The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

In Rome, Poggio lands a job at the court of the cardinal of Bari, but within the year Poggio is hired as a scriptor at the papal court itself. This court, by far the busiest in the western world, receives 2,000 cases a week. The pope, as the spiritual leader of Europe, must adjudicate legal disputes that touch on spiritual issues, such as marriage annulments “and a thousand other delicate social relations” (136). The pope also controls a vast section of central Italy and must deal with restive city-states nearby, sometimes with military force.

The inner workings of the court are filled with intrigue, corruption, avarice, and sexual license. Poggio rises to the office of papal secretary; his fellow secretaries often meet in a side room, which Poggio calls “the Lie Factory,” to gossip about members of the court and to tell jokes, most of them bawdy. This “chatter, trivial, mendacious, sly, slanderous, often obscene" (142) Poggio collects into a journal, the Facetiae. It is published two years before Poggio’s death and becomes “a huge success” and “the best known jokebook of its age” (144).

Poggio is adept at courtly politicking and backbiting; he gives as good as he gets. Still, he is troubled by all the intrigue; he writes a number of dialogues—“On Avarice, Against the Hypocrites, On Nobility, On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, On the Misery of Human Life, and so forth” (147)—which critique the venal culture that benefits him. Poggio believes there is something about religious life that attracts hypocrites: “their conspicuous professions of piety, humility, and contempt for the world are actually masks for avarice, laziness, and ambition” (148).

Poggio admits that it is hard to tell a clever hypocrite from the less common good man, but the overly pious raise his hackles. Almost no one at the papal court, he believes, is a good man. Poggio dreams of a different life for himself but remains, despite politics, wars, and plagues, at the papal court for his entire career. His saving grace is his love of ancient books. 

During the 1410s, Poggio is promoted to apostolic secretary, the highest post a non-cleric can attain in the papal court. He works for Baldassare Cossa—the original Pope John XXIII—who is a master of intrigue. The pope faces “two rival claimants to the papal throne” (155), along with other threats to his power.

Rome in the early 1400s is a small city of scattered populations who live among the ancient ruins. Poggio despairs at the wreckage of a once-great metropolis: “This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! How changed! How defaced!” (157).

Cossa, a son of Neapolitan pirates, becomes governor of Bologna and a cardinal. Though he was “a hugely gifted man of the world, it was obvious that he did not have a trace of a spiritual vocation” (159). When Pope Alexander V visits Cossa and dies suddenly, possibly from poison, Cossa’s faction engineers his election to pope. Because of a 30-year schism in the church, there are two other claimants to the papacy, the Spaniard Pope Benedict XIII and, from Venice, Pope Gregory XII. Cossa rebuffs and calls for a second vote by all the cardinals. The situation becomes a stalemate.

In 1413, King Ladislas of Naples invades and sacks Rome. Cossa and his court retreat to Florence, and Cossa appeals to the Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund, for aid. Sigismund wants a council to meet in Constance, north of the Alps, to resolve the schism; Cossa is forced to accede. In the late summer of 1414, the pope crosses the mountains with a retinue of 600, including his favorite scholars, among them Poggio. “The pope was a thug, but he was a learned thug, who appreciated the company of fine scholars and expected court business to be conducted in high humanist style” (163). Looking down at the valley where lies Constance, the pope turns to his men and says, “This is the pit where they catch foxes” (163).

Arriving in Constance are church officials, nobles, and public officials, plus an entourage of assistants, cooks, and the like. Also arriving are a wide assortment of tradespeople and 700 prostitutes. In all, somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 visitors swell the ranks of Constance for the great council.

To remind the visitors that he is the actual pope of Rome, Cossa makes a grand entrance, all in white upon a white horse, preceded by nine horses that carry his papal wardrobe. Cossa’s hundreds of retainers follow him.

One of the issues before the Council is church reform. Jan Hus, a Czech priest, has railed against clerical corruption, especially the selling of indulgences that, for a fee, purport to relieve the donor from having to spend time in Purgatory after death. Hus campaigns against Cossa: “If he is manifestly sinful, then it should be supposed, from his works, that he is not just, but the enemy of Christ” (166). The church has excommunicated Hus, but, “[p]rotected by powerful Bohemian noblemen, he continued to disseminate dangerous views” (166).

Despite “a guarantee of free passage from the emperor Sigismund” (167), Hus is arrested and thrown into a filthy prison cell, where he becomes seriously ill. The emperor lets pass this attack on his honor. Cossa hopes the Hus saga will distract the council, but he is mistaken. Fearing for his life, in March 1415 Cossa slips away and heads for an ally’s castle in a nearby town, but he is apprehended and brought back.

Cossa faces dozens of charges, including “simony, sodomy, rape, incest, torture, and murder. He was charged with poisoning his predecessor, along with his physician and others” (170). In May 1415, Cossa, as Pope John XXIII, is formally deposed and, for a time, imprisoned in a cell near Hus. The ex-pope's courtiers, including Poggio, suddenly are unemployed.

Now at liberty, Poggio travels to France in search of ancient texts; he finds orations by Cicero, copies them, and sends them to friends in Italy.

In July 1415, Hus is defrocked and burned at the stake, his bones tossed into the Rhine River. “A century later, Luther, mounting a more successful challenge, remarked: ‘We are all Hussites without knowing it.’” (172). A year later, Hus’ associate, Jerome of Prague, is also brought up on charges of heresy and defends himself in court. Poggio is troubled that so eloquent a man should be on trial; nevertheless, Jerome is executed.

To heal his rheumatic hands, Poggio visits the baths of Baden, where a thousand men and women, barely clothed, bathe together and converse—sometimes touching, sometimes singing, behaving playfully. This reminds Poggio of the lives of the ancients; he judges Baden “a great center of the Epicurean way of thinking” (176).

In the summer of 1416, Poggio and two Italian friends hunt for lost books in a monastery near Constance. Soon enough, Poggio “had located an astonishing cache of ancient books” (177), including the complete text of the Classic age’s premier manual on oratory, The Institutes by Quintilian. Unable to save the eloquent heretic Jerome from the pyre, Poggio can at least rescue Quintilian’s wisdom from oblivion.

None of this pays the bills. Poggio’s erstwhile benefactor, the deposed pope Cossa, languishes in prison—he will buy his way out after three years, retire to a Florentine cardinalship, and die in 1419—and an earlier papal employer, the also-deposed Pope Gregory XII, dies at this time. Poggio nonetheless presses ahead with his hunt for ancient books, “viewed by his friends as a culture hero, a magical healer who reassembled and reanimated the torn and mangled body of antiquity” (181). In 1417, he makes the find of a lifetime, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things.

Lucretius’ ancient poem On the Nature of Things totals 7,400 unrhymed lines spread across six books. Beautiful but difficult, and covering everything from religion to sex and from society to physics, the work is subversive, as it calls into question many of the entrenched assumptions of the Catholic church.

Lucretius is not, as often charged, an atheist. He believes in the gods but asserts that they are too far removed to take any interest in human affairs. Most religions find this idea discomfiting because they depend on gods who can be persuaded to give favors. Poggio, aware that Lucretius’ beliefs implicitly criticize the Catholic faith, would likely have convinced himself that Lucretius was merely critiquing pagan beliefs: “he at least grasped that the practices of his own contemporaries were worthless” (184).

Many of Lucretius’ ideas are surprisingly modern and conform remarkably to current scientific beliefs (185): “Everything is made of invisible particles” (185); “The elementary particles of matter—‘the seeds of the things’—are eternal” (186); “The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size” (187); “All particles are in motion in an infinite void” (187); “The universe has no creator or designer” (187).

Lucretius asserts that “Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve,” a miniscule, random change whereby “they deflect slightly from their straight course [...] But it is enough to set off a ceaseless chain of collisions. Whatever exists in the universe exists because of these random collisions of minute particles” (188). Furthermore, “The swerve is the source of free will” (189), in that it creates an opening for something other than the predetermined nature of those particles to influence the course of events.

“Nature ceaselessly experiments” (189). This leads to the evolution of all creatures, as different forms are discarded or adopted over time. “The universe was not created for or about humans” (190). Earth, for example, “with its seas and deserts, harsh climate, wild beasts, diseases” (190), is largely inhospitable to people.

As for society, “[h]umans are not unique [...] they share many of their most cherished qualities with other animals” (191). “Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival” (191). There is no wondrous past handed to people but only struggle and the slow advance of society and civilization, which is a mixed blessing, what with avarice, warfare, and overeating.

Lucretius also believes, heretically, that “[t]he soul dies” (192). Made of the same stuff as the body and interspersed within it, the soul dissolves like “a perfume whose exquisite scent has dispersed into the air” (193). Thus, “[t]here is no afterlife,” and “[d]eath is nothing to us" because we won’t be aware of it. Also, “[a]ll organized religions are superstitious delusions” (193) that play on our fears of, for example, lightning and earthquakes.

“Religions are invariably cruel,” and “[t]here are no angels, demons, or ghosts” (194). Lucretius thus turns away from religion and instead believes that “[t]he highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain” (195). To pursue the simple needs of oneself and others becomes the highest calling; other, often violent, ambitions are “perverse and unnatural” and lead “to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more” (195).

Ironically, “[t]he greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion” (196). People strive after impossible dreams of infinite pleasure and glory and thus make themselves miserable. Searching for the perfect lover, they are consumed with yearning and possessiveness; they “cause bodily pain, often driving their teeth into one another’s lips and crushing mouth against mouth” (197).

On the other hand, “[u]nderstanding the nature of things generates deep wonder” (198). The way out of suffering is through reason. “Human insignificance—the fact that it is not all about us and our fate—is, Lucretius insisted, the good news” (199). Contemplating the true nature of reality frees us from unwarranted fears and ambitions.

“Certainly almost every one of the poem’s key principles was an abomination to right-thinking Christian orthodoxy. But the poetry was compellingly, seductively beautiful” (202).