CHAPTER ELEVEN

AFTERLIVES

SILENCING BRUNO PROVED far easier than returning On the Nature of Things to the darkness. The problem was that, once Lucretius’ poem reentered the world, the words of this visionary poet of human experience began to resonate powerfully in the works of Renaissance writers and artists, many of whom thought of themselves as pious Christians. This resonance—the trace of an encounter in painting or in epic romance—was less immediately disturbing to the authorities than it was in the writings of scientists or philosophers. The ecclesiastical thought police were only rarely called to investigate¹ works of art for their heretical implications. But just as Lucretius’ gifts as a poet had helped to diffuse his radical ideas, so too those ideas were transmitted, in ways extremely difficult to control, by artists who were in contact directly or indirectly with Italian humanist circles: painters like Sandro Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, and Leonardo da Vinci; poets like Matteo Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. And before long the ideas surfaced as well far from Florence and Rome.

On the London stage in the mid-1590s, Mercutio teased Romeo with a fantastical description of Queen Mab:

She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate stone

On the forefinger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomi

Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep …

(Romeo and Juliet, I.iv.55–59)

“… a team of little atomi”: Shakespeare expected then that his popular audience would immediately understand that Mercutio was comically conjuring up an unimaginably small object. That is interesting in itself, and still more interesting in the context of a tragedy that broods upon the compulsive power of desire in a world whose main characters conspicuously abjure any prospect of life after death:

Here, here will I remain

With worms that are thy chambermaids. O, here

Will I set up my everlasting rest …

(V.iii.108–10)

Bruno’s years in England had not been in vain. The author of Romeo and Juliet shared his interest in Lucretian materialism with Spenser, Donne, Bacon, and others. Though Shakespeare had not attended either Oxford or Cambridge, his Latin was good enough to have enabled him to read Lucretius’ poem for himself. In any case, he seems to have personally known John Florio, Bruno’s friend, and he could also have discussed Lucretius with his fellow playwright Ben Jonson, whose own signed copy² of On the Nature of Things has survived and is today in the Houghton Library at Harvard.

Shakespeare would certainly have encountered Lucretius from one of his favorite books: Montaigne’s Essays. The Essays, first published in French in 1580 and translated into English by Florio in 1603, contains almost a hundred direct quotations from On the Nature of Things. It is not a matter of quotations alone: there is a profound affinity between Lucretius and Montaigne, an affinity that goes beyond any particular passage.

Montaigne shared Lucretius’ contempt for a morality enforced by nightmares of the afterlife; he clung to the importance of his own senses and the evidence of the material world; he intensely disliked ascetic self-punishment and violence against the flesh; he treasured inward freedom and content. In grappling with the fear of death, he was influenced by Stoicism as well as Lucretian materialism, but it is the latter that proves the dominant guide, leading him toward a celebration of bodily pleasure.

Lucretius’ impersonal philosophical epic offered no guidance at all in Montaigne’s great project of representing the particular twists and turns of his physical and mental being:

I am not excessively fond³ of either salads or fruits, except melons. My father hated all kinds of sauces; I love them all…. There are changes that take place in us, irregular and unknown. Radishes, for example, I first found to agree with me, and then to disagree, now to agree again.

But this sublimely eccentric attempt to get his whole self into his text is built upon the vision of the material cosmos that Poggio awoke from dormancy in 1417.

“The world is but a perennial movement,” Montaigne writes in “Of Repentance,”

All things in it are in constant motion—the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt—both with the common motion and with their own. Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion. (610)

And humans, however much they may think they choose whether to move or to stand still, are no exception: “Our ordinary practice,” Montaigne reflects in an essay on “The Inconsistency of our actions,” “is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circumstance carries us.”

As if that way of putting things still gives humans too much control, he goes on to emphasize, with a quotation from Lucretius, the entirely random nature of human swerves: “We do not go; we are carried away, like floating objects, now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm: ‘Do we not see all humans unaware/Of what they want, and always searching everywhere,/And changing place, as if to drop the load they bear?’” (240). And the volatile intellectual life in which his essays participate is no different: “Of one subject we make a thousand, and, multiplying and subdividing, fall back into Epicurus’ infinity of atoms” (817). Better than anyone—including Lucretius himself—Montaigne articulates what it feels like from the inside to think, write, live in an Epicurean universe.

In doing so, Montaigne found that he had to abandon altogether one of Lucretius’ most cherished dreams: the dream of standing in tranquil security on land and looking down at a shipwreck befalling others. There was, he grasped, no stable cliff on which to stand; he was already on board the ship. Montaigne fully shared Lucretius’ Epicurean skepticism about the restless striving for fame, power, and riches, and he cherished his own withdrawal from the world into the privacy of his book-lined study in the tower of his château. But the withdrawal seems only to have intensified his awareness of the perpetual motion, the instability of forms, the plurality of worlds, the random swerves to which he himself was as fully prone as everyone else.

Montaigne’s skeptical temper kept him from the dogmatic certainty of Epicureanism. But his immersion in On the Nature of Things, in its style as well as its ideas, helped him to account for his experience of lived life and to describe that experience, along with the fruits of his reading and reflection, as faithfully as he could. It helped him articulate his rejection of pious fear, his focus on this world and not on the afterlife, his contempt for religious fanaticism, his fascination with supposedly primitive societies, his admiration for the simple and the natural, his loathing of cruelty, his deep understanding of humans as animals and his correspondingly deep sympathy with other species of animals.

It was in the spirit of Lucretius that Montaigne wrote, in “Of Cruelty,” that he willingly resigned “that imaginary kingship⁴ that people give us over the other creatures,” admitted that he could barely watch the wringing of a chicken’s neck, and confessed that he “cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.” It is in the same spirit in “Apology for Raymond Sebond” that he mocked the fantasy that humans are the center of the universe:

Why shall a gosling⁵ not say thus: “All the parts of the universe have me in view; the earth serve for me to walk on, the sun to give me light, the stars to breathe their influences into me; I gain this advantage from the winds, that from the waters; there is nothing that the heavenly vault regards so favorably as me; I am the darling of nature.”

And when Montaigne reflected on the noble end of Socrates, it was in the spirit of Lucretius that he focused on the most implausible—and the most Epicurean—of details, as in “Of Cruelty,” “the quiver of pleasure”⁶ that Socrates felt “in scratching his leg after the irons were off.”

Above all, Lucretius’ fingerprints are all over Montaigne’s reflections on two of his favorite subjects: sex and death.⁷ Recalling that “the courtesan Flora used to say that she had never lain with Pompey without making him carry away the marks of her bites,” Montaigne immediately recalls lines from Lucretius: “They hurt the longed-for body with their viselike grip,/And with their teeth they lacerate the tender lip” (“That our desire is increased by difficulty”). Urging those whose sexual passion is too powerful to “disperse it,” Montaigne in “Of Diversion” quotes Lucretius’ scabrous advice—“Eject the gathered sperm in anything at all”—and then adds, “I have often tried it with profit.” And attempting to conquer any bashfulness and capture the actual experience of intercourse, he finds that no description ever written is more wonderful—more ravishing, as he puts it—than Lucretius’ lines on Venus and Mars cited in “On some verses of Virgil”:

He who rules the savage things

Of war, the mighty Mars, oft on thy bosom flings

Himself; the eternal wound of love drains all his powers

Wide-mouthed, with greedy eyes thy person he devours,

Head back, his very soul upon thy lips suspended:

Take him in thy embrace, goddess, let him be blended

With thy holy body as he lies; let sweet words pour

Out of thy mouth.

Citing the Latin, Montaigne does not attempt to match this description in his own French; he simply stops to savor its perfection, “so alive, so profound.”

There are moments, rare and powerful, in which a writer, long vanished from the face of the earth, seems to stand in your presence and speak to you directly, as if he bore a message meant for you above all others. Montaigne seems to have felt this intimate link with Lucretius, a link that helped him come to terms with the prospect of his own extinction. He once saw a man die, he recalled, who complained bitterly in his last moments that destiny was preventing him from finishing the book he was writing. The absurdity of the regret, in Montaigne’s view, is best conveyed by lines from Lucretius: “But this they fail to add: that after you expire/Not one of all these things will fill you with desire.” As for himself, Montaigne wrote, “I want death⁸ to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden” (“That to philosophize is to learn to die”).

To die “careless of death,” Montaigne understood, was a far more difficult goal than it sounded: he had to marshal all of the resources of his capacious mind in order to hear and to obey what he took to be the voice of Nature. And that voice, he understood, spoke above all others the words of Lucretius. “Go out of this world,”⁹ Montaigne imagined Nature to say,

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. (Lucretius)

(“That to philosophize”)

Lucretius was for Montaigne the surest guide to understanding the nature of things and to fashioning the self to live life with pleasure and to meet death with dignity.

In 1989, Paul Quarrie, then the librarian at Eton College, bought a copy of the splendid 1563 De rerum natura, edited by Denys Lambin, at auction for £250. The catalogue entry noted that the endpapers of the copy were covered with notes and that there were many marginalia in both Latin and French, but the owner’s name was lost. Scholars quickly¹⁰ confirmed what Quarrie suspected, as soon as he had the book in his hands: this was Montaigne’s personal copy of Lucretius, bearing the direct marks of the essayist’s passionate engagement with the poem. Montaigne’s name on his copy of Lucretius was overwritten—that is why it took so long to realize who had owned it. But in a wildly heterodox comment penned in Latin on the verso of the third flyleaf, he did leave an odd proof that the book was his. “Since the movements of the atoms¹¹ are so varied,” he wrote, “it is not unbelievable that the atoms once came together in this way, or that in the future they will come together like this again, giving birth to another Montaigne.”

Montaigne took pains to mark the many passages in the poem that seemed to him “against religion” in denying the fundamental Christian principles of creation ex nihilo, divine providence, and judgment after death. Fear of death, he wrote in the margin, is the cause of all our vices. Above all, he noted again and again, the soul is corporeal: “The soul is bodily” (296); “The soul and the body have an extreme conjunction” (302); “the soul is mortal” (306); “The soul, like the foot, is part of the body” (310); “the body and the soul are inseparably joined.” (311) These are reading notes, not assertions of his own. But they suggest a fascination with the most radical conclusions to be drawn from Lucretian materialism. And though it was prudent to keep that fascination hidden, it is clear that Montaigne’s response was by no means his alone.

Even in Spain, where the vigilance of the Inquisition was high, Lucretius’ poem was being read, in printed copies carried across the border from Italy and France and in manuscripts that quietly passed from hand to hand. In the early seventeenth century Alonso de Olivera, doctor to Princess Isabel de Borbón, owned a French edition printed in 1565. At a book sale in 1625,¹² the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo acquired a manuscript copy of the work for only one real. The writer and antiquary Rodrigo Caro, from Seville, had two copies, printed in Antwerp in 1566, in his library inventoried in 1647; and in the monastery of Guadalupe an edition of Lucretius, printed in Amsterdam in 1663, was kept in his cell, it would appear, by Padre Zamora. As Thomas More discovered when he tried to buy up and burn Protestant translations of the Bible, the printing press had made it maddeningly difficult to kill a book. And to suppress a set of ideas that were vitally important in enabling new scientific advances in physics and astronomy proved to be even more difficult.

It was not for want of trying. Here is an attempt from the seventeenth century to accomplish what the killing of Bruno had failed to do:

Nothing comes from atoms.¹³

All the bodies of the world shine with the beauty of their forms.

Without these the globe would only be an immense chaos.

In the beginning God made all things, so that they might generate something.

Consider to be nothing that from which nothing can come.

You, O Democritus, form nothing different starting from atoms.

Atoms produce nothing; therefore, atoms are nothing.

These are the words of a Latin prayer that young Jesuits at the University of Pisa were assigned to recite every day to ward off what their superiors regarded as a particularly noxious temptation. The aim of the prayer was to exorcise atomism and to claim the form, structure, and beauty of things as the work of God. The atomists had found joy and wonder in the way things are: Lucretius saw the universe as a constant, intensely erotic hymn to Venus. But the obedient young Jesuit was to tell himself every day that the only alternative to the divine order he could see celebrated all around him in the extravagance of Baroque art was a cold, sterile, chaotic world of meaningless atoms.

Why did it matter? As More’s Utopia had made clear, divine providence and the soul’s postmortem rewards and punishments were non-negotiable beliefs, even in playful fantasies about non-Christian peoples at the edge of the known world. But the Utopians did not base their doctrinal insistence on their understanding of physics. Why would the Jesuits, at once the most militant and the most intellectually sophisticated Catholic order in this period, commit themselves to the thankless task of trying to eradicate atoms? After all, the notion of the invisible seeds of things had never completely vanished during the Middle Ages. The core idea of the universe’s basic material building blocks—atoms—had survived the loss of the ancient texts. Atoms could even be spoken of without substantial risk, provided that they were said to be set in motion and ordered by divine providence. And there remained within the highest reaches of the Catholic Church daring speculative minds eager to grapple with the new science. Why should atoms in the High Renaissance have come to seem, in some quarters at least, so threatening?

The short answer is that the recovery and recirculation of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things had succeeded in linking the very idea of atoms, as the ultimate substrate of all that exists, with a host of other, dangerous claims. Detached from any context, the idea that all things might consist of innumerable invisible particles did not seem particularly disturbing. After all, the world had to consist of something. But Lucretius’ poem restored to atoms their missing context, and the implications—for morality, politics, ethics, and theology—were deeply upsetting.

Those implications were not immediately apparent to everyone. Savonarola may have mocked the pointy-headed intellectuals who thought the world was made up out of invisible particles, but on this issue at least he was playing for laughs, not yet calling for an auto-da-fé. Catholics like Erasmus and More could, as we have seen, think seriously about how to integrate elements of Epicureanism with the Christian faith. And in 1509, when Raphael painted the School of Athens in the Vatican—his magnificent vision of Greek philosophy—he seems to have been sublimely confident that the whole classical inheritance, not simply the work of a select few, could live in harmony with the Christian doctrine being earnestly debated by the theologians depicted on the opposite wall. Plato and Aristotle have pride of place in Raphael’s luminous scene, but there is room under the capacious arch for all of the major thinkers, including—if traditional identifications are correct—Hypatia of Alexandria and Epicurus.

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

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

“Faith must take first place¹⁴ among all the other laws of philosophy,” declared a Jesuit spokesman in 1624, “so that what, by established authority, is the word of God may not be exposed to falsity.” The words were a clear warning to curb unacceptable speculation: “The only thing necessary to the Philosopher, in order to know the truth, which is one and simple, is to oppose whatever is contrary to Faith and to accept that which is contained in Faith.” The Jesuit did not specify a specific target of this warning, but contemporaries would have easily understood that his words were particularly directed at the writer of a recently published scientific work called The Assayer. That writer was Galileo Galilei.

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

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

On June 22, 1633, the Inquisition delivered its verdict: “We say, sentence, and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of the evidence arrived at in the trial, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy.” Still protected by powerful friends and hence spared torture and execution, the convicted scientist¹⁵ was sentenced to life imprisonment, under house arrest. The heresy officially specified in the verdict was “having believed and held the doctrine, false and contrary to sacred and divine Scripture, that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world.” But in 1982 an Italian scholar, Pietro Redondi, uncovered a document in the archives of the Holy Office that altered the picture. The document was a memorandum detailing heresies found in The Assayer. Specifically, the inquisitor found evidence of atomism. Atomism, explained the inquisitor, is incompatible with the second canon of the thirteenth session of the Council of Trent, the session that spelled out the dogma of the Eucharist. If you accept Signor Galileo Galilei’s theory, the document observes, then when you find in the Most Holy Sacrament “the objects of touch, sight, taste, etc.,” characteristic of bread and wine, you will also have to say, according to the same theory, that these characteristics are produced on our senses by “very tiny particles.” And from this you will have to conclude “that in the Sacrament there must be substantial parts of bread and wine,” a conclusion that is flat-out heresy. Thirty-three years after the execution of Bruno, atomism remained a belief that the vigilant forces of orthodoxy were determined to suppress.

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

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

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

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

She would certainly have consigned these verses to the fire, she wrote in her autograph dedicatory letter, “had they not by misfortune¹⁷ been gone out of my hands in one lost copy.” This sounds, of course, like the familiar gesture of feminine modesty. It is a gesture she reinforces by refusing to translate several hundred sexually explicit lines in book 4, noting in the margin that “much here was left out for a midwife to translate whose obscene art it would better become than a nicer pen.” But in fact Hutchinson made no apology for what she called her “aspiring Muse.”¹⁸Rather, she abhorred “all the atheism and impieties” in Lucretius’ work.

The “lunatic” Lucretius, as Hutchinson called him, is no better than the other pagan philosophers and poets routinely commended to pupils by their tutors, an educational practice that is “one great means¹⁹ of debauching the learned world, at least of confirming them in that debauchery of soul, which their first sin led them into, and of hindering their recovery, while they puddle all the streams of Truth, that flow down to them from divine grace, with this pagan mud.” It is a lamentation and a horror, Hutchinson wrote, that now, in these days of the Gospel, men should study Lucretius and adhere to his “ridiculous, impious, execrable doctrines, reviving the foppish, casual dance of atoms.”

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

Her answer is a revealing one. She had not initially realized, she confessed, how dangerous Lucretius was. She undertook the translation “out of youthful²⁰ curiosity, to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand.” We have, through this remark, a glimpse of those quiet conversations, conducted not in the lecture hall or from the pulpit, but away from the prying ears of the authorities, in which Lucretius’ ideas were weighed and debated. This gifted, learned woman wanted to know for herself what the men in her world were arguing about.

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

The little glory²¹ I had among some few of my intimate friends, for understanding this crabbed poet, became my shame, and I found I never understood him till I learned to abhor him, and dread a wanton dalliance with impious books.

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

Hutchinson said that she was simply obeying Anglesey, who had asked to see this book that she now beseeched him to conceal. To conceal, not to destroy. Something restrained her from urging that it be consigned to the fire, something more than the copy that had already gone out of her hands—for why should that have held her back?—and more even than her pride in her own accomplishment. An ardent Puritan, she echoed Milton’s principled opposition to censorship. She had, after all, “reaped some profit²² by it, for it showed me that senseless superstitions drive carnal reason into atheism.” That is, she learned from Lucretius that childish “fables” meant to enhance piety have the effect of leading rational intelligence toward disbelief.

Perhaps too Hutchinson found the manuscript strangely difficult to destroy. “I turned it²³ into English,” she wrote, “in a room where my children practiced the several qualities they were taught with their tutors, and I numbered the syllables of my translation by the threads of the canvas I wrought in, and set them down with a pen and ink that stood by me.”

Lucretius insisted that those things that seemed completely detached from the material world—thoughts, ideas, fantasies, souls themselves—were nonetheless inseparable from the atoms that constituted them, including in this instance the pen, the ink, and the threads of the needlework Hutchinson used to count the syllables in her lines of verse. In his theory, even vision, so seemingly immaterial, depended on tiny films of atoms that constantly emanated from all things and, as images or simulacra, floated through the void until they struck the perceiving eye. Thus it was, he explained, that people who saw what they thought to be ghosts were falsely persuaded of the existence of an afterlife. Such apparitions were not in reality the souls of the dead but films of atoms still floating through the world after the death and dissolution of the person from whom they had emanated. Eventually, the atoms in these films too would be dispersed, but for the moment they could astonish and frighten the living.

The theory now only makes us smile, but perhaps it can serve as an image of the strange afterlife of Lucretius’ poem, the poem that almost disappeared forever, dispersed into random atoms, but that somehow managed to survive. It survived because a succession of people, in a range of places and times and for reasons that seem largely accidental, encountered the material object—the papyrus or parchment or paper, with its inky marks attributed to Titus Lucretius Carus—and then sat down to make material copies of their own. Sitting in the room with her children, counting the syllables of translated verses on the threads of her canvas, the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson was serving in effect as one of the transmitters of the atomic particles that Lucretius had set in motion centuries and centuries earlier.

By the time Hutchinson reluctantly sent her translation to Anglesey, the idea of what she called “the foppish, casual dance of atoms” had already long penetrated the intellectual imagination of England. Edmund Spenser had written an ecstatic and strikingly Lucretian hymn to Venus; Francis Bacon had ventured that “In nature nothing²⁴ really exists besides individual bodies”; Thomas Hobbes had reflected wryly on the relationship between fear and religious delusions.

In England, as elsewhere in Europe, it had proved possible, though quite difficult, to retain a belief in God²⁵ as the creator of atoms in the first place. Thus Isaac Newton, in what has been called one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of science, declared himself an atomist, making what appears to be a direct allusion to the title of Lucretius’ poem. “While the Particles continue entire,” he remarked, “they may compose Bodies of one and the same Nature and Texture in all Ages: But should they wear away, or break in pieces, the Nature of Things depending on them, would be changed.” At the same time, Newton was careful to invoke a divine maker. “It seems probable to me,” Newton wrote in the second edition of the Opticks (1718),

That God in the Beginning²⁶ form’d Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportions to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form’d them; and that these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divine what God himself made one in the first creation.

For Newton, as for other scientists from the seventeenth century to our own time, it remained possible to reconcile atomism with Christian faith. But Hutchinson’s fears proved well grounded. Lucretius’ materialism helped to generate and support the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic, devastating disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other Enlightenment figures.

What lay ahead, beyond the horizon of even these farsighted figures, were the astonishing empirical observations and experimental proofs that put the principles of ancient atomism on a whole different plane. When in the nineteenth century he set out to solve the mystery of the origin of human species, Charles Darwin did not have to draw on Lucretius’ vision of an entirely natural, unplanned process of creation and destruction, endlessly renewed by sexual reproduction. That vision had directly influenced the evolutionary theories of Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, but Charles could base his arguments on his own work in the Galápagos and elsewhere. So too when Einstein wrote of atoms, his thought rested on experimental and mathematical science, not upon ancient philosophical speculation. But that speculation, as Einstein himself knew and acknowledged, had set the stage for the empirical proofs upon which modern atomism depends. That the ancient poem could now be safely left unread, that the drama of its loss and recovery could fade into oblivion, that Poggio Bracciolini could be forgotten almost entirely—these were only signs of Lucretius’ absorption into the mainstream of modern thought.

Among those for whom Lucretius was still a crucial guide, before this absorption had become complete, was a wealthy Virginia planter with a restless skeptical intelligence and a scientific bent. Thomas Jefferson owned at least five Latin editions of On the Nature of Things, along with translations of the poem into English, Italian, and French. It was one of his favorite books, confirming his conviction that the world is nature alone and that nature consists only of matter. Still more, Lucretius helped to shape Jefferson’s confidence that ignorance and fear were not necessary components of human existence.

Jefferson took this ancient inheritance in a direction that Lucretius could not have anticipated but of which Thomas More, back in the early sixteenth century, had dreamed. Jefferson had not, as the poet of On the Nature of Things urged, withdrawn from the fierce conflicts of public life. Instead, he had given a momentous political document, at the founding of a new republic, a distinctly Lucretian turn. The turn was toward a government whose end was not only to secure the lives and the liberties of its citizens but also to serve “the pursuit of Happiness.” The atoms of Lucretius had left their traces on the Declaration of Independence.

On August 15, 1820, the seventy-seven-year-old Jefferson wrote to another former president, his friend John Adams. Adams was eighty-five, and the two old men were in the habit of exchanging views on the meaning of life, as they felt it ebb away. “I [am] obliged²⁷ to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne,” Jefferson wrote:

“I feel: therefore I exist.” I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.

These are the sentiments that Lucretius had most hoped to instill in his readers. “I am,” Jefferson wrote²⁸ to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, “an Epicurean.”