Centuries were required to accomplish this grand design, and it was never fully completed. But the grand outlines may be seen in the late third and early fourth century in the works of a North African convert from paganism to Christianity: Lactantius. Appointed tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine, who had established Christianity as the religion of the empire, Lactantius wrote a series of polemics against Epicureanism. That philosophy had, he acknowledges, a substantial following, “not because it brings44 forward any truth, but because the attractive name of pleasure invites many.” Christians must refuse the invitation and understand that pleasure is a code name for vice.
The task, for Lactantius, was not only to draw believers away from their pursuit of human pleasures; it was also to persuade them that God was not, as Epicureans believed, entirely absorbed within the orbit of divine pleasures and hence indifferent to the fate of humans. Instead, as Lactantius wrote in a celebrated work written in 313 CE, God cared about humans, just as a father cared about his wayward child. And the sign of that care, he wrote, was anger. God was enraged at man—that was the characteristic manifestation of His love—and wanted to smite him over and over again, with spectacular, unrelenting violence.
A hatred of pleasure-seeking and a vision of God’s providential rage: these were death knells of Epicureanism, henceforward branded by the faithful as “insane.” Lucretius had urged the person who felt the prompting of sexual desire to satisfy it: “a dash of gentle pleasure sooths the sting.” (4.177) Christianity, as a story rehearsed by Gregory demonstrates, pointed in a different direction. The pious Benedict found himself thinking of a woman he had once seen, and, before he knew what was happening, his desires were aroused:
He then noticed45 a thick patch of nettles and briers next to him. Throwing his garment aside he flung himself into the sharp thorns and stinging nettles. There he rolled and tossed until his whole body was in pain and covered with blood. Yet, once he had conquered pleasure through suffering, his torn and bleeding skin served to drain the poison of temptation from his body. Before long, the pain that was burning his whole body had put out the fires of evil in his heart. It was by exchanging these two fires that he gained the victory over sin.
What worked for the saint in the early sixth century would, as monastic rules made clear, work for others. In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.
The infliction of pain46 was hardly unknown in the world of Lucretius. The Romans were specialists in it, dedicating vast sums and huge arenas to public spectacles of violence. And it was not only in the Colosseum that Romans could glut themselves on injury, pain, and death. Plays and poems, based on the ancient myths, were often blood-drenched, as were paintings and sculptures. Violence was part of the fabric47 of everyday life. Schoolmasters and slaveholders were expected to flog their victims, and whipping was a frequent prelude to Roman executions. This is why in the gospel account, prior to his crucifixion, Jesus was tied to a column and scourged.
But for the pagans, in the great majority of these instances, pain was understood not as a positive value, a stepping stone to salvation, as it was by pious Christians intent on whipping themselves, but as an evil, something visited upon rule-breakers, criminals, captives, unfortunate wretches, and—the only category with dignity—soldiers. Romans honored a brave soldier’s voluntary acceptance of pain, but that acceptance was far different from the ecstatic embrace celebrated in hundreds of convents and monasteries. The heroes of Roman stories willingly met what they could not, in good conscience, avoid or what they felt they had to endure in order to prove to their enemies their dauntless courage. Outside the orbit of that heroic obligation, there lay the special philosophical discipline that enabled the classical sage to regard inescapable pain—of kidney stones, for example—with equanimity. And for everyone, from the most exalted philosopher to the humblest artisan, there was the natural pursuit of pleasure.
In pagan Rome, the most extravagant version of this pursuit of pleasure came together in the gladiatorial arena with the most extravagant infliction and endurance of pain. If Lucretius offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pleasure principle, Christianity offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pain principle. Early Christians, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, the sinfulness of mankind, and the anger of a just Father, found the attempt to cultivate pleasure manifestly absurd and dangerous. At best a trivial distraction, pleasure was at worst a demonic trap, figured in medieval art by those alluring women beneath whose gowns one can glimpse reptilian claws. The only life truly worth imitating—the life of Jesus—bore ample witness to the inescapable presence in mortal existence of sadness and pain, but not of pleasure. The earliest pictorial depictions of Jesus were uniform in their melancholy sobriety. As every pious reader of Luke’s Gospel knew, Jesus wept, but there were no verses that described him laughing or smiling, let alone pursuing pleasure.
It was not difficult for Christians of the fifth and sixth centuries to find reasons to weep: the cities were falling apart, the fields were soaked in the blood of dying soldiers, robbery and rape were rampant. There had to be some explanation for the catastrophic behavior of human beings over so many generations, as if they were incapable of learning anything from their historical experience. Theology provided an answer deeper and more fundamental than this or that flawed individual or institution: humans were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them; they needed to be punished; they had coming to them an endless diet of pain. Indeed, it was only through this pain that a small number could find the narrow gate to salvation.
The most ardent early believers in this doctrine, those fired by an explosive mix of fear, hope, and fierce enthusiasm, were determined to make the pain to which all humankind was condemned their active choice. In doing so, they hoped to pay to an angry God the dues of suffering that He justly and implacably demanded. They possessed something of the martial hardness admired by traditional Roman culture, but, with a few exceptions,48 the goal was not the achievement of Stoical indifference to pain. On the contrary. Their whole project depended on experiencing an intense sensitivity to hunger, thirst, and loneliness. And when they whipped themselves with thorny branches or struck themselves with jagged stones, they made no effort to suppress their cries of anguish. Those cries were part of the payment, the atonement that would, if they were successful, enable them to recover in the afterlife the happiness that Adam and Eve had lost.
By the year 60049 there were over three hundred monasteries and convents in Italy and Gaul. Many of these were still small—little more than fortified villas, with their outbuildings—but they possessed a spiritual rationale and an institutional coherence that conferred upon them stability in an unstable world. Their inhabitants were drawn from those who felt compelled to transform their lives, to atone for their own sins and for the sins of others, to secure eternal bliss by turning their backs on ordinary pleasures. Over time, their numbers were supplemented by many less fervent souls who had in effect been given to the Church by their parents or guardians.
In monasteries and convents driven by the belief that redemption would only come through abasement, it is not surprising that forms of corporal punishment—virgarum verbera (hitting with rods), corporale supplicium (bodily punishment), ictus (blows), vapulatio (cudgeling), disciplina (whipping), and flagellatio—were routinely inflicted on community members who broke the rules. Disciplinary practices that would, in pagan society, have been disgraces inflicted only on social inferiors were meted out with something like democratic indifference to rank. Typically, the guilty party had to carry the rod that was used for the beating, and then sitting on the ground and constantly repeating the words Mea culpa, submit to blows until the abbot or abbess was satisfied.
The insistence that punishment50 be actively embraced by the victims—literalized in the
kissing of the rod—marked a deliberate Christian trampling on the Epicurean credo of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. After all, the experience of pain was not only punishment; it was a form of pious emulation. Christian hermits, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, mortified their flesh, in order to experience in their own bodies the torments that Jesus had had to undergo. Though these acts of self-scourging began to be reported in late antiquity—they were novel and strange enough in the beginning to attract widespread attention—it was not until the eleventh century that a monastic reformer, the Italian Benedictine Peter Damian, established voluntary self-flagellation as a central ascetic practice acceptable to the Church.
It had taken a thousand years to win the struggle and secure the triumph of pain seeking. “Did our Redeemer not endure scourging?” Damian asked those critics who called into question the celebration of the whip. Weren’t the apostles and many of the saints and martyrs flogged? What better way to follow in their footsteps, what surer method of imitating Christ, than to suffer the blows that they suffered? To be sure, Damian concedes, in the case of these glorious predecessors, someone else was doing the whipping. But in a world in which Christianity has triumphed, we have to do the whipping for ourselves. Otherwise the whole dream and doctrine of the imitation of Christ would have to be abandoned. “The body has to be shaped51 like a piece of wood,” explained one of the many texts that followed in Damian’s wake, “with beatings and whippings, with canes, scourges, and discipline. The body has to be tortured and starved, so that it submits to the spirit and takes perfect shape.” In the pursuit of this spiritual goal, all boundaries, restraints, and inhibitions drop away. Shame at appearing naked before the eyes of others has no place, nor does the embarrassment of being seen trembling, howling, or sobbing.
Here is a description of the Dominican nuns of Colmar, penned at the turn of the fourteenth century by a sister named Catherine von Gebersweiler who had lived in the convent since childhood:
At Advent52 and during the whole of Lent, the sisters would make their way after matins into the main hall or some other place devoted to their purpose. There they abused their bodies in the most acute fashion with all manner of scourging instruments until their blood flowed, so that the sound of the blows of the whip rang through the entire convent and rose more sweetly than any other melody to the ears of the Lord.
This is no mere sadomasochistic fantasy: a vast body of evidence confirms that such theaters of pain, the ritualized heirs to St. Benedict’s spontaneous roll in the stinging nettles, were widespread in the late Middle Ages. They were noted again and again as a distinctive mark of holiness. St. Teresa, “although she was slowly wasting away, tormented herself with the most painful whips, frequently rubbed herself with fresh stinging nettles, and even rolled about naked in thorns.” St. Clare of Assisi “tore apart the alabaster container of her body with a whip for forty-two years, and from her wounds there arose heavenly odors that filled the church.” St. Dominic cut into his flesh every night with a whip affixed with three iron chains. St. Ignatius of Loyola recommended whips with relatively thin straps, “summoning pain into the flesh, but not into the bones.” Henry Suso, who carved the name of Jesus on his chest, had an iron cross fixed with nails pressed into his back and whipped himself until the blood flowed. Suso’s contemporary, Elsbeth of Oye, a nun from Zurich, whipped herself so energetically that the bystanders in the chapel were spattered with her blood.
The ordinary self-protective, pleasure-seeking impulses of the lay public could not hold out against the passionate convictions and overwhelming prestige of their spiritual leaders. Beliefs and practices that had been the preserve of religious specialists, men and women set apart from the vulgar, everyday imperatives of the “world,” found their way into the mainstream, where they thrived in societies of flagellants and periodic bursts of mass hysteria. What was once in effect a radical counterculture insisted with remarkable success that it represented the core values of all believing Christians.
Of course, people continued to pursue pleasure—the Old Adam could not be so easily eradicated. In peasants’ huts and the halls of the great, along country lanes, in prelates’ palaces, and behind the high walls of the monasteries, there was drinking, overeating, raucous laughter, merry dancing, and plenty of sex. But virtually no one in moral authority, no one with a public voice, dared speak up to justify any of it. The silence was not, or not only, the consequence of timidity or fear. Pleasure seeking had come to seem philosophically indefensible. Epicurus was dead and buried, almost all of his works destroyed. And after St. Jerome in the fourth century briefly noted that Lucretius had committed suicide, there were no attacks on Epicurus’ great Roman disciple. He was forgotten.
The survival of the disciple’s once celebrated poem was left to fortune. It was by chance that a copy of On the Nature of Things made it into the library of a handful of monasteries, places that had buried, seemingly forever, the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure. It was by chance that a monk laboring in a scriptorium somewhere or other in the ninth century copied the poem before it moldered away forever. And it was by chance that this copy escaped fire and flood and the teeth of time for some five hundred years until, one day in 1417, it came into the hands of the humanist who proudly called himself Poggius Florentinus, Poggio the Florentine.
CHAPTER FIVE
BIRTH AND REBIRTH
FLORENCE AT THE dawn of the fifteenth century had few of the architectural features with which it is now graced, features that deliberately evoke on a grand scale the dream of the ancient past. Brunelleschi’s magnificent cupola on the Duomo, the city’s vast cathedral—the first large dome constructed since Roman antiquity and to this day the principal feature of the city’s skyline—did not yet exist, nor did his elegantly arched loggia of the Foundling Hospital or his other projects carefully constructed on principles derived from antiquity. The cathedral’s baptistery lacked the famous classicizing doors designed by Ghiberti, and the Church of S. Maria Novella was without Leon Battista Alberti’s harmonious, gracefully symmetrical facade. The architect Michelozzi had not designed the beautiful, austere buildings for the Convent of San Marco. The wealthiest families of the city—the Medici, the Pitti, the Rucelli—had not yet built their grand palaces, whose columns, arches, and carved capitals conspicuously emphasize classical order and proportion.
The walled city was distinctly medieval in appearance, closed in and dark. Its densely populated central zone was crowded with high towers and fortified stone buildings, with twisting narrow lanes and alleys made still darker by projecting upper stories and covered balconies. Even on the old bridge—the Ponte Vecchio—that crossed the Arno, shops crammed tightly next to each other made it impossible to glimpse an open landscape. From the air, it might have looked as though the city possessed many open spaces, but these were for the most part the walled interior courtyards of the huge monasteries built by the rival religious orders: the Dominicans’ S. Maria Novella, the Franciscans’ S. Croce, the Augustinian Hermits’ S. Spirito, the Carmelites’ S. Maria del Carmine, and others. Secular, open, public spaces were few and far between.
It was to this somber, constricted, congested city, subject to periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague, that Poggio Bracciolini came as a young man in the late 1390s. He had been born1 in 1380 in Terranuova, an undistinguished backwater within the territory that Florence controlled. Years later Tomaso Morroni, one of his polemical enemies, wrote that Poggio was the bastard son of peasants who eked out a living from the soil. The account cannot be taken seriously—it is one of many libels that Renaissance humanists, Poggio among them, hurled recklessly at one another, like punch-drunk pugilists. But, growing up where he did, he was undoubtedly familiar with Tuscan farms, whether he toiled on one or not. It was difficult for Poggio to claim a long line of illustrious ancestors, or rather, in order to do so with a straight face after he had established himself in the world, he had to purchase a fraudulent 350-year-old coat of arms.
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p; A more plausible story, one Poggio himself seems to have allowed at certain points in his life, is that his father Guccio was a notary, though a tax record of the period describes him as a spetiale, that is, a druggist. Perhaps he was both. Notaries were not figures of great dignity, but in a contractual and intensely litigious culture, they were legion. The Florentine notary Lapo Mazzei describes six or seven hundred of them crowded into the town hall, carrying under their arms bundles of documents, “each folder thick2 as half a bible.” Their knowledge of the law enabled them to draw up local regulations, arrange village elections, compose letters of complaint. Town officials who were meant to administer justice often had no clue how to proceed; the notaries would whisper in their ears what they were meant to say and would write the necessary documents. They were useful people to have around.
There was, in any case, an indubitable link in Poggio’s family to a notary, his maternal grandfather Michaelle Frutti. The link is worth noting because in 1343, many years before Poggio’s birth, Ser Michaelle signed a notarial register with a strikingly beautiful signature. Penmanship would turn out to play an oddly important role in the grandson’s story. In the concatenation of accidents that led to the recovery of Lucretius’ poem, Poggio’s handwriting was crucial.