Épicure aux Enfers: Hérésie, athéisme et hédonisme au Moyen Âge by Aurélien Robert

Abstract

Reviewed by: Épicure aux Enfers: Hérésie, athéisme et hédonisme au Moyen Âge by Aurélien Robert John Monfasani Aurélien Robert. Épicure aux Enfers: Hérésie, athéisme et hédonisme au Moyen Âge. Paris: Fayard, 2021. Pp. 367. Paperback, €24.00. Always an essential component in histories of philosophy, Epicureanism has taken on a special importance of late because some scholars have seen its doctrines as triggering modernity (Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007]; and Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern [New York: W. W. Norton, 2011], or, alternatively and more modestly, with the subtitle [End Page 693] How the Renaissance Began [London: Random House, 2011]). Certainly, Greenblatt can be accused of historical malpractice. Robert, in the book under review, calls Gleenblatt's work a "bon roman" (14); see also my July 2012 review in Reviews in History, reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1283, and that of Laura Saetveit Miles: https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/05/the-ethics-of-inventing-modernity.html. But in point of fact, Greenblatt's extravagant claims about the transformation wrought by Poggio Bracciolini's discovery of Lucretius's poem De Rerum Natura in 1417 set the context and, indeed, can be viewed as provoking the title of the book under review. The basic premise of Épicure aux Enfers is that it was the Middle Ages, and not the Italian Renaissance, that first recovered a true understanding and appreciation of Epicureanism as opposed to the vulgar view of it as the philosophy of pure sensual hedonism that justified Dante in the Divine Comedy placing Epicurus in hell instead of in limbo, as he did the other great philosophers of antiquity. As Robert puts it at the very end of his book, "En ce qui concerne Épicure, aucun doute, c'est bien le Moyen Âge qui l'a sorti des enfers" (318). Fittingly, the book cover reproduces a Vatican manuscript miniature by Guglielmo Giraldi of Dante and his guide Virgil visiting the souls in hell, just as does, I might add, a nearly contemporary book on the same subject: Christian Kaiser's Epikur im lateinischen Mittelalter (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), which reproduces a different miniature in a Florentine manuscript of the same scene. Robert finds Epicurus rescued from hell in the face of a seemingly unrelentingly hostile tradition first by examining the treatment of Epicurus in the writings of the great twelfth-century figures Peter Abelard, John of Salisbury, and William of Malmesbury, as well as of thirteenth-century authors such as John of Wales, Hélinand de Froidmont, and Giovanni Colonna, and then by introducing the reader to the medieval medical literature that had a certain sympathy for Epicurus since the doctors considered pleasure, and specifically coitus, valuable for a healthy life. Relying especially on Seneca, who had sought to reconcile Epicureanism with Stoicism, the twelfth-century authors took note of Epicurus's denial of divine providence and the immortality of the soul, but also recognized that Epicurus himself not only led an exemplary moral life, but also taught that virtue, justice, and temperance were the keys to the true pleasurable life, quite in contradiction to the wild hedonism popularly attributed to him. Before reaching these rescuers of Epicurus, Robert examines in detail the history of Christian attitudes toward Epicurus and Epicureanism from the second century onward. By the end of antiquity, 'Epicurean' had become a term synonymous with a heretical opponent of Christianity. Despite some hints in Lucian, however, Robert finds no firm evidence of a corresponding anti-Christian polemic on the part of the Epicureans. Ironically, as Tertullian once proclaimed, just as the name was once enough for Christians to be persecuted, so too now the name 'Epicurean' had become grounds for condemnation as a heretic. Among the other two medieval religious traditions, Judaism shared Christianity's notion of the Epicurean heretic, while the matter is ambiguous for Islam. In the case of the latter, much depends on how one interprets the word dahriyyūn in medieval Muslim literature. In what may be viewed as the one philosophical part of the book, in a section titled "Aristote et Épicure...