Book Review: The Swerve - WSJ.com
We think of the Renaissance as a time of unsurpassed artistic accomplishment, but it was also a time of unrelenting strife. In the 14th century, the city-states of Italy were in constant turmoil; Milan warred against Venice, Florence against Rome. This was the period of the "Babylonian Captivity" of the church, when the papacy was established in Avignon, where it became a satellite of the French king. Central religious authority so disintegrated that eventually no fewer than three popes would simultaneously claim the chair of St. Peter. Reformers to the north began issuing denunciations of the church, denouncing a clergy and hierarchy that had grown ever more corrupt and licentious.
In this age of chaos and confusion, a small band of learned men, the Renaissance humanists, clung to a vision of the past that seemed to hold out some hope of tranquility. Antiquity offered models of noble conduct, but they survived only in broken statues or in the mildewed pages of manuscripts hidden for centuries in remote monasteries. To locate and copy manuscripts that contained the voices of the vanished past in all their unsurpassed eloquence became, for some scholars, an overmastering obsession.
The remarkable Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) is hardly remembered today, even in his Tuscan hometown of Terranuova. Yet his discoveries led, by slow, almost imperceptible steps, to a revolution in Western thought. In "The Swerve," Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt traces Poggio's extraordinary career and legacy. He served as apostolic secretary to one of the three rival claimants to the papacy, John XXIII. He was a calligrapher of genius, creating elegant scripts (beautifully illustrated in one of Mr. Greenblatt's well-chosen plates). And he was a book-hunter of the most dogged sort.
Aided by his official position, Poggio used every skill at his command—diplomatic suavity, flattery, displays of erudition—to talk his way into otherwise inaccessible monastic libraries. Underlying his quest was a conviction that the good order of the world and of society depended upon a disciplined reverence for language, specifically the Latin language; true eloquence had a moral foundation. Though Poggio was responsible for many priceless finds—the works of Vitruvius and Quintilian, the letters of Cicero—it was thanks to his discovery in 1417 of the sole surviving manuscript of the Roman poet Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things" that, in Mr. Greenblatt's phrase, "the world swerved in a new direction."
The Swerve
By Stephen Greenblatt
(Norton, 356 pages, $26.95)
The notion of the "swerve" is taken from Lucretius, who lived in the first century B.C. and taught that the world, uncreated but infinite in extent, is composed of nothing but atoms and the void. These atoms are in perpetual motion, but sometimes they swerve, and this swerve—what Lucretius called the "clinamen"—accounts not only for change in general but for the forms that develop in nature. Mr. Greenblatt expands Lucretius' term to designate Renaissance art and thought itself, startled into new life by the rediscovered freshness of the past.
The message of Lucretius' poem was subversive and liberating. Following his master Epicurus, the poet placed the highest value on pleasure (voluptas); that choice itself was threatening to established beliefs. But he also taught that, though the gods exist, they are unconcerned about us. Still, the poet invokes Venus at the outset. Under her aegis, sexual desire becomes the driving force of everything that lives; his descriptions of sexual intercourse scandalized generations of readers, and they are still delightfully spicy. Thus lovers (in A.E. Stallings's brilliant recent translation) "can't decide / What to enjoy first with hand or eye—so closely pressing / What they long for, that they hurt the flesh by their possessing."
The last third of Mr. Greenblatt's book shows how the slow spread of Lucretius' work, first through copies and later through translation, offered a powerful alternative to church doctrines. The poem influenced such thinkers as Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake for heresy in 1600), Machiavelli and Montaigne, as well as our own Thomas Jefferson (who said of his philosophy of life, "I am an Epicurean"). But Mr. Greenblatt never loses sight of the remarkable 15th-century figure who, though no Epicurean himself, set the swerve in motion.
Among the triumphs of Mr. Greenblatt's account is his portrait of Poggio's patron, John XXIII (c.1370-1419), an offspring of a Neapolitan family of pirates who went on to practice "higher forms of piracy" as a prelate. At once thuggish and refined—a quintessential Renaissance combination—this pontiff comes alive in all his low cunning and overweening grandiosity. The book's high point comes just before Poggio makes his Lucretius discovery, at the Council of Konstanz, convened in 1414 to re-unify Christendom under a single pope.
Mr. Greenblatt describes in teeming detail the thousands of clergymen, nobles, lawyers and knights who, in Konstanz, jostled alongside a ragtag entourage of merchants, mountebanks, barbers and acrobats. John XXIII connived to ensure that Czech reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake—even as his own position became insecure. All three popes were deposed, and John XXIII was imprisoned two years later.
Amid the chaos of the council, Mr. Greenblatt's introduces the tale of Jerome of Prague, a follower of Hus also condemned to be burned for heresy. At his trial he defended himself in an oration of astonishing eloquence, and Poggio—present at both the trial and the ghastly execution—was troubled. How could a man "of so noble and excellent a genius," one who came so close to the "standard of ancient eloquence," be condemned for heresy? For Poggio, as for his fellow humanists, language skillfully wielded revealed the truth of character. Poggio's doubt was itself a small swerve away from darkness and toward what Lucretius had called "the shores of light."
