Ecologies of Eros: De Rerum Natura
For a very long time Lucretius’s 1st century BCE poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) was deemed anathema by Christianity. Drawn from the philosophy of Epicurus and allegedly written in an altered state produced by a love potion, the poem dismissed gods of any kind as impious superstitions while proposing a self-organizing universe made from the continual flow of atoms, ceaselessly gathering and falling away again in systems of transitory phenomena. This did not go over well with the Christians and the book was often deemed one of the more dangerous and heretical texts to have survived from antiquity: see for example the fate of one Giordano Bruno; put to death for ideas inspired by this poem.
One of the poem’s last remaining manuscripts had been found in a German monastery in the 15th century, saved from oblivion and, after a thousand years of Christian repression, the poem went viral. From then on it would be read and reread by a whole host of European bigheads, astonished to discover a profound exploration of the physical world without recourse to spirit. Helping in no small part to jump-start the renaissance and the scientific revolution, the poem would go a very long way in forming that vision of the cosmos now foundational to the physical sciences—even including such far-reaching notions as the existence of other worlds, chaos theory and quantum indeterminacy. In the universe described by Lucretius life and meaning are not given to us by heaven, but rather grow up, by chance, out of the material conditions of the erotic earth—to which we are all subjected as we are subject to our own bodies.
It is helpful to note that the infamous and oft misunderstood 19th century philosophy of materialism—itself born whole-cloth from De Rerum Natura—is at the very least a valiant attempt to put some limits upon a psyche that is always threatening to spill everywhere. The main limit imposed upon psyche by Lucretius is that of mors immortalis, immortal death; and in particular the death of the soul; there is no afterlife in this world. For Lucretius, in an ultimately unknowable and ever-changing universe, located just this side of chaos, the fact of death becomes an immortal and ethical datum: everything must die. And not only organic life, as Marx notes (who read this poem closely) but philosophies too must perish, not to mention capitalist political economy—thanks be to god.
Anways, in the end “death is nothing to us,” Lucretius says; the fear of death and the yearning for immortality caused by religion cheapens this life here and now. In the cyclical movement of the universe, mortality is always transforming into life—death continually resolves into Eros. Our contemporary understanding of ecology—as a global system of living entanglements and nested complexities—finds its origin too in Lucretius. What we now call the law of conservation began as first principles of the poem: nothing comes from nothing and nothing can return to nothing.
This axiom, as integral to thermodynamics as to ecology, has the rather paradoxical effect of blurring the limit between spirit and material, organic and nonorganic, animate and inanimate. In this closed system there is no life and death as such, but rather only the never-ending erotic transformations of a self-organizing, self-aware universe.
Primavera, 1480s, Botticeli (inspired by De Rerum Natura)
