Happy Violence: Bentley, Lucretius, and the Prehistory of Freethinking

In recent years, Lucretius has become increasingly important to a scholarly understanding of science and philosophy in the early modern period and eighteenth century, and scholarly interest in Lucretius shows no signs of abating anytime soon. Many contemporary engagements with De rerum natura focus on the things that Lucretius has to say about falling atoms, swerving particles, and self-conscious matter. In other words, Lucretius’s importance to early modern and eighteenth-century scholars relates primarily to the ways that writers who lived after him absorbed his scientific theories.¹ Stephen Greenblatt posits that one of the primary reasons that Lucretian science is so important to modern readers is that Lucretian theories of physics complement our historical understanding of the term “modernity.” “At the core of [Lucretius’s] poem,” Greenblatt suggests, “lay key principles of a modern understanding of the world” (5). By “modern,” Greenblatt is referring to the kinds of ideas that do not seem classical in nature. What’s odd about Greenblatt’s claim—and he does not ignore this oddity—is that the science in De rerum natura is not “modern” at all. By the eighteenth century, scientists knew that Lucretius’s theories of physics were largely inaccurate. What makes Lucretius modern, according to Greenblatt, is that his science belies a modern (as opposed to classical) ontology: “In a universe so constituted, Lucretius argued, there is no reason to think that the earth or its inhabitants occupy a central place, no reason to set humans apart from all other animals…” (6). In Greenblatt’s reading, Lucretius refutes the philosophy of human exceptionalism, and his denunciation of human exceptionalism casts a long shadow over the philosophers and literary writers who followed him.

In this piece, I want to challenge the notion that readers of Lucretius were attracted to or repelled by what they might have seen as his philosophy of “human insignificance” (Greenblatt 199). Lucretius has another legacy, too. By turning to an eighteenth-century debate between the philosopher Anthony Collins and the philologist Richard Bentley over the merits and dangers of the philosophy of freethinking, a debate in which Lucretius plays a strange but critical role, I suggest that some readers of Lucretius saw him as advocating the complete opposite of a philosophy of “human insignificance.” Richard Bentley, I claim, thought of Lucretius as a theorist of human feeling. By developing a theory of human feeling, Lucretius contributed to a historical understanding of happiness. Lucretius’s importance to the history of happiness allowed him, in Bentley’s mind, to uphold the human as a figure capable of doing violence to any institution or establishment that threatened happiness. In Bentley’s mind, Lucretius did not see the human as insignificant in the grand scheme of things; rather, Lucretius afforded the human too much significance and left no place for God or organized religion. Lucretius’s contribution to the history of happiness aligns disturbingly, Bentley suggests, with the religiously dangerous philosophy of freethinking, which sees the human mind as a more reliable authority on the nature of the universe than the church or the Scriptures. While Lucretius’s philosophy is on its face more compatible with atheism than with religious faith, his ideas were particularly attractive to theists. When theists such as Anthony Collins absorbed Lucretius’s ideas about human feeling, they were able to view his theories of feeling as complements to religious faith. The combination of Lucretian feeling with religious freethinking leads not to a philosophy of human insignificance, but to a philosophy of human exceptionalism.

By focusing on Bentley’s interest in Lucretius’s influence on the history of happiness, I suggest that there is more to Lucretius’s legacy than atoms, matter, and clinamen. His legacy has as much to do with his theories of human feeling, theories that led many of his readers to see him as a proponent of human exceptionalism. Lucretius theorizes feeling dialectically, in terms of something like illness and cure (by “dialectic,” I mean simply a very traditional model in which two opposing forces clash with one another). The collision between these two forces, the...