Episode 189 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 41 - Chapter 15 - Extension, Submergence, Revival - 04
Date: 08/31/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3271-episode-189-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-41-chapter-15-extension-submergence/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 189 completes the reading of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, concluding Chapter 15 with “The Epicurean Revival.” The discussion opens with forerunners of Gassendi: Lorenzo Valla’s On Pleasure (1431), which strategically gave the better arguments to the Epicurean side; Poggio Bracciolini, discoverer of the Lucretius manuscript; and Cosma Raimondi’s slightly earlier Letter in Defense of Epicurus (c.1429), described as the only thoroughgoing espousal of Epicurean ethical doctrine in the quattrocento. Farinata degli Uberti — the Florentine Epicurean consigned to Dante’s sixth circle of heresy — is discussed, along with Michael Marullus, who drowned in 1500 with a copy of On the Nature of Things in his pocket. The Aldine Press of Aldus Manutius and the invention of the portable book (the Enchiridion) are credited with making Lucretius widely available.
Pierre Gassendi’s project of reconciling Epicurus with Christianity — including his influence on Molière and his transmission to John Locke — is examined at length. DeWitt’s critique is emphasized: Gassendi and Locke confused the test of knowledge with the source of knowledge, ending up with an Aristotelian blank-slate model rather than Epicurus’ own view, which includes feelings and anticipations alongside sensation. The episode discusses Frances Wright, Thomas Jefferson, William Short, and Lucy Hutchinson’s Puritan-era translation of all of Lucretius. Giordano Bruno’s execution — nails driven through his lips in a cross shape as he was led to the stake — is presented as one of the most dramatic examples of Epicurean-influenced defiance. Thomas More’s Utopia is analyzed as Epicureanism with its philosophical heart removed: a world of religious tolerance that still cannot permit the belief that the soul dies with the body.
The episode closes with DeWitt’s final paragraphs on the New Testament and Epicureanism, Martin reading the more fitting conclusion from DeWitt’s bibliography section — “the student will benefit more by a resolute study of the text of Epicurus himself than by excursions into the bewildering auxiliary literature still bedeviled by a hostile tradition” — Callistheni’s question about cautions for new students, and an announcement that the next series will address Cicero’s objections to Epicurus.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we’ll walk you through the Epicurean texts and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics. We’re now in the middle of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. Now let’s join the discussion.
Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 189. We are today going to finish Epicurus and His Philosophy. We are in the fourth episode of discussing Chapter 15, entitled “Extension, Submergence, and Revival,” and today we’re on the happier title that closes the book: The Epicurean Revival. DeWitt says that the Renaissance of Epicurean studies was delayed until the 17th century and was at first confined to France. And strange to say, it was begun by a man in holy orders — Pierre Gassendi — who was attracted both by the ethical and the physical doctrines of Epicurus. The ethics presented little difficulty; the difference was not so much in content as in the absence and presence of divine sanction. The difficulty was greater in the case of physics, but Gassendi solved it neatly by declaring it was God who had created the atoms. And this combination of Christian and Epicurean doctrine was taken over by Sir Isaac Newton and made more acceptable to religious people through that technique.
Before we start the episode today, we had a brief conversation about several other people of note. And Gassendi is not the first person we have record of who was explicitly saying good things about Epicurus as the Dark Ages were coming to a close. One of the first that we identified was Lorenzo Valla, whose work On Pleasure, or Of the True and the False Good (1431), takes a very Epicurean position as to the role of pleasure and implicitly criticizes the Stoics. The consensus is that Lorenzo Valla does not explicitly end up endorsing Epicurus — that would have contradicted the restrictions of religion at the time — but the arguments Valla places in the Epicurean’s mouth are more persuasive than those he gives to the Stoics. So there is a lot of Epicurean-sympathetic material in Lorenzo Valla.
Joshua:
Right, so Lorenzo Valla and Poggio Bracciolini — who was the discoverer of the manuscript of Lucretius in 1417 — have a lot in common when it comes to their careers. In particular, they both worked as apostolic secretaries in the papal Curia, the political court of the Vatican. Neither of them was in holy orders. They were involved in the day-to-day maintenance of that massive bureaucracy: keeping track of letters, translating documents into and out of Latin, casting what the pope dictated to them into high Latin register. Poggio became apostolic secretary to a pope, and it was actually Lorenzo Valla who discovered through Latin etymology that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery — and luckily he had the kind of pope who was interested in that and didn’t immediately have him executed for it. So it is here, of all places, in the Vatican, where this early interest in Epicureanism revives itself, both with Poggio and with Lorenzo Valla.
Cassius:
Features of his On Pleasure are available on the internet. Here is something from the introduction: when Valla first wrote this treatise in 1431, he called it On Pleasure, and it was only in a later version that it became known as Of the True and the False Good. It seeks to debate the question of how humanity can achieve the good by following the precepts of ancient philosophical schools — notably Epicureanism and Stoicism — or by accepting the guidance of Christian teachings. The matter is debated by a number of eminent orators, poets, and clerics, and at the end it is agreed that Christianity provides the best way. In choosing to prefer the arguments of the Epicureans over those of the Stoics, however, Valla was being deliberately provocative. The ideas of the Stoics, who advocated virtue for its own sake, were clearly more compatible with conventional Christian teachings than those of the Epicureans, who argue in favor of pleasure as the guiding principle of moral behavior. So Valla gives the better side of the argument to the Epicureans, which is counterintuitive since the Stoic argument is more compatible with Christianity. There is good material in Lorenzo Valla’s On Pleasure.
Joshua:
Something that ties into that is someone that you mentioned, Cassius, whom I didn’t know of, who predated Valla by two years in publishing. This is Cosma Raimondi, who was apparently from Lombardy — he calls himself a native of Cremona — though very little is known about his life. He was the pupil of a well-known humanist teacher, Barziza, probably at Milan, and his only significant work is the epistolary treatise in defense of Epicurus translated by Martin Davies, published by Cambridge University Press in a volume edited by Jill Kraye. Its importance lies in the fact that it is the only thoroughgoing espousal of Epicurean ethical doctrine in the quattrocento, preceding not only the widespread dissemination of the ancient sources on Epicureanism — Book 10 of Diogenes Laertius and De Rerum Natura of Lucretius — but also the popular dialogue of Lorenzo Valla on pleasure. Raimondi argues for a human good which takes account of the whole parcel of body and mind which we are, and he finds it in the pleasure of Epicurus — a pleasure not opposed to virtue, but both guided and produced by it. The quattrocento is the 15th century as a period of Italian art or architecture, rather like when we speak of the British Romantic period or the Enlightenment.
Cassius:
And, Joshua, the translation of Raimondi’s letter by Martin Davies is excellent — I recommend it to everyone. It is, as you described, an endorsement of Epicurean ethics, a criticism of the Academics, the Stoics, and the Aristotelians, and a full-throated defense of Epicurus’s positions, in the form of a letter to a friend who had previously been Epicurean but had defected to the Stoic camp. Here is a passage near the end of the letter. Cosma Raimondi says:
“You must at length give up your attacks on Epicurus, then, reform yourself and return to the camp in which you once fought with distinction. You have now turned against him under the spell of Stoic subtlety of argument and seduced by the majesty and the splendor of the Academics and Peripatetics. But you may be forgiven for that since you are a younger man, not yet of age to form a proper judgment on these very difficult matters. With the indulgence granted to youth. But now that you have been fully instructed in the arguments of Epicurus, if you persevere in your hostility towards them, you will be thought intolerably arrogant and not a little stupid.”
This is near the end of the letter, after stating those arguments. It is a document filled with very good information and arguments that we can learn from ourselves.
Joshua:
Right. And what it represents is an attempt to pull Epicureanism out of the mire in which it had been buried for millennia. These men really do deserve credit for their effort.
Cassius:
So both of those — Lorenzo Valla and Cosma Raimondi — wrote after the rediscovery of Lucretius. But going backwards into the 13th century, there was an Italian aristocrat in Florence named Farinata degli Uberti, whose main claim to fame is that he appears in hell in Dante’s Inferno — in that sixth circle of heresy — guilty of the heresy that all Epicureans are guilty of: denying the immortality of the soul. And Boccaccio, who interestingly wrote very critically of Leontium, has this to say: “He, Farinata, was of the opinion of Epicurus that the soul dies with the body and maintained that human happiness consists in temporal pleasures. He did not follow these, though, in the way that Epicurus did — that is, by making long fasts to have afterwards pleasure in eating dry bread — but was fond of good and delicate viands, and ate them without waiting to be hungry, and for this sin he is damned as a heretic in this place.” So even before the rediscovery of Lucretius — or as that other source said, the widespread publication of Diogenes Laertius — there are earlier sources picking up on some of this, and Farinata is an interesting example.
Before we eventually move forward to Gassendi, Joshua, is there anybody else we want to mention? I know you brought up the name Michael Marullus, who wrote some poetry and apparently died in the middle of a stream with a copy of De Rerum Natura on his body.
Joshua:
Yes. On the 10th of April, 1500 — this is Wikipedia — after visiting with the humanist Raffaele Maffei in Volterra, Marullus was riding in full armor to join the armed forces against Caesar Borgia — the man Machiavelli thought should be pope, because of his ruthlessness — when he drowned with his horse in the river Ceccina, near Volterra. And what they found in his pocket was a copy of On the Nature of Things. That is the year 1500. What it tells us is that Lucretius’s poem, rediscovered in 1417, has now been sufficiently circulated that you have editions of the poem that can fit in a pocket. There was a Renaissance printer named Aldus Manutius who founded what was called the Aldine Press, born circa 1449, died circa 1515. His goal was, as he said, to inundate the reader in Greek and Latin literature, and to that end he created several new typefaces in Greek — no one had ever printed in Greek prior to this man. Before him, when a book with Greek in it was printed, the Latin script was printed and then someone who could write Greek would come in later and write the Greek by hand in the space provided. He actually prints in Greek. But the other thing he did was create what he called the Enchiridion — a small portable book which revolutionized personal reading. Those Enchiridia are the predecessors of the modern paperback. And one of the books he published was Lucretius. I don’t know if this is the book found on Marullus when he drowned, but as the forerunner of the modern pocket edition it might well have been. According to Stephen Greenblatt, Marullus becomes a kind of cautionary figure — as if dabbling in this material leads you to your death because you are toying with satanic influence.
Cassius:
Okay, well, stop me if anyone else comes to mind as we move back to Gassendi, but Gassendi is a particularly important figure for several reasons. He is not only recognized as one of the leading figures in the repopularization of Epicurus, but I think an argument can be made that Gassendi’s life of Epicurus is perhaps one of the very earliest works on Epicurus accessible to English-speaking readers. From Wikipedia: in 1645, Gassendi held a chair of mathematics at the Royal College in Paris — so we are talking about the mid-1600s. The version that became accessible to the English-speaking world was volume three of Thomas Stanley’s 1660 History of Philosophy, and there are PDF editions of that on archive.org, which we will link in the show notes. This is an extensive, almost a rewrite, with additional commentary of what Diogenes Laertius had written — not only about the life but also about the doctrines of Epicurus. Gassendi is working to make Epicurus compatible with a Christian audience to the extent he can, so he is not rigorously arguing the position of Epicurus as Cosma Raimondi does, but he is an important vehicle of transmission of Epicurean viewpoint into the English-speaking world.
Joshua:
Let me pick up on something here — the last sentence of the first paragraph in the section DeWitt calls “The Epicurean Revival,” which you have already read, Cassius. What it says is: “This combination of Christian with Epicurean doctrine was taken over by Sir Isaac Newton, and by means of it he made acceptable to religious people his revolutionary account of the universe.”
One of the more interesting claims from this period is that in classical antiquity there was this understanding that one of the early sources of atomism was a thinker in Phoenicia — not in Greece, but in Phoenicia — named Mochus, spelled M-O-C-H-U-S. What happened in the 17th century was that these early figures who were trying to adopt Epicurus’s physics and combine it with Christianity — people like Newton, Gassendi, and others — pointed to Mochus as the real source of their atomism, arguing that Democritus and Epicurus were merely transmitters of this earlier doctrine. The only reason it mattered to them is that Mochus is from the right area of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and his name sounds a little like Moses. So the claim being made by Isaac Newton, Gassendi, and others is that the real source of atomism was Moses himself, transmitted into Greek and surviving under the names of Epicurus and Democritus. It is a ridiculous claim, but it tells us something about this project of combining certain aspects of Epicureanism with certain aspects of Christianity.
Cassius:
Yeah, now that is an example of the kind of thing we are going to close our podcast today with. As soon as we finish talking about some of this history that DeWitt is laying out, we will engage in a little evaluation of efforts to revitalize Epicurean viewpoints and discuss the issues involved in attempting to combine Christianity with Epicurus. There are certainly some benefits — maybe one benefit is you do not get yourself burned at the stake. But on the other hand, if you lose sight of the fundamental consistency of the whole philosophy, then ultimately you may not be as successful as you would have liked to have been.
Among the disciples of Gassendi was the dramatist Molière, who wrote comedies in the style of Menander. And from France, the doctrines of Gassendi were carried to England in the Renaissance period and won a vogue for Epicurean studies lasting roughly from 1650 to 1725. DeWitt says: just as in ancient Rome, however, the threat to morals and religion was eventually recognized and the adverse reaction set in. As a repressing agent, the grim Puritan was extremely efficient, and the suspected creed was once more driven into anonymity. The atomic theory could be made acceptable by Sir Isaac Newton only upon condition that God was represented as the creator of the atom.
Joshua:
I just wanted to mention, since you read from DeWitt that the disciple of Gassendi was the dramatist Molière — there is supposedly a translation of Lucretius by Molière, which unfortunately is lost, but was supposed to have existed. So it is not just that Gassendi is interested in this. Molière is writing plays in the style of Menander, a contemporary and friend of Epicurus, and Molière is translating Lucretius. This is quite an exciting time period for Epicureanism, in spite of the fact that in my opinion they are doing it wrong — but at least the name is finally resurfacing in a way that is congenial to people.
Cassius:
Yes, it is hard to judge whether they were right or wrong, or whether they did what they could. DeWitt now turns to this period where Epicurus has been driven underground again in terms of explicit endorsement. But DeWitt says there is no mere accident that John Locke — who during his sojourn in France from 1675 to 1679 became a friend of François Bernier, the most outstanding exponent of Gassendi’s doctrines — should write his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and fix upon the sensations as the source of all knowledge. Even though that is not exactly the way Epicurus stated it, it still helps focus attention again on Epicurean theory. And thus, by a sort of irony, Epicurus seems to have furnished a starting point for modern empiricism.
Joshua:
So it is interesting that Locke is part of the story here, because Locke also wrote a different work called A Letter Concerning Toleration, published anonymously in Latin in the Netherlands, in which he argues well in advance of social expectation at the time in favor of religious toleration. He says all the faith and power of true religion consists in the inward and full persuasion of the mind, and that faith is not faith without believing — you cannot force religion on someone. Forcing it on people not only does not save their souls, but it makes them adverse to the very doctrine you are trying to teach them. So that is interesting. But what is more interesting is that he goes on to say that those who deny the being of a God are not at all to be tolerated. Even here, in John Locke, writing anonymously in Latin, he is not willing to say that those who deny the immortality of the soul should be tolerated. His reason is that you cannot trust an atheist to keep his promises or hold to contracts. So even in this remarkable work for religious toleration, Locke will not make that final case.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, that is a great example of the kind of caution that DeWitt is pointing out, and that we need to bring home here. It is very tempting, as a fan or proponent of Epicurean philosophy, to be enthusiastic about somebody like John Locke — someone who is at least talking about Epicurus even if combining it with Christian doctrine. But there is a serious downside to this compromise, and your example shows that Locke’s conclusions were not at all consistent with what Epicurus would have said.
And to do justice to DeWitt, we need to repeat his clear statement about the serious mistake Gassendi and Locke made. DeWitt says:
“The mistake of Gassendi to which Locke fell a prey was in confusing the test of knowledge with the source of knowledge. Epicurus based his ethics upon his physics, and as a basis of his physics he laid down twelve elementary principles derived chiefly from his predecessors, the truth of which he made no pretense of deriving from sensation.”
In other words, the deductive nature of his physics — the nature of the atoms and the void and how they operate — you do not see atoms and void with your senses. That is a deductive conclusion, not something you can directly observe empirically. Continuing:
“Moreover, the test of the truth of all inferential conclusions was not single but triple — the sensations, anticipations, and feelings. The mind of the newborn infant, so far from seeming to Epicurus to be a blank slate, was thought to have dimly inscribed upon it, as the Venusian system is outlined in the embryo, the patterns of the thoughts of the mature man. Locke’s theory of cognition compared to that of Epicurus is naive.”
So that is a clear deviation from Epicurus’s position: Locke endorses what is essentially an Aristotelian blank-slate position, rather than Epicurus’s own view, which held that the five senses are how you interact with the world, but you process that information through the mind and are also guided by feelings and anticipations as additional sources of what you conclude to be true.
DeWitt then spends some time talking about John Locke’s views on the limits of government and how those match up with the teachings of Epicurus, who was rebelling against Plato’s Laws and its proposal for maximum regimentation. DeWitt says, in the age of Cromwell and the Restoration in England, it was a pressing problem to decide how much authority a government should possess. It was precisely then that Epicureanism arrived with its doctrine of a minimum of government. Therefore began that momentous series of writings of which the chief authors were Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. Among the end results were utilitarianism, universalistic hedonism, and 19th-century liberalism. This was all anti-Platonic, and behind it was a fertile seed of Epicureanism.
It is worth interjecting that Frances Wright dedicates her book A Few Days in Athens to Jeremy Bentham. And it is in this group of people and this time period that Frances Wright was developing her interest in Epicurus.
Joshua:
Yeah, this is incredibly important. One of the other things going on in this time period — he mentioned the Puritan Revolution under Oliver Cromwell — is that one of the earliest translations of the whole of Lucretius into English comes from a very interesting person: a Puritan woman named Lucy Hutchinson. She translated Lucretius’s poem into English, and in her letter to the Earl of Anglesey explaining why she did it, she says she wanted to understand what she had heard so much about at second hand. Even while the Puritan government is in full swing, destroying icons, clamping down on the theaters — even in all of that, Lucy Hutchinson is translating the poem because people are talking about it. She wants to know what the men in the other room are discussing.
She also says that if it were still in her hands she would burn it, and that one of the reasons she translated the poem was that John Evelyn had translated only the first book and put his face in a laurel crown on the frontispiece — and she wanted credit. She wanted credit for translating this very difficult poem. I think this is the first translation into English of the whole poem.
The image that Stephen Greenblatt uses to describe this is a resurgence of Epicureanism and classical thinking generally that is welling up, pushing against an artificial ceiling that has been placed over these ideas but cannot ultimately be held back. Even when writers were apologizing for what they were doing, they were investing enormous time and effort in these translations.
Cassius:
We could probably spend a whole episode on different translators of Lucretius over the years. You mentioned Creech — Creech is very difficult to read and I would not recommend anyone try to tackle that edition, even though Thomas Jefferson had it. There is a 1743 edition published by Daniel Brown, with an anonymous translator, that is significantly better. But these translators are apologizing for what they are doing, not willing to give the full original version, saying that certain parts are too risqué to translate. You have to wonder whether their apologies are their true views or whether they truly agree with what they have translated and are protecting themselves through their apologies.
Frances Wright has a section of her book in which she talks about how some of the most important writers on ethics consistent with Epicurus are unwilling to cite the name of Epicurus as their authority.
Joshua:
Right, and now I have to apologize, Cassius — it was actually John Evelyn, not Thomas Creech, who had only translated the first book and whom Lucy Hutchinson was responding to.
We are now down to the last two paragraphs of the book. You know what — I realized, Cassius — we are heading toward Thomas Jefferson, but I realized that in our introduction to this episode, where we were talking so much about these historical figures, we never once mentioned Giordano Bruno. And I know he is one of your favorites, so say something about him so we do not do him a total injustice.
Cassius:
He is one of my favorites, and part of what I love about this whole story is that he was executed — burned to death, actually — by Cardinal Bellarmino in the Campo de’ Fiori, what is now the fruit and vegetable market in Rome. In the century afterward, his admirers erected a statue of him, glowering in the direction of the Vatican. The reason he was killed, and imprisoned for seven years before being killed, was that he had taken to heart some of Epicurus’s and particularly Lucretius’s ideas about nature. He was fascinated by the idea that the universe truly is infinite, that there are many other worlds like ours — in fact an infinite number of worlds sustaining life. He is absolutely captivated by the atomism and by the grandeur and mystery of the Epicurean cosmos. For his trouble he is imprisoned for seven years, questioned vigorously, tortured, and never once recants his position. In fact, on the way to the stake, as they are leading him to his death, they ask if he has any final words — expecting what most people do in that situation, which is beg their way out — and instead he states everything that he believes as clearly and completely as he believes it. And in order to silence him, they drive two nails through his lips — one vertically and one horizontally, in the shape of a cross — before killing him. It is one of the most interesting examples of how Epicureanism, and particularly how Lucretius’s poem, has survived. Another person we did not talk about was Montaigne — but I have talked about Montaigne quite a lot. We may have mentioned seven or eight names today, but this really is a cultural phenomenon, and that is part of what is so interesting about the Renaissance here and about later periods.
Joshua:
The treatment of Bruno that you have just described reminds me of the recent discussions we have had about how Philodemus, apparently in On Anger, takes the position that the Epicurean view is that anger is in fact appropriate in certain situations — and the way someone like Bruno was treated produces exactly that kind of thought process in my own mind.
But we got to Bruno because we began to talk about Thomas Jefferson. We could almost spend another full episode on Jefferson, and now that I think about it, I don’t know that I’ve thought about this before, but DeWitt does not spend a lot of time in his book talking about Thomas Jefferson’s views about Epicurus — his writings where he says to William Short, “I too am an Epicurean.” That letter is something everyone interested in American history and Epicurus ought to be aware of and have a copy of, because it is a specific endorsement and application of Epicurus’s theories and shows Jefferson encouraging William Short not to be passively idle — since that contradicts the instructions of Epicurus — but to vigorously stand up and pursue life. That is an issue we regularly talk about.
Cassius:
So there is much to be said about Thomas Jefferson’s views, which we can only mention here. But there are collections of excerpts from his letters to friends — to John Adams, again to William Short — where Epicurus is mentioned or Epicurean theories are explicitly included. It would be too much of a tangent to discuss whether Jefferson was truly consistent with Epicurus in all respects, but clearly Thomas Jefferson as a former president is a very well-known figure, and to have such a person be interested in Epicurus — endorsing his views and even arguing them to his friends, even if in private — is a significant endorsement of the Epicurean viewpoint.
Joshua:
It is. And one of the more interesting aspects of this is that what Jefferson was reading and thinking about becomes important because, when the Library of Congress burned, Jefferson made the offer to sell his entire collection to Congress near the end of his life — which he did. And so when one of our friends, Don, was at the Library of Congress in Washington and came across Jefferson’s collection, what he found there were several translations of Lucretius in three or four different languages. Thomas Jefferson had English editions, Latin editions, French editions, and German editions — and sold all of them to Congress for their library. There is a great deal about Thomas Jefferson’s interest in Epicurus that has not yet been discovered or discussed.
Of course Jefferson had a visit from Frances Wright and explicitly endorsed A Few Days in Athens as an extremely good book he got much pleasure from reading.
Just one more example on that front: Thomas Jefferson’s correspondent was William Short, where Jefferson says “I too am an Epicurean.” We may have to presume that William Short had said “I am an Epicurean” for Jefferson to give that response. I bring it up because William Short had spent a lot of time in France — as did Frances Wright, who traveled in some of these same circles. And one of the things William Short experienced in France was jumping into a river to save a drowning boy. There is a story in Frances Wright’s book in which a very similar series of events takes place. So this community — we are seeing only what they published and what has survived — I have to imagine it was far richer than the surface we can see.
Cassius:
I have got to echo that. There is no way a book like A Few Days in Athens just pops out of the air without a background of discussion and exchange of ideas. Frances Wright’s father or uncle was a philosophy professor during this period. There has got to be a great deal of additional material from that period in which Epicurus is discussed by some extremely intelligent people that would be very interesting for us to pursue.
Okay, let us turn to the final paragraph, and I want to take the liberty of dividing it into two sections, because I think the first is extremely important to basically everybody who is interested in Epicurus, and the second part will be of interest to a lesser number of people — and we will talk about that when we get to it. Here is the first part of the final paragraph of DeWitt’s book:
“As for classical scholars, their attitude towards Epicurus has been contemptuous in the main and their treatment perfunctory. In bibliography, Epicurus’s name runs a poor second to that of his alphabetical neighbor Epictetus. Since 1900, a slow increase of interest has become apparent and still persists, but many tedious investigations remain to be made if the misrepresentations of centuries are to be rectified.”
That would be a great place to end the book, because that is a theme DeWitt has been hitting throughout — and one we have attempted to hit as we have gone through the book. That the commentaries of classical scholars are for the most part hostile. If you go back to the very beginning, DeWitt starts the book by emphasizing to his reader that they need to understand that Epicurus is at the same time one of the most beloved figures in philosophical history and one of the most hated — and in most cases there is no middle ground between those two. The writers whose works have been preserved over the years are largely those who hated Epicurus. It is very difficult to find people who are truly neutral on these ideas. The controversy and the implications are so explosive that it is very difficult to detach yourself from them and treat them neutrally. So DeWitt is here closing the book with the same caution he started with: go back to the text of Epicurus himself, as few as they may be, and attempt to fairly and objectively assess what they all mean together.
Joshua:
Right — now that is of particular interest to us, isn’t it, because part of our whole project on the forum and here on the podcast is to extend the interest and understanding of Epicurean philosophy. And to that end — what DeWitt didn’t live to see — a revival in interest in Epicureanism has really taken place, not anywhere on the level of the revival of interest in Stoicism, but there are a number of groups involved in this, and we are just one of them.
Cassius:
Yes, you are right, Joshua. Now, as we move to the latter part of our episode today, the final section of this paragraph will provide us a good bridge. DeWitt closes the paragraph by saying:
“In particular, the New Testament must be diligently studied anew for traces of the language and thought of Epicureanism, which in that day was flourishing both in Judea and in the Greek cities where the apostles sought their converts. This background was helping to shape the new doctrine.”
Now there is something going on here — that DeWitt would choose to close his book on Epicurus with what is, frankly, a very uninspiring and academic commentary about Christianity. Of course, if someone reads DeWitt’s St. Paul and Epicurus they will get a lot more of it. DeWitt chose to explore parallels between Christianity and Epicurus as a matter of either personal interest or an idea like those of the people we have just been mentioning — Gassendi and others who tried to adapt Epicurus to Christianity to make it more acceptable or at least more possible to discuss. There are all sorts of motivations one can have in drawing parallels between philosophies.
I know one thing that came up in some of our recent discussions is that despite DeWitt’s constant pursuit of these parallels, I don’t recall that DeWitt ever explicitly says about himself: “I am a Christian and the Christian views are superior,” or that “Epicurus was wrong about something.” So it is an interesting thing that DeWitt does not seem to be using this book as a bridge to recruit new Christians, as much as seemingly using it as a method of having Christians — who as a matter of simple fact are the majority of people he was dealing with in his time and frankly that we continue to deal with today — use that common reference point as an introduction to a new subject.
Joshua:
Right — now there is an obituary of DeWitt by H. Bennett written in a journal called Phoenix, volume 12, number 4, published in the winter of 1958 by the Classical Association of Canada. I will quote a small part of it: “It was natural that DeWitt’s blithe spirit should turn in later years to the study of Epicurean philosophy, many precepts of which he found to accord with his own views of life. The works of his early retirement, Epicurus and His Philosophy and St. Paul and Epicurus, are a defense of the philosopher against the imputation of a vulgar hedonism and a demonstration that Epicurean doctrines have much in common with the Christian theology of St. Paul.”
So the same kind of claim being made here — and if this eulogizer is to be believed, it is true in a sense that DeWitt had incorporated some sense of Epicurean philosophy into his own life.
Cassius:
You know, it is interesting there. As far as the reference to Paul goes — the views of Paul that DeWitt found to be consistent with those of Epicurus were things like charity, hope, and interrelationships between friends — things that are absolutely unrelated to the real core of the issue: whether there is a divine God creating and running the universe, and whether there is life after death. I don’t think there are many Christians who would fail to understand that those core doctrines of Epicurus are totally incompatible with Christianity. And so you have to wonder whether the obituary writer was simply being kind, pointing out that DeWitt had a lot of good things to say about the doctrines of St. Paul and how they were similar to those of Epicurus — while simply leaving out the fact that the most penetrating and controversial Epicurean positions have absolutely nothing to do with the positions of St. Paul and are totally contradictory to them.
So with that discussion of DeWitt personally, and the obstacles or issues that DeWitt personally faced, we can close the episode today with a general reflection on how those same issues have been at work throughout the centuries and continue to be important to us today.
Taking an Epicurean position in the middle of an extremely religious environment can lead to losing your job, your friends, your family — or your life, as Giordano Bruno found out. Of course, in the ancient world there was a specific closing of the organized schools at different times. But maybe the issue that will continue to be of most interest to the most people is the position that Epicurus’s argument about freedom from fear of death and freedom from fear of the gods is intended to bring comfort and to address the anxiety people have about these issues. But there are people who take the position that their beliefs about a divine God who providentially creates and guides the world and provides life after death are some of the greatest sources of comfort in their lives. So you have people who take totally divergent positions about what does bring them comfort and what brings them pain.
Combined with that is the question of: do we always choose comfort? Or do we choose pain, as Epicurus says, when the choice of an action that brings short-term pain ends up leading to greater pleasure or lesser pain over time? There is this conflict and tension between people interested in pursuing what they believe is the truth and those who find comfort in other views. There are many, many issues involved — so I will throw it open from here for us to discuss to the end of the episode.
Joshua:
I could take up the question, Cassius, by pointing to Thomas More’s Utopia, which was written after reading a travelogue by Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci had made a comment that the mode of life of the Native Americans was Epicurean because they did not have churches, did not have governments that bound them to certain duties. So Thomas More takes up the challenge of writing an extensive work on religious toleration called Utopia — the word Utopia meaning “no place.” This will never happen, More is saying. It cannot exist anywhere; it is unsustainable. But he takes this new world being discovered at the time and situates his Utopia there, far removed from European culture and religion and mores. And what you find in Utopia is a toleration of a type of approach to life utterly foreign to the very Christian England of More’s own day. The king of Utopia says that any religion, any belief in God, can be tolerated. We are not going to police heresy or orthodoxy. You can believe whatever you want — with one exception. The only thing that cannot be tolerated is the belief that the soul dies with the body and that the universe is the mere sport of chance.
In other words, even in this imaginary world far in advance of the Europe and England of More’s day, those two beliefs are not to be tolerated. What More does is design a society that in many respects resembles aspects of Epicureanism — and his impetus for writing the book was Epicureanism — but then he systematically rips the heart out of it by saying these two things you cannot believe. And to attempt to be an Epicurean while believing the soul is immortal, or while thinking we live in a specially created universe that has us in mind, is a contradiction in terms, because those two ideas are fundamentally non-Epicurean. That is part of the problem. It is the problem with Gassendi and his project, it is the problem with Isaac Newton and his attempt to connect atomism back to Moses, and it is certainly a problem in Thomas More’s Utopia.
So the question becomes: how do we get to a point where people can take on board the ethics of Epicurus — the compassion, the kindliness, the valuing of life because it brings pleasure — and some of his understanding of nature, which the scientists of the day were beginning to confirm, without rejecting the core belief: that the soul is mortal and dies when the body dies? And for an Epicurean, you really cannot divorce those two.
Cassius:
Okay, we are going to end up running out of time for this episode. So let’s go ahead and go around the table and see if there are other closing thoughts or comments before we do bring it to a conclusion. Martin, any thoughts today?
Martin:
Yes — maybe let the book finish at page 358. But after that comes the section on bibliography, which is an interesting read, and especially the last sentence. I will quote it, because it pretty much says in different words what Cassius said already earlier:
“As things are, however, the student will benefit more by a resolute study of the text of Epicurus himself than by excursions into the bewildering auxiliary literature still bedeviled by a hostile tradition. It is the aim of the present study to have pioneered in this direction.”
Cassius:
Martin, I am so glad you pointed that out, because you are exactly right. The bibliography section is only two pages long, but that closing statement is almost a more fitting end of the entire book than the official end on page 358. I have got to echo what he said: you will benefit more from the resolute study of the text of Epicurus himself than by excursions into the bewildering auxiliary literature, still bedeviled by a hostile tradition. And in this last sentence I see what DeWitt wanted this book to be accepted as and what he was trying to do: “It is the aim of the present study to have pioneered in this direction.”
And that is the way you end up taking DeWitt — for all of his flaws, for all of his excursions into parallels that some of us accept and some of us do not. What DeWitt has done in this book is pioneer in the direction of going back to the original text and interpreting them in ways more consistent with not only the full body of the text but also with fewer emendations. That is something we have been running across in recent months as several of our core participants at EpicureanFriends — and I specifically have to mention Don — have gotten into the attempt to understand and read Greek for themselves and look back at the texts available on the internet to see how even Usener and Cyril Bailey, just about everybody it seems, is tempted to amend and make changes or interpret the texts in ways consistent with their viewpoint but not always consistent with what is actually on the piece of paper that has been preserved over the centuries. What DeWitt has done in a number of places is go back and look past the emendations that the authorities have come up with to the original text and found that they mean something different. That takes a lot of work, but it is very valuable and very rewarding. I want to again appreciate the work that Don has done in this direction, because he is showing us examples of how you cannot simply trust a commentator — you need to go back as best you can and validate what is being said in the original text.
So Martin, that is a great comment to end the podcast with here today. Callistheni, anything?
Callistheni:
Yes — since this is the concluding episode, and looking back over the whole experience since we have pretty much gone through DeWitt with a fine-tooth comb: are there any things that pop out to any of you regarding cautions that you would give a newer student — maybe someone who does not have any background in Epicurus?
Cassius:
Joshua, let me take that first and say this: the most important caution people need to take, Callistheni, would arise from what we have been discussing here at the end — about writers in the past who have attempted to compromise and combine Christianity or other viewpoints with Epicurean philosophy, or those who have taken one part of the teachings of Epicurus and attempted to focus only on that without the rest. That is the main caution — not only with DeWitt but with anyone.
I think DeWitt is probably less culpable of this than most other writers. But just as we criticized DeWitt at times for being tempted to appeal to people through their Christianity to get them interested in Epicurus, there is also a strong temptation to appeal to people purely on the grounds that they want to be happy. I think there is a similar problem with both approaches. If you focus only on the parallels to Christianity, or only on the ethical conclusion that pleasure is the goal, then you do not get the full picture necessary to understand exactly how Epicurus is approaching these problems. DeWitt’s presentation is going to appeal to somebody who has some knowledge of Epicurus and some degree of interest in philosophy or higher-level training. It is certainly a lot of technical information that will appeal to some people and not to others. So it can be useful to appeal to someone interested in parallels with Christianity as an opening position, or to someone who is anxious or unhappy and wants to deal with unhappiness — but it is a very subtle and complicated thing to appeal to those people in a way that conveys the whole truth of the situation. The sooner you are able to introduce the full aspects of the philosophy to those people, the better off you are going to be, and the less time you are going to waste for yourself or for them. If people are committed to some doctrine incompatible with a significant part of Epicurus, then the benefit they will get from spending time only on his views about happiness will be much curtailed compared to what they would get if they were willing to openly address the full aspect of the philosophy.
So that is the main caution I think needs to be adopted — and just like DeWitt starts his book with the caution that Epicurus was both the most beloved and the most hated of philosophers, people need to understand and be cautious about why they are approaching Epicurus and what they expect to find. As soon as possible, open yourself to the wider picture, so that as soon as possible you get an idea of where it is all going. Joshua, what are your thoughts?
Joshua:
Well, since we are giving Don kudos today and I think that is very justified, I can cite page four of his Letter to Menoikeus: A New Translation with Commentary, where he quotes Philodemus. Don writes: “Philodemus himself is on record as advocating that Epicureans needed to study the works of Epicurus to really understand the philosophy.” And Philodemus says:
“He who claims to know us and to be instructed by us, who claims to be a genuine reader of various writings and of complete books — even if he says something correctly, he has only memorized various quotations and does not know the multitude of our thoughts. What he has to do, he looks up in summaries, like people who believe that they can learn to be steersmen from books and can cross every ocean.”
And Don quotes another one in Philodemus: “But the most shocking thing of most Epicureans is the unforgivable inactivity in regards to the books.”
Now my intention at the end of this episode is not to come off quite as sternly as Philodemus does there, but that is the main caution I would give: as far as secondary literature goes, DeWitt is notable for a number of reasons, one of which is that this is sort of the fullest positive, or almost pro-Epicurean, explication of Epicurean philosophy that touches on almost all of the major aspects — not just the ethics, not just the physics, not just the canonics, but all of it and how it all comes together. So the book is very useful in that respect, and I have probably learned a great deal just by going through it in this series. But it cannot be regarded as a substitute for spending time with the surviving works of Epicurus, or with the surviving poem of Lucretius. That part is always to be kept in mind: we have to return to the books, as Philodemus is urging us to do.
Martin:
The other thing we should always do is think of what makes the most sense for us. When I do this, I check the text itself — it is almost always the case that it matches what Epicurus wrote. But if we use our own internally consistent interpretation and someone finds out it does not make sense for that person, then that person is better off with a different philosophy.
Cassius:
Great point, Martin. Not everybody is cut out to be an Epicurean. Not everybody is going to agree with Epicurus. Just bringing the facts and communicating clearly to someone is no guarantee that the person is going to agree with you, and you have to be prepared for that. That is a big problem that you brought up, because people do tend to think: well, everybody wants to be happy, Epicurus is all about being happy — why isn’t everybody just a big fan of Epicurus? All we need to do is tell everybody what he had to say and everybody will be happy with each other and happy with Epicurus and we will all be friends. But that is just not the way it is, because people who are committed to opposing viewpoints are not going to take kindly to what Epicurus has to say. Even if you can get past someone who is a Stoic and suspicious of pleasure and happiness — and thankfully that type of person does not exist in such great numbers — once you get into the fundamentals of Epicurean philosophy there is a much larger number of people who are just not going to agree with what his position was. And as intelligent or articulate as you might be, you are not going to be able to persuade them. That is something Frances Wright brings up in her book — that arguments of people in opposing positions rarely bring people to the same conclusion if they have started out committed to positions that are not reconcilable.
We are going to begin to run long, so let me close the episode by saying one more thing about what Callistheni had to say. Epicurean philosophy is not tremendously difficult in its outlines — Cicero says it is the simplest of the major philosophies to consider. But it has very subtle aspects to it that do take a background in reading. And what we are going to be addressing in Cicero are a large number of the strongest arguments that the great minds of the ancient world put together to oppose Epicurean philosophy and to oppose what Epicurus was teaching. Unless you have some kind of background in their arguments and in Epicurean philosophy as well, you are going to find those arguments of Cicero very difficult to deal with, and people are going to be tempted to put the book down and say: I do not care what Cicero or anybody else thinks — this is what I think. But if you are going to have confidence in your philosophy, you need to understand the arguments against it. And after all the work we have done in this podcast over the past 180-plus episodes, I think we have gotten among those following along a much deeper understanding of Epicurean philosophy than we had at the beginning. We are now much more equipped to dive into Cicero’s objections and ridicule of Epicurus from a much greater position of strength and understanding.
So hopefully as we tackle this new project, we are going to enter a new phase of being able to explain Epicurus’s positions to other people so that they can also profit from it and, along with their friends, live better and happier lives. So with that, let us close the episode, drop by the forum, let us know what you are thinking about what we have said in this podcast and participate with us there. So until next week, bye.