Episode 135 - Letter to Menoeceus 02 - On The Nature of The Gods
Date: 08/15/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2625-episode-one-hundred-thirty-five-the-letter-to-menoeceus-02-on-the-nature-of-the/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads sections 123–124 on the Epicurean gods, and Martin immediately corrects Bailey’s translation of “knowledge of them is by clear vision” — noting that the word is an idiom meaning “manifest” or “evident” (Hicks’s rendering), not that one literally sees the gods with the eyes; similarly, Bailey’s passive phrasing that the idea of a god is “engraved on men’s minds” implies an engraver and thus smuggles creationism into the text, whereas Hicks has the less loaded “according to the notion of a god indicated by the common sense of mankind.” The group establishes the foundational, uncontested points of Epicurean theology: the gods possess only two attributes — immortality and blessedness — and lack the omnipotence, omniscience, creative function, moral law-giving, and divine providence that post-Platonic and Abrahamic traditions ascribe to God, with Cassius using the Velleius speech in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods and the concept of isonomia as supplementary evidence. A sharp distinction is drawn between physical and idealist interpretations of Epicurean gods: the physical view holds that beings composed of atoms exist in the intermundia and serve as exemplars of the blessed life, while the idealist view reads “gods” as mental constructs — images of ideal happiness useful for moral contemplation rather than real entities — with Joshua, Callistheni, and Cassius each explaining why the Abrahamic inheritance makes it hard for modern readers to engage productively with either position. The episode features rich discussion of how cultural environment shapes perception of the divine — Joshua’s description of a Greek peasant farmer walking into the Parthenon for the first time, or seeing temple doors open hydraulically, or hearing the “voice” of Alexander the Oracle Monger’s papier-mâché snake through a speaking tube — and Callistheni introduces Joseph Campbell’s archetypes and the earth witness mudra (Buddha calling the earth to witness against Mara) as parallels to the Epicurean contemplation of ideal beings. The episode closes with Cassius and Joshua quoting Lucretius on Epicurus as Prometheus — “he explored the vast immensities of space with wit and wisdom and came back to us triumphant, bringing news of what can be and what cannot… and by his victory we reach the stars” — as the positive Epicurean alternative to supernatural religion.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 135 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius, and today we continue with the Letter to Menoikeus, tackling the Epicurean gods. Let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin: The things which I used unceasingly to commend to you, these do in practice, considering them to be the first principles of the good life. First of all, believe that a god is a being immortal and blessed, even as the common idea of a god is engraved on man’s mind, and do not assign to him anything alien to his immortality or ill-suited to his blessedness, but believe about him everything that can uphold his blessedness and immortality. For gods there are, since the knowledge of them is by clear vision. But they are not such as the many believe them to be, for indeed they do not consistently represent them as they believe them to be. And the impious man is not he who popularly denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many. For the statements of the many about the gods are not conceptions derived from sensation, but false suppositions, according to which the greatest misfortunes befall the wicked and the greatest blessings come by the gift of the gods to the good. For men being accustomed always to their own virtues welcome those like themselves but regard all that is not of their nature as alien.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. This is one of the thorniest passages in the whole letter. Before we get into the substantive controversies, let me flag something about the translation. Martin, you had a comment while reading about the phrase “clear vision.”
Martin: Yes. Bailey’s phrase “knowledge of them is by clear vision” sounds as if you are literally seeing the gods with your eyes. But that is not what it means. When you say in English that something is “clear to you” or “you can see it,” that is an idiom meaning you understand it, not that you are observing it visually. Hicks translates the same phrase as “knowledge of them is manifest” — which captures the meaning much better. If you focus on Bailey’s words you will conclude that Epicurus is making a claim about visual perception of gods, which would be absurd, when he is actually saying that the existence of gods is self-evident from what we know.
Cassius: And there is a second translation problem in the same section. Bailey says the common idea of a god is “engraved on men’s minds.” The passive voice here implies a subject — if something is engraved, there must be an engraver. That is almost exactly the language Christians use: God’s laws are written on every person’s heart. But Hicks says “according to the notion of a god indicated by the common sense of mankind” — which puts no engraver in the picture. Bailey’s phrasing opens a door to intelligent design that was not in the original.
Joshua: You can see from these two examples how translation choices can radically change the theological import of a sentence. This is exactly why we should never put too much weight on a single translator’s word choices, especially in a section like this where the stakes are high.
Cassius: Let’s establish the basics first. Epicurus says the gods are immortal and blessed — those are their two attributes. He is not saying they are omnipotent. He is not saying they are omniscient. He is not saying they created the universe, created mankind, placed earth at the center of their plan, know the number of feathers on the back of a sparrow, predestine souls to heaven or hell, or intervene in human affairs. In one sentence, the Epicurean gods completely eliminate most of what modern people mean when they say “God.”
Martin: Yes, definitely. That is a very different kind of god.
Cassius: The word blessed here — macarios in Greek — is the same word used for the gods in Principal Doctrine 1, and it is the same root as the word Epicurus uses in the Letter to Menoikeus for a life of happiness. The gods live the best possible version of the good life. That is the starting point.
Joshua: And then comes the line that gets the most discussion: “For gods there are, since knowledge of them is manifest.” Was Epicurus saying he really believed in divine beings? Was he just saying what he needed to say to avoid prosecution? I think he genuinely believed there was an order of existence higher than humans, and that this order was physical — composed of atoms, just like everything else — and that the gods existed somewhere in the universe, probably in the regions between worlds, the intermundia. The Velleius speech in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods describes this in detail, including the concept of isonomia — the balance of forms in an infinite universe — and the very counterintuitive claim that images flow toward the gods rather than from them to us.
Cassius: And Philodemus wrote an entire treatise called On Piety that provides additional evidence for how Epicurus thought about the relationship between the philosopher and the gods. There is also the Euthyphro problem — Socrates’s dialogue about what piety means — which Epicurus is clearly engaging with when he says the impious man is not the one who denies the gods of the many but the one who attributes to the gods the beliefs of the many.
Joshua: That passage — “the impious man is not he who popularly denies the gods of the many” — was Epicurus turning the charge of impiety back on his accusers. People were accusing him of impiety. He was saying: no, the impious are those who picture the gods as jealous, vengeful, capricious, capable of being placated by sacrifice. That is Plato’s gods in the Republic; that is Homer’s gods in the Iliad; that is the entire Greek religious tradition he is writing against.
Cassius: And it was not just a theoretical position. The Epicurean gardens are documented as having participated in civic religious practices. Epicurus was not trying to destroy religion in the sense of abolishing public ceremony. He was attacking the underlying theology that makes nature frightening and makes the gods your enemies.
Joshua: The cultural context matters enormously here. A Greek peasant farmer in the third century BC — likely poor, working in the fields, with no access to anything like the education we take for granted — would walk into the Parthenon and immediately be overwhelmed. The sheer size and grandeur of the building, the giant gold-and-ivory statue of Athena inside, the scale that made ordinary humans look tiny by comparison. If you had never in your life seen anything like that — if your daily existence was a small farm and a house of mud brick — that experience would have a permanent impact on your understanding of what the gods were and what your relationship to them was.
Callistheni: And in the temples they had hydraulic mechanisms that made the doors open on their own. Wind-up figures on hidden wheels that would move across a room and then withdraw. To someone who had never seen a machine like that, it would look like the gods themselves were at work.
Joshua: The best example is Lucian’s account of Alexander the Oracle Monger. Alexander had a living snake whose real head he tucked under his arm. From under his arm extended a papier-mâché snake head, realistically made and lit in dim light. Then he ran a speaking tube from the mouth of the papier-mâché head through a wall to a room where an accomplice would answer questions — and the congregation heard the god speaking directly to them. The whole thing was obvious fraud, but in that cultural environment, in that light, with that level of prior conditioning about what the gods were capable of, people believed.
Cassius: And the Epicureans were precisely those who, as Lucian says, were confident even without knowing the specific trick that it was a trick. The twelve fundamentals and the physics underlying them produce that kind of confidence.
Joshua: On the question of physical versus idealist interpretations of the gods — I do genuinely believe that Epicurus thought physical beings existed. Everything in nature is physical; the only non-physical thing in the Epicurean universe is void. If beings live the blessed life, they must be composed of atoms. They just exist in conditions that allow them to maintain that composition indefinitely.
Cassius: The idealist interpretation holds that the gods are images in our minds of the ideal state of happiness — useful not because they are real but because contemplating a being who perfectly embodies the Epicurean good life helps us strive toward it ourselves. Like a football player who watches tapes of the greatest players to improve their own game.
Callistheni: That actually resonates with me, especially as an artist. Joseph Campbell studied religions across the world and identified recurring archetypes — the trickster, the hero, the wise old man, the goddess — that appear across completely different cultures. For an artist, engaging with those archetypes is a way of connecting to something larger than yourself, something that spans human history. That is not supernatural, but it is not trivially mechanical either. And the Epicurean gods as exemplars of the best life feel like something similar — images that expand your sense of what is possible.
Joshua: There is an image from Buddhism that I find compelling here. When the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and was confronted by Mara — the figure of temptation and death — he responded with what is called the earth witness mudra: he touched his fingertips to the ground, calling the earth to witness all the lives he had lived working toward enlightenment. It is the gesture of calling nature itself as your witness. And I think that is something like what Epicurus does when he points to the physics of the universe as the foundation of the good life — he is calling nature as his witness that the blessed life is possible.
Callistheni: The mudra is also about calling on all the beings across all time who are working toward liberation — having them stand behind you at the crucial moment. And that is not unlike the way Epicurus describes the effect of studying his philosophy: you draw on the recollection of past pleasures, the expectations of future ones, the knowledge of everything he has built.
Cassius: And Joshua, you raised Henry David Thoreau reading Lucretius — he read the opening lines of Book 1 and wrote about them in his journal.
Joshua: Yes. And interestingly, he reported that the most striking image was Prometheus — even though Prometheus does not appear by name in Lucretius. What Lucretius describes is a man, a Greek, who stands up against religion, climbs the flaming ramparts of the world, crosses the bounds of space and time and thought, and comes back with news of what can be and what cannot. Thoreau read that as Prometheus stealing fire from the gods on behalf of humanity. And that is a genuinely inspiring image: not a god doing something for you, but a human being pushing out to the absolute limits of knowledge and bringing the result back for everyone.
Joshua: Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve is about Poggio Bracciolini, the Renaissance humanist who rediscovered the manuscript of Lucretius in a German monastery in 1417. Poggio’s letters home to Florence describe a man who found the world deeply unsatisfying — he watched educated, articulate people being led to the stake at the Council of Constance — and he would describe what he saw and then use a transitional phrase: “but back to the books.” The world of Cicero and Homer and Epicurus and Lucretius was a sanctuary for him. Not because it was supernatural, but because it was the best humanity had produced.
Cassius: And that is what the positive Epicurean view of divinity provides: not a supernatural authority, but an ideal that is genuinely inspiring. As Lucretius writes in Book 1, in the Stallings translation: “religion so is trampled underfoot, and by his victory we reach the stars.” That is the Epicurean position on religion — not nihilism, not destruction, but the defeat of superstition and the genuine exaltation of human understanding. Closing thoughts?
Martin: Nothing to add today.
Callistheni: This has been very important for me. I have tended to skip past anything involving the word “gods” as not relevant to my life. But I can see now that this section is actually foundational to the whole ethics — it sets up the exemplars, the ideal life to strive toward, and it strips away the fear that otherwise would make that striving impossible. I need to go back and study Joseph Campbell again with this in mind. Thank you.
Joshua: Great discussion. Welcome back, Callistheni. The gods in Epicureanism are genuinely interesting — neither the supernatural tyrants of most religion nor a mere rejection of the concept. Something more interesting than either.
Cassius: We will come back next week to continue the Letter to Menoikeus. Thanks everyone.
Joshua: Goodbye.
Martin: Bye.
Callistheni: Goodbye.