Has Steve Raker Been Reading Lucretius?
In his latest book, Genius, Harold Bloom says of Lucretius:
A genius who warns you away from organized superstition and erotic frenzy might well be at a disadvantage these days. But Lucretius matters most because no other poet teaches you so well not to fear death, a teaching in which Montaigne was Lucretius's follower. By bluntly dismissing survival and immortality, Lucretius seeks to bring you a freedom from dread and from melancholy, a freedom that most of us decline to accept.
The cosmological self-confidence of Lucretius allows him to counsel us to put aside the fear of death as being an irrelevancy. He confronts with serenity the violent world that his poem could not teach Vergil to bear serenely. His art is less varied than Vergil's, and its aesthetic effect upon me is not as great as Vergil's, but it does me more good to read Lucretius.
Wandering through my favorite used book store in Provincetown (Tim's Used Books), I came across a prose translation of Lucretius's On the Nature of the Universe, picked it up, and started reading it. He takes a very dim view of the religion of his time:
You yourself, if you surrender at any time to the blood-curdling declamations of the prophets, will want to desert our ranks. Only think what phantoms they can conjure up to overturn the tenor of your life and wreck your happiness with fear. And not without cause. For, if men saw that a term was set to their troubles, they would find strength in some way to withstand the hocus-pocus and intimidations of the prophets. As it is, they have no power of resistance, because they are haunted by fear of eternal punishment after death. They know nothing of the nature of the spirit.
What strikes me about that passage is its reference to "the prophets." Lucretius lived more than fifty years before Christ, so he couldn't be refering to Christian prophets, and it's unlikely that Hebrew prophets (who didn't focus so much on damnation) would have been spoken of in Rome. Did the Roman religion of the time (typically referred to as a mythology now) have prophets preaching eternal salvation and damnation? If so, we hear little of that now.
History is generally presented as an orderly progression, with, for instance, the Jews inventing monotheism and Christians inventing codified damnation and salvation. The history of Zoroastrianism and the content of the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that things are not so simple. Similarly, we were taught in elementary school that everyone thought the Earth was flat when Columbus set sail in 1492. Yet Dante, writing nearly two-hundred years before that, very precisely and accurately described the Earth as a sphere. History is not an orderly accumulation of knowledge. We as a race have actually discarded things that we once knew.
Lucretius was missing only the notion of energy (he saw everything as matter or void) to have developed a world view that would seem admirably complete even now:
Though education may apply a similar polish to various individuals, it still leaves fundamental traces of their several temperaments. It must not be supposed that innate vices can be completely eradicated: one man will still incline more readily to outbursts of rage; another will give way a little sooner to fear; a third will accept some contingencies too impassively. And in a host of other ways, men must differ one from another in temperament and so also in the resultant behavior. To unfold here the secret causes of these differences is beyond my power. I cannot even find names for the multiplicity of atomic shapes that give rise to this variety of types. But I am clear that there is one relevant fact I can affirm: the lingering traces of inborn temperament that cannot be eliminated by philosophy are so slight that there is nothing to prevent men from leading a life worthy of the gods.
I don't know that more than two-thousand years later, we've come much further in our understanding of nature versus nurture.
In his book, Bloom groups Lucretius in a "Lustre" with Augustine, and that seems appropriate to me. Both understood so much more than we would have expected of their time. And each is weak where the other was strong: Augustine wasn't good with the mechanics of the mundane and Lucretius fell short on the transcendent notion of ultimate causes. Even now, most people have a less complete education than could be had by reading these two authors side by side.
8:35:19 AM 
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