Some
Observation on Lucretius
[The
following lecture has been prepared by Ian
Johnston, Vancouver Island University. It is in the public domain, released
January 2010]
[Quotations
from On the Nature of Things are taken from the translation available here: Lucretius]
Preliminary
Remarks
Thomas
Carlyle had firm opinions about modern translations of works from the classical
past: “We want what the ancients thought and said, and none of your silly
poetry” (quoted in the Preface to W. C. Green’s translation of the Iliad),
a remark which comes to mind when one surveys some of the recent English
translations of Lucretius, where (as with Homer) one finds a rich selection of
competing versions in poetry and prose. I doubt if there has ever been a time
when so many different English translations of On the Nature of Things
have been so readily available to the reader. Thus, in the spirit of someone who
has to select a single text for a class, I find myself speculating on a question
of some importance in such a situation: How should one assess the relative
merits of prose and poetry translations of this book for student readers, both
in general terms and in particular cases?
Lucretius’
poem, of course, belongs to a genre most English readers are not very familiar
with, a long poetical work on a “philosophical” or “scientific” subject
(the reason for the quotation marks will soon be apparent). We do have such
things in our traditions—Zoonomia by Erasmus Darwin (written in heroic
couplets) springs to mind as the best example—but for the most part our
philosophical and scientific works have been written in prose (to say nothing of
the fact that poems like Darwin’s are hardly read by anyone nowadays, let
alone by students). So the decision of many translators to render Lucretius in
English prose appears sensible enough on the surface: they are establishing
contact with the tradition most familiar to the reader. Who has any desire to
read about science or philosophy in verse? In the spirit of Carlyle, we might
say that in such a treatise what matters are the ideas, and the versification
simply gets in the way.
What
objections could one make to such a stance? Well, the first objection might be
that Lucretius constantly reminds us that he is writing a poem, is very
insistent that the poetic form is an important part of his purpose, and is
evidently very proud of the result (even if he did not fully revise it and
prepare it for the reading public). True, he does encourage us to separate form
and content (à la Carlyle) with that image of honey smeared around the cup
containing bitter medicine, a section which we might interpret as suggesting
that for Lucretius the poetic form is merely a sweet decoration covering the
real content. Still, it might be worth remembering that the issue of the
suitability of poetry for “philosophical” works was alive and well in
ancient times and that in selecting to write poetry Lucretius is going against
the traditional suspicions of poetry in Plato and, more importantly, in Epicurus
(as Emily Gowers reminds us). So perhaps we could be losing more than a tasty
but irrelevant treat by completely ignoring and contradicting the passages where
he celebrates the poetry he is “weaving” (and, of course, reading about such
lyric ambitions in an English prose translation strikes one as rather odd).
Another
possible objection is that On the Nature of Things is a culturally
important poem, a vital development in the history of Latin verse, the key link
between Ennius, the father of Latin poetry, and Virgil (somewhat similar,
perhaps, to the importance of Marlowe’s dramatic poetry in the transformation
of English blank verse before Shakespeare). This point is naturally important to
students of Latin poetry and applies only to the poem in Latin. Hence, it is
obviously not relevant to any English translation, no matter how much classical
scholars may deplore the practice of prose translations (if they deplore it), in
the same way that some students of English literature scoff at French prose
translations of Shakespeare.
Objections
to the tradition of translating Lucretius into English prose become more
substantial if one pauses to explore an important question: What is this work
trying to do? What is its purpose? To reach a tentative answer to these
questions, we need to take our lead from Lucretius and follow a circuitous road.
It
takes no profound reflection to realize that the main purpose of this poem is
not to present and defend in any rational manner a comprehensive scientific
argument about the nature of the world. To demonstrate this point one does not
have to assess the scientific content of the poem (more about that later) but
simply point out what is obvious enough from the start: the main point of the
work is not scientific but ethical. Lucretius wants to encourage people to live
more successfully, to experience life without the constant anxieties brought
about by their ignorance of natural causes and by their excessive dependence on
customary religious practices and political ambitions. Knowledge of the
materialistic nature of things, he believes, is the most certain route to such
an improved awareness and thus to a better life. It addition it will motivate
the reader to seek out appropriate pleasures. In writing the poem he is
undertaking a task of persuasion, trying to convince the reader to follow the
advice he is offering. And that persuasion involves, not simply the prosaic
reasonableness of the scientific views he is advancing, but more importantly the
rhetorically persuasive effects of poetry. In other words, this poem is not
simply a presentation of rational ideas; it is about the emotional feelings
associated with those ideas (nowhere is this more evident than in the superb
closing section of Book 3, where the speaker addresses directly the reader’s
fear of death).
Let
me (at the risk of digressing) expand on this last point, since it is key to
what I am going to be claiming about On the Nature of Things. Here is a
very famous example of the poetic expression of feeling for an idea:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
(Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”)
Now,
this idea would be easy enough to render in prose, but the entire point of the
lines would be lost, because what matters here is not the idea but the
speaker’s feelings about the idea. No one would ever place Wordsworth’s poem
on a required reading list for a philosophy course, because the idea is
commonplace. And yet no one would leave this poem out of a course in English
Romantic poetry because it is, quite simply, one of the finest expressions of
feeling about an idea ever written. And that feeling emerges from the poetic
form (the sentence structure, repetition, imagery, rhythm, and so on), from the
way those features of the style help us grasp the confident and urgent intensity
of the speaker’s feelings. The passage is a fine and justly celebrated example
of Wordsworth’s amazing ability to provide in his best poetry insight into his
feelings about nature, something which transformed the understanding of
countless people, not only about nature but about themselves. And he achieved
this, not by rational persuasion but by his poetic power. One might make similar
observations about other famous poems of “ideas” (Pope’s Essay on Man,
for instance or, if we move outside English literature, the supreme examples of
Dante in the Divine Comedy and Aeschylus in the Oresteia): their
purpose is to illuminate feelings about ideas, not rationally to argue for those
ideas (in fact, from a logical perspective, their poetic work often amounts to a
rather poor rational defence of anything).
Now,
this gives us the basis for a more substantial objection to prose renditions of
Lucretius. If he is, indeed, seeking, like Wordsworth, to convey feelings about
a particular understanding of the cosmos in order to persuade the reader to
share those feelings, then abandoning the poetic form in favour of prose would
seem to work against that purpose, since it means turning away from the literary
form best suited to exploring such emotions. This observation may carry a little
more weight when we reflect that the scientific content of Lucretius’ poem has
had little to no effect on the history of science (indeed it rarely merits
consideration in accounts of that history); whereas, what the poem reveals about
an attitude towards life (and science) has always had an enormous influence
among those who read his work in Latin—scientists and non-scientists alike.
At
this point a couple of questions inevitably arise. First, why cannot prose carry
out the same rhetorical effect as poetry? Why would a prose translation
automatically deny this aspect of the poem? The short answer is that such a loss
is not inevitable, for prose is capable of remarkably “poetic” effects, as
anyone who has read the sermons of John Donne or listened to those of Jeremiah
Wright can attest. One could also point out that Plato’s early Socratic
dialogues, thanks largely to their dramatic form and the characterization of
Socrates, are justly famous as prose works which communicate insight into the
delights of the philosophical life and that this aspect of these fictions is far
more important to most readers than any light they shed on complex philosophical
issues. After all, those who meet Socrates in these works retain a (usually
affectionate) memory of the man long after they have forgotten this or that
detail of his argumentative conversations. So, given these and many other
examples, I would never establish some a priori principle about what
prose can or cannot achieve.
That
said, however, it does seem from the examples of prose translations of Lucretius
in English which I have read that prose generally fails to account
satisfactorily for the aspect of the work I have just mentioned. The best of
them (the Hackett edition by Martin Ferguson Smith), for all its merits as
crisp, clear English, never comes close to the sort of poetic quality
needed—the evenness in the tone and cool clarity of the diction and sentence
structure keep things calm and steady in a way well suited to a science essay or
philosophical argument, but there is little sense of emotional variety or
intensity and the pace never seems to vary (try reading aloud the famous opening
to Book 2, for example). Smith certainly avoids the dreary plod of, say, Cyril
Bailey or H. A. J. Munro, but still there’s little sense of Lucretius’
urgency or imaginative excitement in Smith’s prose.
Part
of this response may well stem from the complex question of the reader’s
expectations. People’s way of reading poetry differs from the way they read
prose (a potentially contentious point, I admit, but my assertion is based on my
own experience and my years of teaching prose and poetry to students). And
setting out to read what looks at first like a scientific treatise in the form
of a series of prose essays is inviting the reader to treat Lucretius as if she
were reading a scientific text (like Origin of Species). And to that task
the reader brings different habits and criteria than she does to something that
looks and reads like a long traditional poem. In response to this assertion one
might well ask the following: If
translations of Homer have worked well enough in prose, why cannot one say the
same about Lucretius? And haven’t you contradicted yourself with your remarks
about Plato’s early Socratic dialogues? Fair enough, I suppose. Prose editions
of Homer, however, also elicit different expectations and habits from readers
than do poetic ones. In a prose version, the epic poem becomes an epic novel or,
in many cases I prefer not to think about, a historical romance. However, even
given this shift, I would be prepared to argue that, all else being equal, much
less is lost in that transformation than in one which turns a great epic poem
into what reads like a prosaic argument (at least both prose and poetic forms of
Homer preserve the details of the story, the characters, and the speeches, and
the reader is still dealing with fiction).
There
is, however, at least one compelling argument in favour of a prose translation,
an important point which helps to account for the fact the Smith translation is
still the first choice of many teachers, and that is the questionable quality
(to use the politest term available) of many of those versions offered up as
poetry. Carlyle’s remarks, after
all, may not spring from an insensitivity to poetry so much as from a disgust
with the failure of his contemporaries to provide acceptable poetic translations
of the classics, for their efforts were, by and large, fairly wretched (at least
in the case of Homer). Hence, one can make a good case that having a clear and
eminently readable prose version of Lucretius at least gives us the content in a
succinct and enjoyable manner, and that is preferable to the loose,
periphrastic, inert, and incompetent versification on display in some of the
recent attempts to render Lucretius in English verse. I would, for example,
select Smith’s or Ronald Latham’s efficient prose over Frank Copley’s or
Walter Englert’s laboured verses or A. E. Stalling’s often perky fourteeners
with their emphatic forced rhymes, or William Leonard’s hopelessly outdated
and euphemistic diction. Rolfe Humphries’ colloquialisms and odd word choices
may be relatively infrequent but their effect is catastrophic, and the tone of
the translation seems totally wrong. What one desiderates in a good deal of such
versification is any sense of emotional compression and intensity, together with
an awareness that there may be more to writing poetry than just leaving an
erratic blank space to the right of the page (as in, for example, David
Slavitt’s lifeless lines or Anthony Esoslen’s erratic, rhythmically halting
verses, or the prosaic chat of C. H. Sisson laid out to look like poetry). If
Ronald Melville emerges as significantly better than these poetic offerings, the
reason may well be that—whatever criticism one might have about this or that
aspect of the style—he avoids the idiosyncrasies of the others, so a sense of
the power and seriousness of Lucretius can manifest itself. In his text we are
at least dealing with what we can recognize and read as poetry, without
constantly having to wonder about strange rhythms, odd colloquialisms, and an
inappropriate tone.
Of course, these judgments, like all assessments of poetic quality, reflect very personal preferences. After all, few literary matters are more disputatious than the issue of the quality of poetic translations. But if the poetry in translation cannot catch and hold the tone and intensity of Lucretius (what one reviewer has called the “relentless urgency” of the poem), if, that is, it fails to deliver direct emotional insight into the speaker’s feelings, especially at those moments when Lucretius’ poem really soars (as in the closing section of Book 3, for example), but instead holds the reader back and forces her to wade through awkward, inflated, and rhythmically inert or limping English, then give me good prose every time. This is especially important when one is considering a text for students, because bad poetry will probably reinforce any convictions they may already have about how long poems are boring and irrelevant (especially those from ancient times).
The
Scientific Content of Lucretius
A
response to a good deal of what I have said so far will depend to a large extent
on one’s opinion of the scientific content of Lucretius’ poem. After all, if
the work contains a treasure of scientific information and argument, then one
might reasonably defend a prose version as a contribution important for its
factual and rational content (especially given the deficiencies in most poetic
alternatives). In Carlyle’s words, we would have the essential part—that is,
the denoted content—and the poetry is no great loss. If, however, the
scientific content is not the main (or the only) issue, then offering the work
as a scientific treatise in prose might seem somewhat limiting.
Now,
it’s clear enough that Lucretius is, in part, writing a polemic. He is, as it
were, jumping into an energetic intellectual battle, keen to announce his
support for Epicurean science and his admiration of Epicurus and to wage war
against the opponents of those views, especially the Stoics, the forces of
organized religion, and the traditional values of politically ambitious Romans.
We have lost most of the other philosophical works he is reacting to and
borrowing from, although the diligent work of countless scholars gives us many
details of who said what and when. In the face of that lack of full contextual
documentation, we might well begin by looking directly at the poem and asking
ourselves if there is any scientific value in his contribution (much of which
is, as he admits, borrowed from others).
I
say scientific value, because at this point I wish to separate the literary and
historical merits of his poem (its qualities as a poem and its value as a
historical document) from what it has to offer of value as a scientific
treatise. I also wish to stress that in trying to sort out the value of
Lucretius’ scientific contributions, we need to remember that there is an
important difference between a specific contribution to a scientific
understanding of the natural world and the effort to encourage a particular
approach to understanding nature (scientific or otherwise). The first is a
matter of reasoned argument and convincing evidence; the second is an attempt at
rhetorical persuasion (which may well involve rational argument but is not
limited to that).
On
the face of it, Lucretius’ poem is something of a disappointment as a
scientific work. He is probably at his scientific best when he is refuting an
opponent (although he is not always fair to his rival’s ideas, as in the case
of Anaxagoras), when, that is, he raises key objections to the theories of those
materialists who wish to explain that all matter is produced from one or more
basic substances (fire, air, water, earth, individually or in combination). The
objections may be obvious enough, but his treatment is effective and thorough.
And his argument for the existence of atoms, for their properties, and for the
ways in which a limited number of atomic shapes can produce the variety in
materials we see all around us and also account for variations in colour, smell,
and other sensations is, although not original to him, the strongest and most
interesting scientific theory in the poem. If we measure the value of the poem
by its scientific ideas, Lucretius’ presentation of materialistic atomism is
an obvious highlight.
At
this point one should acknowledge what many people find particularly interesting
in the poem: its apparent anticipation of a number of modern ideas. These
include the social contract, non-visible sources of solar heat, the water cycle,
the development of language, and (perhaps) certain aspects of sexuality and
heredity, among others. However, in the poem these are, for the most part, not
given a firm theoretical basis—that is, they are not scientifically explained
in any detail by atomic theory or anything else (other than the velocity of
falling particles in empty space)—and, as often as not the differences between
modern theories and what Lucretius offers are more significant than the
superficial similarities, so that the very notion of an “anticipation” of
modern theories is pure Whiggery (for example, in what people see in Book 5 as
an early account of natural selection). And where we can recognize an obvious
influence, that may not amount to a scientific contribution. For example, it may
well be that that classic work of modern political sociology, Rousseau’s
Second Discourse (On the Origins of Inequality) borrows heavily and
directly from Lucretius, but the presentation in Lucretius is no more
scientifically convincing than it is in Rousseau.
Moreover,
in many places, the materialistic explanations Lucretius offers are, well,
scientifically embarrassing (although almost invariably interesting). He is
particularly weak on what is often considered the high point of ancient science,
the regular motions in the cosmos (a weakness Frank Copley attributes to the
lack of interest in mathematics endemic to Epicurean science). As a result, the
treatment of solar and lunar eclipses is hopeless (an inevitable result of the
theory of perception which convinces him that the sun and the moon are the same
size as we observe them from earth). In a similar manner, his treatment of the
sun’s motion is very muddled because he does not clearly differentiate between
its daily orbit around the earth and its annual movement around the ecliptic. He
rejects the notion of attraction to the centre (i.e., gravity) because he
confuses the entire universe (which has no centre) with celestial systems (in
his terminology, worlds) within that universe (which do have centres). What he
has to say about the celestial bodies seems to be derived, as Cyril Bailey
observes, from the general knowledge of his time (minus the mathematics). He
relies upon various winds or movements of air (air and wind are different
substances in his view) as the cause of any complex natural phenomenon that is
difficult to explain, everything from the motion of the sun and the stars to
earthquakes, lightning, volcanic eruptions, perception of distance, and
magnetism. His most famous doctrine, that of the unpredictable swerve of the
atomic particles in their linear motion (the clinamen), the source of the
atomic collisions which result in the initial material combinations which create
everything, saves us from the determinism of the Stoics and guarantees free will
in living creatures, but it has long been dismissed as arrant speculation
without scientific credibility. The idea is offered up without evidence: in a
nice piece of circular reasoning worthy of Descartes, Lucretius introduces the
swerve as the guarantor of free will and then uses the existence of free will to
demonstrate the validity of the swerve. The poem relies heavily on observations
of the natural world as evidence (an important point we will consider later on),
and is not interested in precise measurement or experiment. The closest we get
to the latter is (perhaps) the business with the magnet repelling iron filings
when a brass container is inserted between the iron and the lodestone, a result
which should not have happened, because, as we now know and as Lucretius should
(one assumes) have observed, the behaviour of a magnet is not affected by the
interposition of a non-magnetic substance between iron and the source of the
magnetism.
From
the point of view of modern science, one of the most telling deficiencies in
Lucretius is his lack of interest in universally binding theoretical
explanations for natural phenomena (something which may well be linked to his
lack of interest in mathematics). Having focused on a particular perception, he
will then offer a list of alternative often very ingenious theories (e.g., for
the motion of the stars or the appearance and disappearance of the sun each
day). All those which might conceivably happen somehow in a materialistic
universe are acceptable, provided they are not contradicted by our senses, and
there is no use trying to sort out one possible theory from another. He even
expresses a certain contempt for anyone who might want to do that. Lucretius
concedes that in our world there must be only one explanation, but given that
there are countless other worlds in the universe where other explanations may be
valid, he sees little point in trying to settle on just one of the alternatives
as correct.
At
this point one might well protest that such criticisms are manifestly unfair. To
measure Lucretius against the methods and purposes of modern science is to make
demands neither he nor any other ancient thinker could be expected to meet. They
did not have an agreed upon method of enquiry and their reflections on nature
had a purpose fundamentally different from the modern preoccupation with gaining
power over nature. That is very true. But I am not trying to assess the merits
of Lucretius methods, merely to point out that his poem has serious problems if
we wish to see in it a valuable contribution to specific developments in the
methodology and achievements of science. There is, after all, a reason why, as I
have already mentioned, Lucretius, who was read by almost every well-educated
European for five centuries (at least) is almost always totally absent from
histories of science.
This
last historical point perhaps needs some elaboration. There is no doubt that, in
directing people’s attention to a thoroughgoing and secular materialism based
on atoms, Lucretius’ poem exerted a significant influence on those interested
in natural philosophy, so that, as Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson state,
“the Lucretian conception of nature . . . was a major driving force in the
Scientific Revolution experienced in Western Europe beginning in the early
seventeenth century.” But that influence, important as it was in shifting
attention away from traditional ways of carrying out investigations of the
natural world, did not contribute directly to defining the purposes and methods
of the new science. Indeed, as Johnson and Wilson point out, the new scientific
developments in many respects contradicted the major purpose of Lucretius’
endorsement of ancient atomism.
Here
I should also mention the spirited defence of Lucretius’ scientific merits
made recently by Michel Serres, in an extraordinary book which argues that, far
from being a justly forgotten footnote in the development of science,
Lucretius’ poem is, in fact, where it all begins: it is, simply put, the
beginning of modern physics (hence the title of his study of Lucretius, The
Birth of Physics). I do not have time here to explore Serres’ argument in
detail, but, eloquent and interesting as it may be, his defence strikes me as an
extreme case of Whiggery, which requires the insertion of a mathematical
backbone carved out of Archimedes to prop up the often flabby bodily structure
of Epicurean science. Whatever the merits of this procedure for an understanding
of Archimedes or Epicurus, such links are not present in Lucretius’ poem and
suggesting possible connections does little to mitigate the criticisms I pointed
out above.
However,
Serres’ book is a vitally important contribution to an understanding of
Lucretius (and I am very indebted to his arguments) because he quite correctly
places most of his emphasis on the single most important point about On the
Nature of Things: the poem is not primarily about this or that explanation
of natural phenomena, nor does it have much to offer by way of outlining a
detailed method of scientific enquiry (other than repeatedly emphasizing sense
experience and reason); it is instead, first and foremost, an eloquent plea for
a certain way of orienting oneself to nature and, beyond that, to one’s own
life. And this aspect of the poem has exerted an enormous and continuing impact
on European intellectual life, not only among natural scientists but among
educated people of every imaginable description, from Catholic priests to
materialistic atheists, from nuclear physicists to Romantic poets and democratic
politicians.
Let
me amplify this point a little before moving on to consider just what that
orientation involves. What I am claiming about On the Nature of Things is
that the merit of the poem emerges from the eloquence of its observations and
recommendations rather than from the facts or explanations it offers. Just as
Wordsworth’s poetry fundamentally changed many people’s attitude to nature
without offering any particularly useful or detailed “theory” of nature, so
Lucretius contributed fundamentally to influencing attitudes about the natural
world and human conduct, without in the process giving us any remarkably new
discoveries or methods. In other words, On the Nature of Things is not a
scientific treatise (merely or primarily) but an amazing and influential poem,
which succeeds because of its poetic insight and power. To overlook that or
brush it aside in the interests of isolating its scientific content is to negate
the very reason the work has played such an important role in our historical
development and is still a wonderful read.
These
observations about the scientific value of Lucretius’ poem could also be
applied to its philosophical value as well. Hence, tributes to the philosophical
content need to be assessed carefully. George Santayana, for example, claims
that Lucretius offers us “one complete system of philosophy, materialism in
natural science, humanism in ethics. Such was the gist of all Greek philosophy
before Socrates. . . . Such is the gist also of what may be called the
philosophy of the Renaissance, the reassertion of science and liberty in the
modern world. . . .” Given what I have said above about the scientific
contributions of Lucretius, my response to such a claim will be obvious enough.
I have no quarrel with that word “gist” (the limitations it suggests are
appropriate), but the notion that Lucretius offers us a “complete system of
philosophy” seems, to put it mildly, stretching things considerably (there is,
after all, an important difference between applauding and paying tribute to such
a system or to the “gist” of such a system and actually offering us the
philosophical details).
For Lucretius is about as important to the history of philosophy as he is to the history of science. Yes, he is a justly celebrated proselytizer for a certain way of looking at the world and of conducting oneself in it: in fact, he is the most famous, eloquent, long-lasting, and influential literary champion of Epicurean ideas and a crucial voice in the spread of classical humanism. But one would hardly consider Lucretius worth looking at closely if one’s main concern was to analyze the complex details of an attempt rationally to justify the philosophical system he is endorsing.
LUCRETIUS’
VIEW OF NATURE
What,
then, is Lucretius’ view of nature? What lies at the heart of his impulse to
teach us how to view the natural world? And how does that impulse shape what he
has to say? Here we come to the heart of the matter, the “vision” which
inspired him and which he offers to us.
It
is clear enough that Lucretius’ major purpose is, as I said before, ethical.
He wants people to live happier, more successful lives. His Epicurean sympathies
naturally enough see the route to such better lives in the relief of pain,
especially pain of mental anxieties fostered by the pursuit of unworthy and
self-defeating aims (money, fame, political power), by the fear of death, and by
organized religion and its doctrines. Along with release from pain, he includes
the pursuit of pleasure, but only those pleasures which do not promise to bring
with them an increase of pain (that is why random promiscuous sex is to be
preferred to romantic entanglements and why the pleasures of contemplation, so
richly celebrated at the start of Book 2, are the finest of all). Such avoidance
of pain and enjoyment of pleasure, especially in contemplation, are best
achieved by understanding the material basis of the world, thus acquiring
knowledge which will provide a much healthier perspective on what truly matters
(particularly knowledge of our own mortal physicality). Hence, his teaching does
not involve the study of nature for its own sake or as a means of spiritual
discipline or as a method for increasing our power over natural phenomena: its
major purpose is utilitarian—it will make our lives happier.
The
most obvious and famous result of this attitude is Lucretius’ extreme
hostility to traditional religion—which, in his view, is neither reasonable or
natural and is the source of endless anxiety and cruelty. And responses to his
poem often begin and end with that. Voltaire, as one might expect,
enthusiastically approved the most famous line in the poem attacking traditional
religion: “That
shows how much/ religion can turn mankind to evil”
(1.134), and the energy of that endorsement is matched by any number of people
who turned away from Lucretius in horror for this irreligious stance. In many
places, the materialistic explanations for certain phenomena (particularly for
the famous series of seventeen proofs of the mortality of the soul in Book 3)
are obviously designed to neutralize the effect of organized religion’s most
potent weapon: the fear of death and the afterlife. Just as Thomas Hobbes (in Leviathan)
realizes that to convince people to accept his theory he has to demolish
traditional ways of interpreting scripture in order to ease fears of the life
hereafter, so Lucretius has to demolish the immortality of the soul, which is
the basis for all sorts of stories and practices, in order to ease similar fears
deliberately fostered by traditional belief.
Lucretius
does, of course, believe in the gods, but his vision of these entities does not
admit that they have any significant interaction with human beings other than
providing them images of their divine but material persons (by a process he
promises to explain but never does) so that human beings may engage in the only
appropriate form of worship, the contemplation of divine forms. He explicitly
rejects the notion that gods created the world (Why on earth would they
interrupt their tranquil existence to do that? And where would they get the
idea?), as well as the ever-popular view that the design of nature reflects
benevolent purposes in the divine powers that created it (If so, why are there
so many obvious flaws in nature?). It is interesting to observe how some later
thinkers influenced by Lucretius who wish to adopt his materialistic stance but
who need to take the sting out of any accusations of impiety simply make those
gods (or God) the source of natural laws (e.g., the Deists) or else, like Kant
(in Universal History of Nature), invoke Lucretius in order to distance
themselves from him by summoning the design argument to their assistance.
Lucretius’
vision of nature, however, has other important targets. He wishes to counter
skeptics who claim that there is no certain knowledge of anything, let alone of
nature, as well as the determinists, for whom nature operates by permanently
fixed universal laws of cause and effect. The former group he dismisses easily
(the self-referential paradox reveals that they are standing on their heads),
and in response to the latter he offers a vision of a natural world which cannot
be subjected to deterministic rules. The result is totally fascinating, even if
(or perhaps because) it is so different from our mainstream scientific
traditions. And when we explore this aspect of the work, the poem takes on an
extraordinary life of its own as a vision of great imaginative power.
The
first and most obvious point about Lucretius’ view of nature is its
extraordinary dynamism. Everything is always moving all the time. Objects may be
apparently at rest, but all their particles are always in restless motion,
matter is streaming to and from them all the time, the air is full of particles
in motion (sunlight, images, smells, noises, and so on) and its composition is
always changing, corporeal stuff enters and leaves the cosmos continuously,
below the earth all matter is constantly shifting, and everywhere around us the
battle between heat and water continues without pause. The earth is constantly
leaning over and threatening to collapse (like a precarious, ill-constructed
building), then righting itself, and then moving once again, often with
cataclysmic results. No writing about nature is so dominated by verbs of motion,
change, collision, combat, creation, explosion, destruction, and dissolution.
This vision is reinforced by the way in which Lucretius spends so much time on
phenomena involving flowing liquids and constantly shifting atmospheric
conditions, those features of nature which most resist accurate prediction (to
judge from the time he spends on
various subjects and the quality of his poetry as he moves from one subject to
another, he is far more interested in the behaviour of clouds, winds, and
lightning, for example, than he is in the regular motions of the planets). Yes,
he does acknowledge the repetitive patterns, like the returning seasons and the
monthly phases of the moon, but what really fires his imagination are the sudden
and unexpected phenomena, like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, thunderbolts,
rainstorms, whirlwinds, torrential floods, and disastrous diseases).
Allied
to this dynamism is the randomness of nature. At the heart of all natural
processes is the random swerve which cannot be reduced to some universal
deterministic law. And, like that swerve, nature often operates suddenly,
unpredictably, and often with enormous force. The overwhelming sense one gets is
of an intense vitalism, whose effects we can acknowledge but cannot contain,
control, or entirely foresee. The vitalism helps to produce an interesting
ambiguity in the poem, since Lucretius moves back and forth between a sense of
earth as a caring and endlessly creative mother and a sense of the world as an
inanimate stage for the survival of the fittest and for the enduring mechanical
and often violent wars between the forces of production and dissolution.
These
qualities of Lucretius’ vision of nature lie at the heart of Serres’
argument that in this work we have the birth of modern physics, which, in
response to the inadequacies of classical physics, has embraced randomness and
irrational dynamism at the heart of matter. That claim, as I have mentioned,
strikes me as exaggerated, but there is no denying the characteristics of the
poem which prompt it. The vitalism is best symbolized early in the poem by
Venus, the source of the erotic energy that drives all activities in nature. And
Serres makes much of the opening picture of Venus and Mars, in which the speaker
of the poem is asking Venus to control the natural aggression of her lover in
order to bring peace to Romans. Of course, this is a plea for political harmony
at a time of growing unease, but, Serres argues, it is also an important
indication of Lucretius’ overall purpose: Lucretius wants Venus (the symbol of
his vision of nature) to rein in Mars, the aggressive, warlike spirit at the
heart of other ways of looking at nature (Serres makes the same comment about
the later reference to Hercules and his aggressive masculine exploits early in
Book 5).
The
importance of this irrational vitality at the heart of nature may help to
explain one of the greatest attractions of Lucretius’ poem—the emphasis it
places on particular perceptions of single natural phenomena. Again and again,
Lucretius links the point he is making to a specific scene: a horse halfway
across a flowing river, sheep grazing in the meadow, trees rubbing in the wind,
severed limbs twitching on the ground, lions going berserk in battle, garments
hanging up beside the sea, huge dogs playing with their pups, a cow searching
for her slaughtered calf, the appearance of oars above and below the water,
stars glimmering in the heavens, a race horse in the starting gate, the build up
of clouds before a storm, and on and on. Such experiences, the style of the poem
insists, are much more important than any explanations we might try to come up
with to account for them. Lucretius clearly does not wish to subsume the
particularity of our sense perceptions under some universal principle (hence,
all mechanical explanations which satisfy our sense experience are equally
correct). It’s as if he wants our interaction with nature to be specific,
local, individual—anything but some exemplification of a general rule. This
desire, of course, sets him at odds with the driving impetus of modern science,
whose entire endeavour is to subordinate the particular experience to the
general law.
Now
this last point is an important reason why the poetic quality of a translation
matters. Lucretius is often accused of being extremely pessimistic, thanks
especially to his emphatic assertions about the destruction of the world and the
eventual dissolution of everything in our cosmos (to say nothing of the final
section on the plague in Athens). In addition, his poem frequently calls
attention to the destructive effects of natural processes (earthquakes,
whirlwinds, floods, and so on) and to the mutability of everything. Yes, such
passages provide plenty of material for some gloomy reflections. But offsetting
this is the enormous delight he communicates in his pictures of the natural
world and the confident joy he expresses in thinking about it as a source of
unending activity, beauty, sublimity, and power. Like Socrates in Plato’s
early dialogues, Lucretius is urging us to have the courage to reorient our
priorities to nature and to our own lives, and (again, like Socrates) the most
persuasive means he has at his disposal is an insight into his own intense
convictions and his determined courage in the face of an unpredictable,
powerful, dynamic, and dangerous but always fascinating world.
At times one even gets the impression that Lucretius wants us to reach an understanding of nature through our particular perceptions of natural phenomena on a case by case basis. His materialistic atomic theory and his two guiding principles (sense experience and reason) will give us the tools to carry out such a task, so that we can then share the enthusiasm he feels by looking all around us with a heightened sensitivity to the wonders of nature. Serres makes much of the fact that Lucretius at times uses the word foedus (meaning treaty) to describe this relationship: rather than seeking out and imposing universal laws on our experience of nature, we should begin and end with our perceptions and, as it were, arrive at an understanding by some mutual negotiation with nature. Whether this qualifies as a scientific stance is, I suppose, open to debate—it certainly flies in the face of our accepted notions of what science is all about—but it is a call to reorient the way we look at, comprehend, and feel about the world and about ourselves. If we need a “proof” of the value of such a stance before signing on, we find it, not in the scientific or philosophical arguments, but in the character of the narrator of the poem, in the intense confidence, resolution, and delight he reveals in contemplating this vision of the nature of things.
A
COMMENT ON THE INFLUENCE OF LUCRETIUS
I
have referred above to the significant impact Lucretius has had on all sorts of
developments in our culture, up to and including the present day. I have no wish
to offer a detailed or comprehensive account of that influence, even if I had
the time and expertise to do so. Still, one should, I think, at least pay
tribute to that aspect of the poem, if only by suggesting that readers
interested in the subject consult the recently published Cambridge Companion
to Lucretius, a collection of essays in which scholars well versed in the
subject offer, among other things, a fascinating glimpse of those who have paid
tribute to the shaping influence of Lucretius on them and their works.
The
Latin text of Lucretius was first published as a printed book around 1473, and
the first English translation, by a “Puritan blue-stocking,” Lucy
Hutchinson, appeared in the mid 17th century (Taylor). Since the first
appearance of the Latin text in print, the list of those who have acknowledged
Lucretius as an important influence reads like a Who’s Who of Western Culture.
It includes, as one might expect, those who welcome the poet’s attacks on
organized religion and endorsement of reason and sense experience in pursuit of
a life of moderate pleasure (e.g., Voltaire, Diderot, Hume) but it also includes
pious Catholics (e. g. Gassendi), who seem to have experienced little difficulty
with the anti-religious sentiments in the poem, leading Romantic poets (e. g.,
Wordsworth, Shelley), and a slew of nineteenth-century figures (e. g., Arnold,
Tennyson, Marx, Fitzgerald, Pater, Whitman, Goethe), among many, many others.
Thomas Jefferson, it seems, owned eight copies of On the Nature of Things,
declared himself a firm disciple of Epicurus, and may have derived that phrase
“pursuit of happiness,” at least in part, from his reading of Lucretius
(Hamilton). The poem’s influence, according to Stuart Gillespie and Donald
Mackenzie, can be linked to a range of twentieth-century poets and philosophers.
So pervasive is its presence in the intellectual climate that for one critic at
least (Stuart Gillespie) Charles Darwin’s claim that he had not read Lucretius
is rather like Milton’s claiming that he had not read Genesis.
One
figure in this tradition who obviously stands out is Montaigne, who was immersed
in Latin as a child and grew up with the great Latin classics as his constant
companions. Montaigne knew Lucretius backwards, quotes him more than any other
classical author, and covered his copy of Lucretius’ text with his own
annotations. Of course, there are some obvious differences between the two
thinkers, for Montaigne has a much more skeptical, ironic, and wry imagination
than Lucretius does, but for all that there is a great deal in Lucretius which
Montaigne finds to his liking, especially the brave resolve to live with the
pleasures which are possible and to turn away from the storms of political life
and religious controversies in very uncertain times, relying upon reason and
sense experience of nature as a guide. If we remember that Montaigne has
exercised a decisive influence on the education of French students for hundreds
of years, we can better appreciate how a leading modern European intellectual
like Michel Serres, who hails Montaigne as his “father,” is also an ardent
defender and brilliant interpreter of Lucretius.
List
of Works Cited
Bailey,
Cyril, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1910.
Copley,
Frank O., translator. Lucretius, The Nature of Things. New York: Norton,
1977. (Sample here)
Gowers, Emily. “Thoroughly modern Lucretius.” Times Literary Supplement, October 1, 2008 (available here).
Englert, Walter, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2003. (Sample here).
Esolen, Anthony M., editor and translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. (Sample here)
Gillespie, Stuart and Philip Hardie, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007.
Green, W. C. The Iliad of Homer with a Verse Translation. London: Longmans, 1884.
Hamilton, Carol V. “The Surprising Origins and Meaning of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness.” George Mason University’s History News Network 1-28-07. (Available here)
Humphries, Rolfe, translator. The De Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius Carus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. (Sample here)
Johnson, Monte and Catherine Wilson. “Lucretius and the history of science.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Edited Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 131-148.
Latham, Ronald E., translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. London: Penguin, 1994. (Sample here)
Leonard, William Ellery, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. London: J. M. Dent, 1916. (Full text available here)
Melville, Ronald, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. (Sample here)
Munro, H. A. J., translator and editor. T. Lucreti Cari, De Rerum Natura, Libri Sex. Fourth Revised Edition. In Three Volumes. London: George Bell and Sons, 1900.
Santayana, George. Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 1910.
Serres, Michel. The Birth of Physics. Translated by Jack Hawkes. Edited, Introduced, and Annotated by David Webb. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000.
Sisson, C. H., translator. Lucretius, The Poem on Nature: De Rerum Natura. New York: Routledge, 2003. (Sample here)
Slavitt, David R., translator. De Rerum Natura: The Nature of Things: A Poetic Translation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. (Sample here)
Smith, Martin Ferguson, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001 (Sample here)
Stallings, A. E., translator. The Nature of Things. London: Penguin 2009. (Sample here)
Taylor, Margaret E. Review of Cosmo Alexander Gordon. A Bibliography of Lucretius. London: Hart-Davis, 1962. In The American Journal of Philology, Volume 87, No. 2 (April 1966), p. 253. (Available here)
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