Episode 179 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 31 - Chapter 13 - The True Piety 02
Date: 06/23/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3127-episode-179-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-31-chapter-13-the-true-piety-02/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 179 continues Chapter 13, “The True Piety,” with Cassius, Joshua, Don, and Callistheni — Martin is again absent. The episode opens the subsection “The Form of the Gods,” with Cassius cautioning that much of what we know about Epicurean theology comes only through Cicero’s Velleius and Philodemus rather than Epicurus or Lucretius directly, and that these details are speculative compared to the foundational attitude (diathesis) toward the gods. The principle that the gods are corporeal beings — established by materialism/atomism — is noted as uncontroversial, since if everything resolves to atoms, so too must the gods. Don then raises a running concern about DeWitt’s repeated references to Epicurus’s “twelve elementary principles”: while it is easy to extract a list of foundational physics principles from the Letter to Herodotus and Lucretius, there is no evidence that Epicurus wrote a book by that name, and scholarly exercises like Diskin Clay’s “Epicurus’ Last Will and Testament” can produce lists of ten, twelve, or twenty principles depending on how one reads the corpus. Cassius notes that Diskin Clay reads much of the Epicurean material as something like a recorded ongoing discussion rather than a finished system, which makes sense of the fragmentary and non-systematic character of many texts. Don then presents the Long and Sedley alternative view of the gods at length: rather than corporeal beings residing in the intermundia, the gods may be concept formations achieved by admitting streams of images into the mind, enlarging and combining them, with the gods’ everlastingness derived from the inexhaustible supply of similar images rather than from any individual corporeal being. Don connects this to the word eudaimonia (happiness), which contains daimon, suggesting each person must sort out their own internal concept of the divine, and to the Epicurean principle that reverencing a sage is beneficial to the one who reverences. He also notes that the Greek word used for the gods in the Letter to Menoikeus — zoa — can mean “animal,” “living being,” or even “form or image in art,” leaving the question of the gods’ corporeal nature genuinely ambiguous in the Greek. Cassius reads DeWitt’s discussion of knowledge beyond the range of the senses and the two ways the mind processes information about the gods — as a super-sensory organ receiving images, and as the organ of reason drawing deductive inferences. The hint in the texts that the gods are physically larger than humans is examined; Don observes that size indicating importance is common in ancient art (Egyptian murals, mosaics), and Joshua notes the connection to Lucretius’s observation that nature sets limits on living things. Cassius then reads a long passage from John Tyndall’s Belfast Address (1874) on the “promise and potency of all terrestrial life” latent in matter, comparing Tyndall’s willingness to reason beyond the microscope to Epicurus’s own deductions about things beyond sensation, while contrasting it with Frances Wright’s more strictly empiricist position in A Few Days in Athens. Joshua discusses Claudius Ptolemy’s Almagest quotation in which Ptolemy says that tracing the heavenly bodies makes him feel he stands “in the presence of Zeus” — illustrating the kind of astronomical mysticism Epicurus rejected; Epicurus ridiculed the Platonic position that circular heavenly bodies (believed to move in perfect orbits) could be gods. Cassius reads DeWitt on Lucretius’s Book 5 around line 1200: true piety is not a veiled head turning toward a stone or lying prostrate before altars, but “to be able to contemplate all things with a mind at rest.” The discussion shifts to the practical import: many people today still carry guilt and fear from Catholic or fundamentalist upbringings — Don emphasizes that freedom from fear of the gods flows directly from understanding the physics, and that the entire system must be built from foundations upward. DeWitt’s commentary on dynamism versus logic is quoted — “Men do not feel called to devote their lives to propagation of syllogisms,” and the force behind Lucretius’s logic is emotion and “eagerness to emancipate men from fear.” The subsection “Gradation in the Godhead” is briefly opened: the ascending scale of living beings (Scala naturae) — which DeWitt places at the top of nature, not outside it — implies more gods than the Greeks acknowledged; Socrates’s daimon is noted as something Epicureans would have ridiculed. Joshua explains the daimon as Socrates’s voice of intellectual conscience (telling him what not to say, not what to say). Don reads DeWitt p. 263 on zoa: the gods are literally “animals” in Greek — part of the ascending series of living beings, not placed outside it. Joshua quotes the final stanza of Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” (“A serious house on serious earth it is”), and Don shares his experience of awe at Yosemite Valley as parallel to the human striving that ancient temple architecture expressed. Cassius closes with the key takeaway: the gods are part of nature, not above or outside it; Epicurus approaches divinity as a scientist who does not assume humanity is the only form of life in the universe; isonomia (to be covered later) will develop this point further. Next week will resume at DeWitt p. 263 in “Gradation in the Godhead.”
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 179 of Lucretius Today. We are continuing in Chapter 13, “The True Piety,” and today we’re going to be starting with the subsection entitled “The Form of the Gods.” We concluded last week — I remember specifically Joshua reading this section about a general and a specific warning. The general warning was against assuming that the doctrines of Epicurus are easy to understand, and the specific warning was against assigning more than a minimum value to the evidence of dreams. A lot of the detail we’re talking about in these episodes on “The True Piety” is extremely detailed and specific and interesting, and we know about it only because of comments in other writers. We don’t really have a good exposition from Epicurus or Lucretius or any core Epicurean about a full explanation of the nature of the gods. There’s some material from Philodemus and some other writers. But when you talk about the Epicurean view of divinity and gods, you’re really in a very speculative section of the philosophy for us today, because we don’t know these details. So it should be stressed that I don’t think any of us here would suggest anybody else put a tremendous amount of emphasis on these speculations. But the important part is to see how this fits into the overall view of Epicurus about the gods. As Don was pointing out last week, the discussion of the proper attitude toward the gods — their being blessed and not involved in human lives — is right at the top of the Principal Doctrines, and it’s featured at the same spot in the Letter to Menoikeus. So it clearly is an extremely important part of Epicurean philosophy to have a proper attitude toward divinity. But as far as whether the gods speak Greek or how tall they are and things like that, there’s a distance between those specifics versus the important generalities — as Epicurus says in the Letter to Herodotus, you don’t often need the details of a philosophy, but you do frequently need the general outline, the foundational points. Much of what we’re going to be talking about is not foundational but is a very interesting sidelight. And while we may today have a totally different view of quantum mechanics and the way atoms work, and while we may think these details about the gods and divinity are not as relevant to us today, I think we can learn a lot about the Epicurean method of reasoning based on the evidence we have available to us. Today the subsection we’re talking about is “The Form of the Gods,” and it starts out by DeWitt saying that it was the teaching of Epicurus that the gods were corporeal beings of human form, as stated in the scholium to the first authorized doctrine. Only from external sources is it possible to gather the drift of more advanced teachings on this subject, because it’s not even covered in Lucretius.
Joshua: Yeah, and that’s the constant problem we have all throughout this discussion — we see it here in this chapter as well. He starts the first sentence: “It was the teaching of Epicurus that the gods were corporeal.” That much has to be obvious, because when you start with atomism — which is fundamentally the idea, we might call it materialism or in a more modern sense physicalism — it’s the idea that everything that exists has a physical basis, whether that’s mind, whether that’s energy. It all resolves eventually to something physical, and in the case of the Epicureans, that physical thing was the atom. So even the gods, at this distant remove in which we are supposed to find them — even they are atomic and material in nature.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua. And here, let me invite Don to say something. DeWitt makes regular reference to these “twelve elementary principles,” and I know Don has taken a look at that and has some things to say about whether there actually was a book by that name. We know that from looking at the Letter to Herodotus and comparing it to Lucretius it’s pretty easy to come up with a list of core physics principles that Epicurus was following — but whether he was calling them “the twelve” is much less certain. Don, what about that?
Don: Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. You can go through and pick out the foundational principles he’s talking about whenever he’s talking about atoms and void and how they work and how they fit together. I just have a problem with statements like “there was this document, and this document said that” — when we have no way to know what that document actually said, if it even existed. If someone were saying “there was this basic principle that Epicurus talked about, and here’s how it applies” — that would be fine. But trying to say it’s contained in a book that Epicurus wrote, for which we have no evidence — that’s just making up citations.
Cassius: Yeah. And there’s an article by Diskin Clay entitled “Epicurus’ Last Will and Testament” in which Clay goes through and attempts to assemble another list — he gets another list of ten or twelve.
Don: Yeah, exactly. So that’s the thing — whenever you do that sort of thing, you can go through the Letter to Herodotus and some of the other writings and make a nice little list of foundational principles. But you can come up with twelve, you can come up with fourteen, you can come up with twenty. To say that there was a list of exactly twelve that Epicurus wrote, and here is a document, and now I’m going to reference it — that’s just making up citations.
Cassius: Yeah, I think the direction that it takes in the end is one that I think all of us would agree with — that Epicurus certainly had developed his physics as a foundational part of his work. He wrote thirty-seven books on physics. In preparation for this discussion, I glanced back at Diskin Clay’s article, and Clay makes the point that he reads a lot of this material as Epicurus talking back and forth with people — almost like we’re talking in this podcast — not written down in a way intended to be “this is my final conclusion,” but almost a continuing discourse with other members of the school about these things. So the fragments we read, according to Clay, frequently come across as not very systematic — just recording the back-and-forth discussions about what these things could be. That plays further into the idea that a lot of these things are almost speculation between them about how to envision the application of physics principles to the idea of the gods. And I think that’s probably where DeWitt is on the right track: Epicurus would not take a position about the gods that conflicts with his fundamentals of physics. He’s going to make everything fit together as consistently as possible.
Don: I will even say — I’m not entirely sure I’m fully on board with even the “gods are corporeal beings” position. I still find the whole position of Long and Sedley quite intriguing. I was trying to read through their section in The Hellenistic Philosophers again — if anyone is interested, it is available to borrow for one hour at a time on Internet Archive; go to archive.org and search for The Hellenistic Philosophers by Long and Sedley, you will find it there. I find their whole idea that the gods are concept formations in our minds quite intriguing. I find it intriguing because I think Epicurus was a deep thinker who had some really interesting ideas, and I could definitely see it. At least it seems to align with everything that Epicurus says. And the whole idea that the gods are living beings — whenever they talk about that in the Letter to Menoikeus, the word that’s used there is zoa, which I find interesting. According to the dictionary definitions it can mean “an animal” or “a living being,” but it can also refer to the form or image of something in art. So it doesn’t necessarily have to mean one or the other — there’s that level of ambiguity in the word he uses to describe the gods.
Cassius: I think DeWitt can be read consistently with much of what you just said. This first full paragraph on page 258 says: “All knowledge of the gods falls under the head of things beyond the range of sensation” — and I’m presuming he means the five senses, not images — “consequently, all knowledge of them, apart from hints concerning their form, belongs in the category of inferential truths, to be arrived at by analogy or by deduction from certain of these physics principles.” So even someone who argues that the gods are corporeal seems to be also probably going to take the position that even though they’re corporeal, we’ve reached that conclusion through non-corporeal evidence. This is where DeWitt starts talking about the mind functioning in two ways: first as a super-sensory organ of vision that processes images; and second as just the organ of reason, which produces thoughts about the gods through deduction. One of the hints we apparently get is that the gods are large.
Joshua: It’s quite common in the ancient world — if you look at mosaics or even Egyptian wall murals — you’ll see a seated figure, and the standing figure in front of them is the same height as the seated figure. Size in that mode of thinking is used to indicate importance. So the pharaoh is like twice as tall as a normal person — which of course he wasn’t, but that’s kind of where all this stuff comes from, I think.
Don: Yeah, and I was just going to say — it makes sense too just from a sensory standpoint that if you’re standing in awe of something in nature, like a huge tree or a mountain, you’re always looking up, always looking at something towering above you. And I think it sort of transfers over: if something is more important or more “divine,” it’s going to have those properties of something in the natural world that you’re already in awe of. I could at least see that as an argument for that kind of thing.
Joshua: Yeah, Lucretius though has that theme where he talks about how for everything that exists, it has its seeds, its proper time when it flourishes — and he mentions that if that weren’t the case, why shouldn’t we find men who could wade the deepest ocean, who could part a mountain with their hands? He says directly that nature has set a limit and a boundary, which applies to humans and may or may not apply to gods.
Cassius: Right. You know, this is a theme I find interesting in this chapter. He says: “This detail of teaching that the gods were larger than human beings evoked no controversy because it was traditional.” The point being that Epicurus apparently would have been happy to endorse any view of the gods among the common people of Greece that he could agree with. It seems like he saw himself almost as a reformer of religion — purging the wrong aspects of Greek religion and reinforcing the good aspects. He participated in the festivals, as we regularly discuss. But again, he was not a crusading atheist. He was more of a moral and even religious reformer. It’s almost funny to think about — he seems to have been sincere in taking the position that when somebody said the gods are numbering the hairs on our heads and determining when the cock crows and everything, he’s taking the position that those are impious views. And he’s almost offended by them, because he has this concept of divinity as something very worthwhile of keeping pure, and these are blasphemous suggestions. He’s not the blasphemer — it is these people who take the position that the gods are meddling in human and animal lives who are the real blasphemers. And evidently he railed against the atheists of his time too. Because Philodemus quotes him — this is Usener number 387 — Philodemus says: “Likewise in Book 12 of Epicurus’s On Nature, Epicurus criticizes Prodicus, Diagoras, and Critias and others, calling them crazy and comparing them to people in a Bacchic frenzy.” So atheists were a target of Epicurus just like people who held impious beliefs about the gods on the other side. I find that kind of interesting.
Cassius: Lucretius, in Book 5, around line 1200, has this to say on the question of what really is piety — the title of the chapter we’re in is “The True Piety.” Let me just read Bailey: “Nor is it piety at all to be seen often with a veiled head, turning towards a stone and to draw near to every altar; no, nor to lie prostrate on the ground with outstretched palms before the shrines of the gods, nor to sprinkle the altars with the streaming blood of beasts, nor to link vow upon vow; but rather to be able to contemplate all things with a mind at rest.” It dovetails with so much of what is in Epicurean philosophy — if your understanding of the gods brings you frustration and anxiety and fear rather than peace and pleasure and a soul at rest, then you’ve got it wrong.
Don: I mean, we often bring up the practical applications of what we’re talking about. And I think that definitely is one of those things that is still relevant today — people still use the phrase “the fear of God” quite prevalently in any number of religious circles.
Cassius: Don, thanks for bringing that up. We had some discussions on the forum in the past week with people mentioning whether it’s background in Catholicism or other types of fundamentalist religious viewpoints. Many people are so conditioned by those positions when they’re young that they find it difficult or even impossible, at least to this point, to get rid of those problems. They’re haunted by ideas of guilt and lack of worthiness and “I’m a worm in comparison to God” — all these things that Joshua was talking about last week in relation to Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” And another thing that’s important to point out is that this whole idea of not being afraid of the gods is a direct result of the physics and understanding the natural world. You often bring up, Cassius, that people who avoid the whole atoms-and-void thing and say “that’s not relevant, we’re just going straight to the Letter to Menoikeus and talk about ethics” — it is an entire system. Epicurus builds it up from the base: there are atoms and void because I observe this and this and this, and because I observe this, then this results from that. He keeps building blocks on top of each other until you erect a pretty good-looking edifice. And if you take out the foundation stones of it, it all crumbles down.
Cassius: Don, I’m going to read something here from the Belfast Address, which was delivered by a physicist named John Tyndall, towards the end. He writes: “Is there not a temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius when he affirms that nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods? Or with Bruno, when he declares that matter is not that mere capacity which philosophers have pictured her to be, but the universal mother who brings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb. Believing as I do in the continuity of nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscope seems to be of use. Here, the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By an intellectual necessity, I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence and discern in that matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, have hitherto covered with opprobrium the promise and potency of all terrestrial life.” That is John Tyndall, the Belfast Address, which I recommend anyone go read — I will include a link in the show notes. Joshua, what do you think he’s saying there?
Joshua: I think his ultimate point is that people have this idea that nature exists and because it exists it must have had a creator. And John Tyndall is a physicist on the forefront of Victorian science, and a large part of this lecture is about Darwin and his findings and comparing them to Lucretius. His whole point is that nature itself contains this sort of latent power that you could almost describe as a mothering womb to everything that really exists.
Cassius: What was the point about the limit of his microscope — because we have this continuing issue of whether you can derive from your physics anything about eternity or the gods?
Joshua: Right. A scientist normally would describe what he’s seeing and maybe attempt to draw conclusions by testing hypotheses. But John Tyndall, as he says, is moving beyond the microscope and entering perhaps a more poetic way of understanding the universe — “by an intellectual necessity, I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence and discern in that matter which we in our ignorance of its latent powers have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial life.” When he says “hitherto covered with opprobrium,” I think of that quote from St. Paul that you always cite, Cassius — “the weak and beggarly elements.” He’s saying that what we have dismissed as mere atoms and void actually contains the promise and potency of life itself.
Cassius: I think that’s a very controversial and important issue in itself. I find in Frances Wright something of the opposite position — she’s not going to cross the boundary of the microscope. She’s going to observe and stop and not attempt to read more into it than her eyes allow her to see. But I agree with what I’m gathering John Tyndall is saying — that from the evidence you gather through the microscope and other means, you do have to deduce things that are beyond what you can directly see. Just as we deduce the existence of atoms without ever having seen them. And I think a lot of what Epicurus is doing here is exactly that: taking things he can see and deducing from them conclusions about things he cannot see. That very act of deduction of spiritual or divine matters from things we do see is probably the big issue of faith in the first place. Those who say they’re just going to take it on faith without any evidence whatsoever — it seems to me that Epicurus’s thrust throughout is to start with evidence and then deduce from that evidence what is obtainable through the senses. But I don’t know if John Tyndall would say that’s exactly where he’s going — and by referencing Frances Wright you illustrate one of the problems with her book, which is that Frances Wright in my opinion takes the view that Epicurus really was an empiricist who derives everything from sensation. But that simply isn’t true to the facts of the ancient world. Epicurus has a complex understanding of epistemology and how we know what we know — not just sensation, but also feelings and prolepsis. And she ends her book with maybe a more “rah rah atheist” position than Epicurus or Lucretius would have taken. The end result is I think a little off-key from the way Epicurus would have said it. But the reason I went into all that is we’re about to go into a series of really speculative material, and I want to make clear that even the sources were apparently speculating.
Cassius: He says in this part of the discussion: “This detail of teaching that the gods were larger than human beings evoked no controversy because it was traditional” — the point being that Epicurus apparently would have endorsed any view of the gods among the common people of Greece that he could agree with. And evidently Epicurus chose to wax witty over the Platonic position — to Cicero’s annoyance. From times very remote, the circle had been a symbol of perfection, and with the growth of geometry the sphere had captured the popular and learned imagination alike. Plato was moved to exalt certain heavenly bodies, falsely believed to move in circular orbits, to the rank of gods. And so the point is that Plato and others considered some of the gods to be circular balls of fire hurtling through the universe — and Epicurus ridiculed such an idea, considering that the gods must be more akin to human beings or refined forms of human beings, because spherical balls of fire would not be consistent with what we think a god would be like.
Joshua: There’s a quote by Claudius Ptolemy, who wrote a book called the Almagest — which means “the greatest” — his book on astronomy that really informed the medieval view, all the way up to Copernicus. Ptolemy says: “I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral, but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch the earth with my feet — I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.” So it’s that idea that by looking at the stars, by mapping their progress, by understanding the geometry of the geocentric cosmos, that’s really the way to approach the gods. And it’s that idea that Epicurus takes issue with.
Don: That almost reminds me of the part in Lucretius where he talks about Epicurus soaring through the universe and bringing back all the secrets — that he was able to think about those sorts of things and extrapolate from them.
Joshua: “He rent the tight-barred gates of nature’s hold asunder.”
Don: There you go. The royal fountains.
Cassius: Well, the next detail that DeWitt picks up is entitled “Gradation in the Godhead,” and it involves some of the items that Don mentioned a few minutes ago — the question of how many gods there are and whether there are higher and lesser gods even within the Epicurean scheme. Of course, it’s familiar to a lot of people that Socrates had talked about a demon who whispered in his ear, and DeWitt says: “The daimon of Socrates himself must have been a subject of ridicule to Epicureans.” The Greeks believed there were multiple gods, many gods, and the interesting conclusion that Epicureans apparently would have reached based on some of this reasoning is that there are a lot more gods than the Greeks even acknowledged — almost a “more Catholic than the Pope” approach. What’s the line from Shakespeare, Joshua, about more things in heaven?
Joshua: That’s from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Cassius: There you go. I knew you’d know that.
Joshua: Cassius, I do want to talk a little bit about Socrates, because he’s mentioned here. That word — daimon — that you’ve set up as some kind of intellectually votive image. That’s the word Socrates uses. The main component of the idea is that he views his daimon as something like a conscience — for example, when he’s in debate and he makes a point that is spurious or hypocritical, he gets this prompting from his daimon saying “I see what you did there.” So it’s really almost just his conscience, or a spirit of intellectual honesty more than anything that he’s pointing to.
Cassius: And didn’t he maintain that it never told him what to say, but only what not to say?
Joshua: Right, that’s the whole point of it, yeah.
Don: Yeah, that whole idea that Long and Sedley bring up — about everybody having to sort out their own god — I think is an interesting way of looking at it, and I’m going to have to delve a little bit more into that. The whole idea that we all have our own internal concept of what the god is, that we have to sort that out in our own mind — I think that has some interesting implications.
Joshua: I totally agree on that. Well, maybe not more than anything. I’ve still found this whole poetic description of the earth as mother that Lucretius likes to use quite compelling. But the idea Long and Sedley put forward — of taking a god as symbolic, or as like a votive image — I do find that kind of interesting in some ways.
Cassius: And we had a recent thread on the forum about just that question — to what extent can you really use that and make it work for you? Some people are going to find that very compelling.
Don: Yeah, like I said, it always comes back to that whole idea that reverencing the sage is good for the one who reverences — it’s an interesting sort of thing to think about.
Joshua: Now I’m also going to annoy Cassius further, probably, by quoting a poem called “Church Going” by Philip Larkin. I’m only going to quote the last stanza. He says: “A serious house on serious earth it is, / In whose blunt air all our compulsions meet, / Are recognised, and robed as destinies. / And that much never can be obsolete, / Since someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious, / And gravitating with it to this ground, / Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, / If only that so many dead lie round.”
Don: Oh, that’s good. Yeah. It’s a very powerful poem.
Joshua: The whole poem is interesting — he talks about going into churches whenever he visits a country town in England, even when they’re empty. Maybe this relates to the recent thread about Catholic guilt — but anyway, it’s a beautiful poem.
Don: Yeah, that’s the thing. You look at religious structures — whether it’s a temple or a cathedral — there is some darn fine architecture that was in the service of the divine. It’s that striving, that human striving to understand something bigger than yourself and stand in awe of something. You stand in some of those old cathedrals with those soaring vaults and it’s a humbling experience. And I got maybe not the same, but a similar sense of awe when we went to Yosemite Valley and just took in the entire valley. It’s just a breathtaking experience. There is some sort of striving that seems to be common across cultures — maybe Epicurus was picking up on it, given the variety of religious experience in the Mediterranean world available to him.
Cassius: Yeah, it’s a very interesting subject — but now to snap back to reality.
Don: Yeah, sorry.
Cassius: And the reality is that this subsection entitled “Gradation in the Godhead” is really long, and even though the topic seems very unpromising in terms of getting a lot out of it, DeWitt buries in these sections a lot of really interesting commentary about Epicurus’s approach. This morning when I was trying to prepare for this, I highlighted a section that I think applies to what you were just saying about how architecture is inspirational and how it’s used in the service of religion. DeWitt says: “The weakness of logic of course is its lack of dynamism. Men do not feel called to devote their lives to the propagation of syllogisms. The merit of romanticism, on the contrary, is the dynamic that goes with it — it is powered by motion. Lucretius often handles the logic of Epicurus with clarity and skill, but the force of propulsion behind the logic is emotion — pity for the superstitious misery of man and eagerness to emancipate him. In respect of this enthusiasm, Lucretius seems to surpass his master, and yet Epicurus is on record as saying that the wise man will be more susceptible of emotion than other men, and this will be no obstacle to his logic. Here we have the recognition of the blend of logic and romanticism. It’s the latter — the emotion, the eagerness to emancipate men from fear and to show them the road to happiness — that leads Epicurus to extol the blissfulness of the gods as a perfection to contemplate and imitate.” The point being that we’re combining logic and deeper feelings in our discussion of the gods, just like people are saying on the forum that they can’t get rid of the guilt that comes from their Catholic and other types of upbringing. It’s this emotion that drives these questions, not so much the logic of debating angels dancing on the head of a pin. The reason behind all this is not just idle speculation, but an eagerness to emancipate human beings from false notions of the gods.
Don: There’s something, Cassius, I have to talk about because we were discussing it this week — it’s here on page 263, where DeWitt writes: “Even with heroes and demons eliminated, however, there still remain reasons for entertaining the belief that Epicurus favored some degree of gradation in Godhead. According to Epicurus, it must always be borne in mind, the gods are zoa” — which is the Greek word for animals, and it’s the root of zoology — “or if this word seems offensive to us, at least animate creatures. They are thus not placed outside the ascending series of living beings, but at the top of it.” So that kind of bears on the question we were discussing the other day about this issue of zoa versus bios.
Cassius: I’m not sure it resolves it, but it’s an interesting point.
Don: Yeah, and I think you often bring up the whole idea that humans are animals and Epicurus pounds that point home. And if we do take the idea that the gods are zoa as well — that they are animals too, part of the natural world — I think that you do a really good job of talking about the fact that Epicurus includes humans with the other animals and looks at animals as places to find reasons for what he believes. So humans are not separate from the natural world, and at least according to this line of reasoning, the gods aren’t either.
Cassius: Yeah, it’s such an important and central part of the philosophy, and it lies at the heart of the foundation of his claim that it’s pleasure that is the telos of life.
Don: Yep. Yeah, it’s such an important issue.
Cassius: Maybe this is where we do begin to wrap up the episode for today. If there’s anything that you take away from the discussion of Epicurean gods, it’s got to be that they are part of nature — not above nature, not outside of nature, not over nature, not controlling nature. They’re part of nature just like we are. And we can spend as much time as we’re interested in spending reaching reasoned conclusions about what higher beings than humans would do and how they might act and how they might be composed. But we’re never going to cross the line into thinking that they’re omnipotent or omniscient or somehow supernatural.
Don: Or that they’re going to punish us — and this sort of thing, so yeah.
Cassius: We’re approaching the nature of the gods and divinity as a scientist — in the sense that we don’t think we’re the only living beings in the universe. And that’s one of the issues of isonomia that Velleius talks about, which I think we’ll talk about later in this chapter. But we think there’s no single thing of a kind: if the earth is not the only place where life exists in the universe, then there’s going to be limitless numbers of other places where life exists. And it’s reasonable to talk about, just like we would talk about today, what life might be like in the year 3000 if man is still alive. Don could remind me the name of that song.
Don: “In the Year 2525” — I’m going to start singing that song now, because it immediately came to mind.
Cassius: Yes! “In the year 2525 — if man is still alive, if woman can survive, they may find…” So it’s legitimate, and part of our current artistic thinking, at least for those of us who live in 1968 in our dreams, that we talk about what life would be like in the future and where reason and science can take us — in terms of extended life and absence of disease and so forth. I would see this kind of speculation of the Epicureans as similar in vein to that. Zager and Evans, Don, was the group that did “In the Year 2525.”
Don: Yeah, I think one of my friends had a 45 RPM of that, so yeah.
Cassius: Yes, I’ll upload that in the show notes — it was one of my favorite songs. So, okay, let’s go around and come to a conclusion for today. Callistheni, any thoughts on what you’ve heard?
Callistheni: No, I don’t.
Cassius: Thanks, Callistheni. Don, you want to go next?
Don: Yeah, I think this is still an interesting thing to discuss. The counterpoint between the DeWittian position and the mainstream position of the gods as corporeal beings versus Long and Sedley’s idea of concept formation — there’s a lot of stuff out there, but I do agree that it comes down to having that correct attitude toward the gods, that they are not going to punish you and that you have to get that sort of thing straight in your head. And that’s one of the major things that I think is still directly applicable to living in today’s world.
Joshua: Yeah, as DeWitt says on page 263: “Moreover, there is a psychological and ethical nexus. The idea of gods exists congenitally in the minds of men, a model of happiness to which they may aspire.” That seems to be a good summary of where we are.
Cassius: Those were quite enjoyable. Nicely done. I will post all of them to the thread. Okay. Well, probably that’s a good place for us to stop for this week. As Joshua just said, if you have questions or comments about this episode, please post them to the forum, and we will come back next week to continue on. We have some more material in this section on “Gradation in the Godhead” — we’ll begin probably around that page 263 we were just looking at. So thanks for your time today. Enjoy the discussion as always, and we’ll see you next week.