Gassendi, Charleton, and the Translation of Epicurus’ Natural Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century

CHAPTER 9 Taming Epicurus: Gassendi, Charleton, and the Translation of Epicurus’ Natural Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century Rodolfo Garau Along with other early modern translations, a crucial characteristics of the translation of ancient philosophical texts, or portions thereof, was that they rarely appear as self-standing editorial pieces, but were consistently pub- lished along with, or even integrated in, substantial commentaries, notes, or discussions.1 The increasingly outmoded but still quite vivid connection with the tradition of the commentaria of Aristotle’s philosophy represents well such phenomenon.2 Similarly, works such as Justus Lipsius’ Manuductionis ad Stoicam Philosophiam, despite not being translations in the traditional sense of the term, result in fact in a long commentary, along with the translation of a number of Greek passages from Epictetus, Laërtius, Plutarch, and others, merged in Lipsius’ more general reconstruction of Stoicism.3 As in other disciplines, early modern translations and commentaries of ancient philosophical texts ‘were not primarily or exclusively focused on ex- plaining (or reconstructing) the supposedly authentic meaning of the works of the past in a historical sense’. Rather, ‘[t]he primary concern was about the 1 On the early modern tradition of commentaries, see Enenkel K.A.E. – Nellen H. (eds.), Neo- Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1400–1700) (Leuven: 2013); and Enenkel K.A.E. (ed.), Transformations of the Classics Via Early Modern Commentaries (Leiden – Boston: 2013). Enenkel points out that ‘[e]arly modern intellectuals rarely read classical authors in a simple and “direct” form, but generally via intermediary paratexts: dedications, prefaces, and other introductory texts; argumenta; indices, illustrations; and above all, all kinds of commentaries—annotationes, notae, commenta, commentaria, commentariola, animadversiones, paraphrases, etc. These intermediary texts presented the classical text to modern readers in certain ways that determined and guided the reader’s perception of the text being commented upon’, in Enenkel K.A.E., “Introduction”, in Enenkel, Transformation of the Classics 1. 2 On this, see Lohr C., “The Social Situation of the Study of Aristotelian Natural Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries”, in Leijenhorst C.H. et al. (eds.), The Dynamics of Aristotelian Natural Philosophy from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: 2002). 3 See Lipsius Justus, Physiologiae Stoicorum Libri Tres (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610). © Rodolfo Garau, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004349261_011 Rodolfo Garau - 9789004349261 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-NDDownloaded 4.0 license. from Brill.com09/29/2021 04:21:29AM via free access 234 Garau present-day use (usus) and application of antiquity’s writings in every possible sense’.4 In focusing on the contemporary usefulness of classical tradition, early modern translations and commentaries displayed a broad range of different functions—from means of authorization to educational tools, from encyclo- paedias of learning to textual criticism.5 For instance, scholastic commentaria (save some exceptions) had mostly the educational aim to explain and teach Aristotle’s philosophy, bringing light on potentially obscure passages.6 However, the early modern period is also an era in which the relationship with the philosophical classicity becomes more ambiguous and complicated. On the one hand, while certain aspects of Aristotle’s natural philosophy (as for instance his Parva naturalia) still deeply influenced and in- spired the natural-philosophical production, the discontent with Aristotelian- Scholasticism triggered the spread of a pervading rhetoric of the novelty or of the ‘new beginning’ for the philosophical enterprise, as testified for instance by the very title of Bacon’s New Organon, or by Descartes’ search for a new founda- tion of the whole edifice of knowledge. On the other hand, the search for alter- natives to Scholasticism sparked a new interest for a diverse, non-Aristotelian philosophical past. The revival of Scepticism (often employed as an intellectual camouflage for radical anti-Scholastic stances); of Stoicism (especially in political and moral philosophy); and finally of Epicureanism marked the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, informing and influencing the following philosophical productions. In this frame, the early modern translators of non-Aristotelian philosophical texts were often exposed to a twofold pressure. First (as in the case of Stoicism and Epicureanism), they were often dealing with historically controversial texts, which required, in addition to very refined linguistic and philo- logical skills, also the ability to emend potentially impious passages in order to show how they could fit an intellectual framework characterized by intense 4 Enenkel, Transformations of the Classics Via Early Modern Commentaries 4; See also Enenkel K.A.E. – Nellen H., “Introduction”, in Enenkel – Nellen, Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge 3: ‘Commentaries were mainly studied—in various intellectual settings, to be sure—in order to acquire knowledge and skills. A ‘pure’ understanding of the source text was not the exclusive goal. This radically different way of approaching both objects is exemplified by the fact that more often than not the commentary was consulted without reference being made to the text itself. Commentaries were seen as very useful tools for gathering and processing information from entirely different disciplines’. 5 Enenkel – Nellen, “Introduction”, in Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge 3. 6 For a discussion of a translation of and commentarary on an Aristotelian mathematical text, see the chapter by Joyce van Leeuwen in this volume. Rodolfo Garau - 9789004349261 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 04:21:29AM via free access Taming Epicurus 235 censorship. Second, in an era characterized by the above-described rhetoric of the novelty or of the ‘new beginning’, they often had to push back the criticism of being mere ‘historian of philosophy’, and to show the relevance of their texts vis-à-vis the contemporary philosophical, scientific, or political discussions. As a consequence, such kind of early modern translators of philosophical texts had to adopt different strategies to meet both these two potential criticisms. In this paper, I focus in particular on the seventeenth-century ‘Epicurus Renaissance’,7 with particular regard to the complex relationship that the translation of Epicurean texts entertained with the early modern natural- philosophical and scientific discourse on the one hand, and with the Christian faith on the other.8 Indeed, amongst the attempts to revive the philosophical past, the one concerning Epicureanism was by far the most complicated and controversial. In the seventeenth century, the name of Epicurus was still as- sociated with the infamous reputation of an atheist philosopher, advocate of a lascivious ethics, denier of the immortality of the soul, and propounder of a materialistic physics. The world was conceived by Epicurus as deriving from mere chance; the human soul as a material entity that was destined to die with death; death in turn, as the cessation of sense perception, excluded any eternal reward and punishment. Moreover, as in the case of his follower Lucretius, the 7 The rediscovery of the manuscript of Lucretius’ Epicurean poem De rerum natura, found in 1414 by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini, (probably) in the Benedictine library at Fulda, Germany, stimulated new studies on the figure of Epicurus. In the Renaissance, schol- ars such as Jacopo Zabarella, Lorenzo Valla, Francesco Filefo, Cristoforo Landino, Cosma Raimondi, and Leonardi Bruni paid particular attention to Epicurus’ theory of pleasure, of- fering fundamental, and philologically more accurate, revisions of the widespread miscon- ceptions circulating in the Christian world since the late antiquity. Although their works were generally not apologetic (for instance, Valla’s De voluptate uses Epicureanism mostly as a polemic tool against Stoic ethics, then discarding both of them in favour of the Christian moral), they had the fundamental role of reintroducing Epicurean philosophy in the intellectual discourse. Despite this, the Renaissance interest in Epicureanism was far from a sys- tematic reappraisal; at the same time, while discussing the theory of pleasure, Epicurus’s physics was relatively left aside from such discourse. On this, see for instance Jones H., The Epicurean Tradition (New York: 1989); Joy L., “Epicureanism in Renaissance Moral and Natural Philosophy”, Journal of the History of Ideas 53, 4 (1992) 573–583; Joy L., Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: 2002); Butterfield D., The Early Textual History of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (Cambridge, 2013); Wilson C., Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford – New York: 2008). 8 On the importance and pervasiveness of Epicurean thought in the early modern period, see Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity. Rodolfo Garau - 9789004349261 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 04:21:29AM via free access 236 Garau figure of Epicurus was slandered as that of an unlearned and uneducated man, an enemy of erudition and true knowledge.9 Representing a radical alternative to Aristotelian

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