Episode 178 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 30 - Chapter 13 - The True Piety 01
Date: 06/16/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3115-episode-178-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-30-chapter-13-the-true-piety-01/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 178 opens DeWitt’s Chapter 13, “The True Piety,” with Cassius, Joshua, Don, and Callistheni exploring Epicurus’s views on the gods — widely recognized as the most controversial and contested area of Epicurean scholarship. Martin is absent. Cassius frames the chapter by asking whether Epicurus’s theology is still practically relevant, noting that the two major primary sources DeWitt draws on — Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods (the Velleius sections) and Philodemus’s On Piety — have not been examined in depth in previous episodes. Callistheni observes that 70% of Americans still expect Jesus to return, and that the shift from ancient polytheism to modern monotheism makes direct application difficult. Joshua notes that Epicurus is unique among ancient philosophers in removing the gods from both creation and intercession, rendering them “unnecessary” in the sense of Laplace’s remark to Napoleon — “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Cassius argues that the foundation of Epicurus’s theology is the medical aim of removing fear: in the ancient world, Greek polytheism gave worshippers far more to fear than to hope for (the gods were capricious, not covenantal), while Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” illustrates that the same problem persists in Christianity. Cassius then reads Velleius’s speech from On the Nature of the Gods in which Velleius praises Epicurus for recognizing that nature herself has imprinted a prolepsis — a preconceived mental picture — of the gods on all mankind, in place of the ridiculous doctrines of poets, Magi, and popular religion. Don explains that prolepsis of the gods is best understood as an innate sense of awe, comparable to the way infants attend to novel and overwhelming stimuli, though he acknowledges that rationalizing a preconceived notion of “blissful and indestructible beings” remains difficult. Cassius explains that since Epicurus’s physics rules out creation — atoms and void are eternal, gods played no role in making the universe — the classical apologetic argument from design is simply off the table, leaving prolepsis as the primary evidential basis for the gods’ existence. DeWitt’s summary (p. 250) is read: knowledge of the gods draws on all three legs of the canon — prolepsis, the feelings (fears and worries that reveal false opinions by the distress they cause), and reason via deductive inference from elementary principles. The discussion then turns to whether the nature of the gods was an introductory or advanced topic in the Epicurean curriculum, with Cassius reading DeWitt (p. 252) to the effect that the proper attitude (diathesis) toward the gods was prescribed for beginners, while the detailed theology was reserved for more advanced students. Don dissents, arguing that PD 1 — the very first authorized doctrine — and the opening of the Letter to Menoikeus make right understanding of the gods “literally first and foremost.” Don then reads Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 215, an Epicurean text stating that true religion consists not in sacrifices and offerings but in “the formation of a just conception concerning the best thing that we can possibly imagine to exist.” Joshua crystallizes the key Epicurean claim about true piety: “Disbelieving in the gods of the multitude is not impious — it is impious to believe about the gods what the multitude believe,” since portraying gods as jealous, petty, and vindictive is itself the real blasphemy. Don notes that Philodemus’s On Piety records Epicurus encouraging participation in public festivals, and argues that Epicurus could participate sincerely while holding an internally different understanding — reverencing the idea of blissful existence because it benefited him, not because the gods cared about him at all. Cassius adds that Epicurus seems to have approached his own position with the conviction of a “fundamentalist preacher in reverse” — certain that it was the crowd, not he, who held a truly impious view of the gods. David Sedley’s observation that the Letter to Menoikeus occasionally uses the singular “the god” is noted as indicating that each person may have their own conception of divine blissfulness. The episode moves through DeWitt’s section on the “Existence of the Gods” (pp. 255–257), examining the competing empiricist (vision/images) and prolepsis-based interpretations of Epicurean theology. Don explains the Greek word enargeis used in the Letter to Menoikeus — it carries two meanings, “visible in bodily form” (Homer’s sense) and “manifest to the mind’s eye,” and since Epicurus placed the gods in the intermundia between world-systems, they cannot be physically seen and must be perceptible only to the mind. The centaur problem is raised: if Lucretius treats centaurs as composites of two real images, couldn’t the same argument undermine the gods? DeWitt (p. 257) responds that dreams of gods are no more evidence for their existence than dreams of centaurs — but dreams do play two limited functions: stimulating the innate prolepsis and furnishing a hint of the gods’ form. DeWitt’s synthesis is that prolepsis is a genetic or innate capacity that must be activated by external stimulus, not a pre-written tablet. Closing remarks have Callistheni saying she finds it hard to make the material practical; Joshua confessing he is at a total loss with the gods but finds Lucretius’s “earth as our mother” theme compelling and cites Friar Laurence’s soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet; and Don emphasizing that the subject is genuinely complicated even for longtime students, pointing to Alexander the Oracle Monger’s public burning of Epicurus’s books as evidence that something worth pursuing is there. Cassius closes by noting the chapter will take several weeks and that the core point — Epicurus was neither cynical nor insincere, but genuinely believed he held the most pious understanding of the gods available — should be kept in view throughout.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 178 of Lucretius Today. We’re continuing in Chapter 13 starting this week — “The True Piety” — a discussion of Epicurus’s views of the true nature of the gods, which is a very controversial subject. There’s a lot of different opinions as to what Epicurus really thought, what he was trying to say, whether he was sincere or not, and the way he was saying it, and lots of questions also as to the practical implications of a view of the gods to us today, especially as people who are interested in Epicurean philosophy and wanting to apply it in our own lives. We have to ask the question: is this part of Epicurean philosophy still relevant today and something we should take an interest in? We have not really discussed a lot of detail about it in the course of this podcast. When we’ve come to sections in Lucretius in the past where we’ve discussed the gods, we’ve had discussions about this. But other than the material in Lucretius we’ve discussed, we’ve never really taken up the other major sources of information about Epicurean theology — one of which is Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, in which he has a character by the name of Velleius represent the Epicurean position. That’s one of the major sources that DeWitt will be pointing us to as we discuss this chapter, and of course there is material in Philodemus’s On Piety — another fragment that we’ve really not gone into. What we should talk about before we get started is: is it something that’s still relevant? Does it provide benefits? And is it something we should be interested in at all?
Cassius: I’ll jump in on that one. I think that one of the things we have to remember is that even though we’re talking about Epicurus living 2300 years ago, Epicurus obviously placed a huge amount of importance on a correct understanding of the gods. I think that was one of the things that he really hit hard — it’s the first Principal Doctrine, it’s in the Letter to Menoikeus. I think that having that right understanding of the gods is of paramount importance to him. And so by extension, I would think that if you’re interested in Epicurean philosophy, one of those things you have to wrestle with is the fact that he brought it up so often and at the head of all the lists that he made. A right understanding is the first thing you needed. If you continue to think of the gods as having direct influence on your life, as being able to bestow punishment on you, and as requiring propitiation for benefits in your life — that’s one of the major sources of anxiety that Epicurus was addressing. So with that, we can analogize and we can make it a metaphor and we can do all sorts of things like that, but I think that basic premise was of paramount importance to him. Joshua?
Joshua: I should first say that as far as I can tell, Epicurus is absolutely unique in any ideology or religion or thought or philosophy. He removes the gods to such a point — both from the creation aspect and from the intercession aspect — as to render them unnecessary. Which is exactly what Laplace said when he wrote his magisterial book on physics and presented it to Napoleon, and Napoleon said: “Why have you not included God in your understanding of physics?” Laplace responded: “I had no need of that hypothesis.”
Cassius: That’s a great line.
Joshua: Yeah, yeah. That’s kind of where I’ve come down on the Epicurean gods, but I’m not even sure that’s a good place to start.
Cassius: You’re absolutely right, Joshua. It’s almost hard to figure out where to start because it’s such a huge part. We have the entire sections of Cicero’s book about the gods and we have Epicurus’s place of primacy for an understanding of the gods. I don’t know whether it’s generated a lot of light, but it’s certainly generated a lot of heat over the centuries. This discussion has already reminded me that this is where I would like to start — back with the point of who we’re talking to and who’s listening to the discussion. I think we have a tendency in Epicurean discussion on the internet where we’re all talking to a similar group of people who are not primarily religious, at least at this point in their lives. And there’s a lot of people in that category who don’t consider this to be relevant at all — any more than it would be relevant to discuss, I don’t know, the other side of the moon, or the design of merry-go-rounds in Germany in 1853. Something that’s just not relevant to anything because they’ve dismissed this topic from their minds. But that’s where the foundation starts. Epicurus was talking to ordinary people who had ordinary concerns and ordinary understandings that they had been taught about the nature of the gods. And so the deprogramming of these harmful ideas — which was so prevalent in Epicurus’s time — seems to have been clearly important to him. And in fact they are important today too, depending on who’s listening to the conversation, because most of the world still is highly concerned about whether there is providence and divine intervention — and not only that, of course, but the secondary issue that’s also of such importance to Epicurus: whether there’s a heaven and a hell, whether you’re rewarded or punished after death, and so forth, which is very tightly related to the issue of religion in general. So the foundation of everything we’re talking about is how important it is. Epicurus wanted to address those people who have these concerns. He’s acting as a doctor — not only going after the truth of the situation, but wanting to make sure that the words he was saying were useful. Quoting Diogenes of Oenoanda: if the majority of the people around you are like sheep catching diseases one from another in a sort of mental sickness that they’ve gotten from these misunderstandings about the way the universe works, then you don’t treat the patient you’d like to have — you treat the patient you do have. And the patient in the world then and the world today has, among their significant problems, these ideas about whether there are gods and what those gods would be like that Epicurus is saying are just totally wrong.
Callistheni: I just heard a statistic the other day that 70% of Americans still believe in some respect that Jesus will return. So there’s still a large number of people out there that have a specific view of the gods — both small-G and capital-G — and what their influence is on the world. Your question was: is this relevant for now? Is it applicable for people now? And one of the most difficult things I wrestle with is that back in Epicurus’s time there was polytheism — so there were multiple gods — but now we have monotheism, and somehow it doesn’t quite transfer. It’s like you have to remember that it was a different kind of atmosphere regarding religion. Maybe it’s because of my own Christian upbringing that whenever there’s this plural “gods” it doesn’t seem to have the same power or the same place as the word “God” singular. So I think it’s one issue where it takes some translation from the past to the present. And also, as far as how this is actually useful now — we do have to accept there are people that continue to believe in God. Even for atheists, for people who don’t believe in God, they still have to realize there are many other people that believe in God, and so that is one aspect I think is useful in the Epicurean philosophy regarding the gods: it provides a way to keep your mind open and remember that yes, even for atheists saying “God is dead,” well, actually for many people God is not dead.
Cassius: Okay. Taking what Callistheni said as a point of departure, what I would say in an attempt to summarize the whole issue is: she’s absolutely right. And Don mentioned earlier that 70% expect Jesus to return at some point, and presumably these people today find this as a source of hope and comfort. The danger in the ancient world is that people didn’t see the gods that way. In this world of Greek paganism, if you want to call it that, the gods were not quite a blessing for mankind — nor were they exactly indifferent. Their behavior could best be described as erratic at best. So in the ancient world you have more to fear from the gods than you have to hope, because in ancient Greece the afterlife is no great blessing either. As I think Lucretius quoting Ennius says, you wander around as a shade, pale and wondrous wise. So the issue is — and Epicurus is putting his finger on this one point — that religion, particularly in the ancient world, is associated with fear. That’s the root underlying problem, and the religion of the ancient world didn’t do much to assuage that fear. Now you could say that Christianity has tried to take a different course, but I think that even the Epicureans if they were alive today would say the same problems are inherent in Christianity. I was talking before we recorded about this horrible sermon in colonial New England by Jonathan Edwards called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which he says to a congregation: “You are a thousand times more abhorrent, more vile to God than the lowliest serpent is to you. You are hanging by a thread over a chasm, and that chasm is the lake of fire. It is only by God’s grace that you’re still alive — it is only by God’s grace that he hasn’t dropped you. But he hates you while he’s holding you.” It was quite dark — and it’s not the kind of Christianity you’re likely to see today. But in the ancient world it wasn’t like you were despised by the gods — it was more like you were sport for the gods. They were capricious, they were jealous, they had their own interests, and they were pursuing them. Whether that hurt you or helped you was irrelevant to them. It’s not like in the Old Testament where the tribe of the Hebrews is consistently letting God down and he has to exile them and punish them, but he will give them what he promised one day. In Greek paganism there is no promise, there is no covenant, there is no reciprocity. You’re like an insect on the trampling grounds of their world. So two things are problematic: one is the belief in the ancient world that the gods will intercede in your life while you’re alive and cause you pain; and the real problem — what people feared most — is what happens after they die. That’s where the real issue for the Epicureans comes in: this fear of death, which is based on uncertainty. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy is about the dread of what’s to come after death — if it weren’t for that uncertainty we would kill ourselves because the earth is so terrible, but the only thing that stops us is this horrifying uncertainty of what’s going to happen after we die. And that to me is the point of departure for where we take off. So the question that DeWitt goes into now is: do the gods even exist? We’re living in a world surrounded by people making assertions about the gods — where do we even start? The place to start is here on page 250 at the bottom: “Knowledge of the Gods — how do we know they exist or not?” Right, Joshua?
Joshua: I think you’ve done a very good job summarizing that, and DeWitt is going to take us now, as you’ve said, first into this question of how we know about them.
Cassius: As a bridge into that, let me validate what you just said, Joshua. A lot of the material that we’re going to be dealing with is coming from Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, a narrative given under the name of Velleius. Let me take a second and read something that takes us into this discussion of how we know about it. This is Velleius talking — he’s gone through and criticized opinions about the gods that the Stoics and other people had been teaching, and then he says this: “I have given a rough account of what are more like dreams of madmen than the considered opinions of philosophers, for they are a little less absurd than the outpourings of the poets, harmful as these have been owing to the mere charm of their style. The poets have represented the gods as inflamed by anger and maddened by lust and have displayed to our gaze their wars and battles, their fights and wounds, their hatreds, enmities, and quarrels, their births and deaths, their complaints and lamentations, the utter and unbridled license of their passions, their adulteries and imprisonments, their unions with human beings and the birth of mortal progeny from an immortal parent. With the errors of the poets may be classed the monstrous doctrines of the Magi and the insane mythology of Egypt, and also the popular beliefs which are a mere mass of inconsistencies sprung from ignorance. Anyone pondering on the baseless and irrational character of these doctrines ought to regard Epicurus with reverence and to rank him as one of the very gods about whom we are inquiring. For he alone perceived first that the gods exist, because nature herself has imprinted a conception of them on the minds of all mankind. For what nation or what tribe of men is there but possesses, untaught, some preconception of the gods? Such notions Epicurus designates by the word prolepsis — that is, a sort of preconceived mental picture of a thing without which nothing can be understood or investigated or discussed. The force and value of this argument we learn in that work of genius, Epicurus’ Rule or Standard of Judgment.” So let’s discuss how Epicurus had dismissed all of these ridiculous notions about what the gods are doing and replaced it with a perception of the gods that comes at least in part through prolepsis. I suppose Don would be great at explaining this to us, right, Don? Would you like to start with that — how prolepsis is our foundation of knowledge about the gods?
Don: Oh, boy, that’s a hard one, especially because it’s not even really agreed upon what that word prolepsis even means. I would direct people also to our conversation that we had with Dr. Glidden, who discussed some of the things about the prolepsis as well — about pattern recognition and things like that. What it really is — I try personally, for what it’s worth, to wrap my brain around this — is this innate sense of awe, that sort of emotion that has been shown to exist even in babies and toddlers, that their attention can be held by something novel and something sort of bigger than themselves. That’s the only way I’ve been able to sort of understand the prolepsis of the gods: because, according to Epicurus, we have some sort of innate sense that there are gods, and he has tried to put as much commentary on that as he can. But I still don’t see a way that you can really rationalize the idea that we have an innate conception of beings that exist that are eternal, immortal, indestructible, and blessed. So it seems to me that there’s some sort of underlying prolepsis that he seems to have identified, and then he sort of builds on that. So that just helped me muddy the water. I don’t think that helped explain anything, but that’s sort of where I am right now for myself — still trying to understand it.
Cassius: Well, I can explain why that idea is the one you have to rely on. If you go to an apologetics website or read an apologetics book — Thomas Aquinas, for example, would be a more intellectual approach to that issue, and there’s certainly a whole scale of gradation that you could find on the internet — what they will do is point to things in nature, like the human eye, or just the human body, or the delicate relationship that exists in the biosphere between animals and plants. How did this world come to be fine-tuned? And of course the answer, for those apologists, is that it was created by an intelligent being. But Epicurus, interestingly enough, has already taken that off the table. Creation, for one thing, has never happened. The atoms and the void are eternal — they have existed forever, they will exist forever. So it completely leaves the gods out of that part of the equation. And so if you can’t demonstrate the existence of the gods by reference to creation, because they had no role in creation, what are you left with? And I think that’s where we end up with this idea of prolepsis. Essentially the argument is: all people in all countries, no matter where you go in the world, everyone has an idea of the gods. And so this must point to their real existence.
Don: Yeah, and then the other thing I think that’s really important too, as far as the nature of the gods, is that we cannot see them with our physical eyes — we can only perceive them with our minds. That whole idea, that section in the Letter to Menoikeus — that they are manifest to our minds.
Cassius: Okay, Don — there you’ve touched on where I was going to go next. One thing I’ve gathered from reading DeWitt over the years, when you compare his discussion here with other articles people have written about the nature of the Epicurean gods, you’ve got these competing views of where your evidence comes from. DeWitt is starting off this section by talking about texts that, at least in earlier stages, seem to imply that people were either seeing or believing that they saw gods in dreams or in certain experiences. There is an argument that the Epicurean view of gods is based on some form of perceiving images — there’s the discussion in Velleius about the images that are transmitted or received. The problem is that the text seems to say that the images flow from humans to the gods, but there is that reference in which images seem to be involved. And then there are discussions such as what Velleius is saying here when he’s talking about prolepsis, that do not appear to involve images. Maybe that’s the best way to break it down: is knowledge of the gods based on images, or is it based on some kind of intellectual or mental faculty that is separate from images? And you find people on both sides of that argument. Those who focus on images as the source of knowledge are in what DeWitt is calling the “empiricist camp.” And then DeWitt tends to de-emphasize what Lucretius says and emphasize what Velleius is reporting here, and perhaps what Epicurus is saying in the Letter to Menoikeus. But it seems like you come down on this question to some extent based on whether you’re focusing on images as the source of your knowledge or whether you’re basing your position on prolepsis. And of course then you have to sort out: does prolepsis involve images? Don, do you recall what Dr. Glidden was saying — did he base prolepsis on images or not?
Don: My recollection of Dr. Glidden’s idea of the prolepsis is that it is a pattern recognition of the data that comes just pouring into our senses — it’s what allows us to make sense of all of that noise that we get through our senses. Our senses are just picking up the raw data that comes in. Our faculty of the prolepsis is what allows us to say: oh, this particular noise is forming a pattern; I can recognize that pattern elsewhere, so I’m going to assign meaning to this particular pattern of sensory input that I’m getting. Extrapolating that to the gods has always been somewhat problematic for me to figure out. And you mentioned that the images are flowing from or flowing to the gods — I mean, entire papers have been written on that one preposition, so there’s certainly not a consensus of opinion there. A lot of people find it difficult and want to just disregard it, whereas others imbue it with significance that it may have over and above what it actually means. So the fact that one preposition can have such an impact on your understanding of a concept is just mind-boggling to me. It shows how reliant we are on all too few texts — if we had more, presumably this would be more clear.
Cassius: Well, as we go through this, DeWitt’s position — since we’re reading his book and talking about his presentation — I think it’s summarized at the bottom of page 250. DeWitt says, quote: “According to these evidences, the sources of knowledge about the gods are multiple. Prolepsis apprises men of the blissfulness and incorruptibility of the gods. The feelings — that is, fears and worries — serve to inform the individual of the true nature of the divine through the distress that follows from false opinions. Reason, by deductive inferences from the twelve elementary principles, informs men of the existence of the gods, of their corporeal nature, their number, their gradation and kind, and their abode. By the method of analogy — that is, progression from similars to similars — reason also produces confirmatory evidence concerning their form, by a chain argument concerning their nature, and by a disjunctive syllogism concerning the kind of life they lead.” Probably all that boils down to DeWitt taking the position that since we have three legs of the canon — the senses, anticipations, and feelings — he’s thinking that all three legs of the canon have input into our conclusions about the nature of the gods. I don’t know whether anybody has an agreement or disagreement with that they’d like to say.
Joshua: Yeah, it’s all three legs of the canon plus the secondary or even tertiary faculties that we build up from them. So reason, for example, is not canonical, but one of the sources of information about the gods is reasoning based on canonic information.
Cassius: Yeah, I would agree with that. One thing also to say about DeWitt is that he holds the opinion — which is not universal among scholars — that the lost seventh book of Lucretius, that no one is even sure exists, was on the nature of the gods. And so he may limit the influence of Lucretius in informing his opinion on the basis that he doesn’t have what Lucretius actually wrote.
Cassius: That reminds me of something that’s sort of a theme of DeWitt that we might not talk about if we don’t pick it out. The issue that DeWitt seems to suggest is that the nature of the gods was an advanced topic — it was not something that was necessarily the first thing that Epicurus would have discussed with his students.
Don: I don’t get that at all, because again, it’s the first Principal Doctrine. It’s in the Letter to Menoikeus. He talks about having to have a right understanding of the gods all the time. Why would he say that you have to have a right understanding of the gods as the first thing he said, and then say, “But we’ll talk about that later”?
Cassius: “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
Don: Yeah, exactly.
Cassius: Maybe what I should have said is that the details of the true nature of the gods — whether they speak Greek and so forth — seem like a lot of things that we only know from what is contained in the Velleius section of Cicero.
Don: That’s why I always take that with a grain of salt. We know that Cicero is not necessarily always a reliable narrator — he wants to fit his own argument. I’m always a little skeptical of that. Because one of the things I always come up against is this: if the gods are supposed to live in some corporeal form between worlds, by definition that means they don’t actually live on or in a world system that’s anything like ours. If they’re living between the cosmos — and the cosmos is that world system with a planet and the stars around it, again it’s a nice little shell, and then you’ve got another one over here that’s its own nice little shell, all self-contained — if they’re living between those, by definition they’re not actually living on any sort of planet or world, because the whole idea is that you have these little pockets of order nestled in this greater universe. And I just can’t wrap my brain around how they would even exist if they were living between worlds. There’s no world for them to live on.
Cassius: Now here, at the bottom of page 251, I can quote something from DeWitt that agrees with Don in the sense of pushing back on certain details. DeWitt takes the other tack and says: “It is equally unmistakable on the contrary that the essay of Epicurus entitled On Piety was prescribed reading for students of limited advancement. This is exactly what we would expect. The prime necessity for peace of mind and freedom from fear was not a knowledge of the gods — of their number, form, and abode — but the proper attitude or diathesis towards the gods. Hence we find that in the very first of the authorized doctrines, the disciple is assured that the gods are incapable of wrath and hence need not be feared. The prime importance of the attitude is also stressed in the letter to Menoikeus, which warns the disciple against attributing anything to the gods that is alien to their incorruptibility or incompatible with their happiness.” So it’s definitely a hugely important topic — Principal Doctrine 1, top of the Letter to Menoikeus. It’s just a question of how far you get into the topic. Notably, Lucretius has had six long books of poetry to Memmius and has talked a little bit about the gods being incorruptible and so forth, but not gone into a tremendous amount of detail about them.
Don: Yeah, exactly. It seems like maybe, to be as gracious to DeWitt as I can be — you had to have a proper attitude towards the gods first. You had to wrap your brain around the fact that they were not the creators of the universe, they did not bestow blessings, they did not bestow curses. They were examples, basically, of a completely blissful, incorruptible sort of existence that was out there somewhere — or it was a projection of our own aspirations as to what kind of life the ideal Epicurean life would be. So that’s where it gets into the weeds of the whole idealist and realist positions that are out there. But if you have a basic understanding, Epicurus is saying: this is the most important thing you need to understand — the gods are not something to be feared — so you can get on with your life, checking that box off. And that’s the next section that DeWitt goes into on page 252, entitled “The Proper Attitude or Diathesis.”
Cassius: So let’s talk for a while about the proper attitude. DeWitt attributes to Diogenes of Oenoanda a quote: “Happiness is mainly a matter of attitude, of which we are the arbiters” — which is what we’re discussing here, about how the attitude is what is largely being discussed in the opening of the authorized doctrines and the Letter to Menoikeus and so forth. So let’s talk about the proper attitude toward the gods for a classical Epicurean.
Don: Well, I have an interesting thing here. I was digging around and I had rediscovered something I’d found before. There’s a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, number 215, which is sometimes attributed to Epicurus but is definitely from an Epicurean hand. I find one paragraph from it kind of interesting for what we’re bringing up here. So this is Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 215, and part of it says, quote: “Nor indeed when this further statement is made by the ordinary man, ‘I fear all the gods and worship them and to them I wish to make every sacrifice and offering’ — it may perhaps imply more taste on his part than the average — nevertheless by this formula he has not yet reached the trustworthy principle of religion. But do you, sir, consider that the most blessed state lies in the formation of a just conception concerning the best thing that we can possibly imagine to exist, and reverence and worship this idea.” So they’re talking about the fact that if you say you’re going to worship the gods and make every sacrifice and every offering, it’s just going to be a source of anxiety for you. But you have to have a just conception concerning the best thing that we can possibly imagine to exist — that’s what the gods represent — and then you reverence and worship this idea.
Joshua: And when you say that comes from Oxyrhynchus, what does that mean?
Don: Oxyrhynchus was, I believe, a town in Egypt where they found a cache of papyri back in the early 1900s — Joshua may even know better than I — and they’ve been slowly being translated over the years. This happens to be from a collection of those papyri. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this specific book on Archive.org.
Cassius: And so that is emphasizing that the most important thing is your attitude toward the gods. And I think that really is the import of Principal Doctrine 1, and the first line of the Letter to Menoikeus and all of those things. It’s that correct attitude toward the gods — because it was such a part of the culture that you had to fear the gods, and you had to make sure you made the right sacrifices, and they were capricious, and you could do something you didn’t even know angered the gods and they would still punish you. And they were saying: no, the proper attitude toward the gods is just to reverence that state of blissful imperturbability that’s out there, and that’s what you can aspire to as well.
Cassius: Okay, let’s put aside for just a second the issue of how we know about the gods — what we think they’re doing moment to moment, whether they speak Greek versus American English or whatever — and go around the table and summarize what we think Epicurus is telling us to have as our main attitude about the gods.
Joshua: I can answer that. The title of this chapter is “The True Piety,” and one of the more challenging claims that Epicurus makes to his contemporaries — and particularly to his detractors — is this. One of the things that Socrates was executed for was corrupting the Athenian youth and not believing in the gods, so Epicurus was probably on guard against this kind of attack. And what he says in effect — what he says literally — is that disbelieving in the gods of the multitude is not impious. It is impious to believe about the gods what the multitude believes. In other words, if you believe that the gods are as jealous and petty and vindictive and miserable as the common person in Greece seems to believe, that is the true impiety. That’s what makes you really impious — you’re making the gods out to be something that they’re not, and of course the real victim is you, by portraying the gods as these evil, vindictive figures and creating a very difficult life for yourself by constantly having to propitiate them.
Don: Yeah, I think it’s a very good point, Joshua — that’s well put. One of the things that I find interesting is that the charge of atheism was leveled against Epicurus right from ancient times. The early Christian authors used him as an example of the father of atheism and all this sort of thing. And at least if you read Philodemus’s On Piety, it talks a lot about how Epicurus encouraged his students and himself to take part in the public festivals — and all those festivals were related to praising the gods and making sure they looked kindly on the city. My take has always been that Epicurus seems to have taken part in the festivals, but he took part in them with a different attitude than everybody else — that he could reverence the idea of the gods and put his own internal spin on what he was doing and still take part in the dramatic performances and the processions and the dancing and whatever else was going on. He certainly seems to have wanted to get across the point that: “I believe in the gods — but I believe in the gods the right way.”
Joshua: I was just going to say that this is also, of course, a way to avoid scrutiny, isn’t it? Go to the public festivals, partake in all of the ceremony, partake in all of the ritual — because to decline that would in effect be to decline to participate in the idea that the city-state has a protected status granted by its patron god. And as in every place I can find in the ancient world, the answer when things go wrong is to find the people who are the problem and push all your evil onto them and push them out into the desert. Who’s not worshipping the gods right? Who’s the problem here?
Don: Yeah, exactly. And I do think that some people have put forward the idea that Epicurus was basically just faking it — just doing it for his own self-preservation, for looks and for show. And there may be a hint of that, but it seems to me, at least from the wording he uses, that he did see himself as being truly pious. I fully agree that he was fully aware of the idea of Socrates being put to death for impiety and corrupting the youth, so on the surface it probably looked to anybody else like: “Oh yeah, that Epicurus guy — I saw him down at the festival the other day, he was making sacrifices, doing this kind of thing. Maybe he’s not as big of a problem as we thought.” But I still think he had some sort of internal understanding that he truly believed he was being the most pious person at the festival, and everybody else had a wrong understanding. In whatever way the gods existed, they were there, and the important thing is that they don’t really care what he did. The gods were probably not even aware of Epicurus’s existence, because they do not concern themselves with the petty goings of mortals. It’s not even a concern. But it provided a benefit to him to reverence that idea — that there was some sort of blissful, imperturbable existence out there — and that’s what he was working towards. So if the gods do exist, the kind of thing that he’s getting out of participating in the festivals is that sense of awe toward that particular state. Even if they exist themselves and don’t care what you do, it benefits you to have that sense of awe.
Cassius: There’s a lot in this subsection. Before we continue on, I want to agree with the part of what Don was saying a moment ago — that in terms of Epicurus thinking himself to be maybe the most pious one at the festival, I really do see that myself in the way these things are expressed. It seems like they consistently took the position that not only are your ideas about gods creating the universe ridiculous for physics reasons, they really did seem to buy into the conclusion: “It’s not I who am impious and saying blasphemous things — you’re the real blasphemer.” People make comments about Epicurus’s portrayal on his busts — he’s portrayed in many cases very seriously, with a very serious look in his eye. I can see him taking the same serious position on this, almost like a fundamentalist preacher in reverse: “I’ve got the right position about the way the gods really are, and you are running them down, and actually being impious by taking the position that they’re nothing more than rabble-rousing children in the myths you’ve come up with.” That’s basically the position he seems to take in the Letter to Menoikeus — the ideas of the hoi polloi are not the true understanding of the gods. That’s a position that’s hard for people today to get their minds around. We’re very familiar with the idea of ridiculing religion on the grounds that the gods don’t exist. But we’re not very familiar with ridiculing religion on the grounds that you’re not religious enough, or you’re not consistent enough in your religion to have a proper perspective on the gods — but that seems to be the position that Epicurus was coming from. And I will be quite honest that this is a little into the weeds, but I still find it interesting: I believe David Sedley has made a big deal out of the fact that the word “god” is singular in some of those sections in the Letter to Menoikeus — he talks about “the god” — and it seems to be an idea where each person has their own conception or their own god that they’re concerned about. So that’s another interesting little sidetrack: if we are projecting our ideas of blissfulness and imperturbability, then each person may have their own sort of idea of what that means. And it is interesting that entire doctoral theses and academic works of hundreds of pages have been written on this very topic. This is still a topic of conversation in both scholarship and the practical application of the philosophy.
Joshua: Yeah, I would like to think that the future holds much more in continuing discussion of Epicurus and his philosophy, and I do think there needs to be a lot more written on this subject and a lot more profit that can be gotten from going through it and how it fits into the rest.
Cassius: One other comment: I see that on page 254, DeWitt says, quite correctly, Cicero represents his Epicurean speaker as declaring, quote: “Piously and reverently we worship an excelling and surpassing being.” DeWitt’s evaluation is that the gods are not transcendent creatures — they merely stand at the head of a series in which human beings themselves are members. My trepidation with lines like that is always going down the Mormon path.
Joshua: Yes. I’m not super familiar with Mormonism, but I recognize that the Mormons kind of go in that direction themselves. What’s their line? Something like, “As God is, we will be; and as we are, God once was”?
Don: It’s the statement that you take a quality or even a virtue, and by indicating what the superlative of that would be and ascribing that to a god — or as the good — that’s another aspect of Greek philosophy, I think. Taking wisdom as good, but then seeing wisdom as the good. That said, I’m certainly not endorsing that line of reasoning, no.
Joshua: Yeah, I think there are definite problems with hypothesizing something as if it exists when you don’t necessarily have any direct evidence that it does. This could easily go down the route of Plato’s ideal forms — you’re idealizing Blessedness with a capital B or Imperishability with a capital I. That definitely wasn’t endorsed by Epicurus, but I could easily see how it could be interpreted that way. Give it another 5,000 years and there would have been a splinter cell of Epicureans who rediscovered everything in Plato just on that basis.
Don: It’s kind of like using the tools of the enemy against them in a sense. Plato may come up with the idea that it leads to divine providence, but Epicurus may be using his same tools and saying, “Hey, a perfect being even under your own logical formulas is not going to do the things that you say they would do.” And that’s another reason I could see Epicurus taking part in the festivals — because in his time, that was how you worshipped the gods. So if he was looking for a way to be pious, a way of celebrating the gods as he understood them correctly, thank you very much, that was the ritual and the way to express that in a physical way. That was how you worshipped the gods.
Cassius: Well, let’s go on to the subsection entitled “Existence of the Gods.” DeWitt starts out: “Those who are bound to make an empiricist of Epicurus have been compelled to represent him as finding evidence for the existence of gods in vision. This is an error and a curious one. It was Eudoxus and Plato who appealed to vision as evidence of the existence of God. So far as God’s vision is concerned, Epicurus denied that the gods were visible to the physical eye, although he did think them visible to the mind when operating as a super-sensory organ of vision. The value attached to this evidence, however, was strictly limited.” This is again DeWitt coming down on the side of prolepsis as the main basis for knowledge of the gods, versus vision or images.
Don: Yeah, that whole idea of the vision — whether the mind or the eye or whatever — is, I believe, taken directly from the Letter to Menoikeus, and the word used there is enargeis. It’s interesting because it actually has two different meanings. One is “visible, palpable, in bodily shape” — that sort of thing — but in the dictionary it also says it can mean “properly of the gods appearing in their own form.” That’s the word that Homer used when people were seeing the gods in the Iliad and the Odyssey — that they were enargeis, visible to the eye. But the other connotation of that word is that it’s manifest to the mind’s eye, that you can see it in your imagination. My contention is that Epicurus could not have meant the first meaning, because he was specifically quoted somewhere as saying that they lived in the intermundia — the metacosmos, between the worlds. So you could never actually see them, but you could clearly discern them in your mind. So that’s where it seems DeWitt is getting that dichotomy: the discernment of the gods is through the mind, not the physical eye.
Cassius: The discernment of them is, I think, the focus of page 256 of the book, where this material is closely related to what I think Dr. Glidden was talking to us about. Even though DeWitt generally embraces Cicero’s description of the knowledge of the gods, what DeWitt seems to be saying is that he doesn’t think we should interpret Velleius as saying that there’s something written in our brains — a God-inscription, so to speak. DeWitt compares this to more of a genetic process in which there is a capacity that, when stimulated, develops in a particular direction. We should not consider this to be a tablet on which something is written, because that would not be an Epicurean idea. It’s just something that develops over time. Here’s DeWitt’s example: “The idea of God is thought of as emerging in the mind just as the network of veins emerges in the embryo, prefiguring and anticipating the development of the whole organism.”
Don: And if I remember correctly — please correct me if I’m misremembering — the prolepsis of the gods gives us only that there is a blissful and indestructible being or existence. That’s the only thing the prolepsis gives us. Everything else is sort of built on top of that. Whether they speak Greek, whether they’re in human form, what they eat, what they drink, what their bodies are made of — that would all be layered on top of that prolepsis. So going back to Principal Doctrine 1, the kernel of the correct understanding seems to be that the gods are blissful and imperishable beings who don’t bother anybody, basically — that’s what the Principal Doctrine says. So I think that’s the kernel of the true piety: a conception of that is the most important point, because that’s the one that keeps getting made in the Principal Doctrines, in the Letter to Menoikeus, and elsewhere. That’s what you need to understand. How that gets translated into practical application in the modern world — those are other topics for discussion. But as far as the kernel of the philosophy itself, that’s where the true piety comes in: the understanding that a blissful and imperishable being is not going to have anything to do with the creation of the world, not going to have anything to do with bestowing blessings, not going to have anything to do with you — and getting rid of that anxiety is the goal.
Joshua: One thing I’ve always found problematic is when I compare the way Lucretius talks about the gods to the way he talks about centaurs. It would almost seem like his discussion of centaurs — that this is just two different images that got jumbled together, and centaurs aren’t real, but horses are real and humans are real, and when they get jumbled together you get a centaur — I’ve always been sitting there thinking to myself: well, couldn’t that same line of argument in the hands of the right person be made to basically uproot this whole idea of the gods if they also come from visions or from images?
Cassius: Well, on page 257, DeWitt has this to say: “In respect of the evidence afforded by dreams, it is timely to issue a general and a specific warning. The general warning is against the assumption that the doctrines of Epicurus are easy to understand. The specific warning is against assigning more than a minimum value to the evidence of dreams. The vision of gods seen in a dream is no more evidence for the existence of gods than the vision of centaurs is evidence for the existence of centaurs.” So where does that leave us?
Joshua: Yeah, go ahead.
Cassius: “Only two functions are assigned to dreams in the extant authorities. One function, as gleaned from Sextus Empiricus, is to act as a stimulus to the innate prolepsis of Godhead, which up to a point is merely potential and thus render it actual. The other function is to furnish a hint and no more of the form of the gods, as Cicero informs us.” And DeWitt goes on to say more will be said of this under the next heading. It seems to me that DeWitt is saying that the final picture is a result of this innate capacity — not anything more than a sort of encoding or genetic endowment — which has been stimulated to develop by these images that may or may not come through dreams and so forth. So DeWitt sees two components to the final picture. I don’t think DeWitt himself is saying that a lot of the details — speaking Greek and so forth — are particularly reliable or even important to Epicurus.
Don: I would concur with that. That basic understanding seems to be the most important part — the piety part. And then again, as Lucretius discusses in Book Four about images, it does seem that there’s more to be discovered as well about what Epicurus was saying about what images really do in terms of stimulating us to thought or action. But some combination of both — prolepsis and images — has to be considered. It seems to me that when I read a lot of commentaries, there’s an awful lot of emphasis on going to the creases of those texts and looking at discussions of dreams. And I think DeWitt may be a good counterbalance to that by saying you’ve also got to interpret what Velleius is saying about prolepsis.
Cassius: So this is probably the place to start winding up for the day. I just looked at the clock and we’ve been going about the normal length. Let’s begin to conclude today’s episode — we’ve already bitten off a lot that is difficult to chew. Let’s discuss our thoughts on what’s been said so far. Callistheni, any thoughts today?
Callistheni: As I’ve listened to this, it seems like there’s a lot there that I would find hard to make practical for now — but that’s just me.
Cassius: DeWitt would say to you, Callistheni, what Joshua has already quoted — “The general warning is against the assumption that the doctrines of Epicurus are easy to understand.” Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, as usual, when we talk about the gods I find myself at a total loss, and that’s no less true today. What I do find slightly interesting, and maybe even a little bit compelling, is in Lucretius, when he says that we should think of the earth as our mother in some ways. That’s the part that really draws me — and we see it in that passage in Romeo and Juliet, the soliloquy of Friar Laurence right when Romeo first comes into the cell to meet him: “Earth, that’s nature’s mother, is her tomb. What is her burying grave? That is her womb. And from her womb, children of diverse kinds, we sucking on her natural bosom find.” So there’s a poetic aspect of it that I find interesting, also the idea that this is our home — this is where we live, where most of us are never ever going to leave this world except in death. I find that compelling. Most of the rest of this I just have a lot of issues with, but that’s where I’m at.
Don: As far as our listeners go, hopefully they’ve come to understand that this is a complicated subject even for us who have been doing this for a while. So if anybody is confused, I think it helps to know that you’re not alone. I always find it interesting, like I said, that Epicurus really seems to have emphasized a proper understanding of the gods first and foremost in his philosophy — literally first and foremost. I do think that we have to take into account the cultural ramifications of that in his time as opposed to our time. That said, I think there are also people who still believe in capital-G God or lowercase gods, and this kind of understanding — where through the physics and everything else the gods really don’t care about you, or it’s not even that they don’t care, they’re not even aware of your existence — so don’t worry about them. It would be helpful if they work out that understanding from basic physics components to where this idea comes from. I think there is some practical application there somewhere. But it truly is a complicated subject, and it’s another one of those things where it always comes to mind that we are so lacking in the number of texts available to us from Epicurus himself. The fact that we don’t have all of his ideas is just another one of those frustrations we have to deal with.
Joshua: One thing I could say that’s maybe more cheering than what I said last is: I think of that episode in Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle Monger, where Alexander takes Epicurus’s books and burns them in the public market. I think that if your books are being burned by a false prophet in Asia Minor, you’re doing something right. I don’t understand fully what that thing is, but I feel like there’s something there that’s worth pursuing.
Don: That’s a very good point. I like that. That’s a good way to close.
Cassius: Okay. I’ll close by saying that this is a pretty long chapter, and there’s a lot of detail in it and a lot of things that we’re going to be discussing. The cliché about not being able to see the forest for the trees — we’re going to be looking at a lot of trees over the next couple of weeks in this section on “The True Piety.” But the forest of where all this fits together is pretty clear. Epicurus was engaged in philosophy to bring healing and a more successful way of living for people who are misled by all sorts of errors in philosophy and in religion. He’s providing a worldview — and that’s a good word for it — that most people in life seem to need, whether they admit it or not. And a general understanding of where divinity fits into this worldview ends up being important to most people, at least at certain points in their lives. And Epicurus’s summary, even though we don’t have all the details of it, points to a pretty clear way in which he was looking at the subject: getting rid of the problems that common understandings of religion had planted in human life, and pointing a way out that is uniquely different. And some of us are going to find the details to be of interest and helpful, and some of us are not. But I do think we want to nail the lid on the coffin of the idea that Epicurus was being cynical or untruthful in the way he was presenting all this. There seems to be a large component here that Epicurus thought it helpful — morally, spiritually, however you want to look at it — to have this conception of what the blessed life would be like. We’ll have many more things to say about this. In the meantime, please drop by the forum and give us your comments and questions. We’ll be back in a week for more. See you then. Bye.