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Lucretius on Death and Anxiety
Poetry and Philosophy in De Rerum Natura
By Charles Segal PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06826-8
CHAPTER 1
LUCRETIUS'S ADEQUACY TO THE FEAR OF DEATH: LOGIC, POETRY, AND EMOTION
For Lucretius, death both is the greatest anxiety and embodies the greatest mode of anxiety. In one of the highest tributes that one ancient poet offers to another, Virgil seems to recognize this fact. Applying Lucretius's own encomium on Epicurus to the poet himself, Virgil congratulates his predecessor not only on "knowing the causes of things"—that is, explaining the workings of nature in a rational, scientific way—but also on trampling underfoot "all fears, and the doom against which no prayer avails, and the roar of greedy Acheron" (Georgics 2.490–92):
felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas
atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari.
The young Virgil was both an Epicurean and a reader of Lucretius (as we see from Eclogue 6.31–40); and when he turns in the next lines of the Georgics from fear to his own delight in the gods of the countryside and the pastoral demigods Pan, Sylvanus, and the Nymphs, he perhaps implies that Lucretius's heavy toil has freed him to enjoy this happier side of nature (Georgics 2.493–94):
fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes,
Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores.
(Happy too is that man who knows the gods of the country, Pan and old Silvanus and the sister Nymphs.)
Be this as it may, Virgil clearly understands that the central theme of the De Rerum Natura is the struggle against anxiety and particularly anxiety toward death.
This insight of Lucretius's greatest reader also underlies the present study. Few poets in Latin deal more powerfully with death. Few also so beautifully convey their joy in the vital energies of the world as these pervade even the tiniest movements in nature. What then is the relation between Lucretius's philosophy and the extraordinary expressiveness of his poetry? Studies of Lucretius over the last quarter-century have shown that his poetic style is not merely the honey that coats the bitter taste of philosophy, in his own rather self-deprecating figure (1.936–50), but itself is an essential element in his argument. It remains, however, to integrate his poetry of death and war into the overall appreciation of his poetry of life and happiness, and that is the task of the present book.
From Statius and Saint Jerome on to Tennyson and our own time, Lucretius has fascinated readers at least as much for his contradictions as for his consistencies. An exponent of a philosophy whose goal is serenity, he exults in emotional intensity, what Statius called docti furor arduus Lucreti, "the steep madness of learned Lucretius" (Silvae 2.7.76). Committed to the ideal of peace in the soul, he writes extraordinarily detailed accounts of violence. War is the basis of many of his most powerful images, including one of the poem's controlling metaphors, the battle between life and death. Closely following Epicurus, he advocates a calm objectivity and impersonality in viewing death; yet he has a vivid sympathy for birth, nurture, and growth. Scornful of conventional beliefs in the gods, Lucretius will appear to many readers to be in some sense a religious spirit. One will think immediately of his celebration of the blessed abode of the gods and his awe at the vision of infinity in the proem of book 3 or his description of the majesty of the heavens in book 5, with its "solemn constellations of the sky's night-wandering torches and the flames that fly" (5.1188–93).
Like other Hellenistic philosophers, Epicurus aims at achieving a godlike invulnerability. Lucretius, on the other hand, has the Roman concreteness about the practical realities of life and a poet's appreciation of the rich and disturbing physicality of the world around us. The philosopher George Santayana long ago put his finger on the weakness in Epicurus's treatment of the fear of death. Epicurus, he suggested, did not confront "the radical fear of death," of which the driving force is the love of life:
Epicurus, who feared life, seems to have missed ... the primordial and colossal force he was fighting against. Had he perceived that force, he would have been obliged to meet it in a more radical way.... The love of life is not something rational or founded on experience of life. It is something antecedent and spontaneous. It is that Venus Genetrix which covers the earth with its flora and fauna. It teaches every animal to seek its food and its mate, and to protect its offspring; as also to resist or fly from all injury to the body, and most of all from threatened death.
Modern interpreters may demur at this certainty about Epicurus's fear of life, but few will disagree on Lucretius's enthusiasm for Venus Genetrix and all that she embodies. Indeed, the rhetoric of this passage seems itself inspired by Lucretius's own opening invocation to Venus, Aeneadum genetrix.
Other tensions may be due to unresolved issues within Epicureanism itself. As Martha Nussbaum observes, the Epicurean voice of nature urges us to accept the limits of our mortality; but another voice, ultimately echoing the Platonic and Aristotelian praise of the life of the intellect, confers on the wise man an aura of quasi-religious transcendence, albeit within this life. Thus Epicurus ends his Letter to Menoeceus (D.L. 10.135) with the exhortation to meditate on his precepts day and night, for in this way "you will never suffer disturbance sleeping or waking, but you will live as a god among men; for one who lives amid eternal goods is not like a mortal creature."
On the one hand, Epicurus would have us accept the material basis of our life in this fragile world of continual atomic dissolution and renewal. On the other hand, he has us look to the gods, in their serene and remote indifference, as eternal models of the highest peace, as we see them in the proem to Lucretius's third book. To put the contrast a little differently, as a creation of impersonal physical processes, life is of no particular concern to the universe; but from the point of view of the human consciousness that it brings into being, it is indeed of the highest value. This tension, as one would expect, is strong in Lucretius, with his passionately engaged vitalism; and one of its manifestations, as we shall see, is an approach to death that is more personal and emotional than anything in Epicurus's extant writings.
If, in certain areas, Lucretius has his own way of interpreting Epicureanism, this does not mean that he is deeply divided against himself. Epicurean science does for him something analogous to what the heroic tradition does for Homer. As in the case of the Homeric simile, the unifying frame of a larger system encourages and legitimizes observations of everyday experience without the loss of poetic elevation or purpose. Lucretius drew from Epicurus an expansive overview of nature at once systematic and morally engaged, enthusiastic and precise, all-encompassing, yet attentive to the smallest detail.
While the ethics of Epicurus gave him a high moral aim—nothing less than saving mankind from suffering and unhappiness—the physics provided a model of nature both grand in its infinity and intelligible to human reason. Because of the unity of the atomic processes that are the same for every phenomenon of the world, all of nature can be perceived in its permanence, coherence, and interconnectedness. Thus the human body and the universe are linked by their common origins in the movements of atom and void, and their different lives and deaths illuminate one another.
Through Epicurean physics, Lucretius becomes sensitized to a range of phenomena that had rarely found its way into the high style of Latin hexameter poetry: the specks of dust in a sunbeam, or the iridescence in a pigeon's feathers, or the splendor of a peacock's tail, or clothes drying, or the reflected light from an awning in the theater, or the sensation of cold on the teeth. His zeal to prove and explain the workings of the invisible atomic world leads him to daring analogies and elicits brilliant observations of nature. The notion of infinity, whether of worlds, size, or number, stimulates his visual imagination. Thus we have accounts of elephants and wild beasts in battle, cloud formations and comets, seashells and the sloughed skins of snakes or cicadas. He can convey the grandeur of space and the vastness of time as almost no other Latin poet. He heroizes Epicurus for his journey to the flaming walls of the world (1.69–77), but he himself repeatedly looks at the infinite reaches of space and conveys his awe at the breadth and power of the vision, whether in a general reflection on the "deep and vast immensity" that lies open before him or in his personal response of "divine pleasure and shivering awe" at Epicurus's uncovering of nature's secrets (1.957, 3.28–30).
The world for Lucretius is a place of marvels. His wonder even borders on a sense of the sacred. Venus, personification of the life force that he so admires, has a "sacred body" as she covers Mars in her embrace (corpore sancto, 1.38). Sicily holds among its volcanic fires and subterranean roars "nothing more glorious nor more sacred and wondrous and dear" than the philosopher Empedocles (nec sanctum magis et mirum carumque, 1.729–30). Democritus's principles, though sometimes erroneous, are "holy" (sancta viri sententia, 3.371). His own words, he claims, are poured forth with "more holiness and far greater certainty of truth" than those of the Pythian priestess on Apollo's tripod at Delphi (5.110–12; cf. 1.736–39).
Is it surprising, then, that a poet with so developed a sense for the marvels, variety, and sanctity of life would feel toward death something less than the cool indifference counselled by Epicurus? Lucretius counselled this too, and believed his counsel (so far as one can tell). But one to whom life mattered with the intensity and passion that Lucretius everywhere exhibits might well appreciate the ordinary man's anxieties and fears. He may well have sympathized with that "radical fear of death" which, as Santayana suggests, stems from a keen, delighted, and passionate love of life.
We must not here fall into the appealing abyss of the "anti-Lucretius in Lucretius," the poet inwardly divided against himself and his doctrine. Even if he did not find in Epicurus's writings his own enthusiasm for life and living things, he found many other things. The poet who could find in the "hoped-for pleasure of sweet friendship" the inducement to stay awake for the long night vigils of poetic toil (1.140–45) would have reponded to the jubilant, almost evangelical celebration of friendship by his Master: "Friendship goes dancing around the world, announcing to us all to awaken to blessedness." He would have admired Epicurus's deathbed provision for his disciple's children. Thrilling to the awesome divinity of Epicurus's intellect, he would have been deeply touched by the closing sentence of the Epistle to Menoeceus on the quasi-divine life of the wise man, cited above.
For all of his own passion and appreciation of the irrational, Lucretius fully shares Epicurus's belief in the power of reason to explore the dark places of man's nature and nature's irrationality. In human life he identifies "a certain hidden force," vis abdita quaedam, that, like religious superstition, "crushes human affairs" and mocks man's pretensions to power and authority (5.1233–35). This "hidden force" belongs to the uncontrollable violence of nature, storms, earthquakes, tidal waves, and other disruptive phenomena of nature that Lucretius analyzes in book 6. But such a force operates in human life too, and particularly in the areas of love, death, and war—the areas of Freud's eros and thanatos.
Victorian interpreters have often yielded to the temptation of a biographical view and attributed Lucretius's absorption with death to a deep pessimism or a morbid personality. Tennyson's portrait of a great but gloomy mind struggling with incipient madness remains impressed on the English-speaking world. In the same spirit Constant Martha apostrophized, "O most sincere of poets, contemplating the force of your genius in the greatness of your ruin." For Santayana, Lucretius is a poet of "profound melancholy." Among more recent scholars, E. E. Sikes, for example, regards Lucretius as personally "obsessed" with death. To the psychiatrist Logre, Lucretius's apparently welcoming attitude toward death and his unconcern with the physical pain attending it are the perfect symptoms of a suicidal personality. Luciano Perelli, who lays great stress on the mood of anxiety throughout the poem, sees an unconscious contradiction between Lucretius's rational, Epicurean view of death as liberation and the "obsessive form" that death assumes within the work. This obsession, he suggests, negates or at least obstructs the poet's explicit attempt to reassure his audience and instill a serene acceptance of death as part of the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], or freedom from disturbance, that is among the gifts of his espoused doctrine.
The dark strain is perhaps not to be denied; yet it is not death alone that absorbs Lucretius, but the struggle between life and death. If he shows us the destruction of our world and our selves, he also reminds us of the indestructibility of the atoms that will combine into new worlds. If he depicts the aggressive violence and self-destructiveness of mankind, his aim is to provide the medicines of reason and understanding that can turn us to a better use of our lives.
That man is educable by rational instruction is the underlying assumption of Lucretius's poem. He drew from the Master the optimistic belief that philosophy could revolutionize our lives and bring us almost godlike happiness (cf. 3.319–22). Epicurus's own godlike divinity is both a model and an incentive (cf. 3.3–30, 5.7–12 and 49–57). But man is also subject to irrational fears and hopes and may "wander" or stray from the path of reason (2.9–10). Hence the repeated pleas to the reader to exert himself and join with the poet in the battle against the darkness of ignorance and superstition. In following in the footsteps of his master and alleviating human suffering by bringing reason where unreason was, he is also following the humane tradition of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the healing of souls in Greek philosophy. But as a poet he is also keenly aware of how deep-seated is the irrational in us all; and he possesses a unique power of imagination and visual representation in exposing that irrationality.
Epicurus posits an intimate relation between the sufferings of the body and of the mind that follows from the continuum of the physical processes, extending from the visible to the invisible. Epicurus's great predecessor, Democritus, drew an explicit parallel between the healing of bodily ills and healing the soul (68 B31 and B288 Diels-Kranz). Epicurus, perhaps intentionally, echoes his words (frag. 221 Usener). Before Democritus, Greek tragedy explored medical analogies for emotional or psychological disturbances. Lucretius himself assumes the doctor's role when he would apply the honey of poetry to the wormwood medicine of his doctrine (1.936–38, repeated in 4.11–13). He may be drawing as much upon the literary tradition as on the atomic theory (cf. the similar metaphor in Plutarch's On the Education of Children 18.13D). But he is firmly within the tradition of atomism, at least as far as Democritus and Epicurus are concerned, in this shading over of his argument in book 3 from the physiological bases of the soul's maladies to ethical and psychological concerns. Alongside the proofs of the soul's physical weaknesses and therefore mortality, according to the atomic theory, there is much in the first part of book 3 that belongs to the ancient "medicine of the soul," the Democritean [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].
Lucretius's treatment not just of death but of the fear of death brings together the two strongest directions in the De Rerum Natura: the ethical-emotional [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of the soul through Epicurean science and the poetic tradition that offers wisdom and consolation in the face of man's greatest fear and worst ill. The latter is rooted in the compassion for the mortal condition as a whole in both epic and didactic hexameter poetry, where the subjection to mortality constitutes the defining characteristic of the human race. The combination of common-sense argumentation, the "hard" evidence of Epicurean science, and the humane wisdom and authority of an ancient poetic tradition enables him to meet diverse anxieties at many levels and for many different kinds of readers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lucretius on Death and Anxiety by Charles Segal. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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