Read On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics) Online
Authors: Ronald Melville,Don,Peta Fowler
Some few exalted Spirits this latter age has shown,
That labour’d to assert the Liberty
(From Guardians who were now Usurpers grown)
Of this old Minor still, Captiv’d Philosophy;
But ’twas rebellion call’d to fight
For such a long-oppressed Right.
Bacon at last, a mighty Man arose
Whom a wise King and Nature chose
Lord Chancellor of both their Lawes,
And boldly undertook the injur’d pupils cause.
Authority, which did a Body boast,
Though ’twas but air condens’d and stalk’d about,
Like some old Giant’s more Gigantic Ghost,
To terrifie the Learned Rout
With the plain Magick of true Reason’s Light,
He chac’d out of our sight,
Nor suffer’d Living men to be misled
By the vain shadows of the Dead:
To graves, from whence it rose, the conquer’d Phantome fled;
He broke that Monstrous God which stood
In midst of th’Orchard, and the whole did claim,
Which with a useless Sith of Wood,
And something else not worth a name,
(Both vast for shew, yet neither fit
Or to defend or to Beget;
Ridiculous and Senceless Terrors!) made
Children and superstitious Men afraid.
The Orchard’s open now, and free;
Bacon has broke that Scar-crow Deitie.
Cowley’s praise of Bacon is based on Lucretius’ praise of Epicurus in 1. 62–79:
When human life lay foul for all to see
Upon the earth, crushed by the burden of religion,
Religion which from heaven’s firmament
Displayed its face, its ghastly countenance,
Lowering above mankind, the first who dared
Raise mortal eyes against it, first to take
His stand against it, was a man of Greece.
He was not cowed by fables of the gods
Or thunderbolts or heaven’s threatening roar,
But they the more spurred on his ardent soul
Yearning to be the first to break apart
The bolts of nature’s gates and throw them open.
The heroism of this revolt in the name of earth and humanity against the empty tyranny of the gods goes closely in
On the Nature of the Universe
with Lucretius’ poetic empiricism, which constantly recalls us from the mists and darkness of false belief to the plain light of scientific reasoning. Poet and philosopher/scientist unite in inviting us simply to use our eyes and see the world for what it is, to
see through
the ‘words | Of terror from the priests’ (1. 103). It is the enlightenment rhetoric of a Voltaire, echoed in modern times by scientists like Richard Dawkins: a recall from flights of fancy to what Epicurus called ‘sober reckoning’, to the
nature of things
.
And yet the very terms in which this revolt is celebrated so powerfully must give us pause for thought. What attracts us to the assault on myth in
On the Nature of the Universe
, the great Enlightenment project of freeing humanity from delusion, attracts because of its own mythical form: at its heart are those images of Nature unchained, of the hero Epicurus challenging heaven and bringing back victory over it.
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself…
as the Platonist Shelley put it in a passage of
Prometheus Unbound
full of Lucretian echoes. This sort of rhetoric is not sober reckoning, but an inspiring call to liberation whose efficacy depends on means denied by the scientism it champions. Epicurus said that the only virtue of style was clarity, and the rhetoric of
On the Nature of the Universe
endorses this view of language as ideally a transparent window onto reality. If we can but drain language of its false accretions and get back to the plain sense of words, then we can have access to the way things are. But the poem does not just tell it as it is, but constructs a complex world of images and metaphors which refutes this naïve view of language as merely a window on truth. What we buy into when we endorse this grand vision of the triumph of reason is a construction in language whose appeal is entirely due to its linguistic richness—the linguistic richness that ironically the underlying theory cannot accommodate.
On the Nature of the Universe
is
a complex statement of the simplicity of things, and the tension between those two drives is not—and cannot be—resolved within the poem.
One particular aspect of this contrast which has always seemed strange to readers is the presence in the poem of figures such as the personified Nature, Mother Earth, and especially Venus, as invoked at the opening of the poem:
O mother of the Roman race, delight
Of men and gods, Venus most bountiful,
You who beneath the gliding signs of heaven
Fill with yourself the sea bedecked with ships
And earth great crop-bearer, since by your power
Creatures of every kind are brought to birth
And rising up behold the light of sun.
There is nothing unepicurean in the evocation of a god: despite their denial of divine interference in the world, the Epicureans believed the gods existed, and that our cultivation of them could bring us images of divine tranquillity on which we could model our lives. There is also a clear allegory, in that Venus is equated with pleasure, the chief good in the Epicurean ethical system, and it is through the pursuit of pleasure that animals and humans procreate and create. The prologue is ‘set’ at dawn on the first day of spring, 1 April, when Venus’ major festival, the
Veneralia
, was celebrated at Rome, and there need be nothing doctrinally unorthodox about the way that the new year is described. Similarly, Lucretius takes pains to explain that his use of the notion of Mother Earth is just a trope, and should not lead to the idea that earth is sentient or deserves cult:
Indeed the earth is now and has been always
Devoid entirely of any kind of feeling.
The reason why it brings forth many things
In many ways into the light of sun
Is that it holds a multitude of atoms.
If anyone decides to call the sea Neptune,
And corn Ceres, and misuse the name of Bacchus
ather than give grape juice its proper title,
Let us agree that he can call the earth
Mother of the Gods, on this condition—
That he refuses to pollute his mind
With the foul poison of religion.
(2. 652–60)
Although these usages by Lucretius have traditionally been seized upon by opponents wishing to find traces of a subversive religiosity within the text, as Hume pointed out in his
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
, the religious gain little by this move: to say that for the Epicureans Nature becomes a god is of little help to a theist if the notion of divinity is so redefined. Venus, Nature, and Mother Earth are place-markers who dramatize the conflict between providentialist and Epicurean views of the world but must eventually be discarded by the Epicurean. Ultimately, all that happens anywhere is that atoms move at random in the void:
For certainly not by design or mind’s keen grasp
Did primal atoms place themselves in order,
Nor did they make contracts, you may be sure,
As to what movements each of them should make.
But many primal atoms in many ways
Throughout the universe from infinity
Have changed positions, clashing among themselves,
Tried every motion, every combination,
And so at length they fall into that pattern
On which this world of ours has been created.
(1. 1021–8)
But the question remains why we ever needed these figures to help us make the move to Epicurean truth, and what we do with them when we have reached it. The attraction of
On the Nature of the Universe
consists, again, in the myths and stories that we tell about the world: but there is no room for the richness of those stories within the philosophy itself.
But that does not mean, of course, that we cannot take from the poem a message which may not be perfectly Epicurean but which is one of its great lessons. The world
is
, ultimately, atoms and void, blind motion in emptiness, and there is, as Epicurus and Lucretius insisted, no divine hand providentially ordering things for our benefit. What we can construct on that basis is, however, a world of infinite complexity and delight, of which the images, metaphors, and stories that make up
On the Nature of the Universe
are an essential part. And we can do so knowing that those complexities are no more than stories, and yet delighting in them.
On the Nature of the Universe
gives us both a glimpse into how the world is, and a sense of what we can make of it:
And now from all these things delight and joy,
As it were divine, takes hold of me, and awe
That by your power nature so manifest
Lies open and in every part displayed.
(3. 28–30)
W. H. D. Rouse revised M. F. Smith (with translation, Cambridge, Mass., 1975). See also C. Bailey (Oxford, 1922), K. Müller (Zurich, 1975). There is a bibliography of editions by C. Gordon (2nd edn., London, 1985).
C. Bailey (with text and translation, 3 vols., Oxford, 1947). See also the older English commentaries of H. A. J. Munro (with text and translation, 4th edn., London, 1886), W. A. Merrill (New York, 1907), and W. E. Leonard and S. B. S. Smith (Madison, 1942), with those of C. Giussani (Italian; Turin, 1896–8), A. Ernout and L. Robin (French; Paris, 1925–8), and the Latin commentaries of G. Wakefield (Glasgow, 1796–7) and K. Lachmann (Berlin, 1850).
Book 1
: P. M. Brown (Bristol, 1985).
Book 3
: E. J. Kenney (Cambridge, 1971).
Book 4
: J. Godwin (Warminster, 1986), R. D. Brown,
Lucretius on Love and Sex
(Leiden, 1987).
Book 5
: C. D. N. Costa (Oxford, 1984).
Book 6
: J. Godwin (Warminster, 1991).
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Classical World
, 66 (1973), 389–427, 67 (1973), 65–112.
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(Festschrift for M. Gigante, Naples, 1983), ii. 649–77.
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Lucretius, Epicurean and Poet
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The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius
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E. J. Kenney,
Lucretius
(Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics, 11; Oxford, 1977).
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Puns and Poetry in Lucretius’ De rerum natura
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D. Clay,
Lucretius and Epicurus
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Lucretius and the Late Republic
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Simulacrum et Imago
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, 99 (1968), 77–118 (in Classen).
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Simulacrum
of the
De rerum natura
’,
American Journal of Philology
, 108 (1987), 270–94.
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De rerum natura
’, in
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