Stephen Greenblatt: On the Nature of Science and the Humanities

In this episode of Houghton75 we speak with Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, about a small, very fragile book containing an ancient poem that rocked the world, and what it says about the inter-connectivity of the sciences and the humanities.

Find out more about the exhibition and Houghton Library’s 75th anniversary celebrations at http://houghton75.org/hist-75h

Music
De Rerum Natura
by Robert Xavier Rodriguez
G. Schirmer, publisher. Recorded by Albany Records (TROY1479).

Podcast Transcript and Music Notes

[Title sequence background music: Fireworks, Igor Stravinsky, performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra]

Alex Csiszar: Houghton is just this amazing place.
Deidre Lynch: It’s fascinating.
Stephen Greenblatt: It’s yours for the asking, and that is incredible!
Stephanie Sandler: Plus it’s cool.

James Capobianco (JC): Welcome to Houghton75. I’m James Capobianco.

Hannah Ferello (HF): And I’m Hannah Ferello.

[end music]

JC: Houghton Library opened its doors at Harvard in 1942. Throughout 2017, we’re celebrating the library’s world-class collections, and support of research and teaching over the last 75 years.

HF: This podcast is only one of the ways to participate in our year-long program of events that promises a unique glimpse of some of Houghton’s most treasured holdings and the way they inspire scholars and students. Visit houghton75.org for more information.

[background music: De rerum natura, Mvmt. 1 (Invocation of Venus), by Robert Xavier Rodriguez. Performed by University of Texas – Dallas’ Musica Nova Orchestra, Robert Xavier Rodriguez, director. Track 5 on the world premiere recording released by Albany Records (TROY1479).]

JC: Books become “special” or “rare” for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps it’s their age or how many copies are in existence. Sometimes it’s the binding or a unique set of illustrations. Other times it’s a famous owner, insightful marginalia, or other signs of use. For this week’s featured item, there are several reasons for its lasting importance.

HF: We spoke with Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, about a small, very fragile book containing an ancient poem that rocked the world, as well as another poem of dubious quality left behind by one of the book’s famous owners.

[end music]

Stephen Greenblatt (SG): This copy of De rerum natura was printed in 1620 in Amsterdam. It is a genuine pocket book, that is to say something you could slip into your pocket. There were many editions of Lucretius at this point, many of which had elaborate commentaries. This doesn’t have a commentary, it’s the text itself. And it’s remarkable for a number of reasons, but perhaps most of all because it was owned by Shakespeare’s friend and rival, the playwright and poet Ben Jonson.

Ben Jonson seems to have been responsible for the damage to this book, though we can’t be sure. Someone in any case has spilled ink and possibly acid, and possibly acid in the act of making ink. People used to read in the Renaissance with pen in hand, and sometimes you had to make more ink which you did by mixing lamp black and acid and various things, and someone spilled something that has damaged the pages. Ben Jonson liked to drink heavily. He might have been in the tavern with his friends and spilled it, tried to brush it off, but it’s damaged the pages. At the very back of this book, there’s evidence of the peculiar occasion in which at least it once was read and exhibited because Jonson and his friends, perhaps, have written a poem. Not a very good poem, but in rhymed doggerel couplets, against Puritans.

This is a fascinating record of Ben Jonson’s interest in Latin poetry. Jonson famously said that Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek. He was extremely proud of his own large Latin and Greek, and with good reason. He was a bricklayer’s son who had made himself a very learned man. In the early 17th century, in 1620, still relatively few people had read this poem. You had to have lots of Latin, and you had to have lots of interest in a very disturbing account of the universe.

JC: From Professor Greenblatt’s brief description, it’s clear there is much we can learn from this single volume. But let’s set aside the object of the book itself for now, and examine the contents. What is this ancient poem, De rerum natura, and why was it so controversial?

[end music]

SG: This great poem was written by a Latin poet who lived at the time, roughly, of Julius Caesar, named Lucretius. We don’t know very much about him at all. What we do know is that he wrote this remarkable, long poem in Latin hexameters about the nature of the physical universe. The poem fell out of circulation, ceased to be discussed for a very, very long time though it was in its initial generation celebrated, but it disappeared from view. It was only in the early 15th century, in 1417 to be exact, that a papal bureaucrat and book hunter found a manuscript copy that enabled him to return it to circulation, and from that initial circulation it got into print in various countries. It wasn’t translated into English until later than this, but people with good Latin could read it.

It was a book that challenged the fundamental views of the universe that virtually everyone at the time of Jonson and his contemporaries had. It argued that if there were gods, the gods were not interested in human life, they won’t listen to our prayers, they’re not interested in punishing or rewarding us, that the universe is purely physical – it’s a matter of atoms and emptiness and nothing else, and it’s the clashing, the banging and connecting and disconnecting of those atoms over an infinite amount of time that has brought into being and illuminated everything that we know. That includes other species, some of which may have existed before we existed and have become extinct. That includes ourselves. That includes everything. This was a not a view, as you can imagine, that was wildly popular among Christians, or for that matter among Jews or Muslims, and therefore it was a book that was essentially subversive and, in fact, dangerous to discuss its central propositions too openly.

[background music: De rerum natura, Mvmt. 2 (Ricercare), by Robert Xavier Rodriguez. Performed by University of Texas – Dallas’ Musica Nova Orchestra, Robert Xavier Rodriguez, director. Track 6 on the world premiere recording released by Albany Records (TROY1479).]

HF: This poem was considered offensive by a large portion of the population. Yet despite its controversial nature, it was allowed to circulate and even became popular in certain circles!

JC: Still, readers had to take care not to let their appreciation of the poem be mistaken as personal support or adoption of the poem’s central claims. As we learned, proclaiming the poem’s ideas as truth could be a costly decision.

[end music]

SG: The book was allowed to circulate despite its subversiveness for a couple of reasons, the essential reason being that it was written before Christianity. It was written around 50 before the common era, and therefore it received the peculiar kind of quasi-pass that pagan literature received in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. That is to say, it was valued for its remarkable Latin. It’s written in incredibly beautiful Latin. It was mined for its vocabulary and also interesting information about lightning, thunder, various features of the natural world. Its fundamental principles were bracketed or dismissed by most people as pagan insanity or ignorance before the revelation of the truth with the coming of Jesus, and therefore it was allowed to circulate. But if you proposed any of its fundamental ideas as your own you could get in tremendously serious trouble, as a succession of people, most famously the Dominican Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome in 1600 for espousing as his own views some of the ideas that Lucretius wrote in his poem.

[musical interlude: De rerum natura, Mvmt. 2 (Ricercare), by Robert Xavier Rodriguez. Performed by University of Texas – Dallas’ Musica Nova Orchestra, Robert Xavier Rodriguez, director. Track 6 on the world premiere recording released by Albany Records (TROY1479).]

SG: It took a very long time before any of the fundamental views of the universe – the randomness of the connections and disconnections of the atoms, the infinite amount of time, the absence of divine providence, the complete absence of punishment or reward in the afterlife – it took a very long time before those views could be circulated openly. It wasn’t until the 18th century that it became less dangerous to have these views as your own. And in fact we know that, among others, Thomas Jefferson loved this poem and had many copies of it in Monticello.

It wasn’t until the 19th century with Darwin, and particularly with Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, that one essential idea in this work – which was the idea of extinction, survival of the fittest, the possibility that creatures existed and could continue to exist only if they were able to find nourishment and reproduce – that that idea became acceptable for circulation. And even now Darwin’s core idea, which was already articulated 2000 years ago in Lucretius, is still controversial in some quarters.

[background music: De rerum natura, Mvmt. 3 (Variations: Skolion of Seikilos), by Robert Xavier Rodriguez. Performed by University of Texas – Dallas’ Musica Nova Orchestra, Robert Xavier Rodriguez, director. Track 7 on the world premiere recording released by Albany Records (TROY1479).]

JC: It’s amazing to think that today’s evolutionary biology can be traced back to a poem from ancient Roman times. Our “new” discoveries are really confirmations of what Lucretius proposed over 2000 years ago!

HF: Actually, some portions of modern evolutionary theory have their roots even earlier than Lucretius, going back to the Greek philosopher Epicurus! Professor Greenblatt explained the surprising connections between Lucretius, Darwin, Ben Jonson, and Epicurus.

[end music]

SG: Lucretius thought as now evolutionary biology thinks that there are random mutations. Those mutations can lead to failures, but they can also, rarely but it can happen, that they can lead to successes. The successes are for those creatures that can for at least a certain period of time, nothing lasts forever Lucretius thought, but for a certain period of time these creatures could compete for food and can reproduce and therefore survive as a species. That’s already fully articulated in De rerum natura 2000 years ago. It came out of the work of the Greek philosopher even earlier than Lucretius, Epicurus.

One of the interesting things about this copy of Lucretius having belonged to Ben Jonson is that one of Jonson’s most famous characters is the character he calls Sir Epicure Mammon. Sir Epicure Mammon is an embodiment of all of those qualities that traditionally were associated by the opponents of the Greek philosopher Epicurus with Epicureanism. Fantasies of enormous eating and drinking, a kind of appetite for pleasure that is without bounds. This is not actually true of Epicurus or Epicureanism as we now understand it, but it was what people thought. And it’s interesting that Jonson, who possessed this copy, who knew this poem, nonetheless floated in one of his most popular and marvelous plays, The Alchemist, the very traditional idea of what Epicureanism was all about.

[background music: De rerum natura, Mvmt. 4 (Scherzo), by Robert Xavier Rodriguez. Performed by University of Texas – Dallas’ Musica Nova Orchestra, Robert Xavier Rodriguez, director. Track 8 on the world premiere recording released by Albany Records (TROY1479).]

JC: One of the fascinating aspects of De rerum natura is its form. We’ve mentioned it several times already, but take a second to really think about it. It’s a scientific poem!

HF: In a society that views literature and biology as unrelated disciplines, this poem holds a unique position and can tell us a great deal about the historical relationship between the arts and the sciences.

[end music]

SG: Among the many things that fascinates me about this marvelous poem, in addition to the fact that it’s simply beautiful in itself, is that it conveys, I think, to a larger world the fact that the boundary that we draw between the humanities, poetry in particular, and the sciences is neither necessary nor, for long periods of time in the history of the world, real. That actually they interact in extremely important ways. And this particular poem had a vital role to play in the long-term development of thinking in physics, in evolutionary biology, and in our philosophical sense of how the universe, in the material sense, is made. And it comes from a Latin poem that was forgotten for many centuries and then came back.

It’s, for me, very important, especially now because we’re so queasy about the role of the humanities, about what poetry can do, about its relative position in relation to STEM subjects and so forth. It’s good to be reminded that actually it’s just not true. And this poem is one of many proofs of that.

HF: Towards the end of our conversation, we turned to a newer corner of Professor Greenblatt’s research. This time, we looked at a book that, instead of contradicting the notion of creation and other religious tenets, sought to prove their accuracy through science.

[end music]

SG: This is a remarkable book called the Die Physica sacra by a Swiss professor named Johann Jakob Scheuchzer. Scheuchzer was one of those remarkable figures in the 18th century who was poised in what is to us an impossible and uncomfortable way between faith and science. He believed deeply in the literal truth of the Bible, and he believed that the Bible was an infallible guide to the actual nature of the physical universe. He cut his teeth as a scholar, and in fact as an expert, on Noah’s ark, a story that he took, again, literally and thought a lot about in relation to the creatures who perished in the ark. And for Scheuchzer, that universal deluge was the key to the phenomenon that was increasingly bothering people in the 18th century; how to account for those fossils.

He was a great fossil collector. He had one of the great fossil collections in the world in the 18th century. But he became famous for identifying what he thought was the fossil of an early human killed in the deluge. The fossil was very small and, it seemed to him, quite revealing. And it was for a long time believed that he might be onto something, that this might be the fossil of a human that was killed in the deluge. And it wasn’t until Cuvier, I think, in the late 18th century that it was identified as a large, extinct species of salamander.

Scheuchzer, in this Physica sacra, this Kupfer-bibel, prints the Bible and then keeps stopping along the way and associating it with plates and with text that tries to explain how, from the biblical account, the account in Genesis, you can actually learn essential features of the universe and explain also how things we know about the universe must have featured in the Bible account.

[background music: De rerum natura, Mvmt. 6 (Fanfare & Cadenza), by Robert Xavier Rodriguez. Performed by University of Texas – Dallas’ Musica Nova Orchestra, Robert Xavier Rodriguez, director. Track 10 on the world premiere recording released by Albany Records (TROY1479).]

JC: We’d like to thank Professor Stephen Greenblatt for joining us to discuss his work on these important literary and scientific works. They have been a great reminder of the interconnectivity of the sciences and the humanities.

HF: The music for this episode was De Rerum Natura, a symphonic tone poem by Robert Xavier Rodriguez based Lucretius’ work. It was commissioned by the University of Texas at Dallas
for the opening of the Edith O’Donnell Arts & Technology Building. You can learn more about this piece and other compositions by Mr. Rodriguez at robertxavierrodriguez.com. Our thanks to Mr. Rodriguez, Albany Records, and G. Schirmer, Inc. for use of the recording.

JC: To view Ben Jonson’s damaged copy of De rerum natura up close, as well as other fascinating objects from Houghton collections, visit HIST75H: A Masterclass on Houghton Library. This online exhibition of faculty selected items is available at houghton75.org.

HF: Podcast transcripts and detailed music notes are also available online at houghton75.org/podcast.

JC: Thanks for listening, and we hope you will join us next time here at Houghton75.

[music continues to end]

Stephen Greenblatt: On the Nature of Science and the Humanities

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