The French philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) devoted much of his work to making Epicureanism acceptable to his contemporaries. He expounded and defended Epicurus’ views in a number of his writings and completed a Latin translation and an ample commentary on Diogenes Laertius, Book X. In an attempt to reconcile Epicurean natural philosophy and Christian theology, Gassendi held that atoms and void are the primary constituents of everything but, rejecting the anti-theological and radically materialistic implications of Epicurus’ physical system, saw God as the author of the world. As the authority of Aristotelian science crumbled under the weight of new experimental evidence and the emergence of mathematical physics, Gassendi’s work was favorably received by many atomists and prompted a revival of Epicureanism in seventeenth-century Europe.
In recent years, the tension between Gassendi’s theological claims and his scientific views has been discussed in a number of publications, and Enrico Piergiacomi’s Amicus Lucretius, reviewed here, is a contribution to this discussion. Amicus Lucretius examines the influence of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (DRN) on Gassendi’s Christianized Epicureanism by tracing Gassendi’s expositions of Lucretian theological and ethical arguments. The book’s main thesis is that Gassendi maintained a dialectical attitude towards Epicureanism that led him to accept or reject Epicurus’ views in virtue of two ultimate criteria of truth, namely, reason and orthodox theology.
Piergiacomi’s Amicus Lucretius is a highly informative volume, a useful resource, and a valuable addition to the scholarship on Gassendi’s philosophy and on the reception of Epicurus and Lucretius in seventeenth-century Europe.
The book is divided into five chapters.
Chapter one is a survey of the reception of Epicurus and Lucretius from antiquity to the seventeenth century. This chapter provides a historical context for understanding Gassendi’s treatment of Epicureanism. Piergiacomi notes, for instance, that while Epicurus’ views on the mortality of the soul and the gods’ indifference towards human affairs had always been broadly condemned, certain aspects of his ethics and even his polemics against religious superstition had been praised and echoed by some Christian scholars long before Gassendi. On the other hand, prior to Gassendi, Lucretius was admired more for his poetry than for his philosophy, and although Lucretian allusions and citations became fairly and increasingly common in the writings of early modern philosophers, the DRN was rarely studied as a consistent and reliable source of Epicurean doctrine.
Chapter two is about the presence of Lucretius in Gassendi’s work. Even though Gassendi never composed a full-fledged commentary on the DRN, his writings include numerous references to Lucretius. Piergiacomi traces and contextualizes such references, with interesting results. Throughout his works, Gassendi cited as many as 6,249 Lucretian hexameters (over 84% of the total poem), and while his interest in the DRN was initially limited to its ethical arguments, it later expanded to include scientific and epistemological ones. At the same time, his indifference towards Lucretius’ metaliterary considerations, obsolete theories and digressive images suggests that Gassendi saw the DRN primarily as an essential resource for understanding and expounding Epicurus’ philosophical system.
Chapter three focuses on Gassendi’s reconciliation of Epicurean physics and divine providence. For Epicurus, who claimed that the gods exist but do not concern themselves with our lives, the ultimate goal of natural philosophy is to dissuade men from believing in divine causation and thus rescue us from falling prey to irrational fears. For Gassendi, conversely, atoms and void are the ultimate constituents of the world, but the prima causa efficiens of such world is providentia divina. Piergiacomi notes that by turning upside down Lucretius’ anti-theological arguments, Gassendi sought to create a ‘providential atomism’, i.e., a theory of matter that made Epicurus’ atomism agreeable to theological orthodoxy. But for Gassendi – Piergiacomi compellingly argues – providential atomism is not the mere conflation of two opposing views on nature, i.e., Epicureanism and Christianity, but rather a consistent physical system that Epicurus and Lucretius had failed to fully understand.
Chapter four is devoted to Gassendi’s treatment of Lucretius’ proofs for the mortality of the soul. For Piergiacomi, Gassendi sought to reconcile two apparently antithetic views on the human soul: Epicurus’ materialism and Christian spiritualism. He accepted Lucretius’ mind-soul distinction and atomic account of sensations and motions but grafted these views upon an encephalocentric theory of the mind and a conception of the animus as a spiritual, incorporeal substance created by God. Similarly, he combined Lucretius’ denial of the Anima mundi with creationism and rejected the proofs for the mortality of the soul without rejecting Epicurus’ claim that death is nothing to us, which he understood within a Christian view of the afterlife.
Chapter five focuses on Gassendi’s Christian hedonism. Piergiacomi defines Christian hedonism as a twofold view based on the identification of the good with pleasure and the belief that religion is the ultimate source of pleasure. To defend Christian hedonism, Gassendi found in Lucretius an ally that allowed him to Christianize Epicurus’ theory of pleasure. Piergiacomi in fact argues that Gassendi was the first scholar to thoroughly discuss Lucretius’ arguments for the pursuit of pleasure, understood as the absence of pain and anxiety. Gassendi also embraced Epicurus’ distinction of kinetic and katastematic pleasures and agreed that knowledge plays a central role in the attainment of tranquility. Unlike Epicurus, however, Gassendi held that full knowledge of nature is only possible post mortem.
Amicus Lucretius ends with a summary of the book’s main conclusions and an appendix containing a very useful list of Gassendi’s citations of Lucretius.