One might expect Christians familiar with the classical tradition to have a largely negative view of the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius, author of the De rerum natura (On the Nature of the Universe). After all, he was a materialist; he thought the world existed by chance rather than design; he denied that the gods have any concern for us whatsoever; and he denied that there was life after death.

For example, in Institutes 1.5, after criticizing Vergil’s Georgics on creation and claiming that the passage he has just quoted, which encourages belief in “a universal mind animating and invigorating the world,” is not “fitted to beget and foster piety in our minds,” John Calvin says, “We have a still clearer proof of this in the profane verses which the licentious Lucretius has written as a deduction from the same principle.”

Thus it may be surprising to find Martin Luther speaking positively of Lucretius in his Lectures on Genesis–and on Genesis 1 at that.

As far as I can tell from the indices in the Weimarer Ausgabe of Luther’s works, Luther only refers to Lucretius twice over the course of his entire career, and this comment on Genesis is the first.

It comes very early in the Lectures, on Genesis 1:1-2. Luther is not talking of creation, but of the plural word used for “God.” After upbraiding Arius for Trinitarian heresy, Luther writes:

Our minds fall into these absurd opinions when they want to think about such great matters without the Word. And yet we do not know ourselves, as Lucretius says: “It is still unknown what the nature of the soul is.”^[1] We perceive that we can make judgments, count, distinguish quantities and spiritual creatures (so to speak), true and false–and nevertheless we cannot yet define what the soul is; how much less will we understand the divine nature? We do not know what sort of motion our will has; for it is not the motion of a quality, nor of a quantity, and nevertheless it is some sort of motion. What, then, could we know when it comes to divine things?^[2]

Luther here quotes Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe 1.113, to make the point that, if we cannot even understand ourselves, how are we to understand God?

I said that the reference is positive, and it certainly seems so in the context of the Luther passage. But an examination of the context of the Lucretius passage and of his poem as a whole should perhaps modify that judgment.

The quoted bit comes in the midst of Lucretius’s claim that we fear punishment after death because we are ignorant “what the nature of the soul is.” But Lucretius thinks that he does understand the nature of the soul: it is material, and it dies when our bodies die, the atoms returning to their separate state until they recombine to form something else. Therefore, there is no reason that we should fear postmortem punishment, because “we” will not exist.

An examination of On the Nature of the Universe shows that Lucretius thought he understood not just the soul, but the world (it was not made by the gods and is not purposive) and the gods (as noted, they do not care about us), too. All three claims–about the soul, the world, and the gods–are ones Luther would deny.

Luther, then, uses the quotation from Lucretius to encourage humility about the limitations of our own understanding, and this is a quality to which the author of On the Nature of the Universe is diametrically opposed.

So, is it an intentional misreading? The answer to that question is unclear; but it may be. For the reader who knows Lucretius, it may serve as a warning that one should read Lucretius against himself, refusing to claim a comprehensive understanding of mysteries beyond our ken. Had Lucretius done so, he may have been more pious.