An ancient poem was rediscovered—and the world swerved. [View all]

[yortsed snacilbuper]

To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, Lucretius wrote, is folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. And, in so arguing, he gave voice to a thought I had not yet quite allowed myself to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel.

When Lucretius’ poem returned to circulation in 1417, it seems to have struck some early readers with the same personal intensity—the sense of direct address across an abyss—that I experienced. But, of course, the issues were vastly different. To people haunted by images of the bleeding Christ, gripped by a terror of Hell, and obsessed with escaping the purgatorial fires of the afterlife, Lucretius offered a vision of divine indifference.

There was no afterlife, no system of rewards and punishments meted out from on high. Gods, by virtue of being gods, could not possibly be concerned with the doings of human beings. One simple name for the plague that Lucretius brought, and a charge frequently levelled against him then and since, is atheism.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/08/the-answer-man-2