Antiquity and the Meanings of Time

Within time and history, these two antagonistic views are locked into an uneasy and ongoing dialogue that generates our discourses of knowledge and truth. The first section considers the responses of, in turn, Augustine, Aristotle and the Epicurean atomist tradition, particularly Lucretius, which posits a universe infinite in time as well as space, and so without a beginning or an end – and a fortiori without a creator. Lucretius seeks to transcend the human time-bounded perspective by what I argue is a subtle exploitation, in his representation of the figure of Epicurus, of the Aristotelian distinction between actual and potential infinity, framed in a narrative that condenses the concept of a reason that can, theoretically, embrace all phenomena, whatever time and whatever place. For all that Lucretius seeks to eschew explanation in terms of the supernatural, he still has recourse to imagery of the divine in his representation of Epicurean reason. You may seek to drive out God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law, as Barthes puts it, but the greater the claim to intelligibility, the more they inhabit the argument, albeit often covertly. In the second section, I track how the intellectual achievement of Epicurus in attaining what Lucretius represents as universal knowledge is legitimated in a narrative form that is structurally similar to the narrative associated with the project of universal empire explored earlier (Chapter 2 above). Both narratives seek to point to a truth that exists outside time, but from a perspective within time, they illustrate a traffic that flows both ways between knowledge and sociopolitical authority. Claims to truth, whether epistemological or historical/political, are subject to be seen as superseded over time, and the third section examines how the linked narratives of empire and knowledge were re-deployed by Francis Bacon in the service of his project to inaugurate a new intellectual beginning, and have contributed to the emergent sense of ‘modernity’ as a (contested) modality of experience that consigns earlier thought to ‘antiquity’. In seeking to draw together a number of the strands of the argument in this chapter and earlier in the book, the fourth section returns to a theme that has featured throughout it, that of the Book of Nature, to consider how responses to the question of what ‘language’ the Book is written in shape both realist and anti-realist traditions of interpretation.

Augustine’s favoured imagery for his relationship to God is textual; he is, as it were, a character within the text of which God is the author. The text is not simply the story of his life, but ‘the total history of the sons of men’, which God can grasp as a whole, its beginning, its middle and its end, a history, that is, of God’s creation which, like the world itself, was created, along with time itself, at a moment in the past and will end on the Day of Judgement. In trying to understand his part in this creation and his place within time in the last three books of the Confessions, Augustine is moved by the sheer enormity of these issues to consider the text which recounts God’s act of creation, the Book of Genesis: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth...’ It is foolish, he says, to ask what God was doing before he created the world, for he is eternal, and time was created along with the world. God made the world, but not in the way humans make things (11.5.7): ‘You were not like a craftsman who makes one physical object out of another by an act of personal choice in his mind, which has the power to impose the form which by an inner eye it can see within itself.’ The human craftsman, himself God’s creation, imposes form on what already exists, and using the materials that God created. Moreover, the craftsman creates in sequence and over time; but ‘you spoke and they were made, and by your word you made them.’ This involves Augustine in the perplexing notion that something can come from nothing, and he cannot get beyond the notion that God’s act of creation involves the imposition of form. Taking Genesis 1:2 as his basic text (‘the earth was invisible and disorganized, and darkness was above the abyss’), he struggles in Confessions 12.6.6 towards a definition of the abyss as ‘a nothing something’ (nihil aliquid) and ‘a being which is non-being’ (est non est), and concludes, ‘Nevertheless it must have had some kind of prior existence to be able to receive the visible and ordered forms.’² Although Genesis is not that creation itself but a narrative of that act of creation, written in human language by the human Moses (11.3.5), Augustine simultaneously subscribes to the common image of the world itself as text, a text created by God, and so ‘readable’, at least in accordance with limited human understanding.³ Nonetheless, Augustine is careful to distinguish this as an image, a human attempt to grasp what is, in the fullest sense, ineffable, not capable of being spoken.

Augustine’s interests look towards the theological, and an understanding of the ‘nature’ of the physical world is not the focus of his attention. The cosmos is ordered and beautiful, he believes, but we cannot fully appreciate this, for we cannot see it as God does, as a whole: ‘We, for our part, can see no beauty in this pattern to give us delight; and the reason is that we are involved in a section of it, under our condition of mortality, and so we cannot observe the whole design.’ If we were immortal, and had an infinity of time in which to observe every detail, we could, but given that we are not, we must simply accept God’s providence (City of God 12.4):

Hence the right course for us, when faced with things in which we are ill-equipped to contemplate God’s providential design, is to obey the command to believe in the Creator’s providence. We must not, in the rashness of human folly, allow ourselves to find fault, in any particular, with the work of that great Artificer who created all things.

To show interest in the natural world, as Augustine says he finds himself sometimes doing, is a sinful distraction he calls curiositas (Confessions 10.35.57):

When I am sitting at home, a lizard catching flies or a spider entrapping them as they rush into its web often fascinates me...The sight leads me on to praise you, the marvellous Creator and orderer of all things...When my heart becomes the receptacle of distractions of this nature and the container for a mass of empty thoughts, then too my prayers are often interrupted and distracted.

Aristotle feels no such theological constraint on his interest in the natural world. He does not use the metaphor of the world as text or book, but a number of his terms and images suggest the boundedness and unity of his object of study, and overlap intriguingly with those of the textual artefact. A retrospective historicising glance, one might say, sees traces of the textualisation of ‘nature’ already operative at this point en route along the royal road that issues forth in the later image of the Book of Nature. Here he is in the very opening sentences of his Physics, thinking at once about the methodology of the study of nature (1.1, 184a10–16):

Since in all approaches [methodous] that involve beginnings [archai] or causes [aitia] or elements [stoicheia], it is acquaintance with these that constitutes knowledge [to eidenai] and understanding [to epistasthai] – for then we think ourselves to know each phenomenon when we are acquainted with its first causes [ta aitia...ta prōta] and its first beginnings [tas archas tas prōtas] and have got right down to its elements [mechri tōn stoicheiōn] – it is clear that in knowledge concerning nature [tēs peri physeōs epistēmēs] also we must first try to define [diorizesthai] the matter of beginnings [ta peri tas archas].

A chain of necessary or plausible causation is also what interested the Aristotle of the Poetics about plot, as did the issue of the beginning, which he defined there as that which does not come after something else of necessity (Poetics 1450b27–8). Is the overlap of approach and terminology a ‘coincidence’, of no philosophical interest? The word translated as ‘element’ here (stoicheion) crops up in the discussion of verbal style (lexis, one of the six ‘parts’ of tragedy), where it refers to an ‘indivisible sound’ (phōnē adiairetos, Poetics 1456b22) – not just any sound, but the irreducibly smallest one from which a compound sound like a word can arise. However, most significant of all is the word I have translated as ‘beginnings’, for this would often be translated nowadays by the term ‘principles’: to understanding something, we must cordon off or put a boundary around or define (diorizesthai) that before which there is nothing, the thing in first place, the ultimate starting point. The study of poetics also has its ‘approach’ (methodos, Poetics 1447a12), which begins – ‘naturally’ (kata physin, after the manner of ‘nature’) – ‘first of all from first things’ (prōton apo tōn prōtōn, Poetics 1447a12–13).

Physics thus does not have its own ‘final vocabulary’, to recall Richard Rorty’s phrase,⁴ which is wholly peculiar to its own object of study. Within time, we interpret ‘nature’ as we go along, and cannot view it or describe it from the privileged position of the end. Nonetheless, this remains the dream of the discipline of physics; the end or goal, the telos, of physics is a ‘final theory’ or a ‘theory of everything’, but for the moment, it must bide its time; the study of the physical world involves, like a plot, a beginning, a middle⁵ and an end. Aristotle does not deploy the image of a book to give unity to what he studies, but he does have a concept which embraces the phenomena of the world even more economically and effectively – ‘nature’ (physis). His assertion that the study of poetics has an approach that begins ‘after the manner of nature’ (kata physin) from first principles is already indicative of the way that physics, the study of ‘nature’, would like to see itself as the model for all explanation, to be itself the principle of explanation.

For all that their ‘approaches’ diverge, Aristotle and Augustine are equally fixated on the issue of ‘first beginnings’. Although they have taken different directions, and each believes he has taken the direct route to the truth, this is the fork in the road to which they both look back methodologically. Plots, of course, have authors: no problem for Augustine, or for the Aristotle of the Poetics, though for the Aristotle of the Physics it is the source of some concern. Aristotle has no difficulty with the idea that the world has always existed and there is no divine oversight of its workings, but conceptually, he feels, in terms of a valid method of physical explanation, physical processes must have some ultimate ‘beginnings’. However, to posit some supernatural force as setting things in motion attributes to a physical process a non-physical cause, something ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the concept one has striven so carefully to demarcate and define, ‘nature’, and that just won’t do. Such a craftsman-creator or ‘Demiurge’ appears influentially in Plato’s Timaeus.⁶ Part of Aristotle’s project is thus to try to demarcate physics (ta physika, ‘the things to do with nature’) from metaphysics (ta metaphysica, ‘the things that come after [meta] the things to do with nature’ – for physics, as we have seen, likes to think of itself as occupying first place) through his own distinct ‘books’, the Physics and the Metaphysics. However, Aristotle owes much to this Platonic heritage. As David Sedley puts it,

His momentous innovation on that heritage lies in his theologically motivated decision to insulate god from any requirement to intervene in nature, either as creator or administrator. The result is that, while Aristotle’s world retains all the positive values – both functional and other – that Plato had associated with divine craftsmanship, these are now explained by on the one hand phasing out the divine craftsman as moving cause, and on the other representing nature as so closely isomorphic with craft in its structure as to be capable of producing its results even in the absence of a controlling intelligence.⁷

Thus, ‘Nature’, the concept which he uses to circumscribe and define the processes which are the object of his study, comes close to being anthropomorphised as a craftsman.

This comes through in his discussion of the four different kinds of ‘causes’ in Physics 2.3, the material, the formal, the efficient or moving, and the final or end-related. Aristotle offers a number of examples as he goes along. Thus, if we talk of a statue, the material cause is bronze, the formal cause the shape the sculptor gives to it, the sculptor is the efficient cause, and the final is the purpose for which it was created. This is readily understandable in the case of human artefacts or activities, but more elusive (though it can be productive to think with) in respect of natural processes, especially where efficient and final causes are concerned, where the question of agency and purpose become very tricky.⁸ Although Aristotle uses the example of a sculptor or a silversmith rather than a writer, this model of the human artefact swings the Physics in the direction of the Poetics, and its programmatic statement of its approach (methodos), in terms of the craft (tēchnē) particular to poiēsis, how plots should be constructed so as to stand together or form a unity (pōs dei sunistasthai tous muthous, 1447a9). For all Aristotle’s efforts neatly to distribute and demarcate different objects of study across his different texts, overlaps remain. Pursue this line of thinking, and the priority and authority granted to physics starts to look like the product of a moment of methodological decision. It is not hard to imagine a parallel universe in which Aristotle, at the fork in the road marked ‘first beginnings’, took the other turn and decided he should call what we know as his Physics the Metapoetics. Now that is an intriguing ‘what if...’ question.⁹

However, back in the world we are familiar with, instead of putting a supernatural force like Plato’s Demiurge ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the crucial point of beginning and so problematically make it ‘start things off’, the Aristotle of the Physics deals with this by relegating it to the end, the telos, as the ‘unmoved mover’ towards which all physical processes teleologically strive.¹⁰ You could be forgiven for feeling that Aristotle has simply put off or postponed the problem conceptually by this manoeuvre, and that certainly seems to have been the reaction of some of his philosophical successors.¹¹ In particular Epicurus (whose traditional dates are 340–270BC) wondered whether you couldn’t get rid of the supernatural from your approach to ‘nature’ from the very beginning, in principle. He took over and developed the theories of the fifth-century thinker, Democritus, who held that the world was made up of minute, indivisible particles of matter – atoms (from the adjective atomos, that which cannot be cut up, indivisible), whose only properties are size, shape, weight and movement, and which come together randomly to form the visible objects of the world and dissolve again into their constituent elements (Epicurus often uses the term stoicheion of these atoms). This effectively gets rid of the problems of agency and purpose from Aristotle’s theory of causes. The efficient cause is the random movement of the atoms which leads them to collide and interlock. This movement has no purpose whatsoever, but produces the universe we see around us.

Crucial to the Epicurean view of the world was the abolition of any ultimate beginnings and ends: the universe has always existed and will always exist, and so what need is there of any creator figure or unmoved mover? The universe is boundless in space as well, infinite in all directions. The supernatural is abolished by leaving no ‘outside’ for it to inhabit; Epicurus’s ‘gods’ are brought inside the system and have a shadowy and ineffectual existence in the spaces between the innumerable worlds in the universe, where they can get up to no harm – or good, for that matter. Epicureanism posed the greatest philosophical challenge in antiquity and beyond to theological worldviews such as Augustine’s. In one sense, Epicurus abolishes time along with the supernatural. Time becomes purely a matter of the human perception of physical motion and rest. As Lucretius, whose Latin poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) is the greatest testament to the power of Epicurean thinking, puts it, ‘Time also does not exist of itself’ (tempus item per se non est, 1.459); rather, ‘from things themselves there follows the sense of what has been done in the past, then what is present to us, and further what is to follow thereafter; nor should we admit that anyone has a sense of time in itself separated from the movement of things and their quiet calm’ (1.459–63). Any such sense is a purely human abstraction, not a feature of things themselves.

The masterstroke of the atomist tradition was arguably not the theory of matter for which it is perhaps best known today, but its dazzling exploitation of the concept of the infinite. Aristotle had also believed that the universe is infinite in time and space, but his unmoved mover is evidence of the problems posed by the need for any human account of that universe to be finite, bounded by a beginning and an end, and by the way that features of that account (particularly the figure of the author/craftsman) migrate into the phenomenon it purports to describe. The formal imposition associated with human authorship and the anthropocentric character of language, which continue to make agency and intention fiendishly difficult to distinguish in language, play devilish tricks. Thus the full title of Darwin’s book on the theory of evolution was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, but while the theory requires that the language Darwin uses of this ‘efficient cause’ be purged of reference to intention or purpose, selection could be taken to imply a selector and preservation a preserver; favoured races might suggest to the unguarded that there is one who is providentially conferring advantages on these races to some end or other.¹² Origin could also mislead in the context of a work that effectively deconstructs any absolute divisions of animals into ‘natural’ kinds, and denies that one could point to any one particular moment as marking the beginning of such a ‘kind’.¹³ The Epicurean tradition could not escape this bind either, but Lucretius casts a very keen eye on the issues raised in this chapter so far.

Lucretius makes the figure of Epicurus himself a key element in the explanations On the Nature of Things presents. In 1.62–79, Lucretius presents Epicurus in extravagantly heroic terms.¹⁴ The human race is depicted as lying grovelling under the weight of an appropriately personified figure of Religion or Superstition (religio, 63), ‘which showed its face from the regions of the sky, standing over (super...instans, 65)¹⁵ mortals with horrible appearance’. Throughout the poem, Lucretius rejects any description of the universe that would make the divine responsible for creating it or controlling what goes on in it; such explanations are seen to keep the human race subdued by irrational fears. Epicurus is figured as the champion of humankind, and overthrows the oppressor. He does so through intellectual rather than military feats, first by raising his eyes to observe (1.66–71):

primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra

est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra,

quem neque fama deum nec fulmina nec minitanti

murmure compressit caelum, sed eo magis acrem

inritat animi virtutem, effringere ut arta

naturae primus portarum claustra cupiret.

A Greek man was the first to dare to lift up mortal eyes against it, the first to make a stand against it. Neither the fables of the gods nor thunderbolts subdued him, nor the sky with its menacing roar, but all the more provoked the eager courage of his mind to desire to be the first to break through the confining bolts of nature’s gates.

Ignorance of how the world really works confines the human race as if in a city under siege, and Epicurus’s intellectual achievement is presented in terms of a military leader, unintimidated by the ‘threats’ of the heavens (symbolised by the thunderbolt), who breaks the siege and sallies forth (1.72–77):

ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra

processit longe flammantia moenia mundi

atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque,

unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri,

quid nequeat, finita potestas denique cuique

quanam sit ratione atque alte terminus haerens.

The lively vigour of his mind prevailed, and he marched out beyond the flaming ramparts of the world and traversed in mind and imagination the measureless universe, from where as victor he reports back to us what can come into being and what cannot, in short the way in which the power of each thing is limited and has a boundary-stone deep set.

Epicurus’s sally carries him – in his mind and imagination (mente animoque, 74) – beyond the flaming ramparts of the world (our planet and the stars we see above us in the sky) and across the whole universe (omne immensum, 74),¹⁶ and he brings home reports about the regions he has conquered (Julius Caesar’s commentaries on the conquest of Gaul, written in the 50s BC, about the same time as Lucretius’s poem, come to mind) in the form of an explanation of what can, and what cannot, happen in the universe. His victory reverses the earlier situation (1.78–79):

quare religio pedibus subiecta vicissim

obteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo.

Therefore religion in its turn lies crushed beneath his feet, while his victory lifts us level with the heavens.

Thanks to Epicurus, who celebrates his victory with a traditional gesture of humiliation of his enemy, the human race is now in the position traditionally associated with the gods.

The first thing to notice in this passage is its claim to universal truth. The human race is to have confidence in Epicurean physics because it can explain everything. The power or potentiality of each and every phenomenon in the universe is set within limits (finita potestas...cuique, 76), its boundary-stone, which defines what we would call its properties, deeply set (alte terminus haerens, 77) and so not liable to be uprooted and moved. What can and cannot happen is thus strictly defined, that is, set within its own limits (Latin fines). Epicurus has brought everything under intellectual control, and this is conveyed through the characteristically Roman image of surveying: to maintain physical control of territory, you need intellectual control of it as well.¹⁷ The universe, everything there is (omne) may be immeasurable (that is the sense conveyed by immensum, an adjective formed from the verb metior, ‘to measure’), yet measure it is precisely what Epicurus is represented as doing. Paradoxical, but the claim to universal truth involves such paradoxes, and this passage is dramatically representing them. Epicurus is emphatically a human being here. He is the ‘Greek man’ who dared to raise ‘mortal eyes’ against religion (66–67), yet he somehow manages the task of traversing the ‘immeasurable everything’ (74), which would take not only one lifetime, but, strictly speaking, an infinite number of lifetimes. The boundlessness of the universe in space and time is crucial to Epicurean theory,¹⁸ and particularly to its rejection of the idea of a divine figure who created the universe and controls its workings. Infinity allows the self-organisation of the atoms to produce every possible permutation somewhere at some stage – past, present or future – in the universe, in such a way that, though the emergence of complex and reflective organisms such as human beings may seem to be a fluke in a universe formed by the chance collision of miniscule pieces of indivisible matter, such a development was inevitable somewhere, some time.¹⁹ A universe without boundaries of space and time conversely underpins the claim of that theory to universality: no matter where you look, no matter when you look, Epicurean theory can explain anything you observe.

Epicurus does not have an infinite number of lifetimes to carry out this task. In fact, he is represented as having completed it within his single life’s span. The representation of Epicurus here touches on the philosophical question, to which Aristotle repeatedly returns,²⁰ of whether infinity can ever be traversed. Aristotle was much exercised by Zeno’s paradox of half-distances famously posed by the story of the race between Achilles (in Homer, frequently described as ‘swift-footed’) and the tortoise. Achilles (in Homer, frequently described as ‘big-hearted’) gives his opponent a start, but by the time he has traversed half the intervening distance, the tortoise has moved on from where it started. By the time Achilles has once more traversed half the intervening distance, the tortoise has moved on a little further, and so on, and so on; on this basis, Achilles will never catch the tortoise. Absurd, of course, but that is one of the problems posed by infinity: the halves get ever smaller and smaller, but there is no end to them. Wrestling with this problem, Aristotle draws a distinction between actual and potential infinity (Physics 8.8, 263b3–6):

So, the reply we have to make to the question whether it is possible to traverse infinitely many parts (whether these are parts of time or of distance) is that there is a sense in which it is possible and a sense in which it is not. If they exist actually, it is impossible, but if they exist potentially, it is possible.

In the case of Achilles and the tortoise, the halves make up a potential infinity, and so Achilles can traverse them and win the race. This is the philosophical point that underlies mente animoque (‘in his mind and imagination’) in Lucretius 1.74. Epicurus does not physically traverse the infinite universe and does not give an explanation of every actual phenomenon (Lucretius’s poem would then be an endless text), but offers a ratio (cf. 1.77), a rationale from which, theoretically, any phenomenon at any time or any place, past, present or future, can (potentially) be explained.

The journey then is a conceptual one, a journey that one can imagine as having been completed. John Locke put it thus in his discussion of infinity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2.17.7, my emphasis):

I think it is not an insignificant subtilty [sic], if I say, that we are carefully to distinguish between the idea of the infinity of space, and the idea of a space infinite. The first is nothing but a supposed endless progression of the mind, over what repeated ideas of space it pleases; but to have actually in the mind the idea of a space infinite, is to suppose the mind already passed over, and actually to have a view of all those repeated ideas of space which an endless repetition can never totally represent to it; which carries in it a plain contradiction.

Lucretius’s depiction of Epicurus suggests that the poet gave some careful thought to this problem, which bears upon his own attempt to represent Epicurus’s universal truth in his poem. One of the features of his Epicurus is that ‘neither the fables of the gods nor thunderbolts subdued him, nor the sky with its menacing roar, but all the more provoked the eager courage of his mind...’ (1.68–70). Unexplained meteorological phenomena were par excellence the symbol of irrational and superstitious fear, the thunderbolt being traditionally the weapon of Jupiter with which he punished those who displeased him. Thus Lucretius feels obliged to expound the Epicurean explanation of thunder and lightning in atomist terms at considerable length in 6.219–378. He rounds off his account with these lines (6.379–82):

hoc est igniferi naturam fulminis ipsam

perspicere et qua vi faciat rem quamque videre,

non Tyrrhena retro volventem carmina frustra

indicia occultae divum perquirere mentis...

It is by this means it is possible to understand the very nature of the fiery thunderbolt and to see by what power it achieves each of its effects – not by unrolling scrolls of Etruscan incantations, vainly to seek out signs of the hidden mind of the gods...

The Etruscans were famed for their expertise in divination, and Lucretius pictures the superstitious unrolling scrolls containing their carmina, a word that covers spells, incantations and prophecies, and wasting their time by poring over them in a vain attempt to work out the intentions of the gods. The description of Jupiter metaphorically going through the same action in the Aeneid as he foretells the future to Venus draws on the same tradition. But carmina, in the sense of ‘poems’, are also the medium Lucretius is using to expound Epicurean doctrine.²¹ The unstated implication is that it is better to unroll the scrolls of his poem and pore over what it says – you won’t be wasting your time. Lucretius’s discretion, if such it was, in not making this explicit is noteworthy, but it is precisely by making of the universe a text that the infinite can be brought within finite bounds and made comprehensible, just as the endless succession of times is brought within bounds and the significance of each event within it made manifest in the Virgilian Jupiter’s prophecy. The fittingness of the designation of Lucretius’s text as a carmen is doubly determined in that it too has a prophetic aspect, in the sense that, containing universal truth, the form of its explanation is just as applicable to things in the future as to those in the present and the past.

Narratives, as we have seen, can be condensed into a concept. What Epicurus ‘reports back to us’ from his journey across the universe is a ratio, a theory of the universe. At the macroscopic level, the infinity or boundlessness of the universe is a crucial philosophical aspect of the Epicurean theory of the universe.²² It is also an important element in thinking about the problem of what it means to explain something. At the human level, or even more so at the microscopic level of the atom, the explanatory power of Epicureanism depends on the ‘way in which the power or potentiality [potestas] of each thing is limited [finita, set within boundaries, 1.76]’: not everything whatsoever can happen, but is limited by what atoms can, and equally importantly, cannot do. All the objects in the visible and sensible world are compounds of atoms, which have only size, shape, weight and movement, and, as their name suggests, they cannot be cut up (a-tomos) into smaller units. The notion of infinity thus does not go all the way down. Everything in the universe that can be said to exist is a compound made up of these atoms, so defined. The movement and interlocking shapes of these atoms lead to the formation of those compounds, which are subject to eventual dissolution into their constituent atoms once more under constant atomic bombardment.²³ But the atoms themselves survive: they were never created and will never perish, and are distributed across the universe. If, at the largest scale, the universe has no boundaries, at the smallest, there is a boundary, the indivisibility of the atom, and this is philosophically no less crucial to Epicurean theory.²⁴ Every phenomenon in the universe can be referred back to it and its (limited) properties, and so within the structure of the explanation it occupies first place, the ‘beginning’.

The Epicurean atom is too small for the eye to see, but what it lacks in terms of visibility, it more than makes up in a quality that is philosophically far more important, its finality: the atom provides a definitive point of explanatory closure. There is an infinity of actual atoms in the universe, but everywhere you look for an explanation, you start out with the atom and you end up with the atom. If individual atoms can be located in space and time, the concept of the atom transcends them, and ‘embodies’ ultimate truth.²⁵ It is on this conceptual level, ‘in his mind and spirit’, that Epicurus achieves his feat, transcending his own human situatedness to bring back to mankind a theory the validity of which is not limited by time or place. A true theory may, for those who subscribe to it, be ‘outside’ time, but even its most faithful adherents, even the deviser and embodiment of that truth, exist ‘within’ time and circumstance. Epicurean truth may not be subject to time or place, but its remarkable irruption into history is associated by Lucretius (6.1–8) with a very specific time and place, Athens in the lifetime of Epicurus in the late fourth and early third centuries BC.

Epicurus is represented by Lucretius in military terms as a hero who declares war on religion,²⁶ conquers its territory, imposes his terms on it, and returns home triumphantly. If the shape of scientific explanation is not necessarily narrative,²⁷ the legitimation of such explanation usually is.²⁸ For Jean-François Lyotard this can be traced back at least to the allegory of the cave in Books 6 and 7 of Plato’s Republic, which emphatically illustrates the way such narratives generate a traffic between knowledge and sociopolitical authority. The philosopher who has exited the cave and discovered the truth returns to inform those who remain there, and it is to such holders of eternal truth that Plato entrusts autocratic political power. ‘Within’ time, knowledge and power are inextricably intertwined. Lyotard further remarks that the use of narrative to legitimate knowledge can theoretically take two routes, ‘depending on whether it represents the subject of the narrative as cognitive or practical, as a hero of knowledge or a hero of liberty’.²⁹ In practice, Plato’s philosopher, who emerges from the cave to discover truth and then returns to enlighten the dwellers therein, and Lucretius’s Epicurus, who traverses the universe and similarly returns to report to humankind the nature of things and so free it from irrational fears, combine these roles.³⁰ Lucretius’s narrative is framed in terms of Roman imperial conquest, with Epicurus surveying conquered territory as a general would. Epicurus returns to us from his foray across the immeasurable universe bringing back as victor to us (refert nobis victor, 1.75) a prize of war, a comprehensive theory of the nature of things, in a gesture that specifically recalls a Roman general exhibiting his spoils when celebrating a formal triumph.³¹ This ceremony glorified not just the journey outwards, but the return home to the point from which one started out. An actual infinite universe has no centre,³² but Epicurus’s ‘journey’ across the potential infinite exploits the capacity of narrative form, which joins beginnings and ends purposively,³³ to establish our world at the ‘centre’ of that universe, just as the triumph ceremony marks out Rome as the centre even of a ‘universal’ empire ‘without boundaries of time or space’.³⁴

Lucretius’s representation of Epicurus has its roots in the heroisation of great thinkers in the earlier philosophical tradition, and even in Epicurus’s own lifetime the foundations for what we find in Lucretius were already being laid.³⁵ This image of Epicurus was developed in the context of the conquests of his older contemporary Alexander the Great, who in mid-career was already being eulogised as subduing not simply the oikoumenē, the known ‘inhabited’ world, but beyond as well. The Athenian orator Aeschines in his speech Against Ctesiphon, delivered in 330BC, remarks of Alexander that he ‘had departed for lands that lie beyond the Great Bear, and not far short beyond the boundaries of the whole inhabited world’ (165).³⁶ In Lucretius’s time, this Alexander imagery was current of both Pompey (nicknamed Magnus ‘the Great’ in emulation of Alexander) and Julius Caesar.³⁷ In the Roman declamatory schools, Alexander’s conquests were favourite themes for the suasoria, including an exercise³⁸ which involved taking on the role of Alexander deliberating with himself whether he should set sail on the Ocean which was thought to surround the oikoumenē: a recurrent topic is whether he would find land on the other side.³⁹

Much more suggestive for my purposes is the anecdote preserved in Plutarch (De tranquillitate animi, 466D). It involves the philosopher Anaxarchus of Abdera, who accompanied Alexander on his campaigns. Crucially, Anaxarchus was a follower of the early atomist Democritus, also from Abdera, who claimed that there are infinitely many worlds:⁴⁰

Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds. When his friends asked him if any accident had befallen him, he answered: ‘Do you not think it is a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one?’

Lucretius’s Epicurus trumps Alexander in submitting the whole universe to his intellectual dominion. Moreover, while Alexander weeps at the prospect of a task hardly begun and with no hope of completion, Epicurus returns in triumph, mission already accomplished. Again, Aristotle’s distinction between actual and potential infinity is crucial for discerning the differences between the two figures. To return once more to Jupiter’s promise to the Romans of an empire without boundaries of time and space, the Romans ‘within’ the history that Jupiter foretells are like Alexander confronted by an actual infinity that is an endless task, while the god views the same sequence from ‘outside’, a potential infinity that he has traversed. Virgil’s narrative combines and distributes the two notions with enormous subtlety, allowing his readers to occupy both subject positions simultaneously, and so get the best of both worldviews. In historical terms, Lucretius helped to prepare for this.

Lucretius’ ‘imperialist’ Epicurus can help us to consider further the issues of time, knowledge and truth, and the traffic between knowledge and sociopolitical authority. Since the 1970s, the discipline that has come to be known as science studies has grappled with the challenge of bringing ‘within’ history the ‘universal truth’ claimed by the natural sciences. Science studies distances itself from the traditional legitimating narrative that the truth (it is characteristically singular in this narrative), always already there though hitherto unrecognised, is discovered in favour of one that suggests that truths (plural) are painstakingly made, within time and circumstance. The two narratives can be seen to complement each other,⁴¹ but science studies seeks to challenge the hegemony of those narratives of scientific knowledge that treat discovery as a concept by viewing it instead as a metaphor. The starting point of science studies, its principle, is that no final distinction can be drawn between the political and the epistemological. The attempt to forge dynamic theoretical links between these two domains has been a central concern of the work of, most notably, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer,⁴² Bruno Latour,⁴³ and Reviel Netz,⁴⁴ and has been attended by heated controversy, in a scholarly episode often called the ‘science wars’.⁴⁵ Latour coined the phrase ‘political epistemology’ as a shorthand for the way in which knowledge and politics can be seen to go hand in hand from a perspective ‘within history’: any shift in epistemology obliges us to rethink politics, and vice versa, without granting either category the autonomy from, or hegemony over, the other which it craves. Political epistemology does not set out to explain science or knowledge in terms of politics or social context as though these were clearly demarcated ‘natural kinds’ or were in possession of their own ‘final vocabulary’ – indeed, political epistemology asks us as part of its agenda to problematise precisely that way of thinking, as it seeks to negotiate overlapping vocabularies, without recourse to a final explanation of one discipline in terms of the other.

One result of this intellectual movement has been an upsurge of interest in the conceptual connections between knowledge and empire, both within classical studies and beyond.⁴⁶ Thus, for example, Trevor Murphy subtitles his study of the Elder Pliny’s Natural History, a monumental compilation in 37 books dedicated to the Emperor Titus, The Empire in the Encyclopaedia.⁴⁷ In their Introduction to a collection of essays on a number of early imperial writers, Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, Jason König and Tim Whitmarsh encapsulate the characteristic approach of these studies well: ‘we explore the possibility that the Roman Empire brought with it distinctive forms of knowledge, and, in particular, distinctive ways of ordering knowledge in textual form’; their principal interest, they say, ‘is in texts that follow a broadly “compilatory” aesthetic, accumulating information in often enormous bulk’.⁴⁸ However, Lucretius’s spare six-book poem feels a very different sort of text to Pliny’s gargantuan Natural History, although both appeal to empire as a way of characterising the knowledge they contain. Empire is concerned with accumulation, to be sure, with pushing back the boundaries of territory or, as it might be, knowledge, but that’s not the only possible conceptualisation of empire. Accumulation is a Wikipedia model of knowledge: issues of truth and accuracy circulate, sometimes very energetically, around individual details, but there’s nothing to stop anybody adding more and more articles – ad infinitum, just as Alexander aspired to conquer ever more worlds.

Rather different is a text that claims to offer you not truths but the truth. One critic has encapsulated what he calls the ‘ambition’ of Lucretius’s poem thus: it ‘transcends limitations of space and time: rooted in the understanding of the eternal workings of nature, Epicureanism aspires to be a lesson for all people in all ages.’⁴⁹ Conceptually underlying this ambition is Lucretius’s representation of the achievement of Epicurus, who has traversed the whole universe and reports back not on each and every phenomenon, but on the rationale (quanam...ratione, 1.77) by which each phenomenon can be explained, whenever, wherever. That is what Lucretius promises in his work, whose title On the Nature of Things suggests that the ‘things’ that are explained have a nature, a rationale that lies hidden, but a nature, as always already there, that awaits our discovery of it. The different conceptualisations of empire can once more be mapped on to Aristotle’s distinction between actual and potential infinity, and the capacity of the latter, but not the former, to be traversed. To repeat: Epicurus’s journey offers not a serial explanation, unending, of every phenomenon, but a theory according to which any phenomenon can, potentially, be explained. These principles and concepts, it is suggested, hold good at any time and at any place, and so escape the bounds of time and history. This is emphatically not a Natural History, after the fashion of the Elder Pliny’s.

Opposed to a model of accumulation, then, is one of compression, as John Barrow explains:⁵⁰

We might define science to be the search for compressions. We observe the world in all possible ways and gather facts about it; but this is not science. We are not content, like crazed historians, simply to gather up a record of everything that has ever happened. Instead we look for patterns in these facts, compressions of the information on offer, and these patterns we have come to call the laws of Nature. The search for a Theory of Everything is the quest for an ultimate compression of the world.

As Barrow’s reference to a Theory of Everything suggests, compression underlies the notion of a final explanation, a notion prominent in Lucretius’s poem and which finds its basis in the concept of the atom.⁵¹ Compression also underlies reductionism, the belief that, for all their apparent differences, biology may be reducible to chemistry and chemistry to physics in such a way that the sciences (plural) are ultimately unified as science (singular).⁵² A reductionist impulse is evident in Lucretius’s designation of atoms as ‘primary’ particles (corpora prima, rerum primordia), most significantly in his use of the term principium, ‘the thing that occupies first place’, of both a primary particle (as in 1.484) and the premise or starting point (what Aristotle called ‘beginnings’, archai) of an argument (as in 1.149), for in Epicurean terms the atom, not subject to division or further analysis, is both.⁵³

Epicurean atomism also provides a paradigm of realism, and, for all that it famously leaves room for free will at the human level through the notion of atomic swerve,⁵⁴ for determinism as well. What we see in the world is the result of atoms that move mechanically of their own accord, and through their collision and interlocking form compounds. Realist modes of thinking rely upon the notion that ultimately, somewhere back along the chain of causation that has resulted in what you see before you, you can get back to some ‘thing’ (the res that is in the title of Lucretius’s poem) that is self-evident, requiring no analysis (that is, no ‘breaking up’), just as, when this theory is applied to matter, there is an ultimate limit to division in a primary particle that cannot be divided further, an atom. But a realist/reductionist syndrome operates also, and often in an occluded manner, across a range of disciplines. For example, in those discussions of the relationship of, say, knowledge and power which treat one phenomenon as simple and fundamental and the other as complex and in need of explanation, and which then privilege one term over the other by explaining one in terms of the other, allowing it to occupy ‘first place’ in the argument.

Lucretius’s description of Epicurus’s journey thus offers a legitimating narrative of the knowledge he has gained in terms not just of an empire project, but of a universal empire project. Knowledge and empire can be linked in terms of the ever-greater accumulation of information and skills, but when this association is seen in terms of universal empire, a distinctive note enters, as in the notion of universal history, which is not the same thing as a history of the universe; nor is it an encyclopaedic account of everything that is known in the style of the Elder Pliny’s huge work. Rather, as we saw in Chapter 2, it is an attempt to find a meaningful pattern in the development of human society in terms of a narrative structured by a beginning, a middle and an end, which similarly involves compression by being structured around a concept such as power. The narrative of Epicurus’s universal empire project is structured around the concept not of power, but of truth. Virgil’s Jupiter holds out for the Romans the prospect of an empire without boundaries of space or time, tantalisingly a prospect of universal empire, seen from the viewpoint not of those within the flow of the events of history, for whom the explanation for any particular event may be painfully unclear, but of one who can see that or any other event in its full and incontrovertible significance in relation to the pattern as a whole. Crucially, the narrative structure involved is one that lies beyond ‘human’ powers of narration within history, and so is given a divine imprimatur. Jupiter and Epicurus occupy equivalent positions in relation to humankind.

Within such legitimating narratives – ancient and modern alike – the truth stands outside time, and its final and total achievement remains only a prospect for those within it. However firmly they believe themselves to have achieved progress in respect of certain particulars and to be directed teleologically towards the end, those within time nevertheless must await the day when the whole story will have been unfolded. Practically, this is forever, for, as with Alexander, there is an infinity of worlds to conquer; but we can glimpse also the potential infinity in which this overarching project will have been achieved. As Stephen Hawking famously put in at the climax of A Brief History of Time, ‘if we do discover [sic] a complete theory...it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.’⁵⁵ Hawking writes as one still working towards this telos, but confident that the pattern as a whole exists, could he but descry it in full. Epicurus, albeit he is a mortal man, is unusual in already having achieved the truth, and, however averse Lucretius is to invoking the divine in any conventional sense, it provides the imagery in which he feels obliged to characterise Epicurus’s achievement. His ‘theory’ is ‘sprung from his divine mind’ (ratio.../...divina mente coorta, 3.14–15), and ‘he was a god, a god, it has to be said...who first found out that theory of life which is now called wisdom’ (dicendum est, deus ille fuit, deus.../qui princeps vitae rationem invenit eam quae/nunc appellatur sapientia, 5.8–10). The truth stands outside time, and yet is now, Lucretius avers, fully available to those who exist within time, if only they master the wisdom. Lucretius’s narrative is of the revelation of this ‘theory of everything’ at a particular point within time and history, and takes the form of a curiously familiar narrative structure that satisfies this temporal logic: a story of incarnation, not in Bethlehem on the first Christmas day, but in Athens in the fourth century BC when the city ‘gave birth to a man endowed with such great genius who at a point in the past set forth everything from his truth-telling lips’ (cum genuere virum tali cum corde repertum/omnia veridico qui quondam ex ore profudit, 6.5–6).

While paying due attention to the epistemological dimensions of this argument, let us not overlook the political. Lucretius’s description of Epicurus as princeps in 5.9 (cited above) refers of course to his role as the one who was the ‘first’ to discover the theory with which his name is associated. The infinite universe of Epicurean theory, without boundaries of time and space, finds its explanatory closure in the indivisible atom, which Lucretius calls principium, the thing that occupies first place. A similarly unbounded universal empire a generation after Lucretius finds its rationale in the figure of an ‘individual’ – not a particular individual, however eminent (for Augustus, as it may be, is no less a figure within history and no less subject to death than Epicurus himself, for Lucretius the greatest of all men),⁵⁶ but one who adopted as his preferred appellation the term princeps and who similarly occupies first place in the system.⁵⁷ The homology is striking,⁵⁸ and carries on in the leadership of the Catholic Church, which inherited the tropes of universal empire.

Common to all these ideologies is the belief that, though their humanity means that their access to knowledge is inevitably partial, ultimately the truth is in some sense already there and on their side. Ready as they are to concede its metaphoricity, neither Virgil nor Augustine has any problem with the notion that this truth has an ‘author’ (Latin auctor) and that the associated ‘text’ has ‘authority’. Augustine, indeed, can point to a material book, the Bible, that embodies that truth and is the proper object of study, though it needs endless exegesis, commentary and allegory if that eternal truth is to be accessed, however imperfectly, in the here-and-now. Lucretius’s solution to knowing the truth was to enclose ‘nature’ within poetic form, the infinite represented in the (seemingly) finite closural control of an author omniscient thanks to knowing the rationale for everything that can happen. Lucretius is happy to deploy the image of the book explicitly in relation to wrong-headed ideas when he represents the Etruscan seers as poring over their scrolls in a vain attempt to understand thunder and lightning in ‘authoritative’ theological terms. However, he is hesitant about deploying the image in relation to Epicurean theory, though he can’t avoid it entirely when talking of his own poem. For Lucretius, a realist all the way down, the rationale is, emphatically, there in the world, and nobody put it there. So, while Lucretius is happy to ‘textualise’ nature, most famously by making the letters of the alphabet that combine to form words an analogy for the differently shaped atoms that combine to form the compounds we see around us, you will look in vain for a fully explicit image of the Book of Nature in his work. Not so Augustine, for whom the heavens and the earth are God’s creation. In his commentary on Psalm 45:6–7, he says, ‘Let God’s written page be a book to you, so that you may hear these things; let the world be a book to you, so that you may see these things. In those codices, only those who know their ABCs read them; but in the world as a whole, even the uneducated can read’ (liber tibi sit pagina divina, ut haec audias; liber tibi sit orbis terrarum, ut haec videas in istis codicibus non ea legunt, nisi qui litteras noverunt; in toto mundo legat et idiota).⁵⁹ Side by side with the Book of Scripture is the Book of the World, which is open to everyone. However, the notion that truth inheres literally or metaphorically in a text and can be accessed by study or observation of that text is a problematic one, as we shall see when we revisit the issues raised here from the perspective of a millennium-and-a-half and more later.

Narratives of knowledge as an empire project give us a model of endless accumulation; narratives of knowledge as a universal empire project subtly combine endless expansion over time with the compression into concepts and theories that translate that knowledge into eternal truth that can be pointed towards in the here-and-now. These narratives touch, in the words of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, ‘the roots of the occidental episteme. What is at stake,’ he continues, ‘is the fissure between knowledge and truth, the fragmentation of the unity of knowledge through the sciences themselves, in space and time.’⁶⁰ Rheinberger’s observations touch on two interlocking mythic and ideological narratives which structure the history and philosophy of knowledge and play on a distinction between Science, capital S in the singular, and sciences, lower case, in the plural. The first (most memorably represented in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel) is a narrative which sees a prelapsarian originary and unified truth fragmented into multiple and conflicting discourses, the second a teleological narrative that would see these multiple and conflicting discourses united in peace as the provinces of a single unit.

The legitimating narratives of Science for those ‘within’ time have this characteristic teleological shape, whether one positions oneself as looking back on the moment of fulfilment, like Lucretius, or as looking forward to it, like Stephen Hawking. These narratives operate with a distinction of truth on the one side, and ignorance, superstition or myth on the other. The distinction is a moving one, serving at any one moment to differentiate what is regarded as secure knowledge from unfounded or erroneous belief, and it is often linked to the theme of progress: the borders of mumbo-jumbo (that hallowed term of imperialist epistemology) have been pushed back, or, in the case of Epicurus and his enemy religion, comprehensively abolished by scientific reason – reason being the conceptual term precipitated out from this narrative as the capacity to see the picture as a whole. Lucretius believed that Epicurus had said the final word on the nature of things, but time has taken its toll of his doctrines. The atom of the twenty-first-century physicist is a far cry from that of Epicurus. Lucretius’s text, it may be felt, in many respects has had its day, and is of antiquarian interest only, definitively superseded and comprehensively consigned to the past. However, that too is a totalising narrative of knowledge and truth, and is open to sceptical scrutiny.⁶¹ In order to open out the argument further, let us turn to one of the masters of such narratives, and the figure often seen as a prime source for the legitimating narrative of a ‘modernity’ that has consigned ‘antiquity’ to the past in just this way, Francis Bacon.

The title of Bacon’s utopian fantasy of 1626, New Atlantis, takes its cue from the myth of the island of Atlantis told in Plato’s ‘creationist’ dialogue, Timaeus (24d–25d), and its continuation, Critias (108e–121c). In the myth, Atlantis is imagined to have existed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the Straits of Gibraltar, which marked the start of Ocean and the limits of the world known to the ancients. The travellers to Bacon’s island (now re-located to the south seas of the Pacific) encounter the director of a research institute called Salomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days Work, who declares as its mission statement that the ‘End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and the secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’.⁶² The aspiration towards totality is expressed by Bacon in terms of empire at a historical moment when the Virgilian associations had been exercising a particularly powerful sociopolitical influence for more than a century.⁶³ Jupiter’s prophecy had come to function as a way of asserting historical affiliation and continuity, even in the face of apparent rupture, the demise of the Roman empire, by way of the doctrine of translatio imperii and the associated idea of translatio studii, which ‘translate’ power and knowledge, ‘carrying’ them ‘across’ any historical boundary that would seek to separate past and present. This doctrine could be especially potent at moments when the achievements of the Romans of old could be felt to have been bettered. In particular, there was now a definite answer to the question posed by Alexander in the old declamatory exercise of whether there was land on the other side of the Ocean that bounded the oikoumenē. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the territories of the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V encompassed not only more of Europe than the Romans had ruled, but also lands in the New World that the Romans had never known about. This allowed Charles to boast on his device, dating from 1516, that there was ‘more beyond’ (plus oultre) the Pillars of Hercules depicted there. In the greater sweep of history, Jupiter’s prophecy of empire could be seen as one step closer to fulfilment than it had been in the times of the Romans.

Territorial aggrandisement was only one aspect of the boast. The origins and exact meaning of the phrase plus oultre (which in Latin would be plus ultra) remain obscure. It is not an ancient motto, but Dante in the Inferno attests to a tradition that the pillars themselves were ‘where Hercules left his warning that Man should not go further beyond’ (dov’Ercule segnò li suoi riguardi,/acciòche l’uom più oltre non si metta, Canto 26, 107–8). The implied negative (non) plus ultra would suggest simply a statement that there was ‘nothing beyond’, and so it would be pointless to venture further. But a theological sanction may also be felt. The alternative (ne) plus ultra would be an injunction to curb not simply human ambition but human curiosity as well, which was seen in the Christian tradition as a vice. Augustine in Confessions 5.3 had used his own experience to warn against the presumption associated with mankind’s cognitive abilities, its curiositas. Curiosity about the future is the most presumptive, and precise predictive knowledge is Augustine’s particular target. He takes as his exemplary model the capacity of astronomy to make exact prognoses of the future (for example, of eclipses) in respect of what were regarded as the most exalted objects in the universe, the stars in the heavens. Therein, he thought, lay a temptation for man to an irreligious pride in the power of his intellect, whose origin he ascribes to himself rather than seeing it as the creation and gift of his Maker. His path to God is thus blocked: ‘By the proud you are not found, not even if their curiosity and skill number the stars and the sand, measure the constellations, and trace the paths of the stars’ (5.3.3).⁶⁴

The discovery of the New World and that there was indeed ‘more beyond’ helped to loosen this bond on curiosity. As Earl Rosenthal has put it in his investigation of Charles’s slogan,

It...embodied the excitement and the sense of man’s enhanced power experienced by the informed courtiers and humanists of Europe who eagerly awaited news of the latest discoveries in the previously unknown hemisphere. Understood in this context, [Charles’s] motto Plus Oultre was not simply a chiding reversal of a restrictive Herculean proverb but, rather, a new slogan that expressed, quite literally, a new vision of the world.⁶⁵

As Rosenthal suggests, the excitement came from the prospect not simply of territorial acquisition but of increased knowledge, which together offered ‘quite literally, a new vision’ of the world – a new overarching narrative within which to place these advances. What was at stake was not just an increased body of knowledge but a changed attitude towards what constituted knowledge. Rosenthal’s reference to a new vision captures the rhetoric of an emerging distinction between an ‘ancient’ and a ‘modern’ world, a break that is not purely temporal but epistemological as well, and is associated with a legitimating narrative that, even though it has come under sceptical scrutiny, as we shall see, remains a modality of experience inhabited by many ‘moderns’.

It is such a vision that underlies Francis Bacon’s project for a Great Instauration (Instauratio Magna), the covering term for the uncompleted miscellany of writings that occupied the final six years of his life (1620–26) and helped to develop this narrative. Instauratio is a term steeped in religious associations. It is the word used in the Latin Vulgate Bible of Solomon’s renovation of the Temple of the Jews.⁶⁶ The classical roots of the term associate it with the repetition of a ritual that has had to be abandoned. Historically, this can serve to suggest the efforts of the past as abortive, with the consequent need for a fresh start if, specifically, a sacred task is to be properly fulfilled. The magnificent title page of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna, with its depiction of ships sailing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, encapsulates Bacon’s project. Its vision of the expanding horizons of knowledge combines the imagery of Roman imperialism with the biblical prophetic tradition in its use as a motto of an adaptation of a quotation from the Book of Daniel (12:4), ‘many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’ (multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia). However, even as it evokes the past, there is a much more powerful orientation towards the future. This is a vision that, like Jupiter’s in the Aeneid, invites its readers not simply to look forwards, but to look towards the end, towards the divine order within which humankind exists. The Book of Daniel is to the Old Testament what the Revelation of St John is to the New, a prophetic book that describes what will happen before the world comes to an end. The inscription therefore looks to the completion of time and the end of history, within Bacon’s Christian worldview, the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. As with Jupiter’s prophecy in the Aeneid, some of this has already come to pass, for Bacon in the voyages of discovery and the circumnavigation of the globe, and, again as with Jupiter’s prophecy, the orientation towards the end endows the present moment with a providential significance and urgency.⁶⁷

The Pillars of Hercules symbolise an epistemological barrier, even a prohibitive sanction, now overcome. Just as the voyages of discovery had gone beyond what the ancients had achieved historically in terms of worldly dominion, so their epistemological authority was now open to challenge. In the Preface to the Instauratio Magna, Bacon remarks of ‘the received arts’ of antiquity,

In my view men properly appraise neither their assets nor their strength, but place too much faith in the former and too little in the latter. The consequence of wildly overvaluing the received arts is that men do not look beyond them; the consequence of undervaluing their own strength is that they waste it on trivia and do not try to test it on business of real weight. These things are then like baleful pillars set up against the sciences, as men are not encouraged by the desire or hope of getting beyond them.⁶⁸

‘Baleful pillars’ translates Columnae, tanquam fatales, which does not adequately capture the sense that people mistakenly regard these barriers as fated, their actions and their very intellectual horizons determined by the story thus told. However, Bacon uses the tropes of this story so as to sketch out a fresh orientation towards the future. In one of the aphorisms (97) that make up the Instauratio Magna, he takes on the role of Alexander the Great:

...human reason in its present condition is just a farrago and mass made up of a good deal of faith, a lot of accident, and a fair few infantile notions which we swallowed when young.

But if someone in the prime of life, with senses unimpaired and a mind washed clean, applies himself anew to experience and particulars we should hope for better things from him. And here I promise myself the fortune of Alexander the Great, but let no one accuse me of vanity until he has heard me out, for my words aim at the exposure of all vanity.

For this is how Aeschines spoke of Alexander and his deeds: We surely do not live a mortal life, but were born for posterity to tell and proclaim the wonders of us [Against Ctesiphon 132]; as if he took Alexander’s deeds for miracles.

But in a later age Titus Livius thought better and more incisively about the matter, and said something like this about Alexander: that he had nothing other than the nerve to despise foolish fears [eum non aliud quam bene ausum vana contemnere, 9.17.16]. And I think that future ages will bring in a similar verdict on me: that I did nothing great, but only made less of things thought to be great.⁶⁹

In looking towards a fresh future, Bacon reconfigures the past, seeing Alexander not as some miracle-worker, but as a very human figure operating within his world, though special in not being bound by received dogma. In proposing a Novum Organum, a new ‘instrument’ or methodology, Bacon was looking to supersede the old Organon of Aristotelian logic, which he saw as restricting humankind’s capacity for knowledge. The Bible might be the revelation of God’s purpose and the source of an ultimate authority, but endless speculation based on human texts as if they contained a definitive method or world-picture, the modus operandi of the Aristotelianism he rejects, was a dead end. ‘From these Greek philosophies,’ he complains in another aphorism (73) in the Novum Organum, ‘one can scarcely adduce after all this time a single experiment that tends to help and alleviate the human condition, and that can, properly understood, be truly credited to the speculations and dogmas of philosophy.’⁷⁰ The opposition between experiment and speculation signals a willingness not simply to observe and represent (as Aristotle had) but to intervene in the course of nature.⁷¹ The role of the natural philosopher for Bacon is to advance knowledge in practical ways through experiment so as to enhance the welfare of humankind. The Alexander whom Bacon fashions as a precursor is one with innumerable worlds to conquer, and who, far from being daunted, is fired by the prospect. Bacon’s vision is an unashamedly imperial and providential one – there is an overarching pattern to all of nature’s phenomena – but he aligns himself with the human viewpoint from within the project, not God’s outside it.

In the third part of the Instauratio Magna, the Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis, Bacon resumes his attack on the ‘wrong-headed philosophies’ which attempt to read off explanations of the world from the principles set out in Aristotle’s texts rather than observe the world and seek to discover the truth there:

...if there be humility towards the Creator, if there be reverence or willingness to magnify his works, if there be charity in men and eagerness to relieve human necessities and afflictions, if there be any love of truth in nature, hatred of shadows, and desire to purify the intellect, we should beg men again and again to set aside for a while or at least discard these fickle and wrong-headed philosophies, which have put theses before hypotheses, led experience captive, and exulted over God’s works; and to read through with due humility and reverence the volume of creatures [summisse, & cum veneratione quâdam, ad Volumen Creaturarum evolvendum accedant], and dwell and reflect on it, and, purged of opinions, to study it with a pure and honest mind. This is that speech and language which went out to the ends of the earth, and did not suffer the confusion of Babel; let men learn this thoroughly and, becoming childlike, return to infancy again and deign to take its abecedaria into their hands. They should spare no effort in interpreting and unravelling it, but advance energetically, and stick at it until death.⁷²

Two associated ideas dominate this extract. The first is the Fall. For Bacon, the advancement of knowledge is the means by which mankind can reverse the damage caused by the Fall and the confusion of tongues associated with building the Tower of Babel. In a work of 1603, Valerius Terminus, Bacon defines what the ‘true ends of knowledge’ must be: ‘it is a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power (for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them) which he had in his first state of creation.’⁷³ The Adamic language of calling creatures by their true names was lost in the Fall, but Bacon hopes that the loss can be made good by the new methodology. Adam not only named the creatures but commanded them as well; nature is to be controlled as well as understood. The second important idea is the Book of Nature, and Bacon enjoins his readers, as it were, to return to childhood and learn the ABCs of it. Though the originary language and understanding of Adam was lost forever, the hard work of observation and experiment could allow us ‘humbly and with due reverence to turn to unrolling the volume of the creatures’.

Bacon’s reference to ‘unrolling the volume of the creatures’, with its associations of the papyrus scroll used in antiquity, is eye-catching in an author for whom the printing press, along with gunpowder and the magnetic compass, ‘unknown to the ancients’, were the defining inventions of recent times (Aphorism 129).⁷⁴ Bacon’s language of unrolling, which evokes above all the metaphorical scroll which marks Jupiter’s divine authoring of history in Virgil’s Aeneid, suggests an ancient genealogy for an image which he is going to use to make a fresh and very bold claim. Although the topos of the Book of Nature is not classical and only begins to emerge with Augustine’s book of the world (orbis terrarum), we have seen that the trope of the world as ‘readable’ extends back beyond Lucretius’s analogy of atoms and letters of the alphabet to Aristotle, includes Bacon’s abecedarium of nature, and continues in the current image of the genetic ‘code’.⁷⁵

That the world, or aspects of it, might be thought of as a book has particular entailments, and the fleeting metaphor of Jupiter’s book of Fate hardly more than hints at the philosophical and theological dimensions of the image, let alone the scrutiny to which the image would be subjected. In his critique of what he calls the ‘logocentrism’ of the West in Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida tracks what he calls a ‘fundamental continuity’ that ‘systematically contrasts divine or natural writing and the human and laborious, finite and artificial inscription’,⁷⁶ a continuity that can be tracked through Plato’s ‘writing the truth in the soul’ (Phaedrus 274c–276a), and the symbolism of the book in pagan and Christian antiquity through the Middle Ages to the present.⁷⁷ Beyond the plethora of words, shifting and uncertain in meaning, lay something stable and eternal, figured as the Logos or Word. Within this metaphorical economy of words and the Word, the idea of the book, ‘which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing’, which is seen as sequential and time-bound.⁷⁸ Writing is enmeshed in human circumstance, open and disruptive, while the book has structure, closure and a sense of totality. The theological dimension of the Word, expressed in the opening words of St John’s Gospel (‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’), ensured a central place for the dynamic of word and Word in any Christian thinking.

Another vital development was the invention of the codex book which superseded the papyrus scroll, and with it the emergence of one specific book that gathered together under the sign of authority – the supreme authority – disparate writings of different provenance into a unity, the Bible. Beyond the multiplicity of its contents, all of them limited and incomplete, all bearing the signature of human authorship, lay the perfect Book, comprehensive and authorised by God’s Word. However, the Word of God was available to mankind only in human language, and so in need of the fallible and time-bound processes of reading and interpretation to gain access to its eternal wisdom and truth. On the analogy of the Bible, Nature too in the late Middle Ages comes to be frequently figured as a book⁷⁹ that, like the Bible, contained signs and meanings which the reader had to subject to processes of interpretation: ‘The Word as verbum Dei signified the Bible; the Word also authored, through its originative creative power, God’s Works – the world and creatures.’⁸⁰ God’s plan for the world could be read not only in the Scripture, but in the Book of Nature as well. But if Nature was a Book, what language was it written in? Bacon’s answer, the language of Adam, was not to be long-lived, but his mobilisation of the topos had profound effects.

The Book of Nature was a persistent topos, but to describe it as a topos works to isolate it from the movement of history and to mask how it was differently deployed in a variety of polemical contexts, never more intensively than in the early seventeenth century, when the issue of the authority vested in texts was under particular scrutiny. In a superb study, Mario Biagioli has analysed how Bacon’s contemporary, Galileo, used a range of configurations of the book over a decade or so in a number of different debates ‘to legitimize his brand of natural philosophy by casting nature as a material inscription of God’s logos – a “text” that was simultaneously opposed to the Aristotelian corpus and complementary to the Scripture’.⁸¹ As he puts it, ‘the topos of the book of nature did not emerge as an abstract methodological reflection, but as a context-specific response to critics who had invoked the absolute authority of another book: the Scripture.’⁸² Galileo’s brilliant appropriation of the image to consider the ‘language’ in which the Book of Nature is written will be considered in the next section, but Bacon’s is no less audacious.

Bacon had expressed in his image of the Book the aspiration to make good the loss of the Adamic language after the Fall, but was equally eager to escape the constraints of the received attitude towards the Aristotelian corpus and Scripture, which believed that ever more detailed poring over the minutiae of texts was a path to the truth. This was a methodology, as we have seen, that Lucretius was already keen to distance himself from, associating such practices with the superstition of Etruscan divination. However, Bacon was constrained by a force of religious belief that Lucretius was happy to debunk. Bacon’s rhetorical strategy and manipulation of imperial imagery effect two additions to the canon: the old Organon of Aristotelianism is supplemented by his own New Organon, and the authority of the Book of Scripture is supplemented (as Augustine had sanctioned) by that of the Book of Nature. The key mechanism for this supplementarity is typological reading: Alexander the Great and Aristotle are both retrospectively prefigured as types to which Bacon presents himself as the antitype who supersedes them. As we saw in Chapter 2, this typologising is nowhere felt so strongly as in Christian biblical interpretation which figures events or personalities in the Old Testament in the light of the New, but also is characteristic of the notion of translatio imperii, the transfer of power that takes place when the old order of things is superseded by and subsumed within the new. Gary Saul Morson formulates this aspect of typologising reading well: ‘Prefiguration is one way in which a later book may supersede an earlier one and vitiate its integrity while claiming to preserve its sacred status’, and he adds, ‘Religions are defined by the latest book they acknowledge as sacred.’⁸³ Morson also remarks (my emphasis),

A straight line drawn between an earlier and a later testament or key eliminates readings that lead in other directions. Among other things, Christian prefiguration destroys the possibility of seeing events in the Hebrew Bible as prefiguring events in Jewish history, which in its own turn overwrites possibilities imaginable at the time the books were written.

This recalls the way in which the past is tidied up by what we might term, after Heidegger, resolute interpretation. At a stroke, Bacon can reconfigure as dead ends traditions of interpretation that had long been pursued with the utmost earnestness. We are no longer constrained by what ‘they’ say.

To appreciate Bacon’s contribution, it is important to emphasise what he was not rejecting. He was not rejecting the importance the ancients had attached to observation of the world, nor was he rejecting the idea that the world was God’s creation. Rather, with his advocacy of experiment and the manipulation of nature, he was supplementing both the empiricism and painstaking observation associated with Aristotle and the atomists, and the sense of a hidden reality that lies behind appearances that is associated with the theological creationism of Plato. The latter issues forth from the theological perspective that the world is imagined in the mind of the divine figure who created it as having a form, in the way a picture or a statue is the product of the craftsman, or a text is the product of the author. God the craftsman invents or constructs according to his vision outside time, but the human experimenter within time discovers what was there all along could we but discern it, what the ancients still prompt us to call the nature of things. Recall that the competing claims of the terms discovery and invention make up the turf disputed in the science wars between those who would make the latter (‘realists’) and those who would make the former (‘constructivists’) their methodological first principle in looking for a final answer to the question of what science is.

Bacon’s theoretical emphasis on experiment was one important step in this reconfiguration of ancient ideas, but, as Shapin and Schaffer suggest in their discussion of the development of the air pump, it was Boyle later in the seventeenth century who invented the experimental method still current in scientific practice so as to distinguish matters of fact from the interpretation of fact.⁸⁴ Bruno Latour picks out three salient features from Shapin and Schaffer’s analysis. First, the rejection on the part of this experimental method of what he calls ‘the certainties of apodeictic reasoning’, reasoning that seeks to demonstrate something on the basis of some first principle (in the manner of Aristotle or Lucretius), ‘in favour of a doxa’:

Instead of seeking to ground his work in logic, mathematics or rhetoric, Boyle relied on a parajudicial metaphor: credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses gathered at the scene of the action can attest to the existence of a fact, the matter of fact, even if they do not know its true nature...Boyle did not seek these gentlemen’s opinion, but rather their observation of a phenomenon produced in the closed and protected space of a laboratory.

This shifts the emphasis from the truth of the fact to its reliability: the formal experiment can be reproduced over and over again with the same result, as witnesses can attest. Second, these facts are, precisely, constructed:

Ironically, the key question of the constructivists – are facts thoroughly constructed in the laboratory? – is precisely the question Boyle raised and resolved. Yes, the facts are indeed constructed in the new installation of the laboratory and through the artificial intermediary of the air pump...But are the facts that have been constructed by man artifactual for that reason? No: for Boyle...extends God’s ‘constructivism’ to man. God knows things because He creates them...We know the nature of the facts because we have developed them in circumstances that are under our complete control.

Facts are, as the derivation from the perfect passive participle of the Latin verb facere might suggest, ‘things made’. Third, the limitations of these facts must be observed; they don’t ‘tell’ us about anything other than themselves:

Our weakness becomes a strength, provided that we limit knowledge to the instrumentalized nature of the facts and leave aside the interpretation of causes. Once again, Boyle turns a flaw – we produce only matters of fact that are created in laboratories and have only local value – into a decisive advantage: these facts will never be modified, whatever may happen elsewhere in theory, metaphysics, religion, politics or logic.⁸⁵

The experimental fact is produced at a certain time and a certain place, under precisely defined conditions, but, as Latour suggests, that is what is so special about it. The experiment which produces this fact can be replicated times innumerable at any time and at any place so as to reproduce the fact, which can thereby become universal, whatever the social, historical or philosophical circumstances that happen to prevail at any one time. And, if it turns out it cannot be replicated, then it is not the universal it has claimed to be. It can become as true (but only in and of itself) as anything can be, and that is what is so impressive about it: it seems to be not the product of our labour, which dissolves in our mind, but ‘there’ in the world. And if it is ‘there’ now, it must have been ‘there’ in the past (had we but known it), and will be no less ‘there’ in the future.⁸⁶ The artefact of the mind, the concept, so distressingly slippery and subject to change over time and circumstance, so subject to what Derrida calls différance, so readily historicised as reflecting the circumstances of its context and use, comes to seem so much less universal than the experimental artefact, an engine of revelation to which witnesses can point again and again (whenever they want to) and say ‘there’. But, as Latour cautions, once this ‘timeless’ fact is related to other elements and inserted within some larger structure of interpretation (Latour’s list of ‘theory, metaphysics, religion, politics or logic’ is but indicative), it is taken ‘within’ time and mobilized towards the end of that form of interpretation. A fact that has been so painstakingly taken out of time and stabilised is returned to the movement of history.

Latour’s approach has its constructivist sympathies, but contrary to the criticisms often made of his work, he is not in the business of denying what we may call ‘reality’ or ‘truth’. It is rather that the production of any knowledge that can aspire to those names cannot, in his account, be captured as the revelation of what was there all along in a flash of genius as narratives predicated on discovery would have us believe,⁸⁷ but very hard work indeed – which is another legitimating narrative, of course, though to the end of a different understanding of knowledge and truth. Put another way, though he asks us to historicise relentlessly by seeing science as a human practice, he does not let history have the final word. We have learnt to construct the timeless, perhaps the greatest of all human achievements, but we need also to appreciate the limits of what we have done. Latour’s work can caution us against swallowing whole the imperialistic teleological myth that we are coasting ever closer to knowing the mind of God, the foundation myth of the discovery metaphor. His work is a caution too against internalising the rhetoric of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and ‘modernity’ (or, indeed, ‘antiquity’): the title of the book from which we having been quoting is We Have Never Been Modern.⁸⁸ These are, after the manner of Koselleck, concepts with a history, and modalities we inhabit and invest in, rather than objective descriptions of our circumstances.⁸⁹

A narrative of modernity that (fore-)sees its end in knowing the mind of God maps itself on to the teleological narrative of Christian theology, where our fallen state and confusion of tongues is part of a forward movement that ends on Resurrection Day. Latour’s account deconstructs this myth: he dispenses with the idea that knowledge had any Tower of Babel moment when originary unity was fragmented, and, in contrast to the Bible’s pessimistic view of our fallenness, offers a resolutely upbeat version of the myth⁹⁰ to underpin his confidence and delight in humankind’s potentially endless capacity for construction and invention. This orientation towards what-is-to-come (Derrida’s l’avenir) not only looks forward to future knowledge that is predictable but welcomes the unexpected and unforeseen knowledge that will come upon us as an arrivant and could oblige us to re-narrativise what we think we are doing. This is a perspective on knowledge that seeks to supplement an imperfect metaphysics of presence with a Heideggerian emphasis on potentiality. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger calls the objects of scientific research ‘epistemic things’, and explains (my emphasis),

They are material entities or processes – physical structures, chemical reactions, biological functions – that constitute the objects of inquiry. As epistemic objects, they present themselves in a characteristic, irreducible vagueness. This vagueness is inevitable, because, paradoxically, epistemic things embody what one does not yet know.⁹¹

We left hanging the question of the ‘language’ in which the Book of Nature is ‘written’. The notion that once upon a time there existed a language in which everything could be expressed perfectly and without ambiguity is not restricted to the story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man to which Bacon referred. Plato’s dialogue Cratylus conjures up the figure of a ‘nomothete’, who gave names to things, rather as Adam gave names to the animals in Genesis. Cratylus suggests that the sounds were chosen according to the objects’ nature (physis), while Hermogenes argues that they were assigned by human convention (nomos). Socrates, however, would like to abolish the mediation of language altogether: knowledge is not based on our relation to the names of things, but to the things themselves, or more precisely to our ideas of the things, the Forms. In The Search for the Perfect Language, Umberto Eco has tracked in detail the extraordinary range of responses to this perceived dilemma from the Middle Ages to his own times, his emphasis being on the frequently bizarre practical proposals suggested.⁹² Nostalgically, Hebrew, Greek or Latin were variously proposed as that perfect language. This impulse can still be strongly felt in Heidegger, who spent the latter half of his life seeking to get back, beyond an Aristotelian philosophical terminology he felt to be under the dominion of a Latin-language reception, to the presocratic Greek of Parmenides and Anaximander. The search for the perfect language can take the form of a historical quest, but a favoured alternative strategy is, as Plato’s Socrates does, to seek to transcend language in some way. Three examples from authors with very different agendas, and then we shall return to Plato via the mathematicians he so admired.

For Augustine, Creation is pictured as the performative speech act narrated in Genesis: ‘God said, “Let there be light” and there was light.’ God is not only the arch-constructivist, he is the supreme nomothete (‘And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night’), and delegates this power to Adam before the Fall in the naming of the animals in the Garden of Eden. Although word is a metaphor through which Augustine seeks to understand his relationship with God, his writings are marked by an impatience to move beyond the temporal constraints he feels it imposes. As Eric Jager puts it, ‘The Confessions as a whole contains an autobiographical version of the hermeneutics of the Fall that Augustine bequeathed to the Middle Ages.’⁹³ The garden scene in Milan, with its tempting voices, the fig tree and other imagery from Genesis, is a typological reprise of the Fall, and the performance of the sortes biblicae, with its moment of revelation, figures Redemption.⁹⁴ In that moment of redemptive reading, Augustine needed to go no further than the end of the sentence (finis, 8.12.29), and he closed the book (codicem clausi, 8.12.30). This temporal end to reading looks forward to the end of time. Near the end of his own book, Augustine contemplates the temporal limits of scripture itself: ‘Your scripture is “stretched out” over the peoples to the end of the age’ (13.15.18). God’s written word was inscribed by mortal men for mortal men, but God’s scripture is a ‘solid firmament of authority over us’, for ‘“the heaven will fold up like a book” (Isa. 34:4), and “now like a skin it is stretched out” above us (Ps. 103:2)’ (13.15.16).⁹⁵ As Jager puts it, ‘The end of Scripture envisioned here is part of a totalising scheme of language, history, and cosmos.’⁹⁶ At the end of time and of the cosmos, we will be able to ‘read’ the ‘face’ of God, as the angels do (13.15.18):

They have no need to look up to this firmament and to read so as to know your word. They ever ‘see your face’ (Matt. 18:10) and there, without syllables requiring time to pronounce, they read what your eternal will intends. They ever read, and what they read never passes away...Their codex is never closed [non clauditur codex eorum], nor is their book ever folded shut. For you yourself are a book to them and you are ‘for eternity’ (Ps. 47:15).

The perfect language is no language at all, and it exists outside, not within, time.

Lucretius sees his task as precisely having to work within the constraints of language, though his project aspires to transcend them. Lucretius believes that universal truth was revealed to humankind by the ‘Greek man’, Epicurus, in Athens in the fourth century BC. His task, a difficult one as he sees it, is to bring that revelation to a Roman readership, as he says to his patron (1.136–45):

nec me animi fallit Graiorum obscura reperta
difficile inlustrare Latinis versibus esse,
multa novis verbis praesertim cum sit agendum
propter egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem;
sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas		140

suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem
suadet, et inducit noctes vigilare serenas
quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti,
res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis.		145

Nor does it escape me in my mind that it is difficult to cast light in Latin verses on the obscure discoveries of the Greeks, especially since we must deal with many things by means of new words because of the poverty [egestatem] of the language and the novelty of the matter. But your merit and the hoped-for pleasure of your friendship persuade me to undergo any effort and induce me to stay wakeful through the calm nights seeking by what words and what poetry I may be able to spread forth before [praepandere] your mind the clear light by which you may see right into matters that are hidden.

Lucretius needs to render Epicurus’s discoveries into a language in which there is a lack of established terms for the things he wants to talk about – in that sense he presents himself as within time, a constructivist inventing new words – but along with that admission, there is a subtle effacement of language in this passage. The imagery of light and dark encourages the reader to concentrate not on the language but on ‘seeing’ the ‘things’ themselves (cf. 1.144–45). It’s a pity an atom is too small to see, but you are to get beyond worrying about atomi (a transliteration from the Greek Lucretius eschews throughout his poem) or genitalia corpora rebus or semina rerum or corpora prima or primordia rerum – the proliferation of rebarbative phrases just underscores that they all point to the same (simple) thing. Praepandere (1.144) perhaps uses the image of unrolling a scroll, but what you will see in that scroll aren’t words, but things (res, 1.145). The phenomena of the visible world have, in the imagery of 1.77 examined earlier, their ‘boundary stone deep set’ (alte terminus haerens), but the implication of Lucretius’s realism is that, though the ‘terms’ in which the theory is described may appear to shift in their translation from Greek to Latin, the truth resides not in the shifting words, but in the deeply rooted ‘things’.

He lays emphasis on the ‘poverty’ of his language (1.139),⁹⁷ though it has been argued that he is playfully asserting the superiority of Latin as a medium for expressing Epicurean ideas,⁹⁸ and this is a notion that can be readily entertained within the broader context of the reception of the imperial imagery deployed in the poem. The notions of universal truth and universal empire are complicit in Lucretius’s representation of Epicurus, and the dream of a universal language may be no less so. As Joseph Farrell has argued, ‘the Virgilian model of universal extension and absolute potency’ gives rise to a Latin culture that ‘tends to imagine itself and its language as universal and powerful beyond all competitors’.⁹⁹ Epicurus’s truth may stand outside time and any version that is offered of it, but Lucretius makes a pitch that within time and history his version can claim to be definitive. His act of linguistic translation from Greek to Latin thus enacts translatio imperii. This ‘carrying across’ is the process that seems to point towards such universality in acknowledging the historicity of linguistic boundaries while claiming that the truth transcends them and is, universally, translatable.¹⁰⁰ Lucretius’s dream may not be so much for a perfect language, rather that the universality of the truth he conveys renders the language that expresses it – Greek, Latin or any other – invisible.

For the third example, we return to the Book of Nature. As briefly touched on in the previous section, Mario Biagioli has analysed how Bacon’s contemporary Galileo used a range of configurations of the book over a decade or so in a number of different debates ‘to legitimize his brand of natural philosophy by casting nature as a material inscription of God’s logos – a “text” that was simultaneously opposed to the Aristotelian corpus and complementary to the Scripture’.¹⁰¹ The scare-quotes Biagioli places around ‘text’ suggest for him its metaphoricity. Bacon had expressed in his image of the Book the aspiration to make good the loss of the Adamic language after the Fall. However, much the most famous of all invocations of the Book was made by Galileo in his dialogue The Assayer (1623).¹⁰² In response to his Scholastic opponent, Galileo suggests that philosophy, the true knowledge of nature, is not a book like the Iliad or Orlando Furioso written by some human author. No, philosophy is ‘written in the language of mathematics’:

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and recognize the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it. Without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.¹⁰³

Galileo effects a brilliant sleight of hand here, as he seeks to efface the textuality associated with the Book of Nature: the ‘grand book’ here is the universe, and once one has grasped that its ‘language’ is the geometrical relationship of things one to another, one need not look beyond the surface of these geometric figures, as one does with language, for some deeper or hidden meaning: the forms are all. In his critique of logocentrism, Derrida locates Galileo’s book within his contrast of a metaphorical ‘natural and universal writing, intelligible and nontemporal’ and a writing that is ‘sensible, finite...on the side of culture, technique and artifice’.¹⁰⁴ However, Galileo deftly casts geometrical figures as configurations that are there, in the world, and contrasts them with the ‘letters’ and ‘characters’ like those of the alphabet which define human writing, and are of necessity a mediation between human understanding and the divine Word or Logos. Biagioli suggests that Derrida falls short in placing Galileo’s Book of Nature on a par with scripture as an example of ‘natural writing’, which is to overlook a further level of metaphoricity in Galileo’s ‘book’ above and beyond that of scripture. Galileo’s ‘book of nature was neither a book written by humans (like the Aristotelian corpus) nor a metaphorical book (like the Scripture),’ he says, where access to the Logos was mediated through actual letters and characters and interpretation was required: ‘Galileo’s topos showed itself to be more of a logocentric construct than Scripture itself in that it claimed an immediate coexistence with the logos.’¹⁰⁵ In Galileo’s use of the topos in The Assayer, God did not write the Book of Nature or even draw geometrical shapes in it, but is figured rather as an architect who gave geometrical shape to his creation – a demiurge whose creation is equated with the imposition of form.

Galileo stretches the metaphor of the book almost to the point where it falls apart, but he does not explicitly erase it. As in the case of 195 Jupiter’s ‘book’ in Virgil’s Aeneid, when the metaphor has done its work in suggesting a truth beyond words, it is quietly allowed to fade away – before the paradoxes become too obtrusive. If humans were to try to read Jupiter’s ‘book’, their task would be one that went on forever as they followed the story of ‘empire without end’. Galileo uses the image of the book to suggest a notion of truth as form, and as something self-evident; but its contents are likewise infinite.¹⁰⁶ There is no limit to the number of nature’s laws, but there are constraints of time on the human observer, and the discovery of that complete truth is endlessly deferred. In spite of the paradoxes, the image of the book carries with it some powerful compensatory associations:

Galileo’s book of nature provides a very evocative image for those who think of knowledge as already achieved – as a well-organized, unambiguous map of a terrain that has been fully measured and triangulated. The book of nature conveys an image of totality, a magisterial image of knowledge like that of an encyclopedia or, even better, the Scripture – a book whose characters were all already known, without the possibility of adding new ones.¹⁰⁷

The sense of something transcendent already achieved that the image of the book brings with it (even if the task of reading remains to be completed, and is endless) evokes also Virgil’s characterisation of empire: its presence seems palpable, even if on reflection what is yet to be achieved is likewise endless. Lucretius presents the truth of Epicureanism as a totality already achieved, but while he is prepared to see his own project in terms of textual inscription, it is noticeable how he seeks to eschew this in relation to Epicurus’s achievement. Although he has surveyed the infinite universe in his journey across it, he does not return, in Biagioli’s words, with a ‘well-organized, unambiguous map of a terrain that has been fully measured and triangulated’. Even a diagram is taboo. Epicurus reports back to us (refert nobis, 1.75) ‘how each thing has its potentiality set within boundaries and its deep-set boundary mark’ (1.76–77). Against one isolated reference to Epicurus’s writings (3.10), Lucretius prefers to use the metaphor of ‘speech’ to refer to Epicurus’s thought.

Nonetheless, as Derrida’s discussion of the opposition of speech and writing can remind us, for all that speech is often taken to be a guarantor of presence, even the spoken word is a form of mediation that seems to keep ‘the world itself’ at one remove.¹⁰⁸ Galileo’s solution to this dilemma is a subtle one: the ‘language of mathematics’ is actually no language at all, but out there in the geometrical patterns in which the Creator formed nature. For mathematical realists, geometrical shapes or numbers are not constructs of the human mind, as language is. As Roger Penrose memorably puts it, ‘Like Everest, the Mandelbrot set is just there.’¹⁰⁹ So believed the Pythagoreans, and Plato too. This outlook was succinctly expressed by Manilius, the late Augustan poet of astrological determinism, who in his didactic poem the Astronomica, celebrates the power of mathematical calculation to reveal the movements of the heavens. The heavens are mathematical, and so the positions of the constellations, past, present and future, are calculable. He regrets that words, even the rhythms of poetry, can never capture this without the risk of diminishing it (4.430–35), but expresses the hope that ‘as I report through my poetry the jurisdiction of destiny and the sacred motions of heaven, my words must conform with its dictates: it is not granted to me to fabricate, only to point out, the pattern’ (4.436–38):

sed mihi per carmen fatalia iura ferenti

et sacros caeli motus ad iussa loquendum est:

nec fingenda datur, tantum monstranda figura.

In the climactic line 438, Manilius plays on figura and fingenda, which are etymologically linked: the pattern (figura) is not, as the word might seem to suggest, something that is to be dreamed up or constructed (fingenda). It is monstranda, there in the movements of the constellations to be pointed out. He goes on to say ‘nor is it right for the world to be dependent on words; in the reality it will be greater’ (nec fas est verbis suspendere mundum:/rebus erit maior, 4.441–42). The word fas, here translated by ‘right’ and cognate with the verb ‘to speak’, connotes a religious or ritualistic permission or prohibition on speaking. The suggestion of ineffability is piquantly associated with the idea Manilius rejects that the universe is somehow dependent on words. The invocation of res, ‘things’, makes Manilius a realist, and for realists, mathematical form, thus theologically inflected, is discovered rather than invented by the human mind.¹¹⁰

Mathematical entities appear to be independent of space and time, in that relationships like ‘2+2=4’ seem true regardless of where or when they are invoked, as Winston Smith sought to convince O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But where, or in what sense, can these ‘things’ be said to exist? For mathematical realists like Manilius, the answer is obvious: in the mind of God. In 4.439–40, he glosses his assertion that it is not granted to fabricate, only to point out the pattern (nec fingenda datur, tantum monstranda figura), with what he takes that to entail: ‘to have indicated the deity is more than enough; he himself will grant to himself authority’ (ostendisse deum nimis est: dabit ipse sibimet/pondera).¹¹¹ Mathematics are ‘divine arts’ (divinas artes), as he refers to them in the opening line of his poem, brought down from the heavens. For Augustine, the test case is infinity (City of God 12.19). Rejecting the ‘blasphemy’ that God does not know all the numbers, Augustine ridicules the notion that God’s knowledge extends only to a certain sum. He refers to Plato’s Timaeus (35b–36d) for the argument that God constructed the world by the use of numbers, ‘while we have the authority of Scripture, where God is thus addressed, “You have set in order all things by measure, number, and weight” [Matt. 10:30].’ Still, the result feels paradoxical,¹¹² and Augustine too resorts to the trope of ineffability:

Never let us doubt, then, that every number is known to him ‘whose understanding cannot be numbered’ [Ps. 147:5]. Although the infinite series of numbers cannot be numbered, this infinity of numbers is not outside of the comprehension of him ‘whose understanding cannot be numbered’. And so, if what is comprehended in knowledge is bounded within the embrace of that knowledge, and thus is finite, it must follow that every infinity is, in a way we cannot express, made finite to God because it cannot be beyond the embrace of his knowledge [profecto et omnis infinitas quodam ineffabili modo Deo finita est, quia scientiae ipsius inconprehensibilis non est].

Like other varieties of realism, the mathematical finds some kind of recourse to the notion of the divine irresistible (Penrose, for example, avers that ‘There is something absolute and “God given” about mathematical truth’¹¹³), even if those defenders of realism resistant to theism place God within scare-quotes or hasten to describe their expression as ‘metaphorical’ – their version of the ineffability topos.

Galileo, in a move that is characteristic of proponents of realism, appeals to a ‘language’ that is not a language, in the sense that he asserts that there is no mediation involved. For their part, critics of realism characteristically bring the discussion back to what they see as the irreducible textuality of knowledge, its mediation through various forms of representation, diagrams, graphs, models and formulae as well as language. Both camps have their take on infinity. For a realist like Lucretius, there is nothing outside the universe, but for a critic of logocentrism like Derrida, there is nothing outside the text, no outside-text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte). Each has its characteristic way of configuring through a legitimating narrative how timeless knowledge and truth make their appearance in history, the realist through the miraculous discovery of something that has been there all along, had we but known it, the anti-realist through the painstaking construction or invention of something that can claim to be universal, though it didn’t exist before. Mathematics is no less susceptible of an anti-realist account that would see it as the painstaking construction of human textualising effort. Observe the Greek mathematicians in Reviel Netz’s account, toiling away as they develop technologies of representation¹¹⁴ through which they can generate compelling modes of argument:

I will argue that the two main tools for the shaping of deduction were the diagram, on the one hand, and the mathematical language on the other hand. Diagrams – in the specific way they are used in Greek mathematics – are the Greek mathematical way of tapping human visual cognitive resources. Greek mathematical language is a way of tapping human linguistic resources. These tools are then combined in specific ways. The tools, and their modes of combination, are the cognitive method.

But note that there is nothing universal about the precise shape of such cognitive methods. They are not neural; they are a historical construct. They change slowly, and over relatively long periods they may seem to be constant. But they are still not a biological constant...They can only be studied as historical phenomena, valid for their period and place.¹¹⁵

Rather than start from the assumption that an ideal world of mathematics exists eternally (in the mind of God), waiting patiently for a genius within history to access it, Netz sees the emergence of Greek mathematical thinking as intimately connected with the development of some very practical ‘tools’ out of already existing visual and linguistic ‘resources’, the lettered diagram and a very restricted vocabulary: he notes that ‘the entire Archimedean corpus is made up of 851 words’,¹¹⁶ and that typically a large corpus of mathematical writings will have ‘around 100–200 words used repetitively, responsible for 95% or more of the corpus (most often the article, prepositions and the pseudo-word “letters”)’.¹¹⁷ It is through the scrupulous development of these technologies that Netz’s mathematicians found themselves able to track equivalences and transitive relations through successive stages of argument in a way not possible in the messy empirical world.

Geometric proof involves a mode of ‘translation’ where exact equivalences can be ‘carried across’ to the next stage of the argument, as against linguistic discourse, where equivalences (e.g. imperium and power, or the Aeneid and Nineteen Eighty-Four) are at best only crude approximations on either side of an ‘equation’ that involves the continuing negotiation over time of differences and similarities. So for Netz it is not beyond but in the textual that Greek mathematics achieves its success in bringing together the finite and the universal:

Greek geometric propositions are not about universal, infinite space. As is well-known, lines and planes in Greek mathematics are always finite sections of the infinite line and plane which we project. They are, it is true, indefinitely extendable, yet they are finite. Each geometrical proposition sets up its own universe – which is its diagram.¹¹⁸

Each diagram is structured and finite, but is demonstrably true for the specific ‘universe’ it ‘sets up’. As in Shapin and Schaffer’s analysis of experiment, the human mathematicians mimic God’s constructivism. Netz devises metaphors in keeping with his emphasis on mathematics as a practical skill: the proofs generated go into the ‘tool-box’, ready to be brought out to construct another demonstration (just as Boyle’s air pump is a piece of kit that can be deployed in the context of fresh experiments).¹¹⁹ But this tool-box is good for Greek mathematics and nothing else. Netz is at pains to fashion an account that does not have recourse to universalist assumptions about human ‘nature’, for example, that deduction is somehow biologically hard-wired into the human brain. His specifically Greek mathematicians are doing something that is ‘valid for their period and place’, and he emphasises the point in a footnote: ‘What I study is not “deduction” as such; what I study is a specific form, namely the way in which Greek mathematicians argued for their results.’¹²⁰ Nonetheless, thanks to the diagrams and the particular uses of vocabulary they have developed, their techniques can then be transmitted across time and space.

This sets Netz directly at odds with Plato, who in a famous and influential scene in the Meno (81e–86b) uses a set of exchanges about geometry between Socrates and a slave to suggest that there is no such thing as learning, only a remembering of knowledge that was always already there in our immortal souls before our birth. For Netz, these techniques are not a hard-wired feature of human brains, and so people who are not Greek mathematicians can nonetheless learn how to use them. They become transferable skills, skills that can be ‘carried across’ time and space: Pythagoras’s theorem can be proved beyond the borders of Greece at any time and any place – so long as the networks of transmission that carry the techniques associated with the proof are not broken. Once more, translation offers a model of continuity, save that in this case it is one of continuity absolutely without change. These skills are transferable, Netz emphasises, only within the discursive limits as narrowly defined by the mathematicians. At a historical moment when the potentialities of epideictic persuasion and rhetoric are being explored by the sophists within various contexts of public debate, the Greek mathematicians were developing a mode of apodeictic proof, which would, in its own terms, be binding, and could convince rather than just persuade.¹²¹ They did so by rigorously limiting themselves to the study of forms, and eschewing all discussion of content. Greek mathematics was about Greek mathematics and nothing else.¹²² He emphasises how austere and isolated Greek mathematicians were, a tiny circle of devotees focused inwards to the elaboration of the very specific, very specialised object of study they had fashioned.

The work of these few Greek mathematicians might have remained marginalised had it not come to the notice of the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition.¹²³ But this reception proved crucial to the later perception of mathematics:

[W]e all know the fate of a book which suddenly becomes a bestseller after being turned into a film – in the version ‘according to the film’. This process originated in south Italy in the late fifth century BC, but it was Plato who turned ‘Mathematics: The Movie’ into a compelling vision. This vision remained to haunt western culture, sending it back again and again to ‘The Book according to the Film’ – the numerology associated with Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism.¹²⁴

But it also proved crucial to the later perception of philosophy. Latour is not as polite as Netz, and sees what Plato did with mathematics in terms of an appropriation, or even a hijacking. Characteristically, he reserves his greatest scorn for what he sees as the attempted Platonic elision of the textual:

The major scandal for philosophers in antiquity, a scandal that is still with us today, is that no two philosophers agree with one another. Was the Platonic philosophy a real emulation of geometers’ practices that produced conviction around the collective inspection of lettered diagrams, sticking to the conclusions that forms, and only forms, could lead to? Of course not, since they did not use diagrams to begin with. Philosophy did not carefully limit itself to forms, as geometers did...but instead claimed to be talking about contents: the Good Life, the proper way of searching for Truth, the Laws of the City, etc. It is as though Plato extracted no more than a style of conviction from geometry and added to it a totally unrelated content; it is as though the type of persuasion mathematicians obtained at great pains (because they limited themselves to forms) could nonetheless be reached, at almost no demonstrative cost, by philosophers with regards to what they saw as the only relevant content! A mimicry of mathematics, just sufficient to boot the Sophists out of philosophy.¹²⁵

Plato is a more sophisticated rhetorician than Latour will here allow. In the Vatican fresco, Raphael represents Plato as pointing to transcendent truth in the heavens rather than grasping it, just as in the dialogues when human time presses in, Socrates leaves the discussions to be resumed. Yet, Latour is spot on when he suggests how Plato’s philosophy is entangled in his historical context.¹²⁶ Latour’s approach directs attention to the consequences of this appropriation at the level of political epistemology, that any shift in epistemology obliges us to rethink politics, and vice versa. In Plato’s Gorgias (508a), one of Socrates’s put-downs is that Callicles neglects the study of geometry (geometrias gar ameleis), and so has no idea of fair shares or just deserts in social terms. Latour points to the spell that the myth of the Cave in the Republic continues to cast, with its relationship between true knowledge and the social world. The philosopher (or, as it might be, the scientist) ‘once equipped with laws not made by human hands that he has just contemplated because he has succeeded in freeing himself from the prison of the social world, can go back into the Cave so as to bring order to it with incontestable findings that will silence the endless chatter of the ignorant mob’.¹²⁷ In its presumptive appropriation of ‘timeless’ knowledge for its own ends within time, the myth of the Cave holds out for Latour a political epistemology that is not only a negation of democracy but a waste of so much human potential.

We may look to an answer to these questions, but the shadows are lengthening and the end of this book beckons. Translation has been a recurrent theme of Antiquity and the Meanings of Time: translations of language, power, knowledge and skills, with consequences – good or bad – that within the temporal sphere of our existence we will continue to debate to different ends, not all of them foreseen. That theme touches upon the exhilarations, the dangers, the challenges of reading. We can never wholly grasp the traces of the past in the present, but on one issue Latour and Netz have got it about as right I currently think they could. We will not even be able to point to those traces that interest us, those moments of enlightenment that make us realise, if only temporarily, our human potential if the networks of transmission that carry the techniques and skills we need to do so are broken. One of the greatest pleasures of writing this book is that I have come to read books I never expected to read. A new day will dawn, and a new book will be opened. That book may well be one I have opened many times before, but never read like this. I look forward to moments of fresh enlightenment. The time one thinks one is right is the time to think again.

5

TIME, KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH