Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied.
De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) Must read 'On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius':
That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, 'On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius'—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.
His aim was to free the Roman world from its two great terrors – the gods and death. Lucretius argues that the gods are not actively involved in life, so need not be appeased; and that death is the end of everything human – body and soul – and therefore should not be feared. On the Nature of Things is a long celebration of the philosophy of Epicurus, a view of life which claims that all natural phenomena are to be understood in terms of the movements and combinations of material atoms. From this it flows that gods play no role in natural events or human affairs and have nothing to do with creating or sustaining the world, that the immortality of the soul is a myth fabricated by traditional religions for their own absurd and cruel purposes, and that the highest goal of life is the avoidance of unnecessary pain and the pursuit of appropriate pleasure, especially through contemplation. The poem is thus a long, impassioned plea for what we would now call classical humanism.
The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson. Lucretius was born in 99 BC, and 'On the Nature of Things' is his only surviving work. Lucretius may not rank among those who have contributed important theories to science, he ranks in the forefront of those who have encouraged later thinkers to adopt a materialistic vision of the world and to base their lives on the values of classical humanism.
'Epicurus maintained that the unhappiness and degradation of humankind arose largely from the dread which they entertained of the power of the gods, from terror of their wrath, which was supposed to be displayed by the misfortunes inflicted in this life, and by the everlasting tortures which were the lot of the guilty in a future state, or where these feelings were not strongly developed, from a vague dread of gloom and misery after death. To remove these fears, and thus to establish tranquillity in the heart, was the purpose of his teaching.
Thus the Gods, whose existence he did not deny, lived forevermore in the enjoyment of absolute peace, strangers to all the passions, desires, and fears, which agitate the human heart, totally indifferent to the world and its inhabitants, unmoved alike by their virtues and their crimes. To prove this position he called upon the atomism of Democritus, by which he sought to demonstrate that the material universe was formed not by a Supreme Being, but by the mixing of elemental particles which had existed from all eternity governed by certain simple laws. The task undertaken by Lucretius was to clearly state and fully develop these views in an attractive form; his work being an attempt to show that everything in nature can be explained by natural laws without the need for the intervention of divine beings.' Ramsay, 1867, pp. 829–30
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