Justified True Belief

(●) The Roman poet who put the case for a universe without gods into verse, and put it so well that Christians have been answering him ever since. + Almost every serious objection a modern skeptic raises was written down, in Latin hexameters (the long six-beat line of epic poetry), before the birth of Christ. The universe is made of matter and empty space and nothing else. It was not designed, and its cruelties show it. The soul is part of the body and dies with it, so there is nothing after death to fear or to hope for. Religion is not the cure for human misery; it is one of its causes. Lucretius argued all of that in a single poem of about 7,400 lines, and he argued it beautifully. He is the reason the Epicurean school matters to Christian readers. Epicurus himself wrote in Greek prose, and most of what he wrote is lost. Lucretius took that philosophy, gave it a Roman voice and an epic meter, and produced the only complete statement of ancient materialism (the view that matter in motion is all there is) that survives from the ancient world. When Paul stood in Athens and found Epicurean philosophers in his audience (Acts 17:18), these were the ideas in the room. Here is the fact about him a reader will remember. We know essentially nothing about his life. No birthplace, no career, no attested friend except the man he dedicated the poem to, one letter from Cicero and a hostile paragraph from a Christian scholar four centuries later. The greatest Latin philosophical poem comes down to us from a man who is, historically speaking, a name on a manuscript.

(●) c. 99 BC: He was born somewhere in the Roman world, and that is very nearly the whole of what can be said. + Start with what a biographer would normally have and here does not. There is no record of where Lucretius was born, who his parents were, whether he held any office, whether he married, or how he earned his living. His three names, Titus Lucretius Carus, come to us from the manuscripts of his poem and from later writers. The Lucretii were an ancient Roman family with patrician branches, which has encouraged the guess that he was well born, and the ease with which he addresses a Roman praetor as a near equal points the same way. A praetor was a senior elected magistrate, one rung below the consuls who headed the state, with the law courts of Rome in his charge and a province to govern afterward if he wanted one. A guess is all it is. The dates attached to his name are conventions rather than records, and it is worth saying plainly where they come from, because the two late notices we have do not agree. Jerome, writing his chronicle of world history around 380 AD, put Lucretius’ birth in 94 BC and had him dead in his forty-fourth year. Donatus, in his life of the poet Virgil, says instead that Lucretius died on 15 October, the day Virgil formally came of age. That sounds exact until you follow it out: the consuls Donatus names for that year point to 55 BC, while Virgil’s own birth year, counted forward to the age of manhood, points to 53. Take the death as 55 BC, subtract the forty-four years Jerome gives him, and you get the c. 99 BC that most reference works print. Every date fixed to this life is a scholar’s reconstruction out of those few scraps.

(●) The 60s BC: He read Epicurus and did not treat him as a philosopher, but as a rescuer. + Epicurus had taught in a garden outside Athens two and a half centuries earlier, and the school he founded was still running. His diagnosis was that human beings are miserable chiefly because they are afraid: afraid of the gods, and afraid of death. His cure was physics. If you understand that the world is nothing but small hard particles moving through empty space, atoms and void, then the gods are not watching you and death is not a doorway to anything, and the fear drains out of a man the way water drains out of a cracked jar. What is startling in Lucretius is the temperature. This is not a man laying out a position; it is a man who has been let out of a cell. In the opening of his fifth book he reaches for the highest word his language has and applies it to a philosopher who denied that the gods take any interest in us at all: "a god he was, a god." An anti-religious poem that opens one of its books by deifying its teacher is a strange object, and Lucretius knew it. The point he is making is that Epicurus did for the human mind what Ceres was thanked for doing with grain and Liber with wine, and did something more necessary than either. Whether he ever studied in the Epicurean community that flourished around Naples, where the philosopher Philodemus taught and whose library was buried at Herculaneum when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, is unknown. What the poem shows is a man who had read Epicurus closely enough to argue in his voice.

(●) The 50s BC: He wrote On the Nature of Things for a Roman politician, while the republic came apart around them both. + The poem is addressed to Gaius Memmius, a Roman aristocrat who was praetor in 58 BC and governed the province of Bithynia the following year, and who is named in the first, second and fifth books and nowhere after that. He is not a promising man to hand a work of Epicurean physics to. He was a politician with literary tastes. The young poet Catullus served on his provincial staff and complained bitterly about him afterward, and in 52 BC Memmius was convicted of electoral bribery and left Italy. Whether Lucretius was writing to convert a patron, to flatter one, or to reach the wider Roman reading public over his shoulder is one of the open questions of the poem. The years matter. Lucretius says in his opening pages that he cannot work with an untroubled mind "in our country’s day of trouble," and asks Venus for peace for the Romans. Those were the years just after Catiline’s conspiracy, the plot to seize the city by force that Cicero exposed as consul in 63 BC and answered by having its ringleaders put to death without a trial. They were also the years of the alliance of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus that hollowed out the constitution, of Caesar’s legions in Gaul, and of armed gangs fighting in the streets of Rome. A poem arguing that the gods do not intervene in human affairs was written in a decade that gave a Roman little evidence they did. He wrote it in dactylic hexameter, the six-beat line of Homer and later of Virgil, and he complained about how hard it was. Greek philosophy had a vocabulary Latin simply did not have, and he had to build one, coining and stretching words for atom, void, and the swerve. Much of the technical language later Latin thinkers used was hammered out first in his verse.

(●) February 54 BC: Cicero, who disagreed with nearly every line, told his brother the poems were brilliant. + One sentence is the whole of the contemporary evidence for the man. It was written in February 54 BC, which is either a few months after the death most reference works give him or a year or two before it, depending on which of the two disputed years you take, so it reaches us from the very edge of his lifetime. Cicero, closing a letter to his brother Quintus, wrote that "the poems of Lucretius are as you say: with many flashes of genius, yet very technical," in Shuckburgh’s translation. Quintus had evidently read the poem and written home about it, and his famous brother agreed. It is worth pausing on how odd that is. Cicero was a Roman senator who thought Epicureanism corrosive to public duty and spent whole books attacking it. He believed the world showed design, that the soul survived, and that religion held a society together. Then he read the strongest possible case against all three, and told his brother it was well made. The compliment sat so badly with everything else Cicero wrote that editors worked the sentence over for generations, emending it and repunctuating it on the assumption that he could not have meant it as praise, but the words as the manuscripts give them are now generally defended and left alone. A later tradition, reported by Jerome, says Cicero went further and edited the poem for publication. Nothing in Cicero’s own surviving letters confirms it, and most scholars doubt it. Two praises and a complaint sum up the ancient reputation, and they are worth taking in order. Virgil, a generation later, echoed him constantly and wrote a line usually taken to be about him: happy is the man who could learn the causes of things. Ovid went further still and predicted that the verses of "the sublime Lucretius" would perish only on the day the world does. Quintilian, who taught rhetoric in Rome under the emperors, was the one with the complaint, and it was a schoolmaster’s: Lucretius is elegant in his own subject, but he is difficult, and no model for a young man learning to write prose. Notice what none of the three says. Not one of them says he was right. The poets who loved his verse were not, on the whole, persuaded by his physics.

(●) c. 55 BC: He died with the poem unrevised, and it went out into the world in that state. + Nobody knows how he died. The poem, though, carries the marks of a work whose author stopped before he was finished, and they are the marks anyone would recognize from clearing out the desk of someone who left in a hurry: a promise made early and never kept, the same paragraph written out twice, pages that seem to have changed places. He tells us in the fifth book that he will describe the dwellings of the gods at length, and never does. A long passage comparing his poetry to honey smeared on the rim of a medicine cup appears twice, in the first book and again at the head of the fourth, with small differences, as though he had copied it out again and had not yet decided which version to keep. And there are signs that books three and four were swapped at some stage of composition, the sort of thing a last revision would have settled one way or the other. And then there is the ending. The sixth book closes with the plague that struck Athens in 430 BC, adapted from the Greek historian Thucydides and made worse: bodies heaped in the streets, temples full of corpses, families brawling over funeral pyres. It stops there, mid-scene, with no consolation and no summary. Some readers think that is deliberate, a last hard proof that nature is indifferent and that even philosophy’s own city was not spared. Others think the poet died before he wrote the ending he meant to write. The argument has run for centuries and has never been settled.

(●) c. 380 AD: Jerome added a love potion, madness and suicide to the record, and the story stuck. + In the chronicle Jerome compiled as a Christian scholar four centuries after Lucretius died, one entry reports that the poet was driven insane by a love potion, wrote his books in the intervals between fits of madness, and killed himself in his forty-fourth year. That single sentence became the portrait. The Victorian poet Tennyson built a poem on it; painters painted it; for most of the modern period it was simply what people knew about Lucretius, the way a man can be remembered for one rumor and nothing else. There is no earlier source for any of it. Jerome does not say where he got it, and the men who read Lucretius closest to his own lifetime, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, show no trace of a scandal. Fairness requires saying that a Christian writing about the ancient world’s most eloquent enemy of religion had an obvious motive to pass along a story of madness and self-destruction, and equal fairness requires saying that motive is not proof of invention. Historians today treat it as a tradition of unknown origin and generally an untrustworthy one, and note that a poem left unrevised fits an unexpected death better than a planned suicide. The love-potion detail has a source in the air of late antiquity rather than in evidence. The Roman world believed in aphrodisiac drugs that could unhinge a man, and Lucretius had written the ancient world’s harshest attack on romantic passion, in the fourth book, calling it a wound and a madness. Turning that against him made a tidy story.

(●) 1417 AD: A papal secretary hunting for lost books found a copy in a German monastery, and the poem came back. + The Middle Ages very nearly lost him. Two ninth-century copies survived, made in Carolingian scriptoria, which were the writing rooms where monks copied books out by hand in the empire Charlemagne left behind. Scholars know the two by the shape of their pages, the Oblongus and the Quadratus, and both now sit in the university library at Leiden. Almost nobody read them. A poem denying providence, the soul and the afterlife was not what a monastic library was normally copied for, and the odds against any ancient book surviving at all were long. In the winter of 1417 an Italian named Poggio Bracciolini, a secretary to a deposed pope with time on his hands and a passion for hunting manuscripts, found a copy in a German monastery, most probably at Fulda. He could not keep it, so he had it copied and sent the copy to his friend Niccolò Niccoli in Florence, and from that transcript the poem spread through Renaissance Italy and then through Europe. What came back was a fully armed ancient case for a material universe, and it arrived in a Christian civilization that had never had to answer it. Montaigne, the French essayist, wore out his copy and quoted it a hundred times. Traces of it run through the scientific revolution, through Enlightenment France, and into the modern argument about design. Whether the rediscovery made the modern world, as some popular accounts claim, is a much larger question than the evidence will carry. That it changed the argument is not in doubt.

What He Taught

(T1) Nothing is ever made out of nothing, and the universe of atoms and empty space has no edge and no maker. + Watch a gardener in spring. Seed goes in, rain falls, and in August there are tomatoes. What there is not, ever, is a tomato appearing on bare gravel with nothing put in. Lucretius makes that ordinary observation the foundation of everything: things come from other things, always, in fixed ways, and if things could come from nothing then anything could come from anything, and men would rise out of the sea, fish out of the earth, and birds burst out of the sky. Since they never do, the first law of nature is that nothing is produced from nothing. From there he builds. The stuff things are made of must be permanent, or the wearing-down of the world would have finished long ago; so at the bottom there are particles too small to see and too hard to break, which he calls first-beginnings and which we call atoms, from the Greek for uncuttable. Between them there must be genuinely empty space, or nothing could ever move, and he points to what a reader can check: water runs through rock, food spreads through a body, sound passes through a shut door. Atoms and void, and everything else is those two arranged. Then comes the part that still stops people. If there are infinitely many atoms falling through infinite space, no boundary can be drawn anywhere. Suppose there were an edge, he says, and suppose a man walked to it and threw a spear. Either something stops the spear, in which case that something is outside your supposed edge, or it flies on, in which case you were not standing at the edge after all. Wherever you put the wall, he will ask you what happened to the spear. It is worth being clear about what that whole chain of reasoning does and does not do. It is a serious argument that the material world is eternal and self-sufficient, needing no maker to start it. It is not an argument that no god exists, and Lucretius would have been surprised to be read that way, because he thought gods existed, perfectly happy and completely uninterested in us. So the clash with Genesis is not over whether there is a divine being at all. It is over whether the universe is the kind of thing that was made.

(Q) "This terror then and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and the law of nature; the warp of whose design we shall begin with this first principle, nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by divine power." + Source: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things I, 146–150 (Munro translation). The lines that set the whole program. Fear is the disease, understanding nature is the medicine, and the first dose is the principle that nothing comes from nothing. Lucretius thought the sentence about terror and darkness worth saying again, and set it down a second, third and fourth time near the start of Books II, III and VI.

(T2) Atoms sometimes swerve, and that tiny deviation is what keeps the world from being a machine. + Picture rain falling straight down through still air, every drop on its own vertical line. No drop ever meets another, so nothing is ever built. That, Lucretius admits, is what an infinite void full of falling atoms would give you: a permanent parallel drizzle and no world. So he proposes something small and strange. At no fixed time and at no fixed place, an atom leans very slightly off its line. His word for it is the clinamen, usually Englished as the swerve, and he is careful about how small he needs it to be: the least possible, just enough to call a change of inclination, or the visible world would show us objects drifting sideways as they fall. One nudge is enough. One collision makes two, two make a cascade, and out of that comes everything. The swerve does a second job, and that one mattered more to him than the first. Epicurus had inherited from Democritus a picture in which every motion of every atom is fixed by the motion before it, so that if you knew the position of every particle in the world at one moment you could read off every human choice forever after. Philosophers call that determinism. Lucretius will not have it. He asks where, in a world like that, the power could come from by which we go where the will leads, and he answers not with a definition but with a morning at the races: the starting gates fly open, the horses are wild to go, and yet the animals do not move as fast as their own minds want, because the matter of the whole frame has to be gathered up before the limbs will follow. The beginning of motion, he says, is born in the will of the mind. Christian readers should notice that this is a philosopher fighting for something they also want. Lucretius saw that a purely mechanical universe leaves no room for a genuine decision, and he refused to pay that price. His solution has been criticized ever since, and the criticism is fair: a random jog in an atom is not obviously the same thing as a person deciding, and swapping fate for chance does not by itself hand anybody the freedom to choose. But he had put his finger on the problem, and the problem has not gone away.

(Q) "When bodies are borne downwards sheer through void by their own weights, at quite uncertain times and uncertain spots they push themselves a little from their course: you just and only just can call it a change of inclination." + Source: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things II, 217–220 (Munro translation). The swerve, introduced with a warning about how slight it has to be (T2). Here is a motion with no cause behind it, written deliberately into the foundations of nature, and there is little else like it in ancient physics. Lucretius gives the fullest account of the doctrine that survives; the rest of what we know about it comes from hostile witnesses like Cicero.

(T3) The soul is made of atoms, so it dies when the body does, and death is therefore nothing to us. + The third book is the heart of the poem and the reason Christians have argued with it for eighteen centuries. Lucretius wants to remove the fear of death, and his method is not consolation but anatomy. He divides what we call the soul in two. There is the animus, the mind, seated in the chest, which thinks and decides and feels dread; and the anima, the life-breath spread through the whole body, which carries sensation to the fingers and toes. Both, he argues, are made of exceedingly fine atoms, and he then piles up around thirty arguments that they are mortal, most of them drawn from things anyone can observe. Mind and body are born together and grow together; a child’s mind is a child’s. They sicken together: wine muddles thought, illness sets it wandering, a blow to the head puts it out entirely. Medicine works on the mind, and medicine is a physical thing acting on physical things. A limb can be lost while the person remains, so the life-breath is divisible, and what can be divided can be dissolved. Then the conclusion he has been building toward. If the soul ends at death, the person who might be harmed by death does not exist afterward to be harmed. There is no one there to miss the sunlight. And he closes the argument with a comparison that has never lost its force: you were not distressed by the centuries before you were born, and nature holds that up as a mirror of the time after you die. The force of it is worth feeling before anyone tries to answer it. The fear of extinction is real, and it visits ordinary people at two in the morning, and Lucretius is doing something kind with it as well as something clever, because the third book is written for a frightened reader rather than for a seminar. What Christian teaching denies is not that the argument is powerful. It is that the premise is true. If the soul does end when the body ends, his conclusion very nearly follows, and everything therefore turns on whether it does.

(Q) "Think too how the bygone antiquity of everlasting time before our birth was nothing to us. Nature therefore holds this up to us as a mirror of the time yet to come after our death. Is there aught in this that looks appalling, aught that wears an aspect of gloom? is it not more untroubled than any sleep?" + Source: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things III, 972–977 (Munro translation). The mirror argument, usually called the symmetry argument by philosophers, and still debated in university courses on the ethics of death. It comes just after a long speech Lucretius puts in the mouth of Nature herself, who scolds a man weeping at his own deathbed and asks him what he thinks he is losing; the mirror is the poet’s own summing up of her case (T3).

(T4) Religion is not the cure for human fear but one of its chief causes, and it has driven men to atrocities. + Twenty lines into the argument of the poem, Lucretius tells a story rather than making a claim, and it is the right way round. The Greek fleet is stuck at Aulis, becalmed, and the seers say the goddess wants a girl. Iphianassa, whom most readers know as Iphigenia, is brought to the altar by her father’s chosen men. Lucretius slows down where a lesser poet would hurry: the ribbon in her hair falling in equal lengths down each cheek, her father standing sorrowful beside the altar, the priests hiding the knife, the countrymen weeping, the girl sinking to her knees speechless with terror and getting nothing from being the first child ever to call this man father. She is carried up shaking, and instead of the wedding song she should have had at that age, she is killed so the ships can sail. Then the line that has been quoted for two thousand years. The Latin word he uses, religio, is worth teaching carefully. It does not mean what a modern reader hears. For a Roman it meant scruple, dread of the divine, the binding sense that unseen powers are watching and must be appeased. What Lucretius is attacking is the terror that priests and omens and threats of eternal punishment hold over ordinary people, and his claim is that this terror does not restrain wickedness but produces it. A frightened man will kill his daughter. Where does the fear come from? In the fifth book he gives an account, and it is the ancestor of every naturalistic explanation of religion since. People saw impressive shapes of gods in dreams, and credited them with power. They saw the sky wheel overhead in perfect order and could not account for it. They saw lightning fall on their own houses and read it as anger. Out of that, temples and altars and the whole apparatus of appeasement. Two things have to be said plainly here, and the second is the harder of them. This is not atheism as the modern world means it: Lucretius held that gods exist, in perfect tranquility, in dwellings that no wind or storm out of our world ever reaches, and he thought a man should look at them calmly and imitate their peace. And a Christian who reads the Iphigenia passage should feel its force rather than deflect it, because Scripture makes the same accusation against the same practice in harder words than Lucretius uses.

(Q) "So great the evils to which religion could prompt!" + Source: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things I, 101 (Munro translation). In Latin, tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, probably the single most quoted line of the poem and the closing blow of the Iphigenia scene (T4). Voltaire admired it; critics of religion have used it as a rallying cry ever since; and it remains the pithiest form of an objection Christians still have to answer.

(T5) The world was not made for us, and the state of it is the proof. + Of everything Lucretius wrote, this is the argument that has aged the least, and it deserves to land before anybody reaches for a reply. He starts with an audit of the planet, and he does it in the manner of a surveyor walking a property line rather than a preacher working a crowd. Take the whole surface of the earth. Mountains and forests full of dangerous animals have one share of it; rocks, swamps and the sea take another; roughly two thirds of what is left is lost to burning heat and killing frost. The remainder will grow thorns unless a man breaks his back over a hoe, and after all that labor the crop can still be burned by the sun, drowned by rain, frozen, or flattened by a storm. Then he asks why nature feeds the beasts that eat us, why the seasons bring disease, and why death comes early. And then the image he saves for last, which is the best thing in the argument. A newborn baby, he says, lies on the ground like a sailor thrown up by a cruel sea: naked, speechless, unable to do a single thing for itself, filling the room with wailing, as well it might, given what is ahead of it. Meanwhile the herds and the wild animals get up and walk. They need no rattles, no nurse’s baby talk, no changes of clothing for the seasons, no weapons, no city walls. Whatever this world was arranged for, he says, look at the creature it treats worst. The technical name for this today is the argument from poor design: not that the world shows no arrangement, but that the arrangement is too shoddy to credit to a good designer. It is a near relation of the problem of evil, the old question of why a God who is both good and able would allow a world with this much suffering in it. And it is not answered by pointing out that Lucretius was a poet, because the observations are accurate. The reply has to be a theological one. Scripture does not describe the world in its present state as the world as it was made, and it says so in language at least as bleak as his (Romans 8:20–22).

(Q) "The nature of things has by no means been made for us by divine power: so great are the defects with which it is encumbered." + Source: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things V, 195–199 (Munro translation). Lucretius says he would make this argument even if he knew nothing at all about atoms, on the evidence of the arrangement of the world by itself (T5). Lactantius quoted the lines a little earlier in the same book, where Lucretius calls it folly to say that the gods arranged the glorious nature of the world for the sake of men, and set out to answer them in his seventh book, which put a piece of the argument in front of Christian readers who had never seen the poem.

(Q) "Just as physicians when they purpose to give nauseous wormwood to children, first smear the rim round the bowl with the sweet yellow juice of honey, that the unthinking age of children may be fooled as far as the lips, and meanwhile drink up the bitter draught of wormwood and though beguiled yet not be betrayed, but rather by such means recover health and strength; so I now, since this doctrine seems generally somewhat bitter to those by whom it has not been handled, and the multitude shrinks back from it in dismay, I have resolved to set forth to you our doctrine in sweet-toned Pierian verse." + Source: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things I, 936–946 (Munro translation). Wormwood is a bitter herb, once given to children as a worm treatment; Pierian verse means poetry, from Pieria, the region the Muses were said to come from. Lucretius is explaining why a treatise on physics is written as an epic poem, and he is not embarrassed about it: the doctrine is hard to swallow, so he has sweetened the rim of the cup. Whether he was right about the physics or not, he was right about the method, and that is exactly why the church could never afford to ignore him. Plenty of ancient materialists were refuted and forgotten. This one was beautiful.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Paul met his school in Athens, and the disagreement was clear to both sides within a sentence. + Luke records that when Paul was arguing daily in the Athenian marketplace, "some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him" (Acts 17:18). The Epicureans are named in the New Testament exactly once, and that is the encounter. These were people holding the positions Lucretius had put into verse a century earlier: a material universe, gods who are supremely happy and take no interest in human affairs, and no life after death. Read the rest of the scene and the fault line is obvious. Paul quotes Greek poets to Greeks and appeals to what a person can know of God from the made world and from conscience, which theologians call general revelation, the knowledge available to anyone without a Bible. His hearers stay with him through all of it. Then he mentions that God has raised a man from the dead, and some of them sneer (Acts 17:32). For a school that had argued at length that the soul dissolves like smoke, the resurrection was not an unproven claim but an absurd one. That is worth holding on to. The dispute between the gospel and Lucretius is not a misunderstanding about words. Both sides in Athens understood each other, and both knew immediately where the break was.

(†) Lactantius answered him line by line, and by quoting him kept part of him alive. + Lactantius, a Latin rhetorician who converted and later tutored the emperor Constantine’s son, wrote the Divine Institutes in the early fourth century, the first systematic account of the Christian faith in Latin. He is the Christian writer who took Lucretius most seriously, and he did it in the most useful way available: he quoted him, then answered him. In his seventh book he sets out the Lucretian claim that it is folly to say the gods arranged the glorious nature of the world for the sake of men, and replies that Epicurus and Lucretius alike had no account of why human beings exist at all, and so could not see what the world was for. Later in the same book he takes up the case from the third book of the poem, that because soul and body are born together they must die together, and answers that the two are not alike enough for the inference to work: one is heavy, tangible and of the earth, the other is not. Whether Lactantius won those exchanges is a fair question, and modern readers often think he gets the better of the design argument and the worse of the argument about the soul. What is not in question is the compliment his method paid. He treated Lucretius as an opponent to be quoted accurately, and there is a real irony in it: during the centuries when almost nobody was reading the poem, some Latin readers met Lucretius chiefly in the pages of the Christian apologist who was trying to refute him. Jerome, by contrast, gave the ancient world its portrait of the mad poet, and that was the whole of his contribution. Arnobius, whom Jerome names as Lactantius’ own teacher, borrowed the poem’s vocabulary and manner while attacking the gods of the pagans. After that the trail thins to almost nothing. An echo of Lucretius on time still turns up three centuries later in Isidore of Seville, the Spanish bishop whose encyclopedia taught the early Middle Ages most of what it knew, and even he seems to have picked the line up at second hand from a commentary on Virgil rather than from the poem.

(†) After 1417 he became the permanent opposition, and Christian thinkers took his physics while refusing his conclusions. + The rediscovered poem put European Christians in an awkward and productive position. The physics looked promising and the theology was intolerable, and for two centuries people worked at separating them. The clearest case is Pierre Gassendi, a French Catholic priest and astronomer of the seventeenth century, who set out deliberately to rescue atomism from Epicurus. His revision kept the atoms and the void and threw out the rest: the atoms are finite in number, not infinite; they were created by God, not eternal; they do not swerve at random but move under providence; and the reasoning soul is not made of them at all. That Christianized atomism fed straight into the new science, and something close to it is in the background of Robert Boyle’s chemistry and of Isaac Newton’s corpuscles, the tiny particles Newton took light and matter to be built from. A Christian priest is one of the reasons modern physics inherited the ancient atom. Others took the whole of it. In the Enlightenment and after, Lucretius became the standard authority for a universe running without God, and the argument from the world’s defects (T5) passed by a fairly direct line into David Hume and later into Charles Darwin’s difficulties about a benevolent design. A popular modern account credits the rediscovery of this one poem with launching the modern world outright. That claim goes well past what the evidence supports, and historians of the period have said so at length. The sober version is enough: after 1417 the strongest ancient case against providence was back in circulation, in Latin verse anyone educated could read, and it has been part of the argument ever since.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: creation, the soul, the altar at Aulis, and a world he found defective. + Four breaks, and they are not all of the same kind. Two are flat contradictions, one is closer to agreement than a reader might expect, and one is genuinely hard. - Nothing from nothing. The first principle of the poem is that no thing is ever produced out of nothing by divine power (T1), and Scripture opens by saying the opposite: in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1). The New Testament puts the same claim in its sharpest form. "By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" (Hebrews 11:3). Lucretius was right that within nature things come from other things; he had no way to test whether nature itself is the kind of thing that could have a beginning, and the modern evidence that it did would have surprised him. - The soul and the mirror. If death is simply the end of the person, his mirror argument is strong (T3). Scripture denies the premise: "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). And the Christian hope is not the immortality of a soul that was never going to die anyway, which is closer to Plato than to the apostles. It is resurrection, a dead man raised bodily, and Paul stakes everything on whether it happened: "If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead" (1 Corinthians 15:19–20). That is a claim about an event, and it stands or falls as evidence, which is the ground Lucretius would have chosen. - The altar at Aulis. Here Lucretius is not the enemy of Scripture but an unexpected witness for it. His charge is that dread of the divine makes men kill their children (T4). The God of Israel says the same thing about the same practice, and says it as a horror: of those who burned their sons and daughters in the fire in the valley outside Jerusalem, he says it is a thing "which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind" (Jeremiah 7:31). The difference between the two altars is the whole difference between the religions. At Aulis a father kills his daughter to buy a favorable wind. At the center of Christianity a father gives his own Son, and no one else is asked for a child. Lucretius aimed at a religion of appeasement, and hit it. - A world with defects in it. This is the hard one, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. His audit of the earth is accurate (T5), and the crying infant on the ground is a real infant. What Christianity denies is not the observation but the inference, because Scripture does not claim that the world as we find it is the world as it was made. "The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope," and "the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now" (Romans 8:20–22). Whether that answer is adequate is one of the oldest arguments there is. What can be said is that it is not a denial of what Lucretius saw. He and Paul are looking at the same wrecked garden and disagreeing about whether it was always like this. He is worth reading for the reason Cicero gave. The case against providence has rarely been put better, and a faith that has never met it at full strength has not been tested.