The elegance of Lucretius

A scholar named Steven Greenblatt came to KU to talk about Lucretius, a Roman philosopher who died about 50 BC. What was interesting to Greenblatt, and to me, was the fact, that the primary writing of Lucretius was essentially buried until it was rediscovered in a German monestary in the 15^th century by one, Poggio Bracciolini.

That’s a long time.

Christianity, as a world ideology and institution had something to do with the disappearance of Epicurean thought and other ideas that were heretical to Christian thinking. And according to Greenblatt, Christianity in this time period was particularly illiberal or intolerant.

So the particularly interesting part is that this major poem by Lucretius, De rerum natura, or On the nature of things, survived at all over 15 centuries and then once rediscovered, survived several hundred years more among scholars who certainly understood that the content was heretical until the Enlightenment finally allowed for competing ways of thinking.

The suggestion was made that Lucretius and his ideas survived because his writing was so elegant. The Latin, for those who could appreciate such things, was astonishingly good, if difficult for those whose understanding of Latin was lacking. The poetry was simply beautiful.

Greenblatt suggests that a kind of denial went on among the scholars: they simply ignored the parts of the poem they couldn’t agree with or perhaps they couldn’t make sense of, given their worldview; and they also told themselves that they were simply engaging in literary scholarship, as if the content was not really relevant.

How significant Lucretius’s thinking was to what Greenblatt called ‘The swerve’ to a modern worldview can’t and doesn’t need to be measured. The assumption that literature, that is the writing of those who have thought about the human condition, can have an impact on the direction of human culture seems established. We can debate the issue for our pleasure and our own enlightenment as we wish.

Considerable elements of chance are involved in this tale of Lucretius poem. And there is a  strong hint by Greenblatt that in our own time we might be unable to see what is shaping the directions of human thought with even the level of clarity that we characterize several hundred years of the development of ideas half a millennium ago – that is not so clearly.

Elegance matters. In science as well. Numerous scientists talk about the validity of a scientific theory as tied to the elegance of the math or ideas.

If there is something to all this, here is the beginning of my question: which ideas in our time have the elegance to capture the imagination of humans who will shape the direction of the main thoughts of our time and future as a human culture?