A Not-Burned Book Helped Create USA

Review by Bill Doughty––

Thomas Jefferson –– America’s first scientist/philosopher president –– reached for a book to hone his thinking about “the pursuit of happiness” in drafting the Declaration of Independence. The book was Titus Lucretius Carus’s “De rerum natura,” “On the Nature of Things” (c 60 BCE).

On his bookshelf Jefferson had five copies of Lucretius’s homage to Epicureanism, a philosophy promoting freedom from fear, including fear from death. The book focuses on enjoyment of life, especially based in reason and critical thinking.

It’s remarkable that copies of “On the Nature of Things” made it through the purge of book burnings in Europe during the Inquisition and Dark Ages and then made its way into Jefferson’s hands centuries later. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stephen Greenblatt tells how the book, as well as its powerful messages, survived in “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).

This is a book about courage. The courage to face fears to find –– and accept –– truth.

In that sense, it meets the criteria laid out by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. M. M. Gilday on the Navy’s Professional Reading Program website, “Read Well to Lead Well.” In order “to outthink our competitors, we must study and apply lessons we’ve learned from our past, Gilday says. It is critically important for our Navy to be a learning organization. And one of the very best ways to do that is to foster an environment where every Sailor deepens their level of understanding and learning.”

Deeper understanding comes, in part, through studying history. While “Swerve” will likely never be part of a CNO’s NPRP list, it certainly dovetails with some of the titles endorsed by Navy and Marine Corps leaders like Mullen, Mattis, Stavridis, and Richardson to enhance critical thinking. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley encourages reading books about history and philosophy and learning the perspectives of others.

In “Swerve,” Greenblatt explores the earliest Western seeds of critical thinking from Ancient Greece, how those seeds took root in the Roman Empire, and what it took to reap a harvest of knowledge centuries ago, eventually informing humanists like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. Epicurus was one of the seed planters.

Jefferson statue at U.S. State Department (Sgt. Amber I. Smith)

Jefferson considered Greek philosopher Epicurus his muse: “I am,” he wrote, “an Epicurean.” Roman Lucretius reached back to Epicurus and another philosopher, Democritus, for his inspiration too.

Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” amazingly explores concepts of atoms, chaos theory, and natural selection –– all modern accepted theories of life, science, and laws of the universe. Epicurus and Democritus conceived that all matter was made of invisible, indestructible, and infinite particles. Those ancient Greek thinkers called the tiny particles “atoms.”

While the power of atoms can cause fear, understanding of atoms can be a joy, not just to nuclear engineers, but to anyone who wants the intellectual freedom of knowledge and wisdom. From Greenblatt’s “Swerve”:

“In constant motion, atoms collide with each other, Epicurus reasoned, and in certain circumstances, they form larger and larger bodies. The largest observable bodies –– the sun and the moon –– are made of atoms, just as are human beings and water-flies and grains of sand. There are no supercategories of matter; no hierarchy of elements. Heavenly bodies are not divine beings who shape our destiny for good or ill, nor do they move through the void under the guidance of gods: they are simply part of the natural order, enormous structures of atoms subject to the same principles of creation and destruction that govern everything that exists. And if the natural order is unimaginably vast and complex, it is nonetheless possible to understand something of its basic constitutive elements and its universal laws. Indeed, such understanding is one of human life’s deepest pleasures.

This pleasure is perhaps the key to comprehending the powerful impact of Epicurus’s philosophy: it was as if he unlocked for his followers an inexhaustible source of gratification hidden within Democritus’s atoms … And the enlightenment he offered did not require sustained scientific inquiry. You did not need a detailed grasp of the actual laws of the physical universe; you needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence –– atoms and void and nothing else –– your life will change. You will no longer fear Jove’s wrath, whenever you hear a peal of thunder, or suspect that someone has offended Apollo, whenever there is an outbreak of influenza. And you will be freed from a terrible affliction –– what Hamlet, many centuries later, described as ‘the dread of something after death,/The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns.’”

Lucretius

Lucretius wrote “On the Nature of Things” in Latin hexameters. His poetry is rich with “verbal textures,” “subtle rhythms,” and “cunning precision and poignancy of its imagery,” according to Greenblatt, who takes us back not only to Greece and Rome, but also 15th century Germany and England. We meet characters like reformer priest Jan Hus, theologian Jerome of Prague, and Dominican friar Giordano Bruno. All three were burned at the stake for heresy against the Church.

Yet, despite people- and book-burnings, Lucretius’s enlightened work survived destruction. That was thanks to people like calligrapher Poggio Bracciolini, the fascinating hero of this story, who worked for a disgraced flamboyant pope who was eventually imprisoned. Poggio’s rescue of “On the Nature of Things” is fraught with intrigue in a time of great superstition, persecution, torture, and death to nonbelievers. That the book survived “is something one could be tempted to call a miracle.”

Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," inspired by Lucretius: "For you the ocean levels laugh, the sky is calmed and glows with diffused radiance."

“On the Nature of Things” and Lucretian love of beauty and pleasure inspired other great thinkers: Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Einstein, among hundreds of artists during the Renaissance, including Botticelli.

Freedom in art and through reason became an antidote to a “toxic form of superstition, combining in equal measure absurd arrogance and absurd fear.”

Lucretius embraced science and cold reality of the laws of nature. He envisioned unexpected, unpredictable movement of atoms and codes within matter –– the “swerve.” We see in his philosophy, a garden of ideas about relativity, chaos theory, DNA, natural selection, and the punctuated equilibrium mechanism for evolution. His science wasn’t perfect, but it was perfectly forward-thinking for his time.

While the book and philosophies it describes are deeply rooted in Western thought, there are stunning similarities to Eastern thinking in Epicureanism and its contemporaneous philosophy Stoicism. According to Professor Richard Jenkyns, Epicureanism, “often caricatured as a religion of sensuous self-indulgence, is in reality rather austere.” Jenkyns wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics “The Nature of Things” by Lucretius (translated by A.E. Stallings, 2007), “If you were looking for an analogy in modern spirituality, you might turn to Buddhism.”

Epicurus

At points in Western history, before and even after Epicurus and Lucretius, people generally believed the sun revolved around the earth, that the earth and sun would last forever, and that humans were given “dominion” over the earth and therefore had a right to plunder the planet and damage the environment.

“In a universe so constituted, Lucretius argued, there is no reason to think that the earth or its inhabitants occupy a central place, no reason to set humans apart from all other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the gods, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no justification for dreams of limitless power or perfect security, no rationale for wars of conquest or self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature, no escape from the constant making and unmaking and remaking of forms. On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world.”

In the current era of conspiracies, insurgencies, hubris, and questioning of norms and rules, there is great relevancy in the ancient insights of Epicurus and Lucretius: happiness over anger, pleasure over pain, love over hate.

Today “Epicurean” has come to identify a love of beauty and sensual pleasure in living and especially in food. U.S. Navy chefs and cooks have competed in Epicurean culinary competitions, for example.

Naval Hospital Bremerton's Culinary Specialist 2nd Class Anh Vu and Culinary Specialist 3rd Class Timothy Mitchell participate in the Battling Chef challenge in the Armed Forces Culinary Arts Competition, May 4, 2019, an epicurean event with culinary specialists from varied service branches showcasing their skills in such categories as desserts, garnish displays, chili, gumbo, wings, ribs, gourmet burgers, and a Battling Chef challenge to a panel of judges. (Douglas H Stutz)

Epicurus and Lucretius set the table, so to speak, for a harvest of new ideas that would lead to a Declaration of Independence and the phrase, “pursuit of happiness” as a right later to be guaranteed in the Constitution.

Jefferson, a dedicated botanist, saw the wisdom of Epicurean insights planted in Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things” and how those liberating ideas could grow a living democracy –– a united republic –– and a government of “We the People.”

The Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon marches in front of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial , April 12, 2014. (Sgt. Bryan Nygaard)

Of interest to SECNAVs and CNOs: Jefferson also imagined a global maritime strategy for the new nation. He envisioned the development of submarines. And he deployed the first American naval expeditionary force with both Sailors and Marines to fight terrorism overseas.

Jefferson’s ideas of nature –– one of his favorite words, and a word he frequently capitalized as Nature –– led eventually to emancipation and the expansion of civil rights. According to scholar Charles A. Miller in “Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), “The natural rights doctrines of the antislavery movement sprang directly from the Declaration of Independence.”

Although Jefferson had his own personal ethics issues, especially about equality and slavery, he can be seen as a citizen of his time, where ideas of freedom often outran the realities of culture and society. Yet he helped create a country where Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms could grow; autocracy, authoritarianism and book-burning could be rejected; beauty can be appreciated and the “pursuit of happiness” could flourish.

(A post about "On the Nature of Things" –– "De rerum natura" –– follows this blogpost.