Episode 180 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 32 - Chapter 13 - The True Piety 03
Date: 06/30/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3142-episode-180-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-32-chapter-13-the-true-piety-03/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 180 concludes Chapter 13 “The True Piety” with Cassius, Joshua, and Callistheni — Don and Martin are both absent. The episode opens with Cassius reorienting the discussion: the fundamental Epicurean principle about the gods, embedded in Principal Doctrine 1 and the Letter to Menoikeus, is that no gods are creating, controlling, or punishing — a position derived from both physics and the logical inference that a truly blessed being does not meddle in the affairs of lower beings. Cassius introduces the Niagara Falls analogy to explain how the gods might maintain their incorruptibility without being supernaturally eternal: just as a river maintains its form through a constant throughput of water molecules, the gods might maintain their bodies through a constant movement of atoms in and out. The connection is made to ancient philosophy’s turn toward geometry as a response to Heraclitean flux — Pythagorean number mysticism (1=point, 2=line, 3=surface, 4=solid, sum=10, the perfect number of the heavenly spheres, the music of the spheres) is presented as the tradition Epicurus was explicitly rejecting. The Letter to Pythocles’s multi-explanation approach is cited as the correct Epicurean alternative: you need not identify one true cause of something in nature if you can enumerate several natural explanations adequate to eliminate the supernatural. Joshua then introduces a discussion prompted by Don’s posting of a debate between a Catholic podcaster and a Catholic bishop (Bishop Barron), in which the “summum bonum” question reduces to Thomas Aquinas’s “uncaused cause” argument: everything must have a cause, yet something must have had no cause — which Epicurus simply refuses by asserting that the atoms have always existed and the chain of causation is infinite in both directions. Cassius connects this to a Bishop Barron review of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve in which a YouTube commenter claimed Jefferson was “more Aristotelian” because he was a eudaimonist — prompting Cassius to note that all ancient schools are eudaimonist, and that the real question is what eudaimonia means, which is precisely what Diogenes of Oenoanda’s fragment 32 addresses: “pleasure is the end of the best mode of life while the virtues are no way an end, but the means to an end.” The subsection “Incorruptibility and Virtue” (DeWitt p. 267) is then discussed: the gods are characterized by blissfulness and incorruptibility, neither of which is inherent in their nature — they are incorruptible only because the contingency of destruction is avertable by their own vigilance. DeWitt quotes the Andria of Terence: “I think the life of the gods to be everlasting for the reason that their pleasures are perpetual.” DeWitt p. 267 is read: since gods are zoa in the same ascending order as humans, and since nothing but atoms is intrinsically eternal, incorruptibility must be a maintained state. Joshua raises the Monty Python reductio: just as there is no supernatural god to oversee the natural gods, there is no super-supernatural god, and so on in any absurd direction — the Epicurean answer is simply that there is no reason to believe the universe ever had a beginning. Cassius notes that even Hinduism posits gradations of heaven, making this a recurring human tendency. “Seventh heaven” and Dante’s ascending and descending circles are briefly noted. The isonomia subsection (DeWitt pp. 270–271) is examined: the principle of equitable apportionment, derived from the infinity of atoms, space, and time plus Lucretius’s observation that nature never produces only one of a kind, yields three inferences — (1) perfection must exist somewhere as well as imperfection; (2) the number of gods cannot be less than the number of mortals; (3) the forces of preservation always prevail in the universe as a whole. An indirect inference follows: since individual worlds are subject to dissolution, the incorruptible gods must dwell in the intermundia between worlds. Cassius uses the example of giant Carboniferous-era insects — dragonflies as large as eagles, possible in an oxygen-rich environment because insects lack a vascular system — to illustrate how natural limits work and why Epicurus applies conclusions from earth to the rest of the universe without positing supernatural zones. The 1960 film Inherit the Wind (Spencer Tracy) is cited for the moment where the defense attorney, reading Genesis, asks: “Now where the hell did he come from? Did God pull a creation in the next county?” — illustrating the principle that once rules of materialism are established, violations elsewhere are just as absurd. Joshua reads the Venus and Mars symbolism in the Hymn to Venus as a poetic rendering of the Epicurean/Empedoclean forces of creation and destruction — “for every coming together there will be a falling apart again but no final collapse.” The life of the gods in the intermundia is covered: Seneca found it lonely (no farm animals, servants, comforts), but Philodemus’s On the Management of an Estate shows that philosophical conversation with like-minded friends is itself the greatest pleasure, and this is exactly what the gods enjoy in each other’s company. Philodemus confirms: gods must have speech, and they speak Greek (or something not far different), which Cassius notes influenced the famous Latin-versus-Greek debate between Lucretius and Cicero. The subsections “Communion and Fellowship,” “Religio vs. Pietas,” and “Prophecy and Prayer” are then covered: Lucretius warns that the impious man cannot receive the images that float from the divine beings into minds of the truly pious; an audiobook called Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini (narrated by Todd Portnoy) is cited for its analysis of Lucretius’s contrast between religio (superstitious fear) in Book 1 and pietas (correct attitude toward gods) in Books 5–6. Vatican Saying 32 is noted: “Reverence for the wise man is a great blessing for the one that feels the reverence.” On prophecy: DeWitt argues that Epicurus’s denial of divination was as dangerous as Socrates’s positions — Anaxagoras was exiled for saying the sun was a ball of hot metal larger than the Peloponnese, and Epicurus goes further. Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle Monger is cited; Thomas Jefferson’s quote — “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions — ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them, and no one ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity” — is presented as exactly parallel to Epicurus’s approach to prophecy. The scholium to Aeschylus on prophecy: “when foretelling calamity you have caused pain before the due time and when foretelling something good you spoil the pleasure.” On prayer: Vatican Saying 65 — “It is useless to ask of the gods such blessings as a man is capable of procuring for himself” — and Horace’s version: pray to Jupiter only for what he gives and takes away (life and means of life); the quiet mind I shall provide for myself. Callistheni gives substantial closing remarks about the importance of settling these questions before confronting death or the death of loved ones, since at those moments people will always say “it’s God’s will” and the only defense is having thought it through in advance. Joshua adds that he cannot stop thinking about these questions and finds the subject vital to how he lives every day. Cassius closes by announcing that next week the group moves to Chapter 14, “The New Virtues,” returning to the question of virtue, what it really means, and its relationship to pleasure.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 180 of Lucretius Today. We’re continuing in Chapter 13, “The True Piety,” and last week we were beginning the discussion of the subsection entitled “Gradation in the Godhead” and discussing the observation made by Joshua that in Epicurean theology, the gods are part of the great scheme of nature. Before we continue, it’s always good for us to say something in general about where we are and the importance of what we’re talking about. This whole chapter, “True Piety,” is oriented towards Epicurus’s attitude towards the gods, which is contained in such a prominent position in Principal Doctrine 1 and in the beginning of the Letter to Menoikeus — it’s mentioned just about everywhere you find any discussion from Epicurus or Lucretius or any of the Epicureans. It’s a fundamental point that you orient yourself with the knowledge that there are no gods creating or controlling the world, providing fate for you, giving you a mission in life, giving you an outcome in life, and not punishing you or rewarding you after death. So that’s the fundamental aspect of everything — which derives from both the physics and from the prolepsis aspect. And again linking it back to last week: any gods that do exist are going to be part of nature and not above it or beyond it. There’s nothing supernatural or outside nature in Epicurean philosophy. What the Epicureans came up with was this idea that by some method, if the gods are going to continue to live and not worry about dying, the gods have to be able to replace their atoms, to regenerate themselves over time and not decay. Perhaps the gods exist in this form as we would see a river or Niagara Falls — in the sense of a constant movement of atoms in and out of the bodies of the gods. It’s just like the atoms of the river maintain the form of the Niagara Falls or the river itself. So that would be an example of a speculation about the nature of the gods that gives somebody who’s interested in that subject an ability to come up with something that’s not supernatural.
Cassius: And again, that would be the major purpose of everything we’re doing in this section. If we’re going to talk about the nature of the gods, we’re looking for explanations of the way the gods live, the bodies of the gods, and their immortality if they have one — explanations that can be reasonable and natural and not require any kind of supernatural aspect. We can connect this back to Heraclitus and Aristotle and so forth by saying that if change is so rapid that knowledge becomes really impossible, where do you turn in order to build up your view and understanding of nature? And where many ancient thinkers turned was to geometry. What Euclid was doing with geometry was: with very few simple rules in place, you can use mathematics and logic to build this very elaborate system. As long as you can define basically a point and a line, you can follow that almost infinitely in expanding knowledge and defining terms, and you can do it with certainty, because geometry exists in an abstract state outside of nature. How do you gain your understanding of the gods? Apparently by the same form. They applied this to astronomy, to everything, essentially. There was a follower of Pythagoras who said that if you have one, that makes a point; if you have two, that makes a line; if you have three, that makes a surface; and if you have four, that makes a solid. And if you add them up, that makes ten — and ten is the perfect number, the number of the heavenly spheres. And if we weren’t as deaf and as degraded as we are now, we could, like our species used to be able to do in the age of heroes, actually hear that music — the music of the spheres. So it’s not surprising that Epicurus is going to throw that whole line of thinking out the window. And so the question is: what is he left with?
Joshua: And one thing I don’t think we talk about enough with reference to this issue — what I hear you saying, Cassius, with issues relating to flux and flows and so forth — is that this is one explanation for how things might work. What we read in the Letter to Pythocles when we went through that was this constant approach that Epicurus had to explaining things in nature by reference to multiple possible explanations. You don’t become enamored of the single cause and stick to that in the face of all the evidence. You offer multiple explanations, and one or more of them may turn out to be true, but you don’t pin yourself down to one because that is almost certainly going to turn out to be wrong and it’s unhelpful. Just like he’s looking at the sky: when you can’t eliminate every possibility but you can come up with several that may be true and are natural, then you’ve done all you really need to do to dispense at that moment with the idea that there’s a supernatural issue behind it. Even under the most optimistic of constructions, we don’t have nearly enough left in the Epicurean texts to know what they were saying, but we can tell that what they were doing was constructing a theory of how the gods might exist that could be reasonable and natural and not require any kind of supernatural aspect to anything.
Cassius: Right. It’s that same approach that you find in the Letter to Pythocles: if there are natural explanations adequate to explain the phenomena — even if you don’t know which one is right, but if you can enumerate a number of them — that’s sufficient to push off the supernatural explanation. And once you do that for everything in the philosophy, the supernatural explanation is simply rendered moot. There’s no reason to call upon it when the natural explanation is better in every way. Josh, we had a good illustration of something we’re talking about in this whole chapter. Don posted a link to a discussion between a Catholic podcaster and a Catholic bishop, and they were talking about this issue of the summum bonum. The way I would relate this is that the summum bonum issue involves the question of why you’re doing something. You say you’re doing it because you want to be healthy — but why do you want to be healthy? And continuing on this series of “why” questions until you get the person thinking about what ultimately motivates them to come down to some ultimate basic foundational principle. And the Catholic bishop came down to this point that ultimately you come to something like an “uncaused cause” as your ultimate motivation for doing everything in life. Joshua, your background is Catholic and you know much more about this than I do. But when I hear “uncaused cause,” I start thinking about Aristotle and a prime mover — where you cross that boundary in religion or some types of philosophies between things you can verify through physics and things that are supported by evidence versus just abandoning evidence and going for the supernatural.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s Thomas Aquinas, basically. He says that things exist, everything that exists must have a cause. And then he just asserts out of nowhere that there cannot be an endless chain of causation — for some reason, we don’t know why he says that, but he says it. And then he goes on to say: so there must have been an uncaused cause. It’s self-refuting, really. He says everything must have a cause, and then something must have had no cause to get it all started. It doesn’t even make sense internally. And of course Epicurus throws the whole thing out because he says no — there is an endless chain of causation, that nature is eternal in both directions, that the atoms have always existed and will always exist, and that’s the cause. You don’t need to look for something outside of nature.
Cassius: So maybe one thing to look at here would be: what is Epicurus responding to? He’s responding, in part, to the observation that all people have — or at least had in his time — this religious feeling. Everybody had an understanding of the gods. How do we explain that understanding in natural terms, without reference to the supernatural? Because that would be a violation of everything in his physics. How do we approach this question? One way would be psychology — you could say the reason everybody has this belief in God is because of some particular evolutionary trait or something from culture. But Epicurus is taking the approach of looking at nature itself and defining the gods in terms of their physics.
Joshua: Well, part of the importance of it from another discussion is that it takes time to develop a background in Epicurus. Many people come just because of his discussion of pleasure and the issue that you want to live a happy life. Everyone to some extent wants to live a happy life — even someone from a Catholic or any other background; it’s pretty unusual to find somebody who says “I’d like to live a painful life.” But when you get down to this discussion of pleasure and you don’t fully at the beginning understand how sweeping a term it is for Epicurus, you might naturally assume — just as Cicero is doing — that pleasure means stimulation, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and things like that. And a danger that is going to occur to everyone in life is that as they get older, as they get sick, as they get under unfortunate circumstances, those types of stimulating pleasures can be awfully hard to find. So what’s important here is to realize that Epicurus is coming at all of this from a fundamental perspective that the pleasure we’re talking about is living without pain. And again, the reason we talk about these details of the gods is not that we have to know them in every moment — the primary issue is just that the gods don’t cause us any trouble and they don’t punish us after death. But it’s important to realize that there are stages in life when somebody dies, when bad things happen, these questions are constantly out there, and there’s always people about to throw them in your face — telling you it’s God’s will. And the only real way to be ready for those bad times is to have thought about these things ahead of time, to have this habit of approaching things rationally and systematically. Exercising your mind on questions such as “what would a god be like if he really existed?” can be an important part of that.
Cassius: One thing you said — I posted a video from that same Catholic bishop, Bishop Barron is his name. I posted his review of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, and I was reading the YouTube comment section for that, because the name of Thomas Jefferson had come up as it does in discussions of Epicurean philosophy. One of the commenters had said that Thomas Jefferson was more of an Aristotelian, he thought, because his goal was to pursue happiness or eudaimonia. And the point I wanted to make is that all of these schools we’re talking about — Stoicism, Epicureanism, all these schools — are essentially eudaimonist in nature. They’re interested in eudaimonia or happiness. And the question is: what is eudaimonia? What is happiness? And how do you get it? So that’s what differentiates them. That’s exactly what you were talking about with this issue of the summum bonum — which is, why are you doing what you do? Well, yeah — but why are you doing that? And then you just keep asking why, like any good two-year-old knows how to do, until eventually you get to the reason why you really do everything. And we can throw out this idea that it’s because of an uncaused cause. So that’s a jump from ethics to logic or physics. The reason we do everything in Epicurean philosophy is an ethical reason, and it is for pleasure. Which takes me back to Diogenes of Oenoanda, because when you quote somebody saying “Jefferson’s an Aristotelian because he’s a eudaimonist” — yeah, everybody likes happiness. Again, most people don’t have a problem with saying that happiness is a good goal. But as Diogenes of Oenoanda said in his fragment 32: the issue is not what is the means of happiness, but what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature. And he said — both now and always shouting loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks — “pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues are no way an end but the means to an end.” So you could start at this higher level: everybody wants happiness, everybody wants pleasure. But they don’t all agree about what happiness really is, or in the end how to get there. And it’s these details about whether gods exist and what your attitudes should be about them that really end up determining how you proceed.
Cassius: We should probably move on to the next section, “Incorruptibility and Virtue,” which is on page 267. And here DeWitt brings out the point that Epicurus himself, in his writings, had not called the gods immortal. Epicurus doesn’t say that they are deathless by nature. And in fact, when you go through the text, you can find references that suggest that Epicurus thought that the gods needed to act to maintain their deathlessness. And that it would be reasonable to call the actions of the gods in maintaining their deathlessness the virtue of the gods. DeWitt says: “The gods are characterized by two attributes, blissfulness and incorruptibility. Neither is inherent to their nature. They are incorruptible only because the contingency of destruction is avertable by their vigilance” — and that ongoing pleasure causes the immortality, as opposed to the immortality causing the ongoing pleasure. This issue of immortality versus incorruptibility seems important because something that was truly immortal in this natural, material, physical universe would be an aberration — very difficult to explain in the terms that Epicurus had already set down. But he says here, quoting what I gather is the Andria of Terence, where the happy lover is made to exclaim: “I think the life of the gods to be everlasting for the reason that their pleasures are perpetual — because immortality is assured to me if no grief shall intervene to mar this joy.” And so the pleasure is linked up in this — the pleasures of the gods are the cause of their immortality, not the other way around.
Cassius: And what Joshua started to say is contained at the bottom of page 267. DeWitt says: “Gods are zoa — animate beings. They are also units in the ascending order of nature, as is man. Being in this order and corporeal, they cannot be deathless. If deathlessness were inherent in their nature, they would be in another class by themselves. And since they do belong in the same class as man, it’s a logical necessity to think of their incorruptibility as by some means preserved.” And so DeWitt is going here: because we think they’re in the same class as human beings, and because there’s nothing really eternal other than the atoms, you’ve got to make sure you don’t violate your own rules there. And so DeWitt says: “Since in the cosmos of Epicurus, unlike that of Plato, this incorruptibility lacked a superior being to guarantee its continuance, the sole possibility was that the gods preserved it for themselves by their own vigilance. Thus it must be discerned that just as the happiness of man is self-achieved, so the happiness of the gods is preserved.” The higher-level principle is that gods are natural. We have previously established that only the atoms have an intrinsically eternal existence, and so therefore anything that comes from atoms, including gods, is not by nature imperishable and eternal — it has to be sustained in some way.
Joshua: I was watching Monty Python yesterday, so that’s what is prompting this thought. But just as there’s no supernatural god to oversee the natural gods, there’s also no super-supernatural god to oversee the supernatural god — and no super-super-supernatural god — and so forth. You can take that in any absurd direction you want to go. But the point is well made here: if the only thing you have is nature itself and what exists inside of nature, then the rules must necessarily be natural. It’s true for the way that Epicurus thought of the gods, it’s true for everything.
Cassius: That’s that same argument that the Catholic priest is making — “super, super, super…” You at some point get tired of adding “supers” on top of it. But when you get to that point of getting tired, that’s not the time to give in and just say, “Oh, I’m going to forget reason and rationality and just go with a supernatural God.” The option that Epicurus started tracing from the time he was twelve years old is that no — there is no reason that there was ever a beginning. Eternality of the universe makes just as much sense, and in fact a lot more sense, than believing that there’s some divine, supernatural, singular event — that once in all of eternity, something happened and a God arose and created everything. By the way, just in case people think I’m being facetious with that, my understanding is that there is an element in Hinduism of this idea where it’s not like when you die you go to heaven. There are multiple heavens, some above the other, some below. So this idea of gradations, even in a supernatural world, has been pursued by people as being worth studying.
Cassius: That reminds me — what’s “the seventh heaven”? Is that something like what you’re talking about? I remember that term from somewhere. Where does this term come from?
Joshua: Yeah, I mean, I know it was a TV show, and I think probably part of it might come from Dante. In his Inferno he’s going through all the courses and the circles of hell — but just like we’ve been talking about in this great chain of being, it’s not a quick step from humans right to God. It’s humans, then kings, then angels, then archangels and saints, and so forth, until you get to God at the very top. Just like how in hell you have gradations of horror leading to Satan in the lowest pit at the bottom, in heaven you have the same essential structure, except it’s gradations in ascending order until you get to God at the top.
Cassius: Now DeWitt mentions on page 268 he gives examples from Plutarch, who criticized Epicurus and wrote, quote: “Freedom from pain along with incorruptibility should have been inherent in the nature of the blissful being, standing in no need of active concern.” DeWitt cites “should have been” as a criticism — meaning that Plutarch thought Epicurus had said that the gods did have to take active concern over their well-being. And then Eusebius wrote, quote: “According to Epicurus it’s goodbye to providence, in spite of the fact that according to him the gods bring to bear all diligent care for the preservation of their own peculiar blessings.” The bottom line being that the gods — whether they really exist or whether there’s just a guide for us — serve as an example of a being which is tending to its own happiness, which is again what we should do ourselves. And he also quotes something that appears in Plato: “According to the Timaeus, this eternity of the cosmos depends upon the will of the supreme demiurge. Since he was the creator, he could also destroy — it’s impossible, however, to think of him as choosing to do so, thus the cosmos is eternal because it is subject to a contingency which will never occur. Even the immortality of the Christian falls in the same class, being the gift of God — it could be withdrawn.” The ultimate point remains that we’re not violating our fundamental rules about there being nothing eternal but atoms and void. Even anything we entertain as related to the gods is going to be subject to dissolution if proper steps are not taken to maintain it.
Cassius: Okay, so — isonomia — and in spite of a supercilious opinion to the contrary, Epicurus was not a muddled thinker but a very systematic one. That’s what occurs to me as we read through this: whatever you take away from this, Epicurus is going to the trouble here of exploring every possible conclusion that might have an impact on this issue of the gods, derived from his materialist physics. And it’s probably worth doing even if you decide to throw it all out.
Cassius: And where we focus in this section: isonomia is a principle that derives from infinity. We can trace that back to the end of the Letter to Pythocles, which ends: “All these things, Pythocles, you must bear in mind — for thus you will escape in most things from superstition, and will be enabled to understand what is akin to them.” Then Epicurus says: “And most of all, give yourself up to the study of the beginnings and of infinity, and of the things akin to them, and also the criteria of truth and of the feelings and the purpose for which we reason these things out. For these points, when they are thoroughly studied, will most easily enable you to understand the causes of the details — and those who don’t thoroughly take them to heart have not internalized the reason why we’re studying these things in the first place.” So apparently the study of infinity is the basis for coming up with this theory of isonomia and how things exist in the universe. Now related to that, Lucretius makes the observation that nature never creates only a single thing of a kind. And so if you combine: the universe is infinite in time — infinity in time — you’ve got infinity in space, you’ve got nature never making only a single thing of a kind, and you have the ingredients for a lot of ideas, with isonomia being the topic of this section. DeWitt suggests that we should understand isonomia to be “equitable apportionment.” The idea here is that if you have an infinite number of atoms and an infinite duration in which those atoms can come together and fall apart and spread and so forth, what you end up with is a universe in which really almost anything that is natural is possible.
Joshua: Let me put it one way, which would be to say: if you go back into the early history of multicellular life on earth, you get insects which are as big as massive birds. Picture dragonflies the size of a bald eagle, or perhaps bigger — and the reason for that was a particularly oxygen-rich environment. If you are a non-vascular animal like an insect — humans are vascular, we have hearts constantly pumping, we have vessels, veins, arteries carrying blood and with blood carrying oxygen to every cell in our body — insects don’t have that. They get oxygen basically through their environment. What they don’t have is a sophisticated vascular system like you find in warm-blooded animals like mammals. So the upper limit of the size of insects — the reason you’ll never see a spider like Shelob from Lord of the Rings — is that it simply is not sustainable on the planet we live in. So that’s the kind of limit that I think we’re talking about here. That’s why you can have, for example, a human that could wade the deepest ocean — it would seem reasonable that when you reach the conclusion that there are limits to things here on this earth, you’re going to presume that these limits are at least possibly applicable on other earths as well. Even though you haven’t been to these other planets and you don’t know the conditions — just because you haven’t been there, you don’t think that God lives on the moon. You don’t allow violations of nature that you can deduce from reasoning that you think is well grounded in the evidence. Otherwise Epicurus would simply have said: “Well, there’s no God here on earth, but I don’t know what’s going on in another galaxy — maybe God exists in that other galaxy.” Epicurus does not do that. He takes his conclusions from the observations he makes here and extends them across the whole of the infinite universe.
Cassius: There is a movie — trying to look up when it came out — 1960, called Inherit the Wind, with Spencer Tracy and so forth. It’s a courtroom drama, the story of the Scopes Monkey Trial — this question of whether you’re allowed to teach the theory of evolution in the state of Tennessee. In one moment, Spencer Tracy, who is the defense attorney for the teacher who had taught evolution, is reading from the Bible and he goes through Adam and Eve and so forth — and then he brings up a second name and he looks at the prosecutor and he says: “Now where the hell did he come from? Did God pull a creation in the next county?” I think that’s kind of what we’re talking about here. Once you establish the rules of materialism that Epicurus has established, things that happen have to accord with those rules — and it would be as ridiculous as God pulling another creation in the next county to suppose that things are radically totally different elsewhere in the universe.
Joshua: Yeah, this is one of the symbolic aspects of Venus in the Hymn to Venus in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura — this idea that Venus and Mars represent forces of coming together and falling apart. This is a poetic tradition going back to Empedocles but appearing in other Roman poets like Ennius as well — a long tradition that Lucretius is drawing on. He’s expressing it in purely material terms: atoms come together and atoms fall apart, and the coming together allows things like life, culture, civilization, and philosophy. And for every coming together there will be a falling apart again — but there’s never any final collapse, never any blinking out of existence of the universe itself.
Cassius: Right. Let me skip on down to the ending of this subsection where DeWitt says: “By this time three aspects of the principles of isonomia have been brought forward. First, that in an infinite universe perfection is bound to exist as well as imperfection — that is, ‘there must be some surpassing being than which nothing is better.’ Second, that the number of these beings, the gods, cannot be less than the number of mortals. And third, that in the universe at large the forces of preservation always prevail over the forces of destruction. All three of these are direct inferences from the infinity and eternity of the universe. There remains to be drawn an indirect inference of primary importance: since in the individual worlds the forces of destruction always prevail in the end, it follows that the incorruptible gods can have their dwelling places only outside of the individual worlds — the free spaces between the worlds, the so-called intermundia.” And so now we switch over and start talking about the life of the gods in the spaces between the worlds in Epicurean theory — where, as Lucretius describes it, the intermundia just seems to be perfectly balanced and serene, blue skies all the time for the gods.
Joshua: Did you just read that it said there is no wind blowing in the intermundia where the gods live?
Cassius: Yes, Joshua. The passage from Lucretius describes it that way.
Joshua: So that would mean the gods are not material?
Cassius: Well, Joshua was just quoting one of the poetic attributes. It’s hard to know where the poetry ends and the literal meaning begins in this chapter.
Cassius: And so in this section on the life of the gods there’s a lot of detail that we’re probably not going to try to cover today, but DeWitt mentions several aspects. Here’s one that I find interesting: Seneca’s response that the life of the Epicurean gods off there in the intermundia seemed lonely — no living thing, no human being, no property. In so speaking, there was possibly at the back of his mind his own conception of happiness: the life of a wealthy gentleman living on a rural estate abounding in farm animals, servants, and the physical comforts of life. And DeWitt says Lucretius, however, more vague and romantic than logical at the moment, speaks of nature unasked supplying every need. And then he goes on to quote Philodemus — and Philodemus in his essay on the management of an estate stresses the importance, when selecting a country property, of ensuring that the purchaser should have neighbors with whom he might enjoy good companionship, which means that they might meet often together and engage in philosophical discussion. This is the very pleasure that in his books on the gods he represents as being enjoyed by the divine beings. So an interesting quibble, but the answer being that apparently the gods aren’t lonely because at least they have each other — another illustration of how the Epicureans are using common sense from their own experience to discuss the nature of the gods, and they’re not hypothesizing something so dramatically different in class from human beings that we can’t recognize it. DeWitt quotes Philodemus saying, quote: “Philosophical converse with those of their own kind floods good men with ineffable pleasure.” And DeWitt says: like earthly Epicureans, the gods would have been social creatures and found maximum enjoyment in the company of one another. And of course there’s where he’s quoting Philodemus on what he calls a brace of interesting details — that the gods like human beings must be endowed with speech, “for we shall not think of them as more happy and indissoluble if not speaking nor conversing with one another but like dumb people.” And then the second point is the conclusion that they speak Greek: “Yes, and I swear by Zeus, we must believe that they possess the Greek language or something not far different — in no other way do we understand gods existing unless they use the Greek tongue.” And that’s always a line for lots of fun, especially with some of our Greek friends. But as DeWitt says, its interest need not stop with amusement: it had its influence on Latin literature through a chain reaction — Lucretius dwelt upon the poverty of the Latin language, but Cicero shot back at him and claimed not mere equality but superiority for Latin.
Joshua: So there’s an audiobook I’ve been listening to called Long Live Latin, written in Italian by Nicola Gardini and then translated and read for Audible by Todd Portnoy. They have a chapter on Lucretius, and one of the things it focuses on is how each different author uses the Latin language. And Gardini compares Lucretius’s use of the word religio in that famous line in Book 1 — tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (“so potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds”) — with what we just read, which comes from a later book, in which Lucretius uses the word pietas. So that religio versus pietas issue: mere superstition relating to supernatural influences is problematic, but this pietas — this view of looking to the gods as a sort of inspiration for how we should pursue philosophy — that’s how we should really be doing it.
Cassius: Yeah, that takes us back to that word “attitude” — which I think we all agree is really one of the most important aspects of this whole subject. And DeWitt mentions it on page 279 where he quotes — I think Don mentioned last week — Vatican Saying 32: “Reverence for the wise man is a great blessing for the one that feels the reverence.” So this attitude toward the gods is a friendly one, a benevolent one, and is something that is inspiring and leads to pleasure as opposed to feelings of fear or pain. I would say that we move on to the next section here, just noting that the rest of this section is devoted largely to discussion of Epicurus’s participation in the festivals and the religious activities of his time and how it does make sense that you could do that when you have the right attitude. So moving on to “Prophecy and Prayer” — DeWitt says any scholar who would lay the claim of moral invalidism at the door of Epicurus has a weak case to present when the topic of prophecy or divination is investigated. A man who possessed the moral courage to deny the existence of prophecy and to defy the immemorial beliefs of his own countrymen and to condemn the public practices of all the Greek states can hardly be set down for a moral invalid. And of course referencing here this accusation against Epicurus that all of his discussion about the gods was to do nothing other than protect himself from being forced to drink the hemlock as Socrates had done — pointing out here that the basic doctrines of Epicurus on religion would have deserved the same treatment as Socrates had received, and that Epicurus was not really escaping condemnation by describing the gods the way he did, because he was just as open to it as Socrates himself had been.
Joshua: I totally agree — and even more than just Socrates. Before Socrates you had Anaxagoras and Aristarchus, and everything that Epicurus says both about nature and about the gods is every bit as non-conventional and potentially dangerous to the very pious as what you find in any of those writers. Anaxagoras was exiled, for example, for saying that the sun was not a god but a ball of hot metal larger than the Peloponnese. So Epicurus goes much, much further than that in everything he has to say about nature.
Cassius: DeWitt says: “Neither can the man whose pronouncements on religion continued to harass the conditioned reflexes of Greeks, Jews, and Romans be cavalierly dismissed as an incoherent thinker.” In other words, Epicurus didn’t come up with nonsense that these people could just dismiss as nonsense. These people have continuously attacked Epicurean views of the gods ever since Epicurus promoted them. They weren’t something they could dismiss lightly, because as DeWitt says, the reason for his criticisms being so biting was an incontestable validity in them. And then in the last paragraph of that page he says: “Neither was there lack of courage in making these opinions known. His pronouncement was forthright and uncompromising and published in several writings. The art of prophecy is non-existent, and even if it did exist, external events are to be thought of as meaning nothing to the life within us.” And he’s echoing something Thomas Jefferson said about how we approach claims like the Trinity. DeWitt says one of the weapons employed against prophecy was ridicule — Cicero is the authority for the statement that there is nothing Epicurus ridicules so much as the prediction of future events. This chapter contains a series of citations including from Josephus, the Roman historian who went to great detail to try to refute Epicurus’s position on prophecy by citing the prophecies of Daniel and how they eventually came to pass. He also cites the references in Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle Monger, in which the Epicurean character attacks Alexander for his efforts at prophecy. And it says quote: “Divination must have been abominable to Epicurus also because it was inseparable in his world from the sordidness of magic and sorcery.” And that quote from Thomas Jefferson: “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them, and no one ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity.” So Epicurus in a very similar vein, using ridicule to approach some of these ideas in the ancient world — and no one does it better than Lucian in his discussion of Alexander the Oracle Monger. We will link to the text of that because it is essential reading on this point.
Cassius: Here’s at the top of page 287: “Even apart from the degradation of the divine and the deception of men through their hopes and fears, Epicurus had an ethical objection to urge against the business of prophecy. A scholium to Aeschylus runs as follows: ‘There is a doctrine of Epicurus denying the art of prophecy because,’ says he, ‘if fate is the master of all, when foretelling calamity you have caused pain before the due time, and when foretelling something good you spoil the pleasure.’” So that’s the other part of prophecy: it involves us in things like fate and necessity, and you start asking questions about where free will comes into this equation. If prophecy is real, there’s not much room left for it. And just like there’s not much room left for prophecy, there’s also not much room for the concept of prayer. DeWitt quotes Vatican Saying 65: “It is useless to ask of the gods such blessings as a man is capable of procuring for himself.” And he quotes Horace as saying: “It is enough to pray to Jupiter for what he gives and takes away — that he gives length of life and that he gives the means of life. As to the quiet mind, I shall provide for myself.” And looking at how this chapter ends — it continues on some details, it doesn’t, to my observation, have a big ending — but it’s time as we conclude this episode and conclude our discussion of the chapter to come back to the big picture. To emerge from the details that we’ve been swimming in about whether the gods speak Greek and how tall they are and things like that — which are not necessarily of everyday importance to us — and come back to the level of things that are of everyday importance. Let’s close this episode today by talking about our reactions to the whole chapter and any general thoughts we have. Callistheni?
Callistheni: Yes, I took a few notes. The statement that you made about thinking about the nature of the world as material rather than supernatural — that’s important before difficult things happen, or before being confronted by the death of loved ones or oneself, because those who do believe in God may tell you that it was God’s will. Being settled and clear about how you think of things is an important aspect of Epicureanism — being clear about the nature of the material world. Anytime something good happens to you, somebody’s going to say, “Isn’t God wonderful that he blessed you that way?” And then anytime something bad happens to you, “Isn’t God wonderful — he works in mysterious ways, and whatever he does works together for good to those who love the Lord.” You’re always in difficult times or exciting times of life going to be hit with these questions about your relationship to God or the gods. And if you’re not prepared for them, you can be thrown off, you can be disconcerted by them at exactly the wrong time — exactly as Lucretius was warning in Book 1 about how people who are concerned that they may go to hell are vulnerable to the manipulations of the priests because they think they have no way to escape these threats. “You yourself may sometime be drawn away from us by the rant of priests,” and so forth. So that’s right there in Book 1 of Lucretius, and he caps that thought by pointing to the human sacrifice of Iphigenia.
Cassius: You’re right, and anytime something good happens to you, somebody’s going to say it. And anytime something bad happens, well, it’s God’s will. You’re always going to be hit with these questions. And if you’re not prepared for them, you can be thrown off at exactly the wrong time, exactly as Lucretius was warning. Good thoughts, Callistheni. Joshua?
Joshua: You know, I said in a recent thread on Catholic guilt — I mentioned a few times this week and last week — I think what I said was I couldn’t stop thinking about these things even if I wanted to. The questions that we ask about nature and about death are so, so critically important, and I couldn’t bring myself to be uncaring about them even if I tried. And so even though I find this chapter a little bit too deep and a little bit too devoted to particulars than maybe I would like — because it’s not something that particularly interests me — I do find the broader subject very, very interesting, and it’s something that I think about every single day of my life.
Cassius: Yeah, we’ve had good reminders of that — not only the Catholic guilt thread you’re talking about, but again Don’s recent post on the discussion between the priest and the atheist. These are issues that will confront us and do cause lots of problems for lots of people, probably for all of us at some stage in life. Even though we might currently feel like we’ve resolved these questions, it’s almost guaranteed that when something bad happens to us, these same questions come back. And the best way to be prepared is to have thought about them ahead of time. Going through some of the details that the Epicureans were thinking about gives us an example of the approach that can be used. Again following Epicurus’s advice to Pythocles: thinking about the implications of infinity is ultimately the response to that Catholic priest that Don was talking about. We don’t let the infinite chain of causation cause us to go crazy and start believing in heaven and hell and a supernatural God. If you’re not comfortable with this issue of an infinite chain of causation being just as reasonable — and more consistent with the evidence — than a supernatural realm and a supernatural God, then it would be good advice from Epicurus to start getting comfortable with that idea. And the way to do it ultimately is to trace down through philosophy, through logic, through reason, and through evidence these questions that other people are going to assert to you at some time are simply a matter of faith. If there’s anything that Epicurus doesn’t have a whole lot of good to say about, it is blind faith — in people like Plato, in religion, in the different stories about the gods that humanity is constantly flooded with. Epicurean philosophy is an antidote to that, and this section on “The True Piety” is an emphasis on the right attitude to have about that subject. Next week we’re going to change focus — we’re going to go to Chapter 14 on “The New Virtues,” and we will once again, as we near the end of the book, get back to this question that is of prime importance to so many people: what do you mean by virtue? What’s the nature of virtue? Is virtue its own reward? What is the relationship between virtue and pleasure? How does virtue fit with an Epicurean philosophy? That’s a very big subject, and we’ll start it next week. In the meantime, drop by the forum and let us know your questions and comments, and we’ll see you in the next episode.