatt, after spending 4/5th of the book on Poggio’s quest, then towards the end, we are given a sneak peak on how various thinkers reacted, of the spectacular beauty of a larger cultural movement that included Alberti, Michelangelo, and Raphael, Ariosto, Montaigne, and Cervantes, along with dozens of other artists and writers. Some of the ideas touched upon include (in loosely chronological fashion, listed here to redeem the book by highlighting the best parts):

- Lorenzo Valla’s early reaction through On Pleasure (De voluptate), an early, highly noncommittal dialogue dealing with the Epicurean ideas.

- Thomas More’s Utopia - which tried very hard to integrate the Epicurean ideas into a society of equality and communism, even as Moore kept them grounded on firm Christian principles.

- The diminutive Dominican monk, Giordano Bruno, who was turned into one of the boldest thinkers on the touch of Lucretius’s poetry. Bruno was perhaps the first real intellectual successor to Epicurus and Lucretius, the one who truly took the ball and ran the full distance and dared to assert a new and dangerous world view (Bruno is only one example of much intellectual activity that erupted, out of which most kept silent, unlike Bruno).

- Machiavelli’s formulations, which could arguably be said to have touched the feared extremes of the philosophy.

- Copernicus, and others, who got support from all this intellectual ferment to explore new boundaries and push human understanding.

- Others like Galileo, who could then go further, even if timidly.

- To pave the way for Descartes, Newton… and so on and so forth, the illustrious list extends to our day.

And even in the arts, the explosion was evident, with Cosimo, Da Vinci, Botticelli, etc., to Montaigne and others, and soon through Bruno’s visit to England, Spencer, Donne, Bacon, and eventually Shakespeare (who was a friend of a friend of Bruno’s!) and Ben Johnson (who had a copy of Lucretius). Soon, the printing press made these irresistible ideas even more irrepressible, until they were everywhere, just like the original atoms. Until, through Jefferson, traces of Epicureanism was embedded in the very constitution of the next great democracy that emerged, in the Declaration of Independence - The Pursuit of Happiness.

How splendid would that intellectual history be, if presented in its full richness and anxiety, with all the various threads and many tensions given stage space!

I know there are other books that explore this explosion and the dance of magnificent ideas, but I really felt let down that the story closed just before the drama began. Bit of an anti-climax. This richly researched biography of probably the most important book-hunter in history is not a must-read or an indispensable book. The best result would be an increased curiosity for the great works that enliven its pages.

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review has been revised and can now be seen at Shelf Inflicted (a Group Blog).

Changed my life forever, did this book.

Reposting the body of the review.
***
De rerum natura was a long narrative poem expounding Epicurean philosophy that was written in the first century before the common era. I am told by those possessed of sufficient Latin fluency to appreciate it that it is beautiful. I am not possessed of that level of fluency, and to me it seemed agonizingly impenetrable and obscurantist.

But Author Greenblatt, in this fascinating Pulitzer Prize-winning history and analysis of the poem and its influence on the world, focuses not on the merits of the poem but on the genesis, development, survival, and influence of De rerum natura, arguably the foundation text for the mental construct that you and I share, and that diverges widely from the mental construct of earlier times. (2020 UPDATE Plenty, plenty disagreement with my position exists.)

Why is this so? Because we accept a material explanation of the existence of things as our prevailing orthodoxy, even in the face of religious challenges to the primacy of logic and evidence and just plain good sense. It's down to Lucretius's poem's astounding clarity of thought, persuasiveness of rhetoric, and miraculous survival and rebirth.

What Greenblatt did was to provide a brief history of Epicurus, his actual philosophy, and the cultural currents that distorted and misrepresented his philosophy, together with the whys and wherefores of that misrepresentation. Then Lucretius, a shadowy figure whose biography is unknown to modern readers except for a calumny heaped on his memory by a man who did not know him and in fact lived centuries after his death, wrote in poetry...a form of expression not to Epicurus's taste or, in his opinion, a good and useful tool of communication, he preferring plain and simple and direct prose...broke down the Epicurean vision of the world, and argued in support of it. Greenblatt then traces the survival of manuscripts from antiquity to the Middle Ages, the resurgent interest in their contents during the run-up to the Renaissance, and the incalculably valuable role of obsessive individuals in hunting down, copying, and disseminating the surviving antique texts to a world then, as now, hungry for more and better and different views and experiences and thoughts and ideas.

I give this book one of my rare five-star ratings because it has solved a problem of identity for me: I am, as Thomas Jefferson said before me, an Epicurean. Not the debased view held of that noble philosophy thanks to “Saint” Jerome, who in the course of ramming his ignorance-celebrating religion down the throats of humanity, hit on the perfect misstatement of Epicurus's actual materialist philosophy: Hedonism! Hedonism and vice and licentiousness and gluttony! The pursuit of pleasure can only mean these things, shouted Jerome, and the chorus of baying dogs was off after the fox.

We all know how that ends.

Chapter eight of The Swerve, “The Way Things Are,” breaks out the point-by-point reality of Epicureanism, and is the prime motivating factor for my five-star rating. (In fact, I dislike Poggio Bracciolini, the discoverer of De rerum natura, quite intensely, and suspect that had I met him in life, I would have been repulsed by him.) I list here the bullet points Greenblatt is at pains to provide with clear, concise, and satisfying explication:

--Everything is made of invisible particles. This is called “atomism.”
--The elementary particles of matter...are eternal.
--The elementary particles are infinite in number, but limited in shape and size.
--All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
--The universe has no creator or designer.
--Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve. (Another word for this is collision.)
--The swerve is the source of free will. If there is no preordained pattern, how can there be a preordained result?
--Nature ceaselessly experiments. Evolution by natural selection, anyone?
--The universe was not created for or about humans.
--Humans are not unique. We are animals, literally not figuratively, like all the others.
--Human society began, not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
--The soul dies. There is no afterlife.
--Death is nothing to us. It is merely a fact. There is no personal component to death.
--All organized religions are superstitious delusions. Religions are, invariably, cruel.
--There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
--The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
--The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain, it is delusion.
--Understanding the true nature of things generates deep wonder.

I have never seen in print or heard with my ears a clearer, more concise, or more complete statement of my own personal worldview than this. It rang me like a bell. It sounds like Lucretius was sitting inside my head and copying down my responses to the world.

In the brief explications Greenblatt attaches to the bullet points, he makes it clear that these ideas, while they never wholly vanished from the world, were seen by the dominant world-view as a challenge to the idiotic legendary nonsense that had come to replace them, and were thus strongly condemned, to the point of burning people alive as a punishment and a warning to others inclined to think for themselves, to view the world as it is instead of through a warped fantasy construct that demonstrably causes harm and pain and facilitates much evil-doing.

So on that basis...five stars, and a ringing huzzah, to Gentile Signor Poggio Bracciolini; to Greenblatt for digging deeply enough in the humus of scholarly debate and historical records to make these connections for us, in a less scholarly age than the Renaissance, to find and use for ourselves as we see fit (ie, to exercise the free will we've got); and to WW Norton for publishing the resultant text as an under-$30 course in humanism. I am also grateful to the Pulitzer Prize board for awarding this book its non-fiction encomium, and to the Catholic News Agency for remaining consistently wrong by grousing about the book's anti-Catholicism and misinterpretation of the Church's anti-intellectualism. It's kind of hard to misinterpret burning people at the stake, guys. Own up: Your religion requires ignorance and prefers stupidity in its adherents.

Books such as this one do nothing to enhance religion's role in human affairs. It is best avoided by those of religious bent.

[Kemper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two thousand years ago a Roman named Lucretius wrote a poem that described a universe guided by physical laws rather than the whims of mystical deities and also advised that people should pursue happiness rather than spend their lives trying to appease gods who don’t exist . As I write this in 2012 certain parts of the world have been rioting and people are dying because some felt that a You Tube video insulted their religion. My own country has a constant political tug of war between the people who want to run things with that whole “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” part of the Constitution in mind while others think we should just throw that out and use the Bible as our rule book.

We are a race of slow learners.

Lucretius’s poem was apparently not only an extremely thorough explanation of Epicurean philosophy, it was also a well constructed and beautiful piece of writing that was almost lost to history. Greenblatt does an outstanding job of laying out the significance of Epicureanism, how it was almost stamped out by the rise of Christianity and why the poem rescued by chance by an Italian humanist and scholar was a spark that helped usher in the modern world.

I especially liked the section where Greenblatt describes how the Christian faith turned most of the public against one of the central principles of Epicureanism; seeking pleasure. ‘Seeking pleasure’ in the Epicurean sense doesn’t mean maxing out your credit cards in Vegas to hire a couple of hookers for a cocaine fueled weekend. It’s more in the ‘How about a nice cup of tea and a good book by a warm fire on a rainy day?’ kind of thing.

Yet the church managed to convince the faithful that it was more spiritual to seek punishment from an angry God, and they tagged Epicureans as a bunch of wild orgy types when in fact it’s not about hedonism, it’s about finding ways to avoid pain and making the most of your existence in this world because you’re gonna have a short shelf life and then you‘re done for good.

This is a fascinating history of how one piece of exceptional writing changed the world.

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 1 out of 5]

A dubious thesis propped up by selective evidence and punctuated by digressions that were often only tenuously connected to the book's argument. Greenblatt massively overstates Epicurean philosophy's significance in the ancient world and his bold claims for the influence of Lucretius' poem in the Renaissance are rarely supported by the evidence he presents to any sufficient degree. Worst of all is his bizarre caricatures of the Medieval period - he doesn't seem to know the Twelfth Century revival ever happened and universities get one passing mention, though the worst aspects of monasticism get repeated emphasis and flagellation gets pages of loving detail. And his claims Christianity somehow suppressed Lucretius' poem are undermined by his underplayed references to various medieval manuscripts of the poem (though these are often tucked away in footnotes). For an institution trying to "destroy" this poem, the Medieval church sure went about it in a strange way.

Greenblatt is an expert in literature rather than history, and it shows. The fact this book won a Pulitzer says something about a triumph of style and marketing over substance and basic fact checking. A book that actively distorts history is not a good history book.

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 4 out of 5]

O carte despre o răsturnare istorică (oare de ce preferăm cărțile de acest gen?), scrisă cu un simț narativ deosebit, dar prea puțin convingătoare.

De cele mai multe ori prefer o astfel de carte tocmai pentru ipoteza îndrăzneață pe care istoricul încearcă s-o justifice, deși pînă și el știe că încercarea lui e sortită eșecului. Răsturnările sînt dramatice, citim cartea cu sufletul la gură: vrem să aflăm cum a început Renașterea și cine este eroul acestui început. Greenblatt ne spune pe larg, dar răspunsul lui e îndoielnic.

În viziunea autorului, totul începe într-o mănăstire obscură din Germania, în secolul XV, cu descoperirea unui manuscris latinesc. Un astfel de început nu are nimic măreț, nu e precedat de „un gest eroic”, o „ciocnire între oștiri, un asediu”, de căderea unui împărat și prăbușirea unui imperiu. A scoate din raft o carte e, mai degrabă, un gest mărunt. Nici un savant n-ar îndrăzni să afirme că descoperirea manuscrisului va împărți istoria în două. În asta stă frumusețea acestui volum, în virulența ipotezei și în imposibilitatea autorului de a o sprijini suficient. Și asta e vădit din capul locului pentru oricine a cercetat istoria filosofiei.

Eroul acestei povești se numește Poggio Bracciolini. E un „vînător de manuscrise”, asemenea lui Petrarca, un umanist florentin și un secretar apostolic (un „scriptor” de documente). A fost în slujba Papei într-o perioadă foarte dificilă. În Biserică a avut loc o schismă (Apusul era guvernat de doi papi, unul la Roma, celălalt cu sediul la Avignon), apoi un conciliu ecumenic (cel de la Konstanz), menit să stingă disputele seculare, care va dura ani în șir (1415 - 1418). Printre altele, venerabilii episcopi adunați la Konstanz au discutat și despre războiul dintre Regatul polonez (unit cu Lituania) și Cavalerii teutoni. Vă mai amintiți de bătălia de la Grunwald (din 15 iulie 1410) și de oștenii lui Alexandru cel Bun?

Cu ocazia acestui Conciliu, Poggio ajunge în iarna anului 1417 la mănăsirea din Fulda, abație întemeiată de sfîntul Sturm pe la anul 744. E o bună ocazie pentru Greenblatt de a comenta tradiția „vînătorilor de manuscrise”, inițiată de autorul Canțonierului, Francesco Petrarca, și încheiată de Poggio Bracciolini prin descoperirea poemului compus de Titus Lucretius Carus, pe la anul 50 î.e.n., și intitulat De rerum natura.

Poemul lui Lucrețiu (cu teoria lui corpusculară și disprețul față de zei) va zdruncina „întreaga lume” a lui Poggio și cursul istoriei occidentale. Universul e alcătuit din atomi care cad în vid și au însușirea de a devia de la linia dreaptă. Ei formează vîrtejuri și se unesc în corpuri materiale. Termenul care definește mișcarea spontană a atomilor, „inițiativa” lor (klinamen), devine o metaforă pentru răsturnarea istorică produsă în Renaștere.

Teoria e frumoasă, chiar strident de frumoasă, dar nu are temei...

P. S. Stephen Greenblatt e conștient de fragilitatea ipotezei sale: „Desigur, un poem nu poate fi singur răspunzător pentru o întreagă transformare intelectuală, morală, şi socială - şi nici vreo altă lucrare, nemaivorbind de una despre care, vreme de secole, nu s-a putut discuta în public liber şi fără nici un risc. Însă această carte antică [De rerum natura], readusă dintr-odată la lumină, a marcat o diferenţă” (pp.18-19).

[William2 · Rating 2 out of 5]

The subtitle of this book is “how the world became modern.” It imparts no such knowledge. It’s a story of the marginal liberalization of thought brought on by the rediscovery of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. All the business about atoms.

I didn’t learn much . Yet there’s stuff to like. Especially the story of how Epicurus and his followers were calumniated by early Christians as debauched sybarites, a smear which has no basis in fact. So vehement were early Christians against the idea of pleasure, a key tenet of Epicureanism, that the salubrious effects of suffering were promoted. The imitation of Christ. Saint Benedict, for instance, upon seeing a beautiful woman, flung his garments aside and threw himself [genitals] onto sharp thorns and stinging nettles and thus “by exchanging these two fires . . . gained the victory over sin.” (p. 103) Yuck.

The fuse is a slow burning one. Halfway through I still don’t see the lineaments of the central argument. Why am I hearing so much about the life of this papal secretary, Poggio? OK, so he found the Lucretius’s manuscript in a German monastery in 1417. He wrote books and dreamed of recovering classics of antiquity. But really, he’s virtually a cipher. We learn little about his life yet I’ve been stuck with him for 150 pages.

Meh. The book doesn’t sing.

Though the author provides a new angle on the corruption of the medieval Church, that’s still a very old story. See Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, and Steven Runciman’s Crusade Trilogy et al. What is new to me is how open the curia was to trenchant critiques about its own corruption until well into the fifteenth century. Poggio was one of six apostolic secretaries to the pope despite writing searing appraisals like Against the Hypocrites.

Virtually any priest or monk who is at the curia is a hypocrite . . . for it is impossible to fulfill the highest purposes of religion there. And if you happen at the curia to see someone who is particularly abject in his humility, beware: he is not merely a hypocrite but the worst hypocrite of all. In general, you should be wary of people who seem too perfect, and remember that it is actually quite difficult to be good: ‘Difficile est bonum esse.’ (p. 149)

He should know. Poggio had 10 children by a mistress whom he abandoned when he married. He had another six children by his wife.

The use of a biographical thread to run through and connect the disparate elements of a narrative is a useful device. One example that springs to mind is Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. But Vann existed within living memory; there was documentation about his activities and people who remembered him. Poggio’s narrative, by contrast, is thin. The only thing that endears me to him is that when “the world around Poggio was falling to pieces . . . his response to chaos and fear was always to redouble his immersion in books.” (p. 177) It is in this one respect that I feel a kinship for him, after 200 pages.

Now on page 210 the author is still hinting at how Lucretius‘s poem made the world modern. He goes on to discuss how Montaigne and Shakespeare and other notables were influenced by Lucretius; that’s interesting though it comes in the last few pages. Turns out the dogmatists in the church were thoroughly against atomism. Naturally, they saw it as a threat to Catholicism. OK. So why do I feel that smoke has been blown thoroughly up my ass?

[Carmen · Rating 3 out of 5]

But for the pagans... pain was understood not as a positive value, a stepping stone to salvation, as it was by pious Christians intent on whipping themselves, but as an evil, something visited upon rulebreakers, criminals, captives, unfortunate wretches, and - the only category with dignity - soldiers.
...

I went into this book convinced I was going to hate it. I mean, have you read the blurb!?!?! The back of my book says:

From the gardens of ancient Rome to the chambers of monastic scriptoria, renowned scholar Stephen Greenblatt brings the past to vivid life in this exploration of one of the most influential works of literature of all time. In the winter of 1417, an unemployed papal secretary turned book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini discovered a copy of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things in a remote monastery. The story of how this astonishing poem would cause the world to swerve in a new direction is at once a supreme work of scholarship, a literary page-turner, and a thrilling testament to the power of the written word.

What a mealy-mouthed bunch of bullshit. Can you make heads or tails out of what this book is about from reading this!?!? No, you can't. National Book Award Winner, Pulitzer Prize Winner, my foot!

*takes deep breath*

However, the book actually isn't as terrible as you'd gather from first glance.

What happened is this:

Greenblatt buys a book for 10 cents out of a bin. Instead of writing a rapturous GR review of it like any normal person would (LOL) he decides that a.) the book is responsible for changing the world and making the world modern and b.) he's going to write an entire 263-page book on the subject.

This book celebrates and promotes atheism and atheist ideas and portrays the Catholic Church as greedy, corrupt, and hypocritical. That part I rather enjoyed.

I think the best chapters are "The Teeth of Time" which discusses pagans vs. Christians and pagan ideals vs. Christian ideals; and "The Way Things Are" which is an excellent breakdown of Lucretius's atheist manifesto.

Unfortunately, these fascinating chapters filled with thoughts and ideas are interspersed with mind-numbingly boring chapters, which detail the intricacies of the lives of Poggio and Pope John XXIII. I didn't care. I didn't care one bit.

A tiny bit of interest came when Greenblatt discussed bookworms and how fragile books were, also how hard a person had to work to create a book back in the 13th century. Wow. I want to once again thank Bi Sheng and also Johannes Gutenberg for their marvelous inventions.

Overall, what am I going to get from this book?

A promotion and dissertation of atheist ideals and morals makes up the best chapter, "The Way Things Are." You are also going to learn some fascinating things about book creation and how the Catholic Church was a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

However, as a fair warning, a lot of this book might leave you bored and frustrated. Since my expectations were at zero, I was pleasantly surprised - I can't promise you the same experience.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book about the history of Roman poet Lucretius’ text On The Nature of Things and its rediscovery by Poggio the Florentine in the 1400s. I certainly learned a lot and enjoyed the storytelling for the most part. My one issue is that despite teasing out the influence that Lucretius had on Botticelli’s most famous surviving painting Primavera (“Spring”) (he is likely to have destroyed the twin painting Estate (“Summer”) during the dark days of Savonarola’s reign of terror in Florence), Greenblatt never talks about this specifically. I did appreciate the insights into Montaigne (who I have attempted to read), Bruno and Newton. Another figure, the Greek poet Marullo was mentioned to have had a portrait made by Botticelli. Interestingly enough I found an article published just two days ago that this portrait can be yours for the low, low price of $30M (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/ar...)!!
A great book for those who wish to understand the origins of religious fanaticism in Christianity and several alternative narratives.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Usually five stars is my rating for a classic I read that was everything I hoped it would be. Nonfiction only gets five stars if it's very special. Once or twice a year. This book is great.

It's a microhistory; that's a book that takes a little niche in history, and generally uses that niche to jump around and explore a bunch of different eras through a specific lens. Salt is a great example, although not a great book. This book uses Lucretius' 50 BCE The Nature of Things as its lens, and it jumps from Roman times to the Renaissance.

Microhistories can be dangerous; at their worst, they're pointless collections of trivia. But at their best, they tie history together in a nice way. I think they're better if you're got a fair handle on history already, so that the threads these books pick up on are ones you're familiar with. It helps you decide whether you think the author's trying too hard, and it's also just really fun to see the book reference something you already know something about. In Swerve, for example, Greenblatt briefly points out how Giordano Bruno was influenced by Lucretius. I read a book about that dude once, so it's neat to just get the reference, plus I'm confident that the connection is valid. (Both had somehow come to the conclusion that if there's our world, there are probably others, and some of them probably also contain life. Milton figured it out too.)

Greenblatt manages to really bring out the excitement in what's a tremendously important and smart work, but also a difficult one to penetrate. Nature of Things is one of the weirdest epic poems I've ever read. It's a proto-atheist work, so it's important to me, and Greenblatt gave me a way into it; without his context, explanation and enthusiasm, it would have been much harder for me to understand what Lucretius was banging on about.

If one judges a book, particularly a nonfiction one, by the number of marks one's made in it, this is a five-star book. And I do, so it is. Swerve brings what it offers.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book doesn't sound very promising--263 pages on an old Roman poem that supposedly helped the world become modern? Ho followed by hum. And yet. And yet! Stephen Greenblatt pulls it off, mixing the intrigue of personalities, the melodrama of religious fanatics, and the tides of history, seaweeds and all.

The chief player in this drama is the Florentine Poggio Bracciolini, a humanist who used his intelligence, translator skills, and wiliness to climb all the way to the top of Rome's heap, securing the job of numero uno secretary for the pope. Never mind that it was Pope John XXII, a man who would be disgraced, imprisoned, and defrocked (and whose name would daringly be adopted in the 1950s by a new and much more popular John XXIII).

Anyway, Poggio's true passion as a layman/humanist mixed up with all these RCC crazies is ancient texts. He hunts them in monasteries. And his big find? A book called On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, an advocate of Epicureanism. Little did I know how much Epicureanism vexed the Catholic Church. Little did I know also how the RCC tried to smear the philosophy, depicting it as wanton excess in all vices concerned with self-satisfaction.

Not quite. Lucretius argues for a more measured enjoyment of life. And why not? It is his belief that there is no afterlife for the soul, that we are all atoms just as every other beast (and mineral) in the world. Not exactly the showcase the Bible gives us with man at the center of God's universe, eh?

Poggio manages to love the book while avoiding suspicion himself, but this book and his story touches on many others not as lucky, including Jan Hus, the Bohemian shish kebab who died for his beliefs after being betrayed (surprise!) by an RCC that promised him safe passage. Whoops.

And so it goes, mixing in some famous sorts from Florence's heyday. There are also cameos by fans Galileo and Montaigne and Thomas Jefferson. All read and loved On the Nature of Things, a book I had never heard of.

Until now. Loud and clear.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think Stephen Greenblatt is a tremendously intelligent man, and a gifted writer. I also think 'The Swerve: How the Renaissance began' is frightfully oversold by its title and blurb.

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

...

The copying and translation of this ancient book, the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age, fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Girodano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had revolutionary influence on writers from Montaigne to Thomas Jefferson.

I'm not arguing against the importance of the manuscript, Lucretius's poem On the Nature of Things, a discourse on Epicurean philosophy that includes some startling statements and insights. Everything is made of invisible, eternal particles, that are in motion in an infinite void. This particles don't travel in straight and predictable lines - instead, they 'swerve' (are miniscule but unpredictable deflection that sets up a random and significant chain of collisions, from which arise everything). The swerve is the source of free will. Humans are not unique, the centre of the universe, or endowed with an eternal soul. Death is nothing, and should be neither sought out nor feared. Religions are superstitious delusion. The highest goal of a life is to seek the enhancement of pleasure and reduction of pain: the greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain - it delusion. And finally: 'understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder'.

My beef with this book is that I never achieved deep wonder. The points above are ticked of in less than 15 pages. In 266 pages (followed by 85 pages of end notes, bibliography and index, and prefaced by a less than endearing introduction where Greenblatt describes himself as being blown away as a teenager by Lucretius's (notoriously difficult) poem), Greenblatt gives us:

- a primer on the creation and survival of papyrus scrolls and illuminated manuscripts
- a speculation on the potential circumstances of Lucretious's writing (extremely little is known about the author)
- biography of apostolic secretary, bookhunter and humanist Poggio Braccolini
- a study of the rise of humanist thinking, and how it shaped the period we call the Renaissance
- a description of the political maneuvering inside the Catholic church in Poggio's lifetime (including the schism between three claimants to the papacy)
- a rundown of how 'pagan' texts were received, treated and intellectually managed by the Catholic church
- a quick recap of the contents and style of Lucretius's poem
- a gloss of how Lucretius's poem - specifically, its fine Latin, its Epicurean theory, and the ideas around atoms - influenced later thinkers, writers and artists.

It's just too much. Every time you get intrigued by something, you're carried off in another direction. I got particularly peevish over the opening chapters (in particular the spectacularly speculative recreation of a possible symposia in Pompeii) and took until the middle of the book to regain my equilibrium. Even with Greenblatt's fluid writing, I felt shortchanged. I would read a 260 page book on almost any of the points above, and I wouldn't have minded a 500 page book that gave more space to Greenblatt's interweaving of history and interpretation. But as it was, I know enough to know that there's more to know about almost every point that Greenblatt made, and that niggled away at me throughout.

[Kalliope · Rating 2 out of 5]

When we heard from his daughter that Ted had passed away, Tony invited Ted’s Friends here in GR to pick one book out of Ted’s TBR list and read it for him sometime during this year.

I chose The Swerve – it was already in my TBR too, it was a Pulitzer price and it dealt with one, well, two of my favorite periods in history: The Renaissance and the Classical times.

How I wish Ted were still with us because I would want to discuss it with him and contrast impressions. My guess is that he would have enjoyed it. I know he enjoyed reading about the Italian Renaissance and that doing so awoke in him happy memories from his visit to Tuscany and other places.

On my side, unfortunately, I have found this read a great disappointment, to the extent that it has made me angry at certain points.

Greenblatt allegedly narrates us how Poggio Braggiolini ‘discovered’ in 1417, possibly in the Benedictine monastery in Fulda, a manuscript (written in Carolingian script) of the book, De rerum Natura, written by the Roman poet Lucretius (99-55 BC).

I am certainly one for learning about the context in which any work was created; I am no formalist. And this Greenblatt offers. But to my mind, he has gone too far and about 40 % of the book could be cast out, and I am an addict to the Renaissance. I also felt somewhat affronted when I had to read a few platitudes, such as that during Roman times literacy rates were lower than ours may be he thinks his readership is illiterate , or that the word ‘scrolling’ that we use for texts in computers has a relation to the word ‘scroll’ – one of the book formats in older ages. He also loves to bring in too many irrelevant comments and references, such as Shakespeare and Ben Johnson, or Theodosius and Hypatia, or St Clare of Assissi and many other names dropped in his irrelevant prattling. It is not surprising therefore that his bibliography is about 30 % of the book; and yet this is no scholarly work that would grant that extended list of books. There is no advancement in knowledge. What we have is an accumulation of material that Greenblatt must have collected along a long time and stuffed it all in this account. At one point it made me wonder if he had also included Winnie-the-Pooh andAlice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass Alice in Wonderland (a philosophical work after all, so maybe there is a link to Lucretius’s thinking).

The wiki on De rerum natura article is more illuminating than this book. And much clearer. You can check this for yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_reru...

I miss not being able to discuss this with Ted, for swerving this account certainly is.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about the philosophical epic poem De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things") by Lucretius, written circa first century BC. It tells of its loss in Medieval times and later rediscovery during the Renaissance.

The title, The Swerve, is used (in translation) by Lucretius to describe the unpredictable movements by which particles collide and take on new forms. The rediscovery of Lucretius, it is suggested, was a kind of "swerve" which helped to create the new cultural forms of the Renaissance. The subtitle of "how the World Became Modern" is a bit of an overstatement, but this book does illuminate an interesting moment of cultural significance and provide a summary review of the history of books. It's interesting to note that the British publication of this book had a different subtitle, "How the Renaissance Began" which is just as much an overstatement and raises the question, "Why do the Brits get a different title?"

I have my own interpretation of a second meaning for the title of this book. The title The Swerve brings to my mind the shift in cultural prestige that took place with the coming of the Enlightenment era when the most respected intellectuals became those who questioned perceived wisdom instead of those who meditated on revealed wisdom. The leading thinkers of the first century BC (when Lucretius lived) valued asking questions in the spirit of Greek philosophy. After the rise of Christianity and fall of the western part of the Roman Empire the leading thinkers changed to those who elaborated on the meanings of revealed truth contained in scripture. The coming of the Renaissance and Enlightenment constituted a "swerve" back to the intellectual direction of Lucretius' time.

The story told by this book begins with Poggio Bracciolini visiting at a monastery in central Germany – almost certainly the Benedictine abbey of Fulda - searching for old manuscripts. What he found was a ninth-century manuscript copy containing the entire 7,400-line text of De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things") by Lucretius. This extraordinary philosophical epic poem, composed in Rome around the middle of the first century BC, was in 1417 known only by references by other authors. Distant hints of its initial impact could be heard in a letter of Cicero's of 54 BC, which spoke of its "brilliant genius"; in Ovid's commendation of "the sublime Lucretius"; and in Virgil's lines from the Georgics, "Blessed is he who has succeeded in finding out the causes of things, and has trampled underfoot all fears."

At the time of its discovery and for many years later it was the only known copy of the epic poem. Over the years a few other copies (or fragments) have been discovered, so it wasn't the sole surviving copy as it turned out. The copy found in Germany by Poggio and the copy made for him by a German scribe no longer survived today. But the beautiful transcript made back in Italy by his friend Niccolò de' Niccoli survives today. It is probably no accident that so few copies of "On the Nature of Things" survived the Medieval era. The epic poem by Lucretius espoused ways of thinking that early Medieval church leaders found threatening to their cause.

The history covered by this book includes; (1) The contrast between Roman intellectual thinking and the relatively coarse Latin contained in Christian codexes, (2) The history and fate of ancient Greek and Roman public libraries including the famous library at Alexandria, Egypt, (3) The preoccupation of some of the famous early Christian leaders with suffering which contrasted with Epicurean philosophy, (4) The career of Poggio Bracciolini within the environment of endemic corruption of the Roman Catholic Church (it was the era of three Popes), (5) A summary description of the contents of De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things") by Lucretius, and (6) the history of how later writers and thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment responded to the long poem by Lucretius.

The quotations from "On the Nature of Things" contained in this book are surprising close to an accurate description of theories of atoms and natural selection. Of course Lucretius is speaking as a philosopher and not from observations of scientific discovery. Nevertheless, they sound surprisingly modern.

One little bit of trivia that I learned from this book was contained in the discussion of Thomas More's book, Utopia. More's description of Utopia included capital punishment for those who didn't believe in God and the afterlife. In other words, Moore couldn't imagine people living in peace without the fear of punishment after death for bad behavior. The fear of execution in this life was replaced by fear of hell in the afterlife. The word "utopia" will never be the same for me.

The following short review of this book is from the PageADay Book Lover's Calendar for December 3, 2014.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National book Award for nonfiction, this is a distilled history of Western thought told through a few sharp eyes at critial junctures along the way. The most important to Greenblatt's telling is Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th century apostolic secretary who discovers a rare, 1,000-year-old text by Roman philosopher Lucretius. the two men, and the written histories that connect them, become the basis for this materful volume, which is liberally sprinkled with historical anecdotes that are always illuminating and often humorously entertaining.
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton, 2011)

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, the title is really dumb. And both sides of the colon. The Swerve? Even after reading the book and having it explained to me, I still find it off-putting. And I have a problem with titles which add, after the colon, some phrase of puffery. Usually it's how something or someone (_________) Changed the World or Saved Civilization, even if (_________)'s accomplishment was much more modest. This book would tell us How the World Became Modern. But the World is a very big place. And some of it -- and a lot of people in it -- are not very modern at all. I make this complaint even while admitting that I come from a long line of exaggerators.

With that little pet peeve of mine out of the way, let me say that this book is a marvel. It sang to my Epicurean spirit. I applaud it even as I refuse to sign on to the point of the thesis: that a long-hidden Greek poem, authored BC, accounts more or less for the scientific and philosophical world we now live in. That conclusion is convenient in hindsight but failed to convince me.

Rather, it was the story that I loved. Not the story of the discovery of Lucretius' poem, but the stories of the people who dared to think of how the world works, and the people who tried to stop them from thinking. Heroes and Villains.

The Villains are Baldassare Cossa, the original Pope John XXIII, and Thomas More, who is revered by Catholics to this day, yet tried unsuccessfully to get the Inquisition up and running in England and believed in a Utopia where heretics were burned at the stake.

The Heroes, for me, were Giordano Bruno, who denied the right of his inquisitors to dictate what was heresy (they didn't take that well), and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, whose heavily annotated personal copy of Lucretius' poem informed Shakespeare, and through him, Spenser, Donne and Bacon.

It is one thing, in reading a book, to be entertained (I was); even better is it to immediately have a new must read list as a result. And so I have already ordered Shakespeare's Montaigne The Florio Translation of the Essays A Selection. Another NYRB-Classic, with an introduction by Stephen Greenblatt.

People are moved by what Lucretius wrote, what he imagined. I was. Stephen Greenblatt was. Montaigne surely was, as this included quote from his essays demonstrates:

Go out of this world 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.

[Brad Lyerla · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE) founded a school of thought that thrived for hundreds of years during the Hellenistic and Roman periods following Plato. Only a few fragments of his writings survive today. The most complete statement of Epicureanism that has survived is a poem, ON THE NATURE OF THINGS, written by the Roman poet Lucretius. THE SWERVE is Stephen Greenblatt's account of how ON THE NATURE OF THINGS was rescued from obscurity by Poggio Bracciolini, a Vatican bureaucrat with humanistic interests.

Bracciolini was a manuscript hunter. He and other humanists of his generation searched for ancient manuscripts in monastery libraries throughout Christian Europe. He discovered ON THE NATURE OF THINGS, his greatest find, in a monastery in Germany in 1417.

ON THE NATURE OF THINGS had a profound influence on Renaissance thinkers. It's influence came from the beauty of Lucretius' poetry and the subversive nature of Epicurus' philosophy. Epicurus was a materialist. He believed that everything in nature is made of fundamental particles, called 'atoms'. Atoms exist in an infinite void. They are infinite in number, but limited in shapes and sizes. They are eternal. They neither were created. Nor will they have an end. Epicurus believed that atoms are in constant motion, colliding with one another to combine and re-combine to form everything in our universe, including human beings, who are not uniquely made. Sometimes atoms change direction slightly. This sets off a ceaseless chain of collisions resulting in new combinations of atoms. Lucretius called this 'the swerve' and it is the cause of all new things. It is also the source of free will.

Here, I will insert my only complaint about this excellent book. 'Swerve' seems like the sort of word about which translators might disagree. I think it would have been interesting for Greenblatt to discuss that a bit. Oh well. I loved the book otherwise.

In keeping with his materialism, Epicurus believed that there is no afterlife. When we die, our atoms are released to recombine with other atoms to form new things. He opposed all religions as delusions that interfere with our happiness. For humans to achieve happiness, Epicurus thought we must rid ourselves of these delusions. Only then can we eliminate disappointment and pursue pleasure, which is our highest goal.

Epicurus' materialism is the deepest heresy to Christians. For this, he has been attacked by Christian advocates. A common charge against him is that he taught unbounded hedonism. This charge is easily refuted. Epicurus believed that one should live modestly and pursue knowledge of nature and one's own mind. A modest, contemplative life can allow one to attain tranquility, freedom from fear and absence of bodily pain. For Epicurus, the combination of tranquility and freedom from fear and pain leads to happiness. (Absence of pain and disappointment may be what Epicurus truly meant by the pursuit of pleasure, later argued at least one important 20th century philosopher.)

When Bracciolini introduced ON THE NATURE OF THINGS into 15th Century European society, it would have been natural for Christian authorities to suppress it. Some limited efforts at suppression were made. But they were ineffective. This was due to the beauty of Lucretius' poetry. The poem was held in such high regard for its masterly imagery and language that even pious Christian scholars continued to share the poem with other scholars. Eventually, Epicurus' atomism made an impact too. It's influence can be seen in the works of Renaissance artists and philosophers, including Raphael, Machiavelli, Bacon and Gassendi, among many others.

Greenblatt is impressive. His WILL IN THE WORLD is a favorite. In THE SWERVE, he has written a sophisticated and enjoyable book treating Epicurus' philosophy, Lucretius' artistry and Bracciolini's triumphant discovery. THE SWERVE won the Pulitzer Prize and it is easy to see why. I encourage everyone to read it.

[Karen· · Rating 3 out of 5]

I jogged along easily, enjoying the scenery, taking in the weather without letting it affect me, swinging the arms, breathing, pacing myself nicely thank you. But as in a marathon (I'm told, never had such ambitions myself) there was a man with a hammer waiting at around kilometre 30. Suddenly the legs turned to lead and the breathing became laboured and all I wanted to do was to finish. And soon. Please.

I haven't managed to work out whether the brick wall I hit at the end of chapter eight was lying in wait for me because of my own lack of stamina or whether it had something to do with outside circumstances, or possibly the expectations set up by the sub-title. How Poggio Found The Book was as exciting as a thriller, and the summary of Lucretius' On The Nature of Things was fascinating, but How The World Became Modern was a weaker brew, I thought, with little aroma. However it has to be said that by that point in my reading I was also back home from hols, back to mundane daily life; work and various other commitments, distractions, and stuff to deal with, you know, not always pleasant. So my schizophrenic response might have more to do with me than with the book. But maybe we compounded and confounded each other. At least that's my excuse. I hope Mr. Greenblatt will forgive me.

[Henry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Stephen Greenblatt is a literary scholar specializing in Shakespeare. He is also a cultured despiser of Christianity; indeed, it appears, of all religion. For him, the world become modern is the world discarding God; the means by which it became modern was the discovery and dissemination of Lucretius' De rerum natura in the Renaissance. From it we learned, he says, that the world is made up of atoms colliding at random, forming and reforming objects, including whatever passes for the human soul, without any meaning or higher purpose. The highest purpose in life is maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, and after death there is nothing but dissolution. This last belief is said to be consoling.

It is generally not to the point to discuss an author's personal psychology in appraising his book, but Prof. Greenblatt invites us to do so in his introduction. His own discovery of Lucretius as a teenager, he tells us, freed him from the hold that his own mother's obsessive fear of imminent death (she lived to the age of 95) had had on his psyche. Lucretius' Epicureanism gave him the equanimity of heart to discount his mother's fears and face the world as it really was. Hence he has become an evangelist for Lucretius, a new atheist proclaiming an old atheism.

Prof. Greenblatt's hero is Poggio Bracciolini, the Renaissance humanist who, in the early 15th century, rediscovered De rerum natura in a monastic library (Prof. Greenblatt believes it was Fulda) and put it in circulation once again. Poggio's life story occupies at least the first half of the book, providing the occasion, since he was a papal secretary at the time of the Western Schism and the Council of Constance, for Prof. Greenblatt to lick his chops over the corruption of the Church in that era, and to bewail the deaths of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague. He is too honest to maintain that Poggio actually claimed to be an Epicurean, although if anyone ever echoed the ideas of Lucretius but discounted them in favor of Christianity, he generally claims they did so only to avoid persecution by the evil and all-powerful Church.

Once the Lucretian, Epicurean cat was out of the bag, Prof. Greenblatt argues, modernity was on its way. The ideas of Lucretius, he argues, are responsible for modern science, even though some who benefit from it deny them. By this I take him to mean that anyone who enjoys modern medicine, transportation, computer technology, or any other manifestation of scientific activity, or who accepts modern physics and chemistry, believes that the earth orbits the sun, or recognizes that the ancestors of present-day plants and animals looked considerably different from their descendants, and still believes in God, the immortality of the soul, and a future life, is a hypocrite and an ingrate. That is, in my humble opinion, a pretty big leap.

The Renaissance perfected modernity through the dissemination of Lucretian ideas by Botticelli (whose "Primavera" echoes some of De rerum natura--even though he died in the Dominican habit as a follower of Savonarola), Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Montaigne, and Ben Jonson. Of these, Bruno is Prof. Greenblatt's second hero, one more to the point because he actually was an Epicurean. Bruno's execution demonstrates conclusively for Prof. Greenblatt that the Catholic Church is, was, and always will be the greatest obstacle to progress. From the atomism of Lucretius, shared, he says, by these figures, we have a direct line through Isaac Newton to the theories of modern physics.

Like many of the new atheists, Prof. Greenblatt chooses to remain blithely ignorant of the faith he attacks. Like them, he appears to misunderstand what Christians (and Jews and Muslims) actually believe about God, failing to distinguish between necessary and contingent being, or between immanence and transcendence. He seems to believe that the Protestant Reformers were influenced by atomism in their denial of transubstantiation (which, by the way, was first defined as dogma at IV Lateran in 1215, not at the Council of Trent as Prof. Greenblatt thinks), which is demonstrably untrue. Neither Luther nor Calvin had any more use for Epicureanism than the Catholic Church--indeed probably much less. Bruno would have been anathema, and probably would have suffered the same fate, in Calvin's Geneva or Luther's Wittenberg. Indeed, Copernicanism, which Prof. Greenblatt associates with Lucretius, was better accepted in the Catholic Church than in Protestant states, at least initially. The case of Galileo (whom Prof. Greenblatt likewise claims for one of his own) was a great deal more complex than the confrontation between reason and superstition that he and his confreres would make of it. He is not a historian of science (nor am I, but I know enough about it to recognize the fatal oversimplification), but this does not prevent him from arguing that Galileo was persecuted for his atomism even while acknowledging (in a footnote) that he is differing from most historians of science.

No doubt there are specialists more informed than I who could better expose Prof. Greenblatt's distortions, so I will only mention one more: a fudge common to many atheists as big as Mackinac Island. He gets it from Lucretius and accepts it without comment or any attempt to explain the logic. This is his account of the origin of free will. If everything happens by physical causes, then everything must proceed either by necessity or chance. An honest atheist, like Denis Diderot in the 18th century, recognized that materialism excludes free will. Lucretius introduces a clinamen, or the "swerve" that gives the book its title, as the source of free will for both gods (for Lucretius is a practical, not a theoretical, atheist) and men. I haven't read Lucretius, so I can't judge how he explains this, but Prof. Greenblatt certainly does not explain it. He merely asserts that Lucretius' "swerve" preserves free will.

Professor Greenblatt has written interesting things about Shakespeare, especially his Will in the World. He is not a philosopher or a historian of religion or of science. This book will is less a work of history than yet another entry in the catalog of the New Atheism, a movement of far greater intellectual pretension than quality.

[Σωτήρης Αδαμαρέτσος · Rating 5 out of 5]

Έργο φτιαγμένο να διχάσει· ή θα το λατρέψεις και θα αναζητήσεις περισσότερα ή θα το προσπεράσεις ως προκατειλημενο και μονοδιάστατο. Προσωπικά το θεωρώ ένα μοναδικό ανάγνωσμα.
Το έργο μιλά για ένα βιβλίο, ουσιαστικά για ΤΟ βιβλίο. Όσοι λατρέψατε το Όνομα του Ρόδου στην αρχή θα νιώσετε μια παρόμοια αναζήτηση. Μόνο που δεν μιλά για το - χαμένο - τρίτο βιβλίο της ποιητικής του Αριστοτέλη "περί Κωμωδίας" αλλά για μια ανακάλυψη μετά από 1000 χρόνια, ένα μακροσκελές ποίημα του Ρωμαίου επικούρειου φιλοσόφου και ποιητή Λουκρητιου, "περί φύσεως". Έργο γραμμένο το 70πχ με φυσική κατεύθυνση, με βάσει την επικούρεια φιλοσοφία!

Ο συγγραφέας Στηβεν Γκρηνμπλατ αναπτύσσει διεξοδικά μια προκλητική στην θεματική της (θεωρία/υπόθεση/δοξασία) αποκάλυψη· ότι όλη η νεότερη φυσική και φιλοσοφία, η αναζήτηση των ιδεών της Αναγέννησης και των Ουμανιστων ξεκίνησε χάρη στην επανακαλυψη - από τα βάθη μιας βιβλιοθήκης ενός μοναστηριού από τον αποστολικο γραμματέα του Βατικανού, Ποτζο Μπρατζολινι - του ποιήματος "Περί φύσεως" του Λουκρητιου!!!
Και πώς η αποκάλυψη αυτού του μοναδικού έργου άλλαξε τη ροή της επιστήμης και της φιλοσοφίας, όρισε τον κανόνα στην Αναγέννηση και την σκέψη στους Ουμανιστες και, εντέλει, υπήρξε αυτή η ανακάλυψη και το περιεχόμενο του ποιήματος μια... Παρεγκλιση στην συνήθη πορεία των πραγμάτων, ξανασυστηνοντας στον κόσμο την επικούρεια ηθική και κυρίως την φυσική φιλοσοφία και έναν τρόπο σκέψης και συλλογιστικής που με κόπο και συστηματική προσπάθεια η Χριστιανική εκκλησία φιλότιμα κατάφερε να εξαφανίσει για 1000+ χρόνια!

Είναι εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρουσα όλη η περιγραφή της ιστορίας της γραφής και της γραμματείας των ρωμαϊκών χρόνων, περί περγαμηνων και παπυρων, γραμματέων, γραφέων και βιβλιοθηκών και της σταδιακής απώλειας τόσων κυλινδρων που γράφτηκαν στους αρχαίους και ρωμαϊκους χρόνους και φυλάσσονταν στις μεγάλες βιβλιοθήκες της Αρχαιότητας. Αναφορές στους τρόπους γραφής, αντιγραφής, συλλογής, αποθήκευσης και αρχειοθέτησης σε δημόσιες βιβλιοθήκες και στα ιδιωτικά αναγνώστρια της ρωμαϊκής εποχής, στην Αλεξάνδρεια και στην Πομπηία. Και πως η τελική επικράτηση του Χριστιανισμου εξαφάνισε τα περισσότερα απ αυτά τα έργα της αρχαίας και ρωμαϊκής φιλοσοφίας, είτε δια της φυσικής καταστροφής είτε δια της φυσικής αποσιώπησης.
Και ένας από τους τρόπους αποσιώπησης ήταν ο εγκλεισμός τους στις σκοτεινές βιβλιοθήκες των μοναστηριών...αντεγραμμενα από γράφεις που δεν ήξεραν καν τί αντιγράφουν όπου θάφτηκαν προσωρινά για να ανκαλυφθούν ξανά από τους Ουμανιστες της Αναγέννησης.

Το σκεπτικό του συγγραφέα λοιπόν βασίζεται στην πραγματικότητα της ανακάλυψης της Αρχαιότητας κατά τον 14ο και 15ο αιώνα και την δημιουργία του πολιτιστικού, πνευματικού και καλλιτεχνικου ρεύματος που ονομάστηκε Αναγέννηση, με φορείς του Ουμανιστες και τον αντίκτυπο στην νεωτερικοτητα!
Το κεφάλαιο που πραγματευεται την σύγκρουση της πρωτοΧριστιανικής ηθικής και σκέψης με την Επικούρεια φιλοσοφία κατά τον 4ο αιώνα μΧ είναι το πιο σημαντικό κομμάτι καθώς καταγραφεί την διαφορά σκέψης και αντίληψης του κόσμου, που υποχρεώσαν το Δόγμα να προσδιορίσει στην επικούρεια φιλοσοφία της μη ύπαρξης Θεού, της μη ύπαρξης θείας πρόνοιας, της απουσίας μετά θάνατον ζωής και φυσικά της θεωρίας των ατόμων της ύλης, να προσδιορίσει λοιπόν την επικούρεια φιλοσοφία ως την πιο επικίνδυνη από τις αρχαίες φιλοσοφίες και να προσπαθήσει να την...αποκρυψει, λόγω της αντιδιαστολής της επικούρειας φιλοσοφίας της ζωής και της ηδονής απέναντι στο χριστιανικό δόγμα της θυσίας και του πόνου ως προϋποθέσεις ανταμοιβής...

Γι αυτό το λόγο όταν ο Μπρατζολινι - μέλος μιας ομάδας Ουμανιστων λατινιστων αναγνωστών των αρχαίων κειμένων που εμφανίστηκαν μετά τον Πετραρχη στην Ιταλία κ Φλωρεντία - βιβλιοθηρας και αναζητητης σπάνιων αρχαίων έργων των Λατίνων αυτών συγγραφέων βρίσκει το 1417 σε ένα μοναστήρι στη Γερμανία ένα αντίγραφο του "Περί φύσεως" του Λουκρητιου, η επανεμφάνιση αυτων των φιλοσοφικών ιδεών συνταραξαν τους πρώιμους της Αναγέννησης. Από εκείνη την στιγμή και με τα πρώτα αντίγραφα του έργου ξεκινά μια Παρεγκλιση Ιδεών, μια διαφορετική ερμηνευτική της πορείας του κόσμου, που οδήγησαν στην ανατροπή των θρησκευτικών ιδεών περί φυσικής, επιστήμης και ηθικής και Λόγου!

Το έργο στην συνέχεια παρουσιάζει την επιρροή που άσκησε η ανακάλυψη αυτού του έργου κ των ιδεών του επικούρειου Λουκρητιου στην νεότερη φιλοσοφία επηρεάζοντας τα γραπτά και την σκέψη των Τόμας Μορ, Τζορντανο Μπρούνο, Σαίξπηρ, Μονταινιο, Νεύτωνα, Τόμας Τζέφερσον κ.α.

-- η βιβλιογραφία στο τέλος είναι μοναδική --

[boxer_dogs_dance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty interesting account of Lucretius, his epicurean ideas and his theory of atoms, followed by the story of how his book was lost, rediscovered in a monastery and slowly gained readership and influence.

if I understand the author correctly, one copy was found and all modern copies came from that one source.

[Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius was one of my favorite books I read when I was an undergraduate philosophy student. Perhaps it helped that my professor was a thin man, with a sprawling beard, and intense green eyes, who would shriek the lines of the poem like a Puritan preacher. Fortunately, Stephen Greenblatt cannot take away my experience of reading Lucretius. Much of his book is speculative (if he was here then he probably would have gone to this monastery, and while there, he probably would have done this...), and his thesis is overblown. The book is mostly a sprawling biography of Poggio Bracciolini, an early 15th century Italian humanist, who among his peers recovered classical texts rotting away in German monasteries; as well as descriptions of life and intrigue in the Vatican court and Renaissance Italy. Only a small portion is devoted to Lucretius himself (some of it unavoidably speculative because we have little concrete evidence of his life), and Greenblatt gives almost a bullet point summary of the poem (okay, a slight exaggeration). Finally, as to his legacy (subtitle is "How the World Became Modern"), Greenblatt does spend a lot of time about turmoil in the Christian Church and its prosecution of heretics, but too little, I think, in establishing the influence of Lucretius (and thus, Epicurus) on future thinkers (Perhaps the worst example: Shakespeare was a friend of a friend of the philosopher Bruno, and he also probably chatted with Ben Johnson, who owned a copy of On the Nature of Things.). This was a disappointing book.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. A manuscript copy of a poem by the ancient Roman author Lucretius is discovered in a 15th-century German monastery by the personal secretary of a disgraced and deposed pope. The man’s name is Poggio Basciolini and he is unusual for his time: driven by curiosity, when curiosity is not considered a virtue but a vice, fascinated with the ideas of ancient and pagan Greece and Rome, a dangerous hobby in Poggio’s time, heretical even. Lucretius’s poem, On the Nature of Things, is strikingly modern (that the universe is made up of atoms that are shared by the stars, oceans, animals, and us - a sort of early "unifying theory"; that there is no afterlife, but rather than being something to fear, we should be inspired by this to live life fully), considered radical even in its own time. Greenblatt weaves together the tale of the "book hunter" Poggio and his quest with the fall of Rome and the precarious survival of Greek and Roman texts in monasteries (where monk-scribes copied out the ancient manuscripts not necessarily as acts of intellectual engagement, as I had always assumed, but more often as acts of obedience, and a good thing too, since someone intellectually engaged, as Greenblatt points out, might have been more likely to change something in the process), their recovery by men like Poggio, and the blossoming of the Renaissance.

[Vanessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm very ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, it was an intriguing glimpse into the 15th-century searches for classical manuscripts via the discovery of Lucretius' poem De rerum natura by a relatively obscure papal secretary. It expanded my knowledge of antipopes, humanism, and - obviously - Epicureanism.

But on the other hand, I found the book to be deeply flawed in two significant ways. First, Greenblatt seems to hold bizarre prejudices against the Christian church. For example (and this is just one of many), his depiction of the Church during the Middle Ages is intensely ugly and critical. I'm not saying that the Dark Ages were a great time, but he focuses unrelentingly (and graphically) on the practice of corporal mortification to the exclusion of any other Church practices and doctrines. Second, Greenblatt strains to position the poem as the central text of the post-Renaissance. Maybe it actually was the most influential work of all time, but unfortunately, Greenblatt does not fill me with confidence about this conclusion. He just cherry-picks great thinkers throughout the centuries and asserts (with minimal textual proofs) that they were influenced by the poem. Indeed, he manages to get from Machiavelli to Jefferson in less than fifty pages.

Ultimately, I was left with the impression that the book was trying to "convert" me to Epicureanism. Had it just been a straightforward book of popular history, even one that described the very real tensions between classical philosophies and the doctrines of the Catholic Church, I would have loved it. But I didn't appreciate the sinking feeling that the book was pushing me to conclude that smart, sophisticated people are atheists/Epicureans and that only the willfully ignorant or tragically backwards are still Christians.

[Mohammad · Rating 4 out of 5]

جهان چگونه مدرن شد؟ کتاب پاسخی روشن به این سوال نمی‌دهد؛ با این حال مصداق ارائه می‌کند. ناتوانی کتاب در پاسخ به سوال جهان چگونه مدرن شد از ضعف متن کتاب ناشی نمی‌شود، بلکه انتخاب عنوان نامناسب موجب این نارسایی شده. البته اگر عنوان اصلی کتاب (داستان یک پیچ) روی جلد فارسی می‌آمد، احتمالاً از چاپ اول فراتر نمی‌رفت. اشکال دیگر اینکه قید کلمه‌ی مدرن در عنوان، ناخودآگاه مدرنیسم را به ذهن متبادر می‌کند؛ در حالی که وقایع کتاب در قرن پانزدهم می‌گذرد. سرگذشت شکارچی کتاب، پوجّو براچولینی اومانیست و منشی شخصی پاپ جان بیست‌وسوم معروف به پاپ تبهکار که نقشی اساسی در کشف دوباره‌ی کتاب در باب طبیعت چیزها اثر لوکرتیوس داشته بسی جذاب بود. به خصوص زمانی که پس از صدور حکم ارتداد ژروم و قتل فجیعش توسط دستگاه پاپ، پوجّو درگیر تنش بین هویت‌های دوگانه‌اش در برزخ گیر می‌افتد؛ یک طرف دیوانسالاری که به عنوان مهره‌ای در چرخ‌دنده‌‌ی آلوده‌ی دستگاه پاپ فعالیت می‌کند و از طرفی دیگر که اومانیستی در آرزوی وصال هوای پاک جمهوری روم باستان است. مسیری که در نهایت انتخاب می‌کند از پوجّو شفابخشی جادویی می‌سازد که جسم پاره‌پاره شده‌ی عهد باستان را از نو سر هم می‌کند. اما کشف بزرگ پوچّو چه بود؟ پوجّو در یک صومعه‌ی دورافتاده در آلمان، کتاب در باب طبیعت چیزها را بعد از هزار سال خواب و فراموشی پیدا می‌کند و شروع به نسخه‌برداری از این کتاب می‌کند. کشف پوجّو در اروپا منفجر و به سرعت نقل محافل می‌شود. نویسنده در فصل پیچش‌ها شرحی مبسوط بر کتاب لوکرتیوس آورده. ایده‌ی اتمیسمی که لوکرتیوس به عنوان یک اپیکوری حتی سال‌ها قبل از دموکریت مطرح کرده باعث اعجاز من شد. زیبایی رازآمیز تفکرات لوکرتیوس دست هر خواننده‌ای را برای تفسیر شخصی باز می‌گذارد و احتمالاً همین خصیصه به سخت بودن توضیح این برداشت‌ها منتهی می‌شود. هر چند که نویسنده در فصل آخر به تاثیر کتاب لوکرتیوس بر اشخاصی مثل جوردانو برونو و گالیله پرداخته، باز هم این سوال یا انتقاد مطرح می‌شود که آیا در باب طبیعت چیزها واقعاً چنین تاثیر تاریخ‌ساز و جهان‌شمولی بر مدرن شدن جهان داشته؟ اگر بپذیریم که کشف پوجّو فقط یکی از مصادیق این پروسه بوده، جواب سوال مثبت است

[Lisa Reads & Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Swerve is a romantic tale of a book lover, but it is so much more. True--it's a tale of passion and sacrifice, but also of fanaticism and philosophical determination. The war of beliefs that rages today is not new, but is merely a continuation of fear versus reason, and belief versus logic. The violence we see between ourselves stem from the same ignorance and hatred, fear and exercise of domination. Heretics who believed in atoms and the end of the soul were burned at the stake, after torture and mutilation, in the name of religion. Ideas had power then and a whisper of complaint could cost you your life. We war, still, at rallies, marches and over the internet. What is this desire to control the hearts and minds of our fellow human beings, I'll never understand. Reading The Swerve showed me that intolerance is not new, and we have not evolved. Funny that Thomas Jefferson considered himself an Epicurean. America was built along the linage of Democritus, which describes a civilization more appealing than fire and brimstone. Is fear truly the only way to advance our civilization?

Addendum: A belief system not addressed in The Swerve is a Republican/Conservative one that holds corporations at the same or higher regard as people. Workers and consumers are important only to further the profit of the corporation. Unfortunate side effects such as pollution, toxic products, and dangerous working conditions, and fraud are ignored, denied or tolerated for profit-driven growth. Like the church of old, anyone who disagrees with this will be shouted down, stomped upon, or ridiculed. This election is a battle between humanism and corporation-ists. Like the yin/yang symbol, both sides bear blemishes of the other.

So, new visions have entered the world stage, but the method by which they battle has not changed, it has become more psychological, perhaps, but just as manipulative.

Oh, by the way, I highly recommend this book.

[Blyden · Rating 2 out of 5]

That this mediocre book won a Pulitzer Prize substantially diminishes for me the significance of Pulitzer Prizes.

There are two tangentially connected stories here, which Greenblatt tries to weave together. One is a popular, personalized history of the medieval Florentine humanist and bookhunter, Poggio Bracciolini, who is Greenblatt's subject by virtue of being the person rediscovered the book De rerum natura, known in English as On the Nature of Things, by the Epicurean Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius, in a monastery and brought it into circulation among medieval humanists. This story is carried mainly by chapters two, five, six, seven, and nine; makes interesting reading and is generally well-written, though it suffers slightly from being over-written (see below), particularly in the early chapters.

The second "story" is the central conceit of the book that the rediscovery of De rerum natura, played a significant role in changing the world from medieval to modern, and closely tied to it Greenblatt's personal atheistic and anti-Christian theology presented in a very condescending way in which the author assumes that his theology is synonymous with "rationality", though to this observer that seems a rather absurd and ill-founded presumption by Greenblatt. This story is carried primarily in chapters three, four, eight, ten, and eleven. To this reader, there is little binding these two narratives together, despite Greenblatt's attempt to interweave them.

This is where the book fails. The claim at the heart of this story is not made sufficiently. In fact, I find it lacking credibility, not least because the story itself shows us the foundation of modernist thinking already in place prior to the rediscovery of Lucretius' poem! Greenblatt seems aware of how weak his claim is. In the preface he admits “One poem by itself was certainly not responsible for an entire, intellectual, moral, and social transformation…" but, he nevertheless he claims "this particular ancient book, suddenly returning to view, made a difference.” (p.11) and goes on to describe the effect of teh poem as “momentous”, “explosive”, and describe its discovery in terms of "unleashing” a revolutionary force. But looking around at our modern world, where do we see this?

Or looking in this book is the case made? In Chapter Eight Greenblatt provides an itemized summary of points made by Lucretius that he sees as relevant to modernity. Key among these is that Lucretius and the Epicurean's had a theory of atoms, and modern physics has a theory of atoms, but it is debatable how similar the Epicurean's theory of atoms and the modern theory of atoms really are, and the concept of atoms per se, i.e. that there must be some kind of indivisible building blocks of matter, is one logical solution to the potential problem of infinite regress in asking "if things are made of [X], what is X made of?" So the mere use of concept of atoms is not particularly revolutionary or noteworthy, IMO.

Many of the other points in this chapter are fundamentally theological or ontological: "Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve", that is, by randomness in the motion of atoms; this randomness is ultimately the source of "free will"; "The universe was not created for or about humans"; "Humans are not unique"; "The soul dies" with the body; "There is no afterlife"; "All organized religions are superstitious delusions"; "The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain". There is not anything close to consensus in modernity about these claims, nor can they be demonstrated to be true. The claim that all religions are superstitious delusions is highly ironic when one recognizes that the Lucretius' beliefs themselves constitute an organized religion, which incidentally also offers an alternate explanation to that offered by Greenblatt about why the medieval church took exception to them.

In Chapters nine and ten Greenblatt tries to show the influence of Lucretius on Thomas More, Giordano Bruno, and to the founding political ideals of the United States via Thomas Jefferson. Clearly On the Nature of Things enjoyed a well-educated audience with whose views it resonated to greater or lesser degree, but that hardly makes the case for the claims that this work was a foundation of modernist thinking.

I note a number of excerpts from the book that strike me as either presumptious or peculiar:

“Ancient Greeks and Romans did not share our [sic] idealization of isolated geniuses, working alone through the knottiest problems. Such scenes… would eventually become our [sic] dominant emblem of the life of the mind…” (p. 68) This one actually made me laugh out loud at its absurdity and wonder that an author who would write this could win a Pulitzer Prize.

“Why should anyone with any sense credit the idea of Providence, a childish idea contradicted by any [sic] rational adult’s experience and observation? Christians are like a council of frogs in a pond, croaking at the top of their lungs, ‘For our sakes was the world created.’” (p. 98) The latter sentence seems to me based on a deeply flawed stereotype about Christian beliefs, though perhaps that stereotype had greater validity in medieval times. The first sentence is where, IMO, the real problem lies. Providence is, IMO, one of just a few possible explanations for things that I have experienced and observed in my lifetime, and which I assume many other people experience, and while there could certainly be other explanations for those experiences, I fail to see any basis for concluding that a belief in Providence is irrational. Indeed, it seems to me that there have been a great many generally rational people who have believed in Providence. But then again, the model of "Providence" that Greenblatt offers later in his book bears scant resemblance to what that concept means to me. It feels to me like a straw argument of an atheist who wishes to discount it. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on which side of the debate one stands on, what would be needed to dispel the idea is beyond the possibility of empirical evidence. Which again makes me wonder how the Pulitzer Prize would be awarded to such obviously flawed logic.

Another example of logic flaws are the various teleologies that the author articulates e.g. “What had to be done was…” (p.101), “Centuries were required to accomplish this grand design [sic]…”

Greenblatt writes “Though early Christians… found certain features in Epicureanism admirable…" but then writes "Christians particularly found Epicureanism a noxious threat.” (p. 101) These seems almost self-contradictory. How noxious a threat could it have been if some portions of it were admirable?

Similarly Greenblatt writes "Lucretius was not in fact an atheist…" but then "It is possible to argue that… Lucretius was some sort of atheist…” (p.183) and then again “the set of convictions articulated… in Lucretius’ poem was virtually a textbook… definition of atheism” (p. 221). ?!?

“As every pious reader of Luke’s Gospel knew, Jesus wept, but there were no verses that described him laughing or smiling, let alone pursuing pleasure.” [p.105] There may be no versus that specifically mention Jesus laughing or smiling, but there are a number of scenes mention in the gospels that seem, to this observer, to defy the claim here that Jesus rejects pleasure altogether, including the wedding at Cana, Jesus eating with sinners, Martha annointing him, and especially the observation of some of his contemporaries that he did not affect the mourning/fasting countenance of John the Baptist, and his reply “Can you make the guests mourn while they are with the bridegroom? (Luke 5:34)

Throughout the book, and especially in Chapter four, Greenblatt portrays Christians, at least ardent medieval Christians, as superstitious, irrational, and enemies to mankind. In the context of medieval Christianity, some of that is warranted, but I think the effort to extend it to Christianity generally across time is to conflate the thinking of medieval religious institutions with Christian theology generally.

Greenblatt also has an elitist, derisive view toward less educated, common people, e.g. peasants, artisans, farmers, etc, which is evident at various points in his writing.

The book, especially the early chapters, suffers somewhat from over-writing, by which I mean: (1) some paragraphs are redundant of prior paragraphs, belaboring the point or assuming that the audience is deficient in attention span, as in the manner of a contemporary TV shows that, after each commercial break, give you a synopsis of what they have already covered; (2) the author sometimes wants to tell you what you should think about the things he has described rather than merely describing them and leaving the thinking to the reader, though mercifully that aspect of over-writtenness is minor in this book; (3) the author presents certain information, most notably Poggio's THOUGHTS, and certain presumed "truths" about the universe, which he cannot know, but can only speculate on or assume, aided in the former instance by analysis of Poggio's writings; and especially (4) that the author goes on at length and with various digressions to tell at length what could be said better more succinctly. Greenblatt will offer a half a chapter with unneeded digressions on a half dozen topics to tell you what a lesser writer might have narrated more effectively in a page or two.

“The link [to Poggio’s grandfather] is worth noting because…. [the grandfather] signed a notarial register with a strikingly beautiful signature. Penmanship would turn out to play an oddly important role in the grandson’s story.” (p.112) Really, a paragraph on the grandfather is important because the grandfather and his grandson both had beautiful handwriting?!

In summary, reading the biographical history of Poggio Bracciolini is interesting, as are some of the digressive narratives insofar as they contribute to that story, but the writing suffers from over-writing, flawed assumptions, and certain biases that I find repugnant. Most of all I don't find Lucretius' poem particularly relevant to the modern world and IMO the author fails to make a compelling, or even credible case that it was.

[Antigone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Greenblatt's mother was terrified of death.

"...as far back as I can remember, she brooded obsessively on the imminence of her end, invoking it again and again, especially at moments of parting. My life was full of extended, operatic scenes of farewell. When she went with my father from Boston to New York for the weekend, when I went off to summer camp, even - when things were especially hard for her - when I simply left the house for school, she clung tightly to me, speaking of her fragility and of the distinct possibility that I would never see her again."

The dread of her ever-impending exit from this world haunted Stephen's youth - until, one day, sorting through a box of used books at Yale, he came across a prose translation of Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things." This work, addressing as it did the folly of superstitious fears and philosophically expounding on some pragmatic first principles, served to set many of his worries to rest. In fact, so powerful was its impact that it seeded a quest.

The Swerve is a marvelous journey back in time, to fourteenth-century Florence, to an era of dueling popes and religious persecution, monasteries and scribes. It is an account of book hunter Poggio Bracciolini and his dogged search for manuscripts from ancient days; Greek and Roman masterworks slipped out of circulation through the Dark Ages, whose crumbling bits might still be found in the libraries of religious orders that made a practice of copying things out. Poggio is the man who unearthed the text of Lucretius and, quite probably, the sole reason we are able to read this treatise today. For that, we must be grateful.

However...

Our author goes on to assert that this document, alone, is what launched civilization out of the darkness of ignorance and into the light of modernity. I think that's taking Poggio's accomplishment a little too far. Many works were recovered - not only literary pieces but other forms of art (and science) that certainly contributed to the resurrection of critical thought. Still, I can understand why my author clings to this theory so tenaciously. Lucretius, coming as he did into Stephen's life at just the right moment with just the right words, brought with him the sort of healing we all hope to find. And, afterward, to do a bit of justice.

Barring the one contention, this historical tale is really quite grand and recommended to anyone who enjoys books along the line of The Name of the Rose.

[David Rubenstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book, primarily about the poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. Much of the book is describes the life of Poggio Bracciolini, a very unusual man for his time; he was a classical scholar, who searched abbeys for rare books. In the early 15th century, he discovered On the Nature of Things and re-copied and translated the poem. Despite the fact that the poem was heretical to the Catholic Church, Bracciolini helped to distribute the poem, which gradually liberalized the philosophy of Western Civilization. This is the most interesting part of the book, which describes the Church's reactions to the poem, and the Church's desperate attempts to suppress it.

The Swerve also claims that the re-discovery of the poem helped to fuel the Renaissance, and had an influence on artists, scientists, philosophers and writers. I was not quite as persuaded by this part of the book.

[Ali Di · Rating 2 out of 5]

عنوان، فریبنده
ترجمه، متوسط
.متن، بخشهای زائد بسیار زیادی داشته و بجای ۴۰۰ صفحه میتوانست در ۱۵۰ صفحه خلاصه شود
.و در آخر، نویسنده هیچ استدلال محکمی برای ادعاهای خود ارائه نمی‌دهد

:از متن کتاب

کتاب‌ها کمیاب و پُرارزش بودند. آنها به صومعه‌ای که صاحب کتاب‌ها بود عزت و اعتبار می‌بخشیدند. و راهبان اصلاً نمی‌خواستند اجازه دهند آنها از نظرشان دور شوند. صومعه‌ها گهگاه می‌کوشیدند با انباشتن نسخ خطی گرانبهایشان از انواع لن و نفرین, مایملکشان را محفوظ بدارند. دریکی از این لعن و نفرين‌ها آمده بود که:

کسی که این کتاب را از صاحبش می‌دزدد یا آن را قرض می‌گیرد و بعد پس نمی‌آورد؛ باشد که کتاب به یک افعی در دستانش تبدیل و او را از هم بِدرد. باشد که افلیج شود و همه اعضا و جوارحش از هم متلاشی گردد. باشد که در درد بسوزد، بپوسد و گریان و نالان طلب بخشش کند. باشد که کرم‌های کتاب‌خوار، امعا و احشائش را به نیابت از کرم اعظمی که هرگز نمی‌میرد بجوند و باشد که شعله‌های جهنم تا ابد او را بسوزاند.

[Dax · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed learning about Poggio, the unearthing of Lucretius, and the significance of “The Nature of Things” and it’s role in bringing Europe out of the dark ages and into the renaissance. The Church’s torturing and burning of heretics adds a shock factor to the book. Need to revisit Lucretius ASAP.