The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
I enjoyed Professor Greenblatt’s last book, WILL IN THE WORLD: HOW SHAKESPEARE BECAME SHAKESPEARE enormously but his latest volume, not so much. THE SWERVE is part an historical detective story, part philosophical inquiry, and part celebration of the modern secular culture, with Man shorn of his mistaken beliefs in a God who cares about him and the world and stripped of illusions about the immortality of the soul and eternals truths. Greenblatt traces the beginning of this epic transformation to the rediscovery is 1417 by a papal secretary and book hunter from Florence named Poggio Bracciolini of the Epicurean poet Lucretius’ poem “One the Nature of Things,” written in the century before Christ. Lucretius, he writes, life and the reality in which we exist are accidents, “the soul dies…there is no afterlife…all organized religions are superstitious delusions…religions are invariably cruel…the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain,” all of which (the impression is left that) Greenblatt applauds.