A Review of Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern"
ON THE CUSP OF THE END OF THE FIRST MILENNIA A.D., a figure in monkish robe sat ornamented by firelight as he hunched over a writing desk with quill and parchment. Not two years before, the line of Charlemagne had failed. In just nine months a new millennium would commence, and rumors of the End Times “filled almost the entire world.” Here every mist threatened to bring with it the dreaded beasts of Revelation, and every moan of wind may well have been the brass section of the Heavens warming up. And yet, the notations this monk—an Archbishop, more precisely—was scribbling in the chiaroscuro of the room were not apocalyptic musings, nor esoterica theorizing upon the unutterable things St. Paul refused to speak of in his journey to the Third Heaven (2 Cor. 12:2-4). “On the eve of the Apocalypse,” writes Nancy Marie Brown, “the archbishop of Ravenna and his friend [were in a letter] discussing the best method for finding the area of a triangle.”[1] This archbishop was Gerbert of Aurillac, soon to be known as Pope Sylvester II, and to write his history, says Brown “is to rewrite the history of the Middle Ages.”[2]
In [Sylvester’s] day, the earth was not flat. People were not terrified that the world would end at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 999. Christians did not believe Muslims and Jews were the devil’s spawn. The Church was not anti-science—just the reverse. Mathematics ranked among the highest forms of worship, for God had created the world as scripture said, according to number, measure, and weight. To study science, was to approach the mind of God.[3]With his typical wit, the theologian David Bentley Hart remarks that when it comes to this period of history it appears that “the ghastly light of a thousand inane legends burns with an almost inextinguishable incandescence.”[4] It is not enough merely to set one’s aim to extinguish a few of these “almost inextinguishable” fires. Just as important the question of who lit them, why, and what was sought in such flame must constantly occupy us. Otherwise, like the hydra heads severed by Hercules, for every one snuffed, two more spring into place. As the former Curator of the Louvre, Regine Pernoud writes in her delightful book Those Terrible Middle Ages!: “Now the medievalist, if he has in mind set on collecting foolish quotations on the subject, finds himself overloaded by everyday life. Not a day goes by that one does not hear some reflection [invoking the Dark Ages, or using “Medieval” as an insult].”[5] Recalling an occasion where she accompanied her nephew to one of his classes “so that afterward [parents] can work with their children,” she goes on to note her astonishment at the catechism her nephew’s class is put through:
Teacher: What are the peasants of the Middle Ages called?Pernoud then recalls another time from her many experiences, when she received a call from a TV research assistant who began by saying “I understand that you have some transparencies. Do you have any that represent the Middle Ages?” “Represent?” Pernoud asked. “Yes, that give an idea of the Middle Ages in general: slaughter, massacres, scenes of violence, famines, epidemics…” She immediately burst into laughter, and then promptly regretted it.[7] She notes it was unfair of her to expect popular knowledge to somehow surge beyond that of the general level of knowledge of the Middle Ages by non-specialist academics, who for example in 1964 came together for a meeting of the Cercle catholique des intellectuels Francais (Catholic Circle of French Intellectuals) on the topic “Were the Middle Ages Civilized?” which was a question posed, she notes “without the least bit of humor.” What is more she writes, hardly able to hide her astonishment, that “it involved intellectuals who were for the most part from universities, and for the most part, employed.”[8]
Class: They are called serfs.
Teacher: And what did they do, what did they have?
Class: They were sick.
Teacher: What illnesses did they have, Jerome?
Jerome (very serious): The plague.
Teacher: And what else, Emmanuel?
Emmanuel (enthusiastically): Cholera!
Teacher: You know history very well; let’s go on to geography.[6]
Things have not gotten much better today, it seems. One can point to a very recent high profile example in Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, who, in December 2011, ascended the stage at the Cipriani Club in New York City to receive a National Book Award Prize.[9] A 365-page New York Times bestseller, the book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, was ostensibly about the rediscovery of the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius’s (d. 59 BC) poem De Rerum Natura (On The Nature of Things) by a fifteenth-century Italian employee of the Pope—the well-traveled Poggio Bracciolini. The poem, representing a philosophical school known as Epicureanism, argued that the world was created by the chance collision of atoms, that the gods do not interfere with our world, and that mankind is therefore free to choose as he will. A brutal summary, but it will have to suffice. Greenblatt’s book also won a Pulitzer Prize, and it would eventually net him $735,000 in additional prize money when he was awarded the 2016 Holberg Prize by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.
The epic poem had lain undisturbed on a dusty library shelf in Germany, free from the inquisitorial eyes of the monks, who would surely have burned this document (says Greenblatt) if they knew what it was. To be fair, this tale of discovery is worth the price of the book alone. Greenblatt deftly tells this portion of the narrative with his talent for description. Less worthwhile, however, is the rest of the book, which is embarrassingly ill-fitted over this fascinating core. Like David stumbling about in his overlarge, donated armor (1 Sam. 17:39), Greenblatt’s story awkwardly dresses itself in the tired narratives of the Christian Dark Ages and the repression of Galileo for his science handed down to him via the Enlightenment, as we shall see in a moment. His narrative is also obviously bejeweled with Greenblatt’s own extreme displeasure with religion of all sorts. Greenblatt’s monks are thuggish layabouts, while others of a more entrepreneurial nature self-flagellate, if only to break up the monotony of their concerted effort to hold back civilization. Here, scientific thinking is anathema, a matter of indifference, or perhaps, most of all, just a superfluous luxury in a world that considers its time well spent huddling timidly beneath the shadow of an angry God’s middle finger.
Unlike David, however, who tells Saul he cannot fight in this bloated frame, Greenblatt’s unwieldy epic of history is promoted as the ultimate point of his investigation. Invoking the thrill of discovery that inevitably accompanies stumbling upon some ancient, forbidden secret (if not quite playing the actual theme music of Indiana Jones), Greenblatt argues Poggio’s remarkable find hidden in the dust of Christendom began to change everything held sacred in Medieval Europe. In a bracing crescendo of prose Greenblatt describes his book’s theme:
The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without thinking that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines; to legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to imagine that there are other worlds beside the one that we inhabit; to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul. In short, it became possible—never easy, but possible—in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.[10]
Greenblatt more often than not turns his wonderful grasp of the English language to the task of gussying up historical interpretations that were beginning to collect dust even a century ago, let alone today. Renaissance scholar John Monfasani, reviewing the UK version, calls The Swerve’s central premise—that once Lucretius’ poem was made available it became a major piece in undoing the medieval picture of the world—a fundamentally “unwarranted assumption,” with “virtually no evidence … while a massive amount [of evidence] exists for constructing a different story.”[14] Greenblatt, he says, has written an “entertaining” but an ultimately “wrongheaded [and] belletristic tale.” Historian of Medieval Literature Laura Saetvit Miles writes similarly in her review of the book in Vox: “the oppressive, dark, ignorant Middle Ages that Greenblatt depicts for 262 pages [is] simply fiction.” In fact, she continues: “its fiction worse than Dan Brown, because it masquerades as fact.”[15] She even found its silky narrative taking her along its pathways of sparkling prose, salted as they were with “so many interesting details” and with no uninvited “footnotes to distract me from the story.” Amidst Greenblatt’s pleasant tide of story, she found herself “totally swept up” until she came back to reality. The book is indeed written in “enthusiastic, accessible style” she admits, but it comes “at a devastating, unethical cost: the misrepresentation of a thousand years of brilliant literature, vibrant culture, and actual people.”
Not least among Greenblatt’s distortions comes by way of what Greenblatt calls Lucretius’s “scientific vision of the world” where neither Gods nor the supernatural were needed. In presenting Lucretius in this manner, Greenblatt plumps Lucretius—and Poggio—as lonely heroes heroically subverting the Dark Ages with what he represents as essentially the scientific method and the sensibilities that Greenblatt shares with his colleagues and presumably the awards committees handing out prizes. Among any number of problem’s Greenblatt’s account runs into a very basic one appears nearly immediately: Lucretius was not, by any measure, modern, nor doing science. His approach to the world actually consisted of a profoundly philosophical—even religious—Epicurean goal known as ataraxia (translated broadly: a serene distance or disinterest in the world) that “argued against a purely theoretical use of physics.”[16] Indeed, “the object of [physical] knowledge, like death, must be ‘nothing for us,’” as Remi Brague puts it summarizing the basic Epicurean stance.[17] This meant that understanding the natural world was not a scientific endeavor that sought truly to understand or control, but to accept and withdraw so as to eat, drink, and be merry.
To be sure, Epicureans like Lucretius said a lot of things that would make Christians uncomfortable, and that they would outright reject, reinterpret, or repurpose—the random meaninglessness of the world, for example. Yet, Epicurean “science” was not one of them—for the simple fact that they had none. The purpose of physics for the Epicurean was not to control the world through technology or distill it into manageable bits for understanding, but to comprehend the normal course of things and so free oneself from worry. Nor was the use of Lucretius in the Renaissance, “science.” As the historian Nicholas Jardine notes, despite our obsession with Leonardo da Vinci, “no Renaissance category even remotely corresponds to ‘the sciences’” or “‘the natural sciences’ in our modern sense of the terms.”[18] The disciplines were coordinated in different ways than we might organize them today—and this often included close interaction between theological ideas and scientific presuppositions and even material conclusions. Here, however, we encounter a trope about the Greeks and Romans that is quite common in histories of science—especially those that also want to snipe at Christian recidivism along the way. This is a tendency to single out naturalist tendencies in Greek thought and to string it together into a narrative arriving at the atheistic naturalism of today. However, “the gods never really go away I ancient science (nor does mythology, for that matter …)”[19] It also raises the difficulty of what it even means at any given time to speak of “nature” and “supernature.” But this must wait for later. For now, the point is merely that to see science in the ancient world has also been a story of historians squinting just right so as to not get their religion, philosophy, and esotericism along with it. That squinting, we might say with only slight exaggeration, are the various strands of Positivism again at work pressing upon the historical record their own images of scientific progress.
From the same death of positivism in the mid-20th century that caused what has been termed a renaissance in Christian philosophy in professional academic departments, a similar though less reported sea-change has been occurring regarding investigation of Christinity’s past relationship with science. Though it has not apparently affected Greenblatt’s opinions, over the last fifty years there has been a quiet revolution in the historiography of science and religion based precisely on highly relativizing or even abandoning the categories of “science” and “religion” as unworkable designations,[20]heavily emphasizing the numerous socio-cultural factors that went into how they emerged as historical constructs used to view and carve up the world.[21] And this is in part for reasons we saw in Greenblatt’s work: it is only by squinting through the contemporary categories of “science” and “religion” that one can filter out a non-religious image of Lucretius as proto-scientist. Nor is this isolated to the figure of Lucretius. Using similar selectivity, historical actors like Hypatia of Alexandria, Giordano Bruno, Michael Servetus, and Galileo Galilei are turned into some of the first “scientific” martyrs by completely ignoring their surrounding contexts or by failing to utilize categories that would have been familiar to them. Greenblatt, for example, laments Hypatia’s death (and rightly so), but he does this in order to bolster his “Christianity destroyed Greek science” narrative. Her death therefore becomes a token denoting the general loss of something blandly designated en masse as “Greek wisdom,” a loss which the West suffered at the hands of Christians. Yet, as a Platonist, Hypatia would have been the implacable opponent of Greenblatt’s centerpiece, the Epicurean Lucretius. Even further, as Richard Popkin has noted in his seminal work The History of Skepticism, the real modern opponent of Epicureanism was not Christianity, but the resurfacing of its ancient rival in Pyrrhonian skepticism.[22]Greenblatt’s story, however, really only allows for free thinkers on one side and militant religious fideists on the other: the Greeks on one side, the Christians on the other.
This is no doubt frustrating for Greenblatt’s vision of the shape of history. For Lucretius’s atomism only really eventually aided modern science because Christians (who in fact did read the poem before Poggio’s discovery)[23] eventually disembedded it from the Epicurean virtue of ataraxia, and in the works of those like Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle, disabused it of any supposed atheism. However even in the middle ages there were many arguing for the use of Epicureanism as well. The French scholastic philosopher William of Conches (A.D. 1050-1154), when accused of “falling back on the opinion of the Epicureans,” responded: “When the Epicureans said that the world consists of atoms, they were correct. But it must be regarded as a fable when they said that those atoms were without beginning and ‘flew to and fro separately through the great void,’ then massed themselves into four great bodies. For nothing can be without beginning and place except God.”[24] Christians had, in other words, decontextualized many Epicurean ideas from the broader ornamentations of Epicurean philosophy and religion that were actively stopping their “scientific” application to the world. It was not only in this manner that atomism caught on as a great “scientific” idea in Christian Europe, but the efforts of Christian theologians and philosophers was substantial. The ironic thing is that these claims—the Christianization of atomism, the Christian preservation and reading of Lucretius before Poggio, the non-existence of science in either Lucretius or the Renaissance—all can be made using the secondary sources that Greenblatt himself cites. Did he, in fact, read them?
Good myths are hard to shake, and clever metaphors die hard. Edward Gibbon famously remarked that he first got the idea for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from walking amidst the ruins of the Capitol. It is in fact this metaphor of a ruined world that--despite all of his details and glorious prose--drives the narrative of the Christian destruction of the world. Likewise Greenblatt's work is not so much one of history, as of assuming the gaze of Poggio--with all of his hatred of clergy and contrition and curia. Greenblatt's prejudice has been allowed to spook a herd of facts that now run rampant across his work in the patterns his prejudice molded in advance. But perhaps it does not matter. Just as Greenblatt's hero Lucretius advises us that it is alright to placidly stand by while we observe the suffering of others--for, after all, these sufferings are just the random and unavoidable rearranging of atoms, so too its seems truth-telling need not bother us, for falsehood, like truth, is just another mutation in the endless rearrangement of the world.
[1] Nancy Marie Brown, The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages (New York: Basic Books, 2010), our intro paragraph here is based on the account given on pages 1-4 of Brown’s book. The quote comes at page 3.
[2] Ibid, 3.
[3] Ibid., 3-4.
[4] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale, 2009), 36.
[5] Regine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking The Myths (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 9.
[6] Ibid., 10.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., 12.
[9] Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How The World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).
[10] Greenblatt, Swerve: How The World Became Modern, 10–11.
[11] Ibid.
[12] W.H. Auden, “Heresies – A Review of Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety by E.R. Dodds” The New York Review of Books (Feb. 17th1966). https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/02/17/heresies/. Accessed October 5th, 2019.
[13] Michael Dirda, “Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve” Reviewed by Michael Dirda,” The Washington Post, September 21st, 2011. Last Accessed October 4th, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/stephen-greenblatts-the-swerve-reviewed-by-michael-dirda/2011/09/20/gIQA8WmVmK_story.html?utm_term=.72a1f6ab50f5.
[14] John Manfasani, “Review of The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (Review no. 1283)” Reviews In History, July 2012. Accessed October 4th, 2019. http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1283.
[15] Laura Saetvit Miles, “Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve Racked Up Prizes – And Completely Misled You About The Middle Ages,” Vox, July 20th, 2016. Accessed October 4th, 2019. https://www.vox.com/2016/7/20/12216712/harvard-professor-the-swerve-greenblatt-middle-ages-false.
[16] Remi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 38. Italics added.
[17] Brague, Wisdom of the World, 38.
[18] Nicholas Jardine, “Epistemology of the Sciences,” in C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner, eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 685.
[19] Daryn Lehoux, “’All Things Are Full of Gods’: Naturalism in the Classical World,” in Peter Harrison and Jon H. Roberts, eds., Science Without God? Rethinking the History of Scientific Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 20.
[20] Discussions on this abound. See for example: James R. Moore, “Speaking of ‘Science’ and ‘Religion’—Then and Now,” History of Science 30 (1992): 311–23; Andrew Cunningham, “Getting the Game Right: Some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19 (1988): 365–89.
[21] On the construction of the category “religion,” a few notable works are: Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: The Invention of a Modern Concept (Oxford: OUP, 2009); Peter Harrison, “Religion” and Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: CUP, 1990).
[22] Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism; From Savanarola to Bayle (Oxford: OUP, 2003).
[23] Michael Reeves, “Lucretius in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: Transmission and Scholarship,” in Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 207.
[24] Quoted in Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson, “Lucretius and the History of Science,” in Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, 132.
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