415), who was murdered by a Christian mob, and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who the Inquisition burned at the stake is enough to make me judge the Church harshly, but the stories on several of the Popes and practices at the Papal Count are downright damning. The Catholic Church does not come off well in this story, and Greenblatt isn’t even trying to be critical. I’ve always found studying the history of the Church to be more undermining of its ideas than attacking its cherish beliefs directly. If you are a theist, and among the faithful, The Swerve might be more challenging to your faith than The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, even though it’s not about atheism and skepticism. I’m an atheist, so this is a thrilling history for me. Thus, the subtitle, how the world became modern, or how I would think of it, how atheism took root. Bracciolini made copies of On the Nature of Things that went on to inspire many of the great men of the Renaissance, and many more great thinkers since then. Bracciolini was a humanist scholar and papal secretary, and The Swerve is his story too.

What The Swerve tries to chronicle is the idea that religion has held a tyrannical grip on mankind for thousands of years and Epicurus and Lucretius were among the first to say, “Hey, religion is all nonsense and reality is much different from what religion says it is.” Lucretius wrote all this up in his book On the Nature of Things, but the Catholic Church suppressed his ideas and the book became forgotten for 1400 years until On the Nature of Things was rediscovered in January 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini. Epicurus and Lucretius figured gods might exist, but they also thought the gods didn’t care about us, and religion was all a bunch of hooey that people used to fight their fear of death.

Epicureanism is not atheism, but the roots of atheism lies in Epicureanism. I would have subtitled the book, “The Evolution of Atheism” – although that wouldn’t be a perfectly accurate subtitle either. The Swerve is about the evolution of an idea that’s taken a long time to emerge. And On the Nature of Things is about Epicureanism, which is based on the teachings of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher born 341 BCE and died 270 BCE. The Swerve is a history of a book, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, born 99 BCE and died 55 BCE. The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt is subtitled “How the World Became Modern” but I don’t think that’s accurate.