Episode 005 - On Resisting The Threats of Priests and Poets
Date: 02/14/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1409-episode-five-on-resisting-the-threats-of-priests-and-poets/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 005 covers Book One of On the Nature of Things beginning at approximately Latin Line 105, where Lucretius warns that even the committed student of Epicurean philosophy may someday be overcome by the fear of priests’ and poets’ threatening stories about the afterlife, and must be prepared with a firm understanding of nature to resist. The panel reads and compares four translations — Cyril Bailey, the 1743 Daniel Brown edition, H.A.J. Munro, and Martin Ferguson Smith — and notes significant variation in how translators render the key term: Bailey and Munro use “seer,” Daniel Brown uses “poet,” Martin Ferguson Smith uses “fable monger.” The panel also discusses a notable difference between Daniel Brown (who has Lucretius saying he could invent such fears in the first person) and the other translators (who use the third person — they invent these fears), a discrepancy that touches on whether religious manipulation is presented as deliberate or merely innocent error.
The episode includes a sustained discussion of fear as the primary mechanism by which religion controls people, contrasting Lucretius’s view with Marx’s description of religion as “the opium of the people.” Elaine argues — and Cassius agrees — that Lucretius’s framing of religion as a terror instrument is the more potent and accurate analysis. The panel explores how this fear operates both as dread of afterlife punishment and as social pressure within religious communities, drawing on examples from the atheist movement and cultic groups. Martin adds a comparative perspective: because traditional Greco-Roman religion offered only a grim underworld, Christianity’s promise of a positive afterlife gave it a decisive advantage in winning popular acceptance.
The episode closes with discussion of the passage where Lucretius says we must understand the courses of the sun and moon, and above all the nature of the soul and the mind, in order to be armed against these fears — including understanding why post-bereavement hallucinations occur. Elaine cites a 2015 study in the Journal of Affective Disorders showing that 30–60% of widowed subjects experience post-bereavement hallucinations, noting these are normal rather than pathological. Cassius previews Book Four’s development of the Epicurean theory of images as the explanation for these phenomena. Charles and Julie were absent; the panel was Cassius, Elaine, and Martin.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 5 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who lived in the age of Julius Caesar and who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host, Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you line by line through the six books of Lucretius’s poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. Be aware that none of us are professional philosophers, and everyone here is a self-taught Epicurean. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt.
Before we get started with today’s episode, let me remind you of our three ground rules. First, our aim is to bring you an accurate presentation of classical Epicurean philosophy as the ancient Epicureans understood it, not to tell you our opinion of what we think Epicurus might have said or should have said. Second, we won’t be talking in this podcast about modern political issues. How you apply Epicurus in your own life is entirely up to you. Our approach is what we call not Neo-Epicurean, but Epicurean. Modern philosophy is not the same as Stoicism, or Humanism, or Libertarianism, or Atheism, or Marxism. It’s a unique philosophy of its own, and as we explore Lucretius, you’ll quickly see how that is the case. Third, Lucretius will show us that Epicurus did not advocate a life of luxury, as some people say, but neither did he advocate a minimalist, simple life, as others say. Epicurus taught that feeling, pleasure, and pain are what nature gave us to live by, and not gods, idealism, or virtue ethics. More than anything else, Epicurus taught that the universe is not supernatural in any way, and that means there’s no life after death, and any happiness we’ll ever have comes in this life — which is why it is so important not to waste time in confusion.
As we get started today, remember that the home page of this podcast is LucretiusToday.com, and there you can find a free copy of the version of the poem from which we’re reading, and links to where you can discuss the poem between episodes at EpicureanFriends.com.
In today’s show, we’re going to be discussing the part of Book One that begins at approximately Latin Line 105. Martin is going to read that from the 1743 Daniel Brown edition, but before he does, I’m going to read the same text from the Cyril Bailey edition.
You yourself, sometime, vanquished by the fearsome threats of the seers’ sayings, will seek to desert from us. Nay, indeed, how many a dream may they even now conjure up before you, which might avail to overthrow your scheme of life, and confound in fear all your fortunes. And justly so, for if men could see that there is a fixed limit to their sorrows, then with some reason they might have the strength to stand against the scruples of religion, and against the threats of seers. As it is, there is no means, no power, to withstand, since everlasting is the punishment they must fear in death. For they know not what is the nature of the soul, whether it is born or else finds its way into them at their birth, and again whether it is torn apart by death and perishes with us, or goes to see the shades of Orcus and his waste pools, or by the gods’ will implants itself in other breasts — as our own Ennius sang, who first bore down from pleasant Helicon the wreath of deathless leaves, to win bright fame among the tribes of Italian peoples.
And yet, despite this, Ennius sets forth in his discourse of his immortal verse that there is besides a realm of Acheron, where neither our souls nor bodies endure, but as it were images pale and wondrous wise. And thence he tells us that the form of Homer, evergreen and fresh, rose to him and began to shed salt tears and to converse — to reveal the nature of things.
Therefore we must both give good account of the things on high — in what way the courses of the sun and moon come to be, and by what force all things are governed on earth — and also before all else we must see by keen reasoning whence comes the soul and the nature of the mind, and what thing it is that meets us and frightens our minds in waking life when we are touched with disease, or again when buried in sleep, so that we seem to see, and hear hard by us, those who have met death, and whose bones are held in the embrace of earth.
Now Martin will read the 1743 version of the same text, and we’ll begin our discussion.
Martin:
But still I fear you’ll call from the dispute the maxims I laid down, who all your life have trembled at the poets’ frightful tales. Alas, I could even now invent such dreams as would pervert the steadiest rules of reason, and make your fortunes tremble to the bottom. No wonder — but if men were once convinced that death was the sure end of all their pains, there might with reason then resist the force of religion, and contemning the threats of poets. Now we have no sense, no power to strive against prejudice, because we fear a scene of endless torments after death. And yet the nature of the soul we know not — whether formed with the body, or at the birth infused, and then by death cut off she perishes as bodies do, or whether she descends to the dark caves and dreadful lakes of hell, or after death, inspired with heavenly instinct, transmigrates into the brutes — as our great Ennius, who first a crown of laurels evergreen brought down from Helicon, which gained him fame through all the Italian clans. And yet this man, in never-dying numbers, describes the stately palaces of Acheron, where neither our souls nor bodies ever come, but certain specters strange and wondrous pale. From whence he tells how Homer’s ever-celebrated shade appeared, and how his eyes began to flow with briny tears, as in immortal verse his song of nature and its secrets was revealed.
Cassius:
He blames the fears as being creations of poets. It says here in Martin Ferguson Smith — he translates that word as “fable mongers,” which refers to those who, whether poets or priests, are professional promoters of traditional religion and mythology.
Yeah, I thought that was interesting — “poets.” Let’s see: Munro and Bailey both use the word “seer.” And Stallings uses “doomsayer prophets.”
Elaine:
So, yeah, “poets” might not be the most accurate translation of that word. I guess the word “poet,” certainly today, is going to evoke the meaning of somebody who writes poetry — a songwriter almost.
Martin:
Right, but they mean like a fantast, it sounds to me — somebody who engages in fantasy.
Cassius:
I like this — “I could even now invent such dreams as would pervert the steadiest rules of reason.” And let’s see what Martin Ferguson Smith says: “Consider how numerous are the fantasies they can invent, capable of confounding your calculated plan of life.” That’s a really different interpretation — clouding all your fortunes with fear. And then Stallings says: “They can certainly conjure up for you enough of nightmares to capsize life’s order.”
So I guess it makes a difference whether he really was talking about “reason.” Munro says “calculations of life.” Bailey says “schemes of life.” Yeah, I kind of wish it were the way the Daniel Brown edition has it — the “steadiest rules of reason” — because we know that reason has a place, but it is not what tells you what’s real. And so reason itself is susceptible to fantasy, because if it gets into abstractions and it’s not based on evidence, it can lead you into all kinds of crazy directions. So I was about to take off into how fantabulism and reason can go hand in hand. But I don’t know if the text actually supports taking that direction.
Martin:
I think it doesn’t mean that kind of reason. It just means it in one sense of justification — not in the sense of reason as a kind of thinking that is irrational.
Cassius:
Right. Yeah, I think you’re right. Looking at the other translations, I’m going to make the point anyway, even if Lucretius wasn’t making it.
Elaine:
And yes — it seems this is a spelling mistake in this text. Shouldn’t it be “condemning the threats of poets”?
Cassius:
No, it’s “contemn” — I had to look that up because nobody uses that word, but it is in Merriam-Webster. It comes from the Latin contemnere. Let me go to the page again — I had it pulled up. Yeah, it means contempt, scorn, disdain — so I think that’s the right word. Yeah, I looked at that when I transcribed it to make sure it was not just a transcription error, but yes, it may be archaic, but it’s certainly still out there as a valid word.
Well, what I was going to say about this first paragraph — I think there’s a lot of really important stuff here on a topic that I find very interesting, which is the issue of whether these problems that we’re talking about are mistakes, or whether they are actually calculated misrepresentations. I think probably there’s a lot of both that exist out there in the world from people who come up with the wrong answers to life in a very innocent or mistaken way — but what this is also talking about is that these poets or seers have actually frightful tales that pervert the calculations of life and make you tremble. So I think he’s acknowledging here that it’s easy to make mistakes, and many people are absolutely innocent in repeating these errors about life after death and punishment in hell, reward in heaven — but there are others who are just really intentionally doing this. They’re not just innocently repeating mistakes. They are actually attempting to upset your calculations of your life.
Elaine:
Yes, yeah, I think that’s a really important point. And you can know that — because I could do that, right? “I could even now invent these dreams that would turn everything upside down for you” — so if I could do that, he’s saying these other people have done exactly that. They have invented this stuff. It is really easy for people to see that today. Say they have one religion — in the US, most commonly Christian — and they’ll look at, say, the Mormons and be completely able to realize how ridiculous it is that there’s this angel with the tablets and people are going to be gods of their own planets and all this wild stuff. But then they look at their own religion and they can’t recognize that it’s completely as bizarre if you’re not in it.
And if you remember that you can, recently people have made up their own religions. There was that cult — what was that cult that ended up with people committing suicide because they believed in aliens? Not Jim Jones — I think it was a sci-fi cult in California. Anyway, there have been all sorts of bizarre ones, and we continue to get bizarre cults that most people can recognize as obviously not true. So you can just make up a religion today — if I went online and decided to make up a religion and said that I knew it was true because I saw it in a vision or was channeling some imaginary magic being, I can guarantee you that if I were skillful enough in wording it and made it sound attractive, I would have people who actually started to believe what I was saying. Especially if I were charismatic. I could just make up a religion today. That’s what he’s saying — you can make this stuff up, and in fact that’s what happened. It was all made up.
Cassius:
You know, I just noticed that the very opening of this passage in Daniel Brown is a little bit — maybe even significantly — different from what Munro and Bailey have. Both Munro and Bailey say something like “you yourself, sometime or other, overcome by the terror of the seers’ speaking tales, will seek to fall away from us” — so it’s basically the same thing Daniel Brown is saying, but I think in Munro and Bailey it’s more clear that Lucretius is addressing the listener — addressing Memmius — and saying that you may yourself be overcome by these fantastic stories of the poets, priests, and seers, and fall away from us for that reason. And you need to be prepared for that, whether it’s somebody who is intentionally trying to mislead you, or whether it’s your sainted grandmother who would never tell you a lie she thought was incorrect. You’re going to be hearing all sorts of stories your whole life that are going to strike fear in your heart if you consider that they could possibly be true. And so you need to be prepared for that, and have an antidote for it, and be firm in your conviction that there’s no reason to be frightened by these tales.
I’m just realizing this is another place where Daniel Brown is deviating from all the other translations. He says “Alas, I could even now invent such dreams” — but the others say “they can invent” or “they can conjure up before you.” I don’t have the Latin in front of me today — we had the link to that before — but is it a first-person form that’s used there, or a third person?
Martin:
Sorry — I’ve had a super busy week and I didn’t get to look at it in advance this time. But that might be something that would be interesting to look up.
Cassius:
It’s a different line of reasoning. In one place he’s saying “hey, I could do this — anybody could do it.” In the others, he’s just straightforwardly saying “and what they are doing.” Bailey and Munro do have something like “now conjure up before you” — yeah, it’s certainly a different pronoun between “I” or “they.”
Martin:
Yeah, does seem to be consistent as a “we could do this right now.”
Cassius:
And then if we move on to the next sentences — “with good cause, for if men saw there was a fixed limit to their woes, they’d be able in some way to withstand the religious scruples and threatenings of the seers — but as it is there’s no way, no means of resisting, since they must fear after death everlasting pains” — that’s according to Munro.
Elaine:
Yeah, I think that’s an accurate description of what happens. It’s the means by which you’re disarmed in the face of their arguments — because since you have no ability to articulate back to them why they are wrong, you’re essentially powerless in their grip. You’re left speechless when they tell you that you’re going to suffer eternity in hell after you die — you’re basically backed into a corner with no response. And you’ve got to have a response to that. In most cases it’s not going to be something that you want to just say “well I don’t believe that” and walk away from — it plants in your mind the seeds of doubt that will grow over time. It’s an important issue that you need to have a position on. The only way to have a position that allows you to fight back in your own mind — when you’re trying to be honest with yourself, you want to have evidence or reasoning that you believe sounds true. You don’t want to be thinking to yourself, “well I don’t really know the answer but I’m just going to say this.” You really want to have some confidence and confirmation in your mind that the answer you’ve arrived at yourself has some basis to it.
What I was going to say is also this: this is a very different take — and I know we’re not discussing modern politics, however I think it’s worth contrasting this with Marx’s “religion as the opium of the people” — as sort of a pleasant anesthetic, something you can just enjoy and blind yourself to reality with. This passage says religion is the terror force of the people — religion is what you use to scare people with. Really different take. And I think Lucretius’s take is the correct one.
Cassius:
I agree with you, Elaine — it’s the more potent of the two. It’s probably fair to say that both sides have some validity — that religion is both an opiate, in that it promises things it can’t deliver, and also a terror. It’s both, to some degree. But you’re right that Lucretius is stressing the terror side of it. I really think that’s probably the stronger one. I don’t know how to break it down — whether, if you were trying to say whether most people are motivated by the fear of hell or by the promise of heaven — what do you think about that?
Elaine:
I think it’s mostly the fear, which they’re not aware of until much later. I have been involved somewhat — not heavily — in some of the atheist groups, and because I was raised without religion I’m coming at things from a very different angle from the people who leave religion in adult life after realizing it doesn’t make sense. When they leave, they will tell you there’s some sense of liberation, but somewhere in the process there’s a good bit of fear — and that’s when they realize that it was fear that has kept them in. It’s not just fear of the imaginary supernatural — it’s social fear. Fear of being ostracized by your family and your friends. Which is not a baseless fear, but it’s still a way that fear is used to control people.
Martin:
Yes, it’s particularly strong in Islam, where people really face sanctions from close family — basically excluded from the family. And so most atheists in those communities just keep it secret from their families. They fake the rituals and give the semblance of belief but actually don’t believe.
Elaine:
Or they could be killed, in many places. Yes.
And the other thing — this is my own experience — after just a brief trial in a Japanese sectarian cult, when I saw its nonsense I hesitated to get out right away because of the people I had met in there. And I wasn’t even isolated yet. This is a problem with other cults — they isolate you from your normal social environment so that your only social contact eventually is just within the cult, and this makes it very difficult for people to leave.
Cassius:
Right. Now, what you guys were just saying — I think you’re focusing on the threats of retribution while we’re still alive, and the peer pressure we have here.
Elaine:
Yeah, I was going to say that is a different type of fear from what’s being talked about in this paragraph. I just went that way because when you said “what is the main thing that keeps people in religion?” — I think fear is the main thing, but it’s still connected. It’s definitely connected — because the social pressure wouldn’t be there if everyone were convinced. And he’s using “men” here — at least Daniel Brown capitalizes it: “if men were once convinced that death were the sure end of all their pains, they might resist.” So there wouldn’t be these people who would ostracize you if they were all convinced that death was the end of things.
Cassius:
Now, what I was going to add — the last part of the sentence we read ends “because we fear a scene of endless torments after death,” so he’s clearly at least in that part talking about what’s going to happen after death. But I was going to say: when we were talking about how people today are motivated, perhaps there is a difference between today and the ancient Greek and Roman world he’s talking about. For example, the Stoics and some of these other traditions — maybe even the ordinary Greek and Roman religion — it’s not clear to me that they really focused on what happens after death in terms of a strong idea of heaven and hell. I guess there are Elysian fields and so forth. I don’t have the impression that the Romans and Greeks thought that we were going to live an eternity in some kind of afterlife. Maybe they did — what he’s talking about in the next paragraph, about Homer’s shade appearing, is what happens after death — but I just don’t have that impression. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
Martin:
What the Greeks definitely believed — but they didn’t know “heaven.” It was actually some kind of underworld. The soul would enter that state. So this was basically a big progression when Christianity came up and then gave hope. I think this is one reason Christianity managed to gain enough traction to become the state religion — because people actually liked that more than what their traditional religion offered.
Cassius:
Martin, I also had the impression that every soul did not necessarily experience this afterlife. I gathered that maybe Cicero or somebody said that if you were some kind of prominent, important person and had really used your life in a particular way, then maybe your soul would last somewhat longer. But I was not under the impression that every soul in Greek and Roman mythology immediately went to an underworld and stayed there forever. I could just be wrong about that.
Martin:
I mean, you had to give the coins to the ferryman to cross the Styx. Maybe if you didn’t have the coins you didn’t go. I don’t know as much about that as I could — I’m not sure how much I can say. But I do think it’s interesting.
Cassius:
I didn’t know that the reincarnation idea was going on in Greece or Italy. Was it not Pythagoras who was into reincarnation? Martin, do you know?
Martin:
Pythagoras may be very different on this one because he was a scientist, so he may have differed from religion. I wouldn’t consider Pythagoras as representative.
Cassius:
Okay, here — I’m looking it up now. He did believe in the transmigration of souls into the bodies of humans or any other sorts of animals. Wow, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that would have been a well-enough known option in that time. I mean, here Lucretius is saying there are two options if you’re not just dead: either you’re going to the underworld, or you’re reincarnating. But he doesn’t really mention a heaven-and-hell contrast — just underworld or recycling.
Elaine, we haven’t read the second paragraph in a while — do you want to read it again?
Elaine:
Let me do Munro. “For they cannot tell what is the nature of the soul, whether it be born or on the contrary finds its way into man at their birth, and whether it perishes together with us when severed from us by death, or visits the gloom of Orcus and its wasteful pools, or by divine decree finds its way into brutes in our stead — as sang our Ennius who first brought down from delightful Helicon a crown of unfading leaf, destined to bright renown throughout the Italian clans of men.”
Let me stop there. So that’s it — those three options. Either you’re dead, or you’re in the underworld, or you’re recycled. And of course he starts out by saying that we don’t know — the problem is we don’t know the answer to which of those options is really the case, and we therefore need to have a position on it.
Cassius:
Right. He is setting this up as a contrast — here’s Bailey: “the shades of Orcus and his waste pools.” Yikes — that doesn’t sound like something people would want or enjoy. Let me also note Martin Ferguson Smith’s translation: “or whether it visits the gloom and yawning waste of Orcus” — yeah. So — do you want to read the next part?
Elaine:
Sure.
Cassius:
Let me read from Munro as we stated it: “And yet with all this, Ennius asserts that there are precincts of Acheron — publishing it in immortal verse — that there, neither our souls nor bodies hold together, but only certain idols pale and wondrous wise. From these places he tells us the ghost of ever-living Homer rose before him and began to shed salt tears and to unfold in words the nature of things.”
And let me read Martin Ferguson Smith for this: “And yet in his immortal verses he also declares that there are precincts of Acheron where neither soul nor body survives, but only a kind of wraith weirdly wan. From these parts he relates the apparition of Homer of never-fading genius, who rose and appeared to him and began to shed briny tears and disclose nature’s secrets.”
So it’s my understanding that we don’t have Ennius’s poem anymore to know the details of it, but we have these references that people make about what he said in the poem — about Homer appearing and talking about his experience in the underworld.
Martin:
All right, so I guess he’s saying Ennius kind of had a both-situations thing — where maybe some people were going into animals, and others were in this wraith realm of neither souls nor bodies. Interesting.
What is that other thing that’s not soul or body? But regardless of that, whatever’s going on in Acheron is not apparently very pleasant and not something we really want to spend eternity undergoing. If talking about the nature of things makes you cry, it doesn’t sound good. It sounds like they hadn’t quite expanded their view of hell to include Satan or the devil torturing people directly for an eternity — it sounds more like it’s just an extremely unpleasant place to be, but not necessarily the full Orcus of later imagination.
Elaine:
I mean, there is plenty of torture in the mythology. Look at Prometheus having his liver eaten by vultures constantly.
Cassius:
But yeah, I don’t get that sense either. We can say definitely that Lucretius has a goal here in citing the poets and seers — he’s showing: does this really sound like what you would want? Why don’t we go to the next paragraph? I don’t know that the fourth one really needs to be in it, but let’s go to it since it seems so closely related. Elaine, do you want to read that one?
Elaine:
Okay. “Wherefore we must well grasp the principle of things above — the principle by which the courses of the Sun and Moon come to be, and by what force all things are governed on earth — and also before all else we must see by keen reasoning what the soul and the nature of the mind consists of, and what thing it is which meets us when awake and frightens our minds if we are under the influence of disease, or again when buried in sleep, so that we seem to see, and hear speaking to us face to face, them who are dead whose bones earth holds in its embrace.”
Cassius:
Seems to me this is a continuation of the point that we’ve been making from the beginning of this set of passages. As a result of these threats from the priests, we therefore must grasp the principle of the way the universe works — the way the sun and the moon go by, and whether there’s a god making it happen or whether it happens naturally — and above all, even more so than understanding how the sun and the moon go around, we have to understand what our soul is and what our mind is, and therefore whether it’s going to survive death or not.
It’s interesting that the specific example he uses here — in addition to understanding the nature of the soul — is that we have to understand what it is we confront in dreams, and how it might arise that if we think we see or hear somebody speaking to us who we know is dead, how could that happen? And yet the priests are still not telling the truth — it’s not the explanation that the priests are suggesting. That’s what we want to understand: that clinical or psychological issues can create these phenomena, and it’s not that these people who are dead are living in another dimension waiting to contact us. I suppose even in my own experience I’ve had people who I respect and admire telling me that they’ve had strange experiences where they think they’ve heard someone speaking to them who we all know is dead.
Elaine:
I’m not going to claim to have done an extensive literature search, but as we were talking I remembered having read that there’s a pretty high prevalence of hallucinations after someone has died. I’m just pulling up this one article — I haven’t fully evaluated it, but this is from the Journal of Affective Disorders, 2015: “The Study of Post-Bereavement Hallucinatory Experiences: A Critical Overview of Population and Clinical Studies.” This is a systematic review. Overall, evidence suggests a strikingly high prevalence of post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences — ranging from 30 to 60 percent among widowed subjects — giving consistency and legitimacy to these phenomena, meaning they’re not pathological but rather normal human experience. Not that they’re real.
So I don’t think you have to have a clinical disorder other than grief to have these hallucinations. And I think it’s a great point that this comes up here in this place in the poem, because it brings up that it’s not just the fantasies of the seers we’re being bombarded with — there are things that our own minds do. And so if we don’t know the truth, we won’t know what to make of that, and we might go with those fantasy tales instead of with what’s real.
Cassius:
He’s mentioning what happens to us under the influence of disease or when we’re asleep. In this passage right now, we probably should mention — because I don’t believe we’re going to go into it right now in the upcoming passages — that as we get further into Book Four, the Epicureans had a well-developed theory of images. To use their word — or I think “specters” is a word that Cicero used to try to be derogatory toward them — but Epicurus did have a theory about how vision works, in which everything gives off images which go through space, which explains how we see something. Even today it’s complicated and complex and maybe not even fully understood — how vision occurs. What is going on when we see something in front of us? Are there atoms flowing from that thing to our eyes, or are there light waves influenced between us? How those things happen is a very complex subject. And I think Epicurus was saying: let’s explore the nature of vision and what happens when we see things, and then we can understand how distortions can occur, or illusions, or how we can see things inaccurately — and not only see but hear or smell things that occur at a distance.
Martin:
Action at a distance is something I understand is a major concept in physics. How do you explain what’s going on between that object a hundred yards away and yourself that you see it? It’s an interesting and complicated subject.
Cassius:
And Epicurus said: let’s dig into that. Because if we’re going to take the position that the senses are the foundation of truth, then we need to understand how the senses work, how there can be distortions, what distortions mean, and how we should compensate for them. All of those things will be developed at great length later in the book — and in Book Four in particular.
This is amazing, actually, how comprehensive just these three paragraphs are in describing the types of fears that people are subject to. Have we gotten enough for today? I really feel like this is probably enough.
Elaine:
I mean, if we make them too long I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
Martin:
Yes. I think the shorter podcasts are usually better, and then people can listen to more than one in a row if they want to. They can binge listen to us.
Cassius:
That’s right. So shall we summarize what these have meant, or is there anything else to pull out of these?
So, to me, coming on the heels of the passage we just discussed, this is a further contrast of science with scary religion. In the prior passage he talked about the contrast between the pain that religion visits on people — where they feel they have to kill their children to be able to get their fleet in motion — and then this passage talks about the scary afterlife that gets held over people’s heads and causes them to misinterpret what they’re dreaming about. So he’s laying out a case, bit by bit: reality versus fantasy.
And a part I would emphasize is that first sentence: “You yourself, sometimes vanquished by the fearsome threats of the seers’ sayings, will seek to desert from us.” The point being that today a lot of people have a tendency to think that Lucretius is not an important book for understanding Epicurus — they go right to the ethics, they go right to some of the letters about pleasure and how to live, and they think that’s basically all there is to it. But I think this statement by Lucretius is every bit applicable today: you are not going to escape these threats and fears about death that will constantly be hitting you for the rest of your life. Virtually nobody is immune — especially when you get sick, especially when you get old, especially when something bad happens to you or to your friends, you are going to be confronted by the issues of heaven and hell and what happens to you after you’re dead. And you need to be ready for that. You need to understand the way things work, what your soul and your mind really are, so that you’re not misled into all sorts of crazy things by wondering about punishment or reward after death. The only way to really be confident about that is to understand the way the world works — the way the universe works — and to have a position on it. If you just go through life saying “I don’t know, I don’t care, I’m just going to deal with it when it comes,” you’re not going to be ready. You’re not going to be firm enough to stand up to the suggestions that all you have to do is tithe your money to the church, be baptized, join the local mosque — and you’ll be guaranteed a ticket to paradise. You’re going to be confronted by those things, and if you don’t have a firm opinion about why they are impossible, you’ll probably give in to them at some point. It’s going to be a rare person who doesn’t think about these things and then, when confronted by them, is just immediately able to detect misrepresentation and fraud and error. That’s what Lucretius is about to explain for the rest of the poem — that’s what Epicurus’s own work on nature was about: a discussion of the fundamentals of how the universe works, and how these supernatural issues are basically impossible.
Elaine:
Right. That is exactly the case.
Cassius:
Well, I think Martin is able to give us comments by text if we need any more, but we didn’t have Charles with us today or Julie or anyone else, so we’re probably coming to the end of this particular episode. Alright — well, Martin is typing and probably saying something like “that’s it and goodbye.” Let’s see — yeah, “thanks and bye.” Alright, okay, well let’s adjourn — talked too soon. Alright, bye.