Philosopher · Antiquity
Lucretius
c. 99–c. 55 BC · Epicurean atomism
A Roman Epicurean poet who died before Christ; Lactantius and Jerome attacked him, Poggio's rediscovery of his poem in 1417 fed Renaissance and Enlightenment unbelief, and Cardinal de Polignac answered him in Latin verse.
De rerum natura, his one work, sets out Epicurus's physics and ethics in six books of Latin hexameters: nothing comes from nothing, all is atoms and void, worlds form and dissolve by chance and the swerve of atoms, which also saves free will from fate; the soul is a fine body that dies with the body, so death is nothing to us; the gods exist in untroubled bliss and neither made nor govern the world. Religio, which drove Agamemnon to kill Iphigenia, is the chief source of human terror, and the poem is a therapy for the fear of death and of the gods. Book V traces civilization from brutish beginnings through compacts of justice to the arts, and Book IV treats passionate love as a disease the wise man avoids.
Why he matters: He is the ancestor of every materialism the Church has answered, from Gassendi's Catholic revival of atomism to modern naturalism; Lactantius in the Divine Institutes and Jerome in his Chronicle made him a byword, Dante put Epicurus's followers in the sixth circle, and Dei Filius ch. 1 on a world “governed by providence” is written against a cosmos of chance. The poem's honesty about death is a better interlocutor for the Resurrection than any shallow optimism.
Where to be careful
His denial of creation, providence and the immortal soul contradicts Lateran IV, Dei Filius and Lateran V, and his therapy for the fear of death rests on the soul's annihilation (Benedictus Deus 1336). What remains is a real piety toward nature's order, the ideal of a life without greed or terror, and a moral critique of superstition that Augustine, on different grounds, shared.
Reading
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On the Nature of ThingsLucretius · Book III on the mortal soul; Book V on the origins of the world and of society.
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Lucretius on Death and Anxiety: Poetry and Philosophy in De Rerum NaturaCharles Segal · A study of the poem as therapy for the fear of death.
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Anti-Lucretius, or On God and NatureMelchior de Polignac · The eighteenth-century cardinal's reply in Latin hexameters.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.