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Arethusa 34.2 (2001) 211-220



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Situated Knowledge: Responding To Lucretius

John G. Fitch

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I begin with a personal story, not to affirm its uniqueness (rather the reverse, in fact), but to testify to the way in which personal history affected my reading of a particular text. I grew up, in the 1940s and 1950s, in a family atmosphere of piety--Protestant piety. It was an atmosphere filled with old-fashioned goodness, with caring, and with love. But it was also permeated by a kind of religiosity which, as a teenager, I found increasingly irksome. There was, for example, an emphasis on the will of the Father--the heavenly Father, but also rather definitely the family Father. There was a curious insistence on the need to be saved--and consequently an insistence on sin, from which one needed to be saved. There was a greater interest in one's immortal soul than in one's body and in the pleasures of this world; in fact, the very concept of pleasure was suspect. (All this was in Britain, but readers will no doubt think of similar strains of religiosity in Canada or the United States or wherever they grew up.) Inevitably, after much turmoil of mind and emotion, I reached a moment of decision, a moment which I still remember distinctly; I was walking home from church service one Sunday at the age of fourteen when I decided that this notion of a divine Father was simply a human invention, that I could not and did not believe it.

This personal history naturally coloured my response to Lucretius when I began to study him a few years later as an undergraduate. I was delighted by his insistence that the universe does not operate at the arbitrary will of gods but by spontaneous natural processes. Our lives are centred here, on this earth, said Lucretius, and we should look to the pleasures of this [End Page 211] life, not to rewards or punishments in a fictitious afterlife; again, I agreed wholeheartedly.

My first response to Lucretius, then, was coloured and emotionally charged by the personal history which I have outlined.1 However, the fact that this history is personal to me does not preclude it, I hope, from being relevant to others. Although it is personal, it is certainly not unique; on the contrary, this kind of tussle between traditional religion and the demands of reason has been fought out in countless individual lives, especially over the past century-and-a-half. So although a reading of a text is always situated (to use my title word) in the personal history of a particular reader, that reader's personal history, in turn, is situated in the broader history of the society and culture. The personal voice, therefore, need not be merely personal, in the sense of being eccentric or individualistic or subjective in a negative sense; certainly it carries the energy of the individual's experience, but it is also in some sense representative.2

Since the time of Jerome, responses to Lucretius have often been conditioned in some way, as mine was, by the relationship of particular readers to Christianity. An influential example is that of Henri Patin and his famous lecture "Du poëme de la nature. L'antilucrèce chez Lucrèce," of 1859-60 (= Patin 1868.117-37). The anti-Lucretius of Patin's title is a supposedly religious but unconscious side of Lucretius's personality--an "involuntary spirituality"--in contrast to the overt persona of Lucretius which is rationalistic and hostile to religion. Patin himself uses a strongly personal voice in his lecture, and it becomes evident that the reason why he detects this religious and spiritual element in Lucretius is that he wants to detect it, as a religious man himself who is also committed to the value of classical literature. He affirms that, "Religious feeling is so natural to humans, that it manifests itself now and then through the doubts of the sceptic, the denials of the atheist." Patin dwells, for example, on Lucretius's picture of the earth...

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