Episode 085 - Thunder and Lightning Part 3 - Why Do The Gods Send Thunderbolts Onto Their Own Temples?

Date: 08/29/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2157-episode-eighty-five-thunder-and-lightning-part-three-why-do-the-gods-send-thunde/

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Summary

Martin reads Book 6, lines 340–417. After briefly reviewing last week’s material — including the USGS finding that clouds can weigh 500+ tons (Martin: small droplets suspended in air by friction, like an aerosol) — the panel discusses lines 340–357, where lightning bolts gather force the greater their descent. Martin explains this reflects charge-separation energy proportional to distance. Galileo’s vacuum experiment (both feather and lead ball accelerate identically) and the Apollo 15 moon demonstration come up naturally.

The second half of the episode is devoted to Lucretius’s concentrated anti-religious attack in lines 379–417: why do gods strike the good and innocent rather than the flagitious? Why destroy their own temples and statues? Why waste bolts on mountains and seas? Why give warning via lightning if intending to destroy, yet no warning if we should flee? Martin confirms that lightning strikes the sea proportionally to area (no targeting) and that most lightning travels cloud-to-cloud. The episode closes with discussion of the word “flagitious” and Saint Jerome’s claim that Lucretius wrote while insane from a love potion.

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Transcript

Cassius: Welcome to Episode 85 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Norman DeWitt. For anyone not familiar with our podcast, please visit EpicureanFriends.com where you’ll find our goals and ground rules. If you have any questions about those or anything about the podcast, please contact us at the forum for more information. In Episode 85 we’ll read approximately lines 340 through 417 as we continue further into Book Six. We’ll discuss thunder, lightning, and the eternal question of why the gods strike their own temples with thunderbolts. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.

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Martin: And lastly, the greater the distance is from whence their body descends, its swiftness and proportion increases — it still gathers strength as it moves, grows more violent, and the blow is heavier when it falls. For all its seeds are driven down by that length of violence to one point and unite all their powers in the same motion. Or perhaps they carry with them other seeds in their passage through the air which beats them on and keeps them steady in their descent. The lightning makes its way and passes through bodies that are rare and leaves them safe and unhurt. But other bodies it rents asunder, because its fiery seeds strike through their solid contexture which holds them together. And therefore it easily dissolves brass and gold, because it consists of exceeding small and smooth particles which work themselves without difficulty into the very principles, and in an instant melt the whole contexture and loosen the ties and bonds by which they were secured.

And in autumn and when the flowery season of the spring displays its beauty, then the high palaces of heaven with all its shining stars and the whole earth are shaken most with thunder. For in the winter there wants fire, and in summer there is no supply of wind, nor will the clouds grow thin in too much heat. But in the middle quarters of the year all things occur to make the thunder roar — those seasons are made up of heat and cold blended together. Of both these is formed the thunder, that so these jarring elements may raise the greater combustions and the tormented air toss with more confusion by the strokes of wind and fire. For the end of winter and the beginning of summer makes the spring, and then the heat and cold, two enemies so opposite, must needs engage. And when they meet and mix, very strange confusions arise in the air. And then the end of summer and the beginning of winter bring on the autumn. Now the retiring heat and coming cold engage again. These are the times we say when the elements go forth to war. Where is the wonder if loud thunders roar in seasons such as these and dreadful tempests rattle in the sky, since the elements rage in every way with doubtful war — on one side fire, on the other furious winds mingled with rain?

From hence you must collect the true principle of thunder and discover how it works and sends abroad its fires — for it is vain to look back into the Tuscan legends and from thence inquire into the secret purposes of the gods: from what quarters of the heavens the lightning flies, and to what part it points its forked beams, and how it pierces through the walls of houses, and having spent its rage it finds a passage out, and what evil it portends by flashing from the sky.

For if great Jupiter and the rest of the gods delight to shake the shining battlements of heaven with horrid noise and throw about these fires as please themselves, why are not those struck through who love to act flagitious crimes, and why are their hearts not struck with fiery bolts as dreadful monuments to future times? Why rather are the good and innocent scorched with these blasts and tortured in the flames, and caught up in these whirlwinds of the air, and in the fire consumed? And why do they spend their shafts on solitary places and fatigue themselves in vain? Is it to exercise their arms, to try their strength? Or why do they permit their farthest bolts to be blunted against the bare earth? Why does he suffer this himself and not rather reserve his darts to blast his enemies? Why does not Jove vouchsafe to roar with thunder and smite the earth with his bolts in a clear sky? When the clouds spread over the heavens, does he descend within them in order to be nearer and to throw his darts with surer aim? Why does he send his fires upon the sea? Why does he chastise the waves, the wide ocean, or the plains covered with water?

Besides, if he would have us avoid the stroke of these thunderbolts, why does he not contrive that we may see them as they fly? If he resolves to blast our species with fire before we are aware, why does he first flash out his lightning from that quarter when his bolts are to be discharged, that we may avoid them? Why does he give us notice by raising darkness, noises, and murmurs in the air?

And then, how do you think that he is able to cast so many darts in many various places at once? Do you offer to say that it is never done and insist there are never more darts flying about at the same time? It is certain that numbers of them are thrown together, and it cannot be otherwise — for as the rain and showers fall upon many countries at once, so many strokes of thunder are discharged at the same time.

In the last place, why does he with his deadly thunder beat down the sacred temples of the other gods, and the stately fabrics devoted to himself? Why does he dash to pieces the curious statues of the other deities, and destroy with furious strokes the honors offered to his own images? Why does he level his shafts at lofty places? For we discover many traces of this fire upon the tops of highest mountains.

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Cassius: Martin, thank you for reading that for us today. We have got some interesting material to talk about. We’ve been able to look into the meteorological aspects of things and come up with a very profound religious observation about how the gods must or must not operate, and we want to be sure we give that the attention it deserves. However, we probably need to drop back to last week for at least a few minutes, because we finished our detailed discussion of last week’s text at around line 246. So let’s just quickly look back at the passages beginning 246 to see if there’s anything else we’d like to bring out before we move on to today’s text.

One thing I wanted to point out: something I noted in the forum last night. One of the first things that Don read last week was about the prodigious weight of the clouds. I happened to come across a reference to that very same issue and looked up the weight of clouds on the US Geological Survey. And it appears that clouds can have a very prodigious weight indeed — they can weigh as much as 500 or more tons. I suspect Martin will have some clarifying comments on what exactly that means about the mass of clouds. But it certainly never occurred to me that they could have so much mass in them as they apparently do.

Martin: I mean, this is just a number which is then made up by the volume. If a cloud is a cubic kilometer in volume, then it can easily have that weight. And it stays in the air just because it is spread out over such an area — the small droplets which are there are kept because they cannot accelerate down, because the friction makes them immediately stop. So it’s like if you drop something which is not too dense into honey, it will not sink — it will just stay there even though it’s heavier than honey. It will take ages until it sinks down. And if there are small particles, they behave the same way in air. It’s also the same with an aerosol of a virus — it stays for quite a while in the air.

Cassius: Okay. Well, I just thought that was worthy of note — it’s kind of counterintuitive to realize that clouds could be that heavy, and it’s interesting that Lucretius and Epicurus would have thought to make note of it. So that’s one thing from last week. I think we stopped around section 246. Let’s glance at those and see if we have anything else to pull out.

Don: No, just the thing about the ball of lead melting in its course — I think we covered that last week.

Cassius: Okay, all right. So do we have more meteorology after today’s episode too?

Don: Uh-huh.

Cassius: Oh, lord.

Don: We do, unfortunately. But like I say, this little break on the gods — why do they waste their thunderbolts — should be fun.

Cassius: Yeah, that could be fun. I was telling Martin earlier that in the earlier books we waded through some pretty intense deep material about atoms and were basically able to keep going through on schedule. And I know Don and I joke about there being too many clouds, but we’ve got to take it as it comes.

Don: Right, right. You’ve dedicated to going through the entire poem, so it’s not like you can just skip lines 400 through 900 and say “you can read that on your own.”

Cassius: Right, right. No, I fully agree — you need to take it as it comes. Yeah, so I’m looking now at 309 through 335, and… The only other thing I can think of as we work through all the meteorology is to try to find any other points of philosophy we can shoehorn in, in addition to talking about the weather.

Don: Yeah, kind of like we did last week.

Martin: I didn’t see anything more to talk about for the remaining paragraphs.

Cassius: Okay, all right. I’ll just narrate and we’ll move on to today’s material. It looks like paragraphs 300 through 340 or so are basically the same material we’ve been covering — more detail about the way the clouds work. So that brings us to today’s material beginning around line 340.

Don: Yeah, it’s just a good example of Lucretius not letting any detail go unnoticed. He’s into the nitty-gritty details on the thunder and the lightning in this section; his powers of observation are right there.

Cassius: Right. And we’re analyzing in line 340 how the seeds of the lightning bolts are pushed down against each other and kept steady in their descent. So is he talking about velocity there — that things fall faster, the longer the distance they have? It seems like: the greater the distance from which the body descends, the heavier the blow when it falls. It sounds like if you threw a thunderbolt from three feet off the ground it wouldn’t go very fast, but it’s falling from the vault of the heavens, so that’s why it’s so fast when it comes down. Am I reading that correctly?

Martin: So it seems he’s expressing this behavior of masses when we let them fall — free fall near the surface of the earth.

Cassius: That’s how I was taking it — because he’s talking about the blow being heavier when it falls from a greater height. So maybe that’s why he thinks the thunderbolts do such damage.

Martin: Yeah. The thing is, he is not clear enough on this, and the law was not yet known. What is correct is rather something which is very similar, and qualitatively you cannot distinguish it empirically: the greater the distance, so more energy is in the separation of charges, and this will show up as voltage, and that combination of separated charge times the voltage is the energy. But this is linear — so it goes linear with height. He probably could not make good measurements, so I think by chance his theory is qualitatively correct.

Cassius: Right. And do I remember correctly that a lot of thunderbolts that quote-unquote “hit the earth” actually travel from the earth to the cloud rather than the other way around? I vaguely remember hearing that.

Martin: I mean, that depends. The positive ions will travel through one end and the negative ions along with the electrons to the other. So in some way it starts at one end, and that’s where the breakdown strength is first exceeded, and then from there it will just move on. It’s very conceivable that sometimes it goes from the earth to the top and sometimes from top to the earth. We probably can’t see which direction because this moves too fast for the eye. But maybe with extremely fast cameras we might be able to catch that.

Cassius: Not to beat the dead horse on the lightning bolts, but Martin — help me be less confused on this issue. Is it Galileo or Newton who demonstrated that everything falls through a vacuum at the same speed?

Martin: It’s Galileo, right. So in a vacuum, the feather and the ball of lead will hit the bottom at the same time. When you just drop them from rest, they accelerate continuously — both the feather and the weight. So for a short distance near the surface of the earth, the acceleration is essentially constant, and the speed increases linearly while the distance traveled goes with the square of the time.

Cassius: Okay, that explains my confusion — I wasn’t thinking about the fact that the feather is going to accelerate as it falls, just like the ball of lead, even in the vacuum.

Don: It’s amazing to watch those videos of the feather and the ball dropping at the same rate in the vacuum.

Cassius: I think I vaguely remember seeing something where they did that experiment on the moon — one of the astronauts took two objects to drop on the moon and it was just like that.

Martin: Yeah, it’s completely counterintuitive.

Don: Exactly. It feels weird. So no wonder it took so long to figure out these laws — in a normal observation you’re dealing with air pressure and air resistance, so we don’t experience it as a regular everyday thing. But seeing it filmed is just a little odd.

Cassius: Okay, we’ve got a couple more paragraphs before we get to the pleasure of attacking false religion again, so let’s dive into 357 and 379. Section 357 is about the pretty good observation that the harshest weather occurs at the change of seasons, it looks like — when the cold season and the hot season give way to each other.

Martin: But it depends where you are. In Central Europe it’s rather that in summer we have the most thunderstorms, and in Thailand it’s during the wet season, which corresponds from our spring through to our autumn — but they don’t have those seasons, it’s just the wet season. I would be interested to look at the weather patterns in Greece and Italy, where both Epicurus and Lucretius would have been writing. In summer there it’s fairly dry, and in winter they have a lot of rain. I guess it fits that in the transition they have most of the thunderstorms, because you need that heat to facilitate the thunderstorm so that things are rising fast enough to separate charges — which is why in winter it’s rather rare to have thunderstorms.

Cassius: That makes sense, and I believe that’s what he’s pretty much saying there. Think about: “in the summer there’s no supply of wind, nor will the clouds grow thin in too much heat.”

Don: A lot of poetry going on in that section. Oh yeah — he’s a wordsmith.

Martin: But “the clouds grow thin in too much heat” is a bit weird, because in summer there are not many clouds in the Mediterranean area, and they will evaporate — so they do grow thin in summer. That part is correct at least.

Cassius: I guess at least in my area of the country that’s pretty much what I see — we have the hurricane season in the fall and lots of things go on in the spring, but in the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter things are more mild, or at least not as rambunctious. Okay.

Cassius: So we’ve reached the point: “from hence we must collect the true principles of thunder and discover how it works and sends abroad its fires — for it is vain to look back into the Tuscan legends and from thence inquire into the secret purposes of the gods, and from what quarters of the heavens the lightning flies, and to what part it points its forked beams.” I guess they used to do that kind of divination — thinking about where the lightning was coming from and where it was going.

Don: I remember him mentioning that in some earlier passages too — that you would look at the sky and divide it up into sections and think about what it meant that the lightning started here and went there. It’s more easy for me to think about doing that at night when you’re looking at the constellations and doing some kind of astrology, but I guess even in the daytime you can certainly do north/south/east/west and stuff like that. And if your life depended on getting the divinations right for the king, you would be sure to memorize those areas of the sky.

Cassius: Well, the rest of what we’re talking about today is a lot of good material, and it kind of reminds me of the kind of thing that would be related to the famous riddle of Epicurus that people talk about all the time — about why the gods do this or that or the other, or why they don’t. This is a well-written, well-crafted section on what exactly the gods are supposed to be doing with their thunderbolts, since it really makes no sense to think they are tools of the gods given the way they counterintuitively show themselves to us.

Don: Oh yeah, this is a great section. Very enjoyable. “For if great Jupiter and the rest of the gods delight to shake the shining battlements of heaven with horrid noise and throw about these fires as please themselves, why are not those struck through who love to act flagitious crimes? And why are their hearts not struck with fiery bolts as dreadful monuments to future times? Why rather are the good and innocent scorched with these blasts and tortured in the flames?”

Cassius: You can see someone getting worked up about this. Why do you send those lightning bolts to hit the good people instead of the bad people? What are you wasting your time and ours both, sending your lightning bolts against the people you should be helping?

Don: This is just an ancient argument of “why bad things happen to good people,” you know. Yeah.

Cassius: Exactly. We see this happening and we believe in the gods — why would the gods do this to us? Well, I’m saying there aren’t any, but… These paragraphs kind of break down like that, because I think you’re right — this one would be “why do bad things happen to good people,” and then the next one is “why do they waste their time,” basically. It’s really saying: do the gods have target practice? Do they have to exercise their arms? What’s going on?

Don: A lot of sarcasm there. And the “exercise of their arms and trying their strength” — I can see Epicurus going down this path, just from reading some of his other works, especially some of the On Nature things that have been translated from Herculaneum. Just that sort of biting little sarcasm.

Cassius: Yeah, this is not exactly the kind of argument calculated to win friends and influence people among the religious locals who are dedicated to their idea of gods — it’s kind of rubbing it in. But you know, there’s a time and a place for everything.

Don: Apparently yes, apparently.

Cassius: Okay — Martin, don’t let us leave you out of this conversation. We need your input into the religious ramifications of this. Anything to add?

Martin: Yeah, I mean, I basically agree with what you say. It’s just sarcasm. If you’re pretty sure there’s a natural explanation for these phenomena, there are plenty of ways to make fun of the superstitions that think otherwise.

Cassius: Right, that’s one of the continuing themes we touch on almost every episode. Some people are going to find these particular arguments extremely interesting and motivating to think about, and then some are going to say, “why are you wasting my time talking about these things, it’s so ridiculous to even think about them.” I can’t move on past that without saying that I’ve always thought Epicurus was intending to pay at least as much attention to the normal everyday common person as he was to the academics — and of course at that time, everybody presumably held the position that the gods were doing these things.

Cassius: “Why does not Jove vouchsafe to roar with thunder and smite the earth with his bolts in a clear sky?” — the clear sky part of it, Martin: do we have thunder and lightning in a clear sky, or is that something we just hear from a distant area where there are clouds?

Martin: Yeah, exactly. In a clear sky there’s nothing that would separate the charge, so it’s unlikely that you’d have lightning originating in clear sky. But you can see it from far away, possibly.

Cassius: Right, right. And I like this next one: “When the clouds spread over the heavens, does he descend within them in order to be nearer and to throw his darts with surer aim?” I think that’s a really biting one there — especially since you won’t see through the clouds.

Don: Yeah, exactly. It’s like: that’s why they descend toward the earth, so they can get closer and make sure they throw their lightning exactly where they want. Which of course contradicts everything we’ve been observing.

Cassius: Exactly. And then: “Why does he send his fires upon the sea? Why does he chastise the waves, the wide ocean, or the plains covered with water?” I guess lightning bolts do strike the ocean, Martin?

Martin: Oh, sure, yes, of course — where we have such charge separation and where the thunderstorm sets off. I mean, most of the lightning will probably end up in the sea, because we are more than half covered with water.

Cassius: Well, one of the background premises we’re all assuming without having spoken it is that when the charge builds up, it often discharges itself at a high point — presumably closer to the clouds, like a steeple or a tree or mountaintop. Obviously a steeple, for example.

Martin: Exactly, exactly — especially those steeples that are always ringing those bells during a storm.

Cassius: But what about the ocean? How would lightning pick out a place on the ocean to discharge itself, Martin? Any particular reason it would do it one place and not another?

Martin: There you have the waves, and just by chance where the dielectric breakdown starts — so it’s more likely to hit the top of the crest of a wave than the bottom, but it’s not too much of a difference. It will appear quite randomly in the area where that thunderstorm is, without any particular preference, because there are no height differences except the crests of waves.

Cassius: I think this points out the whole idea of selective attention — where people will see a lightning bolt hit what they think is an appropriate target and concentrate on that, just ignoring all the other lightning bolts that hit things not connected with the thing they want to talk about. “Oh, see, that person was punished because they got hit by a lightning bolt.” Or “that temple was built on the wrong day of the week and the gods were displeased.” And then what about that one over there that hit the other temple last week? Well, we’re not going to talk about that one.

Don: And as Martin mentioned in an earlier session — most lightning actually goes from cloud to cloud.

Cassius: The Olympian gods are always fighting amongst themselves!

Don: So that’s right, that’s right — that’s exactly right. That’s missing from this section. He could have brought that one in.

Cassius: As we go through this — this might be one of the most bitingly sarcastic sections of the whole poem. I’d have to think about whether there are others with a similar sense of sarcasm, but this one is really concentrated.

Don: It is concentrated — it goes on paragraph by paragraph. He got fired up on this one.

Cassius: And the next one he’s just as fired up, because he goes back and forth. First he suggests: well, if God wants us to avoid the stroke of his thunderbolts, why doesn’t he give us some warning — why doesn’t he contrive that we may see them as they fly? So he takes the possibility that God may want the good people to avoid the thunder strokes, but doesn’t give anybody any warning. On the other hand, if he’s resolving to blast us with fire before we know it, why does he first flash out his lightning from that quarter when his bolts are to be discharged, that we may avoid them? Why give us notice by raising darkness, noises, and murmurs in the air if he’s trying to destroy us? So either way it doesn’t make sense that this is a focused intelligent activity.

Cassius: And then he goes right into the next paragraph — he keeps flinging things around. How can he be in multiple places at once? And he’s anticipating responses: “Do you offer to say that it is never done and insist there are never more darts flying about at the same time? It is certain that numbers of them are thrown together, and it cannot be otherwise — for as the rain and showers fall upon many countries at once, so many strokes of thunder are discharged at the same time.”

Don: So he’s really just arguing with these people. And then, as we come to the end, we’re going to come to the coup de grâce of the argument —

Cassius: Why does he destroy his own temples and the temples of his friends, the other gods?

Don: “Why does he dash to pieces the curious statues of the other deities, and destroy with furious strokes the honors offered to his own images? Why does he level his shafts at lofty places? For we discover many traces of this fire upon the tops of highest mountains.” He’s mad at the mountains, he’s mad at his own temples, he’s mad at his other deities — he’s mad at everybody.

Cassius: You get the impression that they had a regular problem in the ancient world with these temples being destroyed by lightning.

Don: I guess they probably did. I mean, look at the Acropolis in Athens — it’s the highest point in the entire city. So if you’re going to get lightning storms, it’s going to get hit all the time. And in another low-lying place, the temple’s going to be the highest point in that particular community. So chances are, yeah.

Cassius: This is like Lucretian standup.

Don: Right, yes it is.

Cassius: And this might well be one of the most memorable bitingly sarcastic passages in the whole poem. You could probably also talk about the end of Book Two, I think, and the death arguments he puts forward there. But this one has a real sense of exasperation to it.

Don: It does. I’d be curious to go back and look at the Latin, but just the short, sharp question after question after question is an interesting way to really just pound that point home.

Cassius: I do think Lucretius intentionally tries to break up the long detailed meteorological material with sections that are more general like this one. It’s amazing what somebody who — according to the church fathers — was supposedly taking a love potion and hallucinating, and was basically insane, can come up with during their lucid moments. It’s amazing what somebody as disadvantaged as that can come up with when they—

Don: What’s that? Saint Jerome?

Cassius: Saint Jerome.

Don: Oh, lord. I’ve got a problem with Saint Jerome. He does that kind of stuff, but he’s also supposedly the patron saint of librarians. So I’ve got this love-hate relationship with Saint Jerome.

Cassius: Well, okay then. And so, Don — you’ll be happy to know that in the next section for next week, we return to meteorological phenomena.

Don: Oh, thank heavens. Oh, that’s great.

Cassius: And to the winds and presumably tornadoes and things like that. But okay, as we started today, we were talking about a couple of words that might not be clear in what we discussed today. One we even laughed about as so obviously needing explanation. What was that?

Don: “Flagitious”?

Cassius: Yeah, okay — “flagitious.” You looked that up and found it means what, Don?

Don: I just found: criminal or villainous. Some synonyms are immoral, wrong, ungodly. So that’s the group of people he’s asking about — why don’t you fling thunderbolts at the criminals, the ones with bad morals doing wrong ungodly things?

Cassius: Right — leave us alone. Of course that’s presumably the most obvious interpretation that supernaturally religious people are taking, that the gods are punishing somebody by sending these storms and lightning bolts. So if they’re taking the trouble to do that, why not do it with more method behind it?

Don: Be more focused, be more focused.

Cassius: Well, we’re about ready to close for today. This was a good break from the pure meteorological stuff to get to this issue about the gods and the lightning and thunder. Martin, do you have any general thoughts to add as we think about concluding?

Martin: I said everything I could think of for this part of the text.

Cassius: Okay. Don, any general thoughts?

Don: No, I think this is a fun way to end an episode — this section is always fun to read.

Cassius: Yeah. And like I say, next week I don’t know that we have quite as religiously tinted a viewpoint of what’s going on with the storms, but basically that is the same reason for the discussion — we’re going through meteorological and atmospheric phenomena that people wonder about and may think are caused by the gods, and we’re assigning rational explanations for what’s behind them. And multiple explanations too.

Don: Right. Always come back to the material, physical reasons for things.

Cassius: Right. Okay, well, I think that’s about all I have to say for today too. I will repeat what I said a minute ago: if someone were going through the poem and looking for sections that are bitingly sarcastic and aggressive and confrontational and in-your-face to people not of the Epicurean persuasion, this might well be one of the most memorable. You could probably talk about the end of Book Two and the death arguments, but this one has a real sense of exasperation to it. I’d be curious to go back and look at the Latin, but at least in the translations that I’ve seen, the short sharp question after question after question is an interesting way to really just pound that point home.

Cassius: Well, okay, on the question of why the gods destroy their own temples — we’ll break for the day and come back next week. Thanks again, and we’ll do it next week.

Don: Sounds good. Bye-bye.