Episode 143 - Diogenes of Oinoanda (Part 3) The Superiority of The Epicurean Viewpoint on "Gods"
Date: 10/11/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2695-episode-one-hundred-forty-three-diogenes-of-oinoanda-part-3-the-superiority-of-t/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Cassius hosts with Joshua and Martin; the fragmentary physics section of the inscription is skipped to move directly to religion, which Cassius argues is foundational to all of Epicurean philosophy — those who go straight to Epicurus’s conclusions about happiness and ethics without working through his view of the gods will almost certainly go astray. Joshua reads Fragments 16, 19, and 20. Fragment 16 identifies Diagoras of Melos as the categorical atheist who denied the gods outright and vigorously attacked all who disagreed, and Protagoras of Abdera as one who expressed the same denial in softer terms — “I do not know whether gods exist” — which Diogenes of Oenoanda argues amounts to the same thing, because he said only the first half and not the counterbalancing “nor do I know that they do not exist.” Diogenes insists it is not the Epicureans but others who truly deny the gods, and cites the positive Epicurean formula: “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; 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.” Fragment 19 criticizes Homer for representing the gods as adulterers, lame, thievish, and struck by mortal spears, and argues that craftsmen should make statues of the gods genial and smiling rather than shooting arrows; Diogenes enjoins reverence at festivals, observance of ancestral customs, and freedom from the vain fear that the gods are responsible for all misfortunes. Fragment 20 contends that wrongdoers who do not fear the penalties imposed by law are equally unafraid of the gods — if they feared the gods they would not do wrong — and that wise people behave well on account of correct reasoning about pain and death, not religion; ordinary people are righteous only insofar as the laws and their penalties compel them, and even then only a very few are steadfast. Diogenes singles out the Jews and Egyptians as simultaneously the most superstitious and the vilest of all peoples as evidence of religion’s complete inability to prevent wrongdoing; Joshua notes that both the panel and Martin Ferguson Smith made the editorial decision not to bowdlerize the text; Cassius and Martin explore possible historical reasons including the prolonged Judean-Roman wars and the Egyptian practice of representing gods in animal form, and Cassius notes that the Epicurean rejection of any chosen-people relationship with a supernatural god (inconsistent with Principal Doctrine 1) would make that claim especially offensive. The discussion addresses John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (promises and oaths have no hold upon an atheist) and Thomas More’s Utopia (two beliefs forbidden: that the soul dies with the body, and that the universe is the sport of chance) as illustrations of how long this anxiety about godlessness and morality has persisted. Joshua defines agnosticism as coined by T.H. Huxley in the nineteenth century — the position that divine existence is unknown and unknowable — and distinguishes the faith axis from the knowledge axis to show that atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive; Cassius argues Epicurus was neither atheist nor agnostic but held a positive, confident affirmation that beings meeting the criteria of immortality and perfect blessedness exist, while categorically denying any supernatural creator or providential interference. The Stoic entry receives extended treatment: Fragment 20 records the Stoic claim that God created the world from a wish to have a city and fellow citizens, and Diogenes of Oenoanda asks where God was living before the world was created, concluding that for infinite time the Stoics’ god was cityless, homeless, and “destitute — roaming about at random,” which Martin identifies as deliberate mockery. Joshua notes that October 15 is the traditional anniversary of Lucretius’s death, the day Virgil was thought to have assumed the toga virilis, and Cassius closes by observing that what we find in Diogenes of Oenoanda — philosophy embraced freely through argument and evidence rather than compulsion — is the model for how Epicurean philosophy should always be approached.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 143 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, 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 our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you through the ancient Epicurean texts 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 Professor Norman DeWitt. If you find the Epicurean world attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics. This week we’ll continue with the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda and we’ll discuss the Epicurean view that their own viewpoint of divinity and the gods was vastly superior to the religious views of much of the rest of the world. Now let’s join Joshua reading today’s text, starting with Fragment 16.
Joshua: And they vehemently denounce the most pious people as atheistic, and in fact it will become evident that it is not we who deny the gods, but others. Thus Diagoras of Melos, with certain others who closely follow his theories, categorically asserted that the gods do not exist, and vigorously attacked all those who thought otherwise. Protagoras of Abdera, in effect, put forward the same view as Diagoras, but expressed it differently to avoid its excessive audacity. For he said that he did not know whether gods exist, which is the same as saying that he knew that they did not exist. If indeed he had balanced the first statement with “however, I do not know that they do not exist,” perhaps he would almost have a circumlocution to avoid the appearance of denying the gods completely. But he said “I do not know that they exist,” and not “I do not know that they do not exist,” doing exactly the same as Diagoras, who indefatigably did not stop saying that he did not know that they exist.
Let us then contradict Homer, who talks all sorts of nonsense about them, representing them sometimes as adulterers, sometimes as lame, sometimes as thievish, or even as being struck by mortals with a spear, as well as inducing the craftsmen to produce inappropriate portrayals. Some statues of gods shoot arrows and are produced holding a bow, represented like Heracles in Homer. Others are attended by a bodyguard of wild beasts. Others are angry with the prosperous, like Nemesis according to popular opinion. Whereas we ought to make statues of the gods genial and smiling, so that we may smile back at them rather than be afraid of them.
Well then, you people, let us reverence the gods rightly, both at festivals and on unhallowed occasions, both publicly and privately. And let us observe the customs of our fathers in relation to them, and let not the imperishable beings be falsely accused at all by us in our vain fear that they are responsible for all misfortunes, bringing suffering to us and contriving burdensome obligations for themselves.
So, it is obvious that wrongdoers, given that they do not fear the penalties imposed by the laws, are not afraid of the gods. This has to be conceded, for if they were afraid, they would not do wrong. As for all the others, it is my opinion that the wise are not righteous on account of the gods, but on account of thinking correctly and the opinions they hold regarding certain things, and especially pains and death; for indeed invariably and without exception human beings do wrong either on account of fear or on account of pleasures, and that ordinary people on the other hand are righteous, insofar as they are righteous, on account of the laws and the penalties imposed by the laws hanging over them. But even if some of their number are conscientious on account of the laws, they are few. Only just two or three individuals are to be found among great segments of multitudes, and not even these are steadfast in acting righteously, for they are not soundly persuaded about providence.
A clear indication of the complete inability of the gods to prevent wrongdoings is provided by the nations of the Jews and Egyptians, who, as well as being the most superstitious of all peoples, are the vilest of all peoples. On account of what kind of gods, then, will human beings be righteous? For they are not righteous on account of the real gods, or on account of Plato’s and Socrates’ judges in Hades. We are left with this conclusion. Otherwise, why should not those who disregard the laws scorn fables much more? So with regard to righteousness, neither does our doctrine do harm, nor does the opposite doctrine help, while with regard to the other condition the opposite doctrine not only does not help, but on the contrary also does harm, whereas our doctrine not only does not harm but also helps, for the one removes disturbances, while the other adds them.
That not only is our doctrine helpful but also the opposite doctrine harmful is clearly shown by the Stoics as they go astray, for they say, in opposition to us, that God is both maker of the world and takes providential care of it, providing for all things, including human beings. Well, in the first place, we come to this question: was it, may I ask, for his own sake that God created the world, or for the sake of human beings? For if it is obvious that it was from a wish to benefit either himself or human beings that he embarked on this undertaking — for how could it have been otherwise, if nothing is produced without a cause and these things are produced by a God? — let us then examine this view and what the Stoics mean. It was, they say, from a wish to have a city and fellow citizens, just as if he were in exile from a city, that God created the world and human beings. However, this supposition, a concoction of empty talking, is self-evidently a fable, composed to gain the attention of an audience, not a natural philosopher’s argument searching for the truth and inferring from probabilities things not palpable to sense.
Yet even if, in the belief that he was doing some good to himself, God really made the world and human beings — for God is, I say, a living being, indestructible and blessed from age to age, having complete self-sufficiency — moreover, what God, if he had existed for infinite time and enjoyed tranquility for thousands of years, would have got this idea that he needed a city and fellow citizens? Add to this absurdity that he, being a God, should seek to have beings as fellow citizens. And there is this further point too: if he had created the world as a habitation and city for himself, I seek to know where he was living before the world was created. I do not find an answer, at any rate not one consistent with the doctrine of these people, when they declare that this world is unique. So for that infinite time, apparently, the God of these peoples was cityless and homeless, and like an unfortunate man — I do not say God — having neither city nor fellow citizens, he was destitute and roaming about at random. If therefore the divine nature shall be deemed to have created for its own sake, all this is absurd, and if for the sake of men, there are yet other more absurd consequences.
Cassius: Thank you, Joshua. Let’s take a moment at the beginning of the episode to recap where we are. Last week we discussed Diogenes’ take on the nature of knowledge and the ability to determine things with confidence, and the fact that even though everything is made up of atoms and void, that does not mean that our world around us is unreal to us — and given the fact that it’s the only one we have, it’s extremely important to us. As we go through the rest of the inscription, we are unfortunately missing significant fragments, and this week, rather than go through a series of very fragmentary comments about physics — which appears to be the subject covered next after knowledge — let’s move down to where we read today, which is the issue of religion.
Of course, that’s Principal Doctrine number one. It’s one of the first things discussed in the Letter to Menoikeus. It’s an extremely important aspect of Epicurean philosophy, and I would say to those who read about Epicurus on the internet and get some familiarity with his emphasis on pleasure, happiness, calmness, and tranquility: Epicurean philosophy is a consistent whole. If you do not understand this fundamental doctrine, you will almost certainly go astray in applying the rest of it, because Epicurus is focusing on the nature of the universe and where we stand in it. If there is a supernatural God who created the universe and created humans and set things in motion, then there are going to be rules of behavior that flow from that position. When you go straight to his conclusions about happiness or ethics without understanding the way he thinks the world works, you’re just not going to understand completely why he comes to his conclusions — because this issue of the absence of life after death, the absence of a supernatural creator, sets the stage for everything else by making impossible the foundations of ethics that the standard religions and philosophies of his day and ours would argue as the case.
Immediately when we turn to this issue of religion, we’re confronted with the question: was Epicurus an atheist, and what is his position about whether any kind of gods exist, whether supernatural or not? This section that we’re reading today is going to give us a lot of material to think about.
We started out today by talking about what Homer was suggesting about the Greek gods and how they did all sorts of capricious and arbitrary things. If you take the attitude that God is active and affecting people’s lives, choosing particular people as his favorites, deciding that certain people are his enemies and taking actions accordingly — that is actually an unholy way of looking at whatever gods might exist, because that’s not a very flattering picture. If you’re submitting that there are beings worthy of being called gods, those beings would not conduct themselves in the reprehensible ways that common religions describe. And one of the first issues you run into in Epicurean philosophy is whether Epicurus was in fact an atheist. This first fragment, 16, bears on that because Diogenes seems to be very clearly distancing Epicurus from someone who denies that gods exist.
Joshua: Yeah, this issue of whether Epicurus was an atheist has become, I think, something of a stumbling block for people today. I would go so far as to say that probably a lot of people who find value in Epicurean philosophy today are somewhere actually closer to that position than to his position, which is why texts like this can occasionally challenge us. Because what Diogenes of Oenoanda says here is precisely what he says elsewhere. He says: it is not we who deny the gods, but others. 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. So what we get in this text is what Epicurus is saying elsewhere. And here in the opening part of Fragment 16, Diogenes points out this figure — I confess I had to look him up — Diagoras of Melos. From what I found, Diagoras of Melos was a Greek poet and sophist of the 5th century BC. Throughout antiquity he was recorded as an atheist, but very little is known for certain about what he actually believed. He was banished from Athens for impiety and ultimately died in Corinth. It’s also thought he may have been a disciple of Democritus, which is an interesting connection given what we discussed last week. But as Diogenes says here, Diagoras categorically asserted that gods do not exist and vigorously attacked all those who thought otherwise.
It’s genuinely not clear what Epicurus may have thought himself about atheism. It’s clear what he thought about people who hold the wrong views concerning the gods. Do we have any text where he describes specifically what he thinks about people who deny the gods? Because what we’re finding here in Diogenes of Oenoanda seems to be a slightly new approach, though I may be wrong about that.
Cassius: Yeah, this is more specific than I think I’m familiar with. There may be some material in Philodemus, but I don’t think we have anything attributed directly to Epicurus himself, other than the Letter to Menoikeus and the opening of the first Principal Doctrine. So we don’t necessarily have much from Epicurus himself on this particular distinction, but this would appear to me to be consistent with everything we do have in Lucretius and the Velleius material that Cicero has described. The basic position, as you’re describing it Joshua, comes down pretty simply: Epicurus categorically denied the existence of supernatural gods, but he expressly affirmed the existence of other beings in the universe, some of which he thinks have the capacity to be immortal and to live a blessed life free from pain. We’ve discussed this many times and will continue to as long as we discuss Epicurus, but it really is interesting here. This is really specific data that the Epicureans were well aware there were philosophers in the past who had specifically and categorically denied the existence of gods. And there were also philosophers who, like Protagoras of Abdera apparently, wanted to have their cake and eat it too — talking in double negatives and avoiding the sharpness of the position.
The way Diogenes says it here is that Protagoras was attempting to avoid the appearance of denying the gods completely and to avoid its excessive audacity. But in the end, Diogenes of Oenoanda is saying that both of those men were taking the same position — whether you express it harshly or softly. And in itemizing those positions, it’s pretty clear that what he’s doing is establishing that that was not Epicurus’ position. So it creates quite a conundrum for us today in thinking about what Epicurus’ position really was, because he clearly did not want to deny all existence to all gods, and yet he was very specifically denying the existence of any kind of supernatural gods. It seems like, as in Fragment 19, the direction Epicurus was going was to emphasize that what everybody thinks about gods — what the common definition of a god is — is wrong, and that a god is perfectly blessed and immortal, and that you cannot attribute to a god any characteristics inconsistent with immortality and perfect blessedness. Whatever else you think about gods, you must make everything consistent with this perfect blessedness and perfect immortality. And as he goes into in Fragment 19, anything worth the name of god is not something that’s going to be going around being thievish or lame or shooting arrows or interfering with the lives of men.
Joshua: And it would almost be better not to believe in the gods than to believe that about them.
Cassius: Right. Because the worst thing that happens when you don’t believe in the gods, from an Epicurean point of view, is that you remove this image of ideal blessedness from your life — you no longer have that to strive for, that personification of it. But if you take the alternate view — that there are gods who interfere in the lives of people, that when you put out on a boat you have to placate Poseidon first or he’ll have you killed — those ideas that Epicurus thought were so dangerous make it impossible to live a happy life. If you think that you have to placate the gods or they’re going to bring torment to you, it’s a very difficult way to live. So it’s almost better not to believe in the gods than to believe in the gods as described by the multitude. And to me that is one of the conclusions we derive from that quote from the Letter to Menoikeus.
Joshua: Right. What you just said is a little bit of a twist on what he says at the end of the Letter to Menoikeus — better to believe in the false theories about the gods than to believe in the deterministic view of the universe in which you can’t be happy. But I think you’re exactly right that from both perspectives he’s saying that it would be an error in his view to believe that there are no gods, but it would be better to err and say there are no gods than to have an unholy opinion about them.
Cassius: And really the unholiness is the part of it that I think is really interesting to comment on, because this and several other passages seem to me to be turning this issue of impiety back against the men in religion — almost as if you should be offended about the positions they are taking. Not just to laugh them off as wrong, but to consider that if these gods do exist and they’re an important part of your framework of the universe — where you’re taking them as examples of the right way to live — it’s not harmless to have these impious positions. If you’re going around making wild accusations that the gods are acting in capricious and arbitrary ways, that is actually a form of impiety itself. If you want to talk about what true blasphemy is, it’s those allegations about the gods that ought to excite some level of actual emotion in response to it.
Joshua: Yeah, because it’s views like that, Cassius, that are the reason that Agamemnon in the opening of Lucretius’ poem was seen to lead his own daughter to the sacrificial altar. If he didn’t have these fallacious views about the gods, he wouldn’t have thought that he had any need to do that.
Cassius: Right. He wouldn’t have thought that he had the need to do that. “Such evil deeds could religion inspire” — that line. And I think we want to avoid today spending too much time grappling with the issue of whether these gods that Epicurus was endorsing are real existing beings in the intermundia or whether they are mental constructs. That’s a continuing issue that we’ll always be debating as we read these Epicurean materials. But whichever position you take, he’s taking them seriously. And as a result of taking them seriously, he’s telling us — this is in Fragment 19 — well then, you people, let us reverence the gods rightly, both at festivals and on other occasions, publicly and privately, and let us observe the customs of our fathers and not let the imperishable beings be falsely accused at all by us in our vain fear that they are responsible for all misfortunes, bringing suffering to us, and contriving burdensome obligations for themselves. He’s not saying there are no supernatural gods, therefore forget about the issue. He’s saying this is an important part of the way you’re thinking and acting, and you should therefore take a reverential position toward it in your life.
Joshua: Even if it contradicts Homer.
Cassius: Even if it contradicts Homer, yes. Which is the scripture of ancient Greece. Now, there’s a specific issue I want to raise because we’re going to encounter some very difficult passages, and one of them to me is in Fragment 16. This may be of some interest to Martin. What he says here is “for he said that he did not know whether gods exist, which is the same as saying that he knew that they did not exist.” So if you consider yourself an agnostic, a religionist will still take you as an atheist. The end result is going to be the same — whether you’re an atheist or whether you’re an agnostic, you’re not going to go to the temple if you hold either of those views. So the differences between them are very small compared to the difference between those positions and the position that the gods do exist. Joshua, I think you’ve hit on several good points there, because we frequently talk about the atheism issue. But we should also discuss this agnosticism issue — whether agnosticism would be consistent with Epicurus or not. And I would say he’s definitely not an agnostic. There are always the general issues of translation questions and whether the text has been corrupted and whether we understand the full context of what Diogenes of Oenoanda was saying. But going along with what Martin was saying, it does appear that Protagoras of Abdera was to some extent putting himself forth as an agnostic by saying that he did not know whether gods exist. That sure sounds like a common everyday position we hear today. And Diogenes of Oenoanda is interpreting it as a denial of the gods. That recalls that in Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens, she actually moves Epicurus more into the agnostic camp and has him say it would be ridiculous to assert that the gods do not exist, but it would also be ridiculous to assert that they do — which I think is not Epicurus’ true position. Because Epicurus is neither an atheist nor an agnostic. He is very firm in stating that a certain type of being that he calls gods exists. The issue for us is that his definition of what a god is does not include being supernatural or omnipotent or omniscient or any of those things we normally consider gods to be. Joshua, in terms of agnosticism, do you see any different perspective on Epicurus and whether he was agnostic?
Joshua: Well, first of all, let me give a definition of agnosticism. I’ve been saying all this without defining the word. Atheism is a very old word that comes down to us from ancient Greek. Agnosticism sounds like it would come down to us from ancient Greece, but in fact it was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in the 1800s. What it means is that the existence or non-existence of the gods is unknown and unknowable. In other words, if you’re an agnostic, it’s not just that you don’t know whether the gods exist — it’s that you think it’s impossible to know. It’s impossible for anyone to know whether the gods exist. I don’t think that was Epicurus’ position, but maybe this is a good time for me to get on my little soapbox, because I’ll often hear it said: I can understand being an agnostic but not an atheist. Well, in fact, there’s no conflict between atheism and agnosticism, and there’s no conflict between agnosticism and some forms of religion. It’s possible to be both, because atheism exists on the faith axis and agnosticism exists on the knowledge axis. What you have then are quadrants and you can fall in any one of them. Anyway, that’s enough on the soapbox.
Cassius: Well, that’s something really good that we hit today, because frankly I’m not sure we’ve ever really discussed the issue of agnosticism in the context of atheism and in the context of what Epicurus is saying here. It appears to me that Epicurus and Diogenes of Oenoanda were staking out a position that was definitely not a denial of all divinity — and it was also not an “I don’t know” position about divinity. They were taking a firm position that the divine exists, but that it does not exist in the way that standard religion and philosophy suggest. It has to be approached based on the evidence we observe about the universe and logically from the position that if a being is immortal and blessed, we cannot combine attributes inconsistent with that. You’re just speaking nonsense when you say that a divine being is going to be shooting arrows at enemies and rewarding friends and being thieves and adulterers — as not only the common ancient religion but many modern religions as well describe.
The most important thing to take away from the whole issue of Epicurean theology, if you want to call it that, is that the most important thing to believe about the gods is first that there are no supernatural gods, and second that the gods do not get involved in human affairs. Those are basically the two most important issues.
Joshua: Right. And what you just said in terms of it being the most important takeaway is something documented by Cicero in On the Nature of the Gods when he quotes the Epicurean Velleius, who gives a long discussion of divinity in that work. Velleius starts by saying — and Cicero frames it sarcastically — “hereupon Velleius began in the confident manner, that is customary with Epicureans, afraid of nothing so much as lest he should appear to have doubts about anything. One would have supposed he had just come down from the assembly of gods in the intermundia spaces of Epicurus.” I think there’s a foundation to that joke. And I think that’s what we see here in Fragments 16 and 19 — the Epicureans were very firm in their positions about the gods. They were not playing games with it. They were confident and assertive in the positions they took about the proper view of the gods in human life.
Cassius: So with that, why don’t we go on to Fragment 20 and talk about some of the practical implications, because the Epicureans had very assertive views about the real-life impacts of these things. Because of course what’s the big challenge that every religionist wants to throw out? You can’t have morality. You can’t have a moral people. You can’t live life successfully and happily and on a friendly basis with other people without religion. It’s only religion that prevents people from stripping off their masks and being absolute monsters to each other at every moment. If we don’t have religion, everybody’s going to do exactly what they want to do. There’s no foundation for any kind of morality.
Starting in Fragment 20, Diogenes asserts aggressively that not only does standard religion not serve that goal effectively, but that it is in fact the Epicurean position on the gods that is not only not harmful but actually is the only way to successfully have a foundation for a successful society. So let’s start with Fragment 20: it is obvious that wrongdoers, given that they do not fear the penalties imposed by law, are not afraid of the gods. And later: they are not righteous on account of the real gods, or on account of Plato’s and Socrates’ judges in Hades. So what is the foundation for claiming that religion does produce this moral effect? Well, that’s clearly what people thought for a very long time — for centuries, really millennia — that it was impossible to behave well if you didn’t have the fear of the gods hanging over your head. Augustine said we couldn’t permit bad ideas about the gods to circulate for the same reason that the state cannot allow the sale of poison bread. And then later on John Locke wrote his famous Letter Concerning Toleration, and he said — I’m paraphrasing — that the only thing we can’t tolerate is atheism, because promises, covenants, and oaths can have no hold upon an atheist. And then Thomas More in his Utopia — we’ve talked about that before on the podcast — here is this Catholic philosopher appalled by what he sees in England and Europe. After he reads Amerigo Vespucci’s report about the natives in the New World, who have never encountered Christianity, and after Vespucci makes the claim that their lives are in many respects Epicurean, More uses this to formulate his literary approach to the fundamental questions about religion and society. The religion in Utopia is very different from Christianity and much more liberal. But when you come right down to it, two beliefs were not allowed to be professed in Utopia: that the soul dies with the body, and that the universe was the mere sport of chance. If you believe those things, what is to stop you from committing crimes? That has been the fundamental issue for a long time.
Diogenes of Oenoanda, of course, is writing before Christianity has come into its full power and is making these claims about society. But he is seeing the same thing — not in Christianity but in the religions of Greece and Rome and other religions of the Near East — where they make essentially the same point: if you don’t believe in the gods, if you don’t believe that there is a more than human judge that can give punishment or reward, how can we trust you to do the right thing when no one’s looking?
The response Diogenes gives to that problem is: just look at the record. If what you were saying were true, we should see religious people behaving well, and in fact they don’t. So whatever is necessary for moral behavior, religion is not it. That would be a way to paraphrase what he’s saying. He uses some examples in Fragment 20. I think we all are familiar in our own lives with people who when you go through the phone book looking for a plumber will have a little fish on their advertisement or put the name of God in the name of their business, do everything they can to wrap themselves in the flag of Christianity. And yet it’s fair to say that those who trade on that kind of asserted trustworthiness are often the least trustworthy. Claims of being endorsed by God are frequently a good sign of the reverse being the case. What actually does work to make people behave well is the laws and the penalties imposed by the law — human effort and human achievement and government — that helps people make the right decision, or at least not make a decision so wrong that it will get them punished.
Martin: I think we can use the same argument against those legal systems, because even though we have established laws, still people commit crimes. So even that does not really work in that absolute way. It’s more that the legal system is there to establish a framework, but it doesn’t guarantee that everybody follows it. And the best legal systems today are the ones that don’t mete out the worst possible punishment, but the ones that try to rehabilitate people into better ways of living.
Cassius: It turns out there is no golden key, no absolute way to get people to behave well. But one thing that we know does not work is fear of the gods. And as a result of these observations, what Diogenes goes forward arguing is that our doctrine — the correct view of the gods — not only does no harm but also helps. While the opposite doctrine not only does not help but, on the contrary, does harm. He’s linking that to all of these unholy positions about the gods that these other religions are taking — the idea that a particular religion is choosing a particular people to be its own, that other people are less worthy than those favored by a particular god. All of the fighting and wars that have been caused by religion over the ages. Whereas the Epicurean doctrine — that the gods don’t pick winners and losers, don’t pick friends and enemies, don’t interfere and threaten us with hell or reward us with heaven — produces a much more beneficial result. For the one removes disturbances while the other adds them.
So in Fragment 20 still, we’ve got a very controversial line. And we had some conversations on the private chats on the forum about how we should deal with this.
Joshua: The conclusion that we ultimately came to — I should say, Cassius, the conclusion that you came to but that I fully support — was the same conclusion that Martin Ferguson Smith came to, which is that he made the decision not to bowdlerize or sanitize the text. And we are essentially following the same path. In preparation, we read some scholarly articles on the problem, because my original reading of it was that while the Jews and the Egyptians are the most religious, they are also the most victimized. But that does not seem to be supported by the Greek. So apparently what Diogenes of Oenoanda is saying is that the Jews and the Egyptians are the most religious, but they are also more capable than most people of wrongdoing. That’s what he’s saying.
Cassius: There’s a historical context to this inscription that I think is really important in evaluating this question. Diogenes was writing apparently around the time of Hadrian in the early second century. If you go back into that time period, there had just been a lot of upheaval in that area — this is not very long after the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. There had been a whole series of wars between the Greco-Roman civilization and the Israelites over a long period of time. So I think there’s very significant historical context that would account for them being singled out. There’s also a special relationship that Judaism has brought to Epicurus — in fact in this time period, the Greeks and Romans largely considered Christianity to be very difficult to identify from Judaism, so there are all sorts of potential crossover issues involved. But the bottom line is that he’s saying the more religious you are, the more emphasis you place on rules supposedly handed down by God, the more difficult such people can be to live with.
Joshua: Yeah, I think that’s fair enough. And as I read this passage, one thing I’m reminded of is the efforts made by the translators of Lucretius to denounce the poem even as they were translating it and putting it into circulation. In the 1743 edition published by Daniel Brown, the preface says: “here I would have it understood that I translate Lucretius as a classic writer of the first rank, one of the venerable fathers of Latin poetry, without thinking myself accountable for his principles or justifying his system.” And he goes on to say that anyone who wants to hold the translator accountable is “a precise fanatic in the Republic of Letters and a secret and ignorant enemy to human learning.” So we put it into the podcast because it’s in the text, and that’s why we’re reading it. And I don’t know that I have much more to say about that.
Cassius: I will add one more thing, Joshua. One of the articles that we came up with in researching the background of this may have made the observation that there are some commonalities between Judaism and the Egyptians of that time period that might have been particularly offensive to Diogenes of Oenoanda, especially in regard to the Egyptians’ portrayal of the gods in animal form. The theme of what Diogenes is suggesting here is that we have an extremely holy view of divinity and of the gods as being the highest possible immortal and blessed type of being — which would be very inconsistent with portraying gods as cats and half-animal men and snakes and all sorts of other images. And the same thing about the burning bush or the pillar of fire in Judaism. So there are a whole number of different issues that are involved in why he would highlight these two civilizations as being both the most religious but also the most wrong about their religion.
One more thing I would add to that list is the issue of claiming that you are a chosen group of God. Principal Doctrine 1 says the blessed and immortal nature knows no trouble itself nor causes trouble to any other, so that it is never constrained by anger or favor, for such things exist only in the weak. To the extent that Diogenes of Oenoanda would have been aware that Judaism claims a special relationship with God, a special covenant — that they are the chosen people — that I think would be a direct contradiction to Principal Doctrine 1 and to other texts about the gods. In Epicurean philosophy gods don’t pick friends and enemies, they don’t punish enemies, they don’t reward friends, and the assertion that you stand in a special relationship with a supernatural God would be about as offensive to Epicurean philosophy as any other assertion you could come up with.
Joshua: There’s that part, and then for Egypt there’s also the pharaohs, who were not just friends of God but who were gods. Whereas in times in the Greek city-states you had something like democracy developing, and in Rome in its early days you have the republic, with the inherent idea that there is no one person who would have the authority to rule all others. Now of course by the time of the inscription the Roman Republic has been replaced by the Empire and you do have just one person who in many ways claims to be favored by the gods. But there are a whole number of different problems with the way that these very religious cultures look at the world, and Diogenes of Oenoanda seems to have a problem with all of it.
Cassius: Right. All of them, not just by any means these two groups he’s chosen to single out in this fragment. So let’s use the remainder of our time to address the Stoics, who seem to often embody the worst of everything. It seems to me that what we’re about to read in this final paragraph, Stoicism sort of stands in the place of all monotheism to some extent. What Diogenes is talking about is the Stoics saying in opposition to us that God is both the maker of the world and takes providential care of it, providing for all things including human beings. And then Diogenes goes into a list of questions that point out the contradictions in that position.
Martin: One more remark first. It doesn’t make sense to me why Egyptians and Jews are mentioned there together, because the Jews were basically dispersed after their last revolt. Many of them were killed, others enslaved, and most of those who survived or were not enslaved were forced out of their country into exile. This was then something driven by their uprisings against Rome, which you can understand as being motivated largely by religion. But the Egyptians were different. The Romans basically respected most of the Egyptian customs. They just took over the leadership and represented the Roman emperor as the successor of the ancient pharaohs, and let the Egyptians largely run their own religion under that. There was no history of repeated wars stretching over nearly 150 years with a lot of Romans killed in uprisings between Romans and Egyptians, the way there was with the Jews. So to me it still doesn’t make sense to add the Egyptians in there, because they were basically a part of the Roman Empire — they didn’t fight against it. It has to be something, some specific prejudice that Diogenes had for some reason. The interesting thing is that later on in the second century you did have a massive native Egyptian revolt against Roman rule, but that was during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Now, the inscription was originally thought to be dated to the end of the second century, not the beginning. And if it were dated to the end of the second century, you could point to that revolt. But that is no longer the scholarly consensus.
Cassius: Martin, one question: at what point did the traditional Egyptian religion die out? I know that Christianity was making headway into Alexandria and Egypt at some point. Does anybody know how long this traditional Egyptian religion survived into this period?
Martin: Yeah, definitely throughout the Roman Empire period. But then Christianity spread a lot in Egypt later on — Clement of Alexandria and so forth. So it was basically largely Christianized. I would expect the traditional religion to have lasted really until the seventh century, when it was overrun by Muslim Arabs.
Cassius: Well, in the interest of time, let’s go on. It seems to me that what we’re about to read in this final paragraph on the Stoics is identifying Stoicism with this position of providence and supernatural creation of the world. The opening sentence is: God is both maker of the world and takes providential care of it, providing for all things including human beings. That is the Stoic position in opposition to the Epicureans.
Joshua: Well, here’s something I’ve never heard before, because of course this is a culturally Greek inscription written in Greek, and so they tend to think in terms of city-states. The Stoics are apparently making the claim that it was from a wish to have a city and fellow citizens, just as if he were in exile from a city, that God created the world and human beings. Doesn’t that tell you a lot about Greek culture? If you don’t have a city, then you’re a banished exile.
Cassius: Yeah. And so this is what God must have felt before he created human beings, like an exile without a city. It’s essentially the God was lonely and wanted some friends argument. I’ve not thought about it in this context either. To express that argument in terms of wanting to have a city and fellow citizens does strike me as an unusual way of looking at the question. But basically this is the general question that people throw out: apparently God woke up one morning and decided that his perfect existence was not sufficient and he needed to have a flock of friends and worshippers around him — and that’s why he created the universe, which of course makes very little sense about what he was doing before he woke up that morning. After an eternity of time he suddenly decided that his prior situation was not good enough and he needed humans to be his friends and worshippers. The essence of narcissism.
Moreover, as Diogenes of Oenoanda says: what God, if he had existed for infinite time and enjoyed tranquility for thousands of years, would have got this idea that he needed a city and fellow citizens? And there is this further point: if he had created the world as a habitation and city for himself, I seek to know where was he living before the world was created. As it says in the text, the god of these people was cityless and homeless — and to ascribe homelessness to a divinity, to God, is probably the ultimate in impiety. You almost have to think this is where Diogenes would have gone on into the material that produced the Riddle of Epicurus — then why call him God and so forth. The point I would emphasize is that it does seem to be pretty key to Epicurean philosophy that all of these many logical arguments against supernatural creation of the universe were a part of standard Epicurean presentations here. The claims of standard religion about Godhood are absurd, and they’re not harmless — they lead to actual harm, inspiring men to all sorts of terrible things. It’s much better for humanity, and also true, to take the Epicurean perspective: that the Earth and humanity are not the only living things in the universe, that there’s life throughout the universe, and that divine beings — whether they exist only in our thought processes or whether they exist in reality in other parts of the universe — are things it is useful and important for us to have a proper perspective on. It’s extremely important not to go astray with false ideas about divinity, but to have ideas about divinity that are helpful to our successful living and happiness.
Joshua: It’s often said by scholars and Latinists that Lucretius’ poem was unfinished, and one theory is that if he had written a seventh book — which he allegedly died before writing — the subject of that seventh book would have been on the nature of the gods. So what we might be looking at here in Diogenes of Oenoanda is, if those people are right, a semblance of what was to come in Lucretius if he had lived long enough to write it. The only thing we have from which we could try to reconstruct such a position would be the material attributed to Velleius in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, which we’ve not undertaken a separate review of. Nothing in it will change the basic conclusions we have in front of us here — that Epicurus took the position that gods or divinities do exist in some way; that it’s important for us not to have unholy ideas about those things; that the common views of religion are absolutely harmful; and that this is in fact the very first doctrine at the top of every list that ever comes up about what’s important to know about how to live in the world.
Cassius: Okay, well, let’s begin to close today’s episode. Martin, closing thoughts from you.
Martin: Yes, for this last part on the Stoics, I think he really is mocking the Stoics here. You can see this from the word “destitute” — he puts up the image of a homeless man who is actually destitute and infers from there what that means for their divinity. I think this is just mockery. He’s making fun of the Stoic position.
Cassius: Yeah, I think you’re right. And it’s an important point for people today to remember as they’re thinking about the difference between Stoicism and Epicurean philosophy: Stoicism is at root a theistic position about the universe and humanity being created by an intelligent being, set in motion and led providentially by that being. When you have such a position, you’re going to look to that source of guidance for how to live your life — which is just an extremely different position from the one taken by Epicurus. Joshua?
Joshua: Well, this is off topic, but it could be rather timely depending on when the episode actually goes out. Today is October 9th. Next Saturday will be October 15th. That is the day on which Virgil is thought to have been born. And if Virgil was born on the 15th, then it’s possible that he was given the toga virilis — the toga of manhood — also on the 15th of October. And it’s said elsewhere that Lucretius died on the same day that Virgil assumed the toga virilis, which would be October 15th. So in lieu of any other better day, I’m quite happy to say that next Saturday, October 15th, will be the anniversary of the day on which Lucretius died.
Cassius: Good point. Lucretius and Diogenes of Oenoanda together are, I think, about as good an example as we could find, because these are people who took Epicurean philosophy to heart and then invested a lot of effort into being able to articulate it to other people and preserve for us — and for themselves — what they saw as the way to live happily. And we should consider ourselves very lucky that we have even as many surviving sources from antiquity as we do, particularly Lucretius.
And I guess in closing for today, it really is fortunate and fascinating to see in Diogenes of Oenoanda — over a hundred years later, in a different part of the world — very similar thoughts being expressed in a very similar way, without a hint that anybody felt they were obligated or that this was some kind of absolutist position you had to agree with. These are people who studied the philosophy, studied the arguments, decided for themselves that they were persuasive, and happily embraced them on their own. That’s a good example of the way all of this should be approached. Something that, when you study it, seems to make sense and leads you to certain conclusions about the way to live. So with that we’ll adjourn for the day. We’ll have a thread on this on the forum, and no doubt we’ll have some citations to add to the material we’ve talked about today. We invite everybody to come by and read that at the forum and join us in other discussions there during the week. And with that we will come back in another week. See you then.
Martin: Bye.
Joshua: Bye.
Cassius: Bye.