Episode 227 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 02 - Velleius Begins His Attack On Traditional Views Of The Gods
Date: 05/10/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3833-episode-227-cicero-s-otnotg-02-velleius-begins-his-attack-on-traditional-views-o/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 227 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and we 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 discussing the Epicurean sections of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. Last week we went through the opening sections where Cicero described why he was writing this and basically how important this issue is — for many reasons, but certainly from Cicero’s point of view, one of them being that if you don’t have the gods to tell you what to do, to give you instructions on how to live, or to threaten punishment for bad behavior and offer reward for good behavior, then you’re likely to have a society that careens totally out of control. And in regard to the importance of this question, one thing that came to my attention just yesterday as we’re getting ready for this podcast is that we have a new participant on the EpicureanFriends Forum who pointed out that she had seen a chart of comparison between Epicureanism and Stoicism that had been prepared by a Stoic. We’re going to post a copy of that chart in the thread for today. A pattern that we often see is that Epicureanism as presented on the internet is often Epicureanism through Stoic eyes or Epicureanism through Buddhist eyes. And without being overly critical of them and their perspectives, it’s natural that they are going to see things in Epicureanism that in many cases are not there, but which they think they are identifying from their own perspective.
In the case of this chart, the chart is divided into virtues, pleasures, the gods, and superstition and divination. It’s worth commenting that high-level summaries in charts like this can be deceptive and incomplete in the best of circumstances. But when they’re prepared from another perspective, there can be particularly a problem. In this chart, as to the gods, the Epicurean entry says, “don’t impact our lives, ignore them,” and the Stoic entry says, “do impact our lives, honor and revere them.” The first comment I’d make is that this underplays the situation for the Stoics, because the Stoics, as we’re going to be discussing, are taking the position that not only do the gods impact our lives, but they basically dictate everything that happens to us. And as a result of seeing everything happening to us as being generated by the gods, the Stoic view is that we should honor and revere the gods and just basically accept our fate and live with it. But when the Epicurean entry says, in summary, “they don’t impact our lives and we should ignore the gods,” that’s a particularly inadequate and inappropriate — and just simply erroneous — summary of the Epicurean position on gods, as we’re going to see Velleius go through.
Now while the gods don’t control our lives, while they don’t intervene in our lives — and that’s a legitimate usage of the word “impact” — the gods do serve a very important function in Epicurean philosophy. And in terms of “ignoring” them, we’re about to spend weeks and weeks going through what Velleius is going to have to say about the gods, and ignoring them and ignoring the topic is exactly not what Velleius is about to do. We’re going to postpone the discussion of the constant issue of whether the Epicureans thought that the gods had a real flesh-and-blood atomic existence in some part of the universe — as appears to be the case given what Velleius is going to tell us and what we have from other sources including Philodemus — or whether the Epicurean position is that these are sort of thought-constructs, that the gods exist as mental pictures generated within humans. Under either scenario, whether they are actual atomic beings in some corner of the universe, or whether they are mental constructs by human beings, the gods are a subject which definitely do have impact in our lives. And the gods, as a subject, are certainly something that you’re not supposed to ignore as a subject. Again, the very first Principal Doctrine is devoted to a discussion of an important aspect of the gods. Epicurus’ Letter to Menoikeus begins with important instructions about what to think about the gods. The gods are covered in Lucretius. The gods are discussed in Diogenes of Oinoanda. The gods are discussed at length in numbers of texts by Philodemus. So it is not a subject to be ignored, and it is not a subject to think does not impact our lives.
So once again, the danger of looking at Epicureanism through Stoic or Buddhist eyes is that because Epicurus took a different view of the control that the gods have over humanity, that does not mean that Epicurus doesn’t have a lot to say about what he thinks the nature of the gods really is. And again, that’s what we’re going to be seeing as we go through On the Nature of the Gods. The fourth category this chart mentions is superstition and divination. The chart says that those subjects are false and to be avoided, and that this is exactly the same attitude that both the Epicureans and the Stoics took. I would suggest at the very least that the Epicurean view of superstition and divination is not simply that those things are false. Lucretius, for example, says call upon Neptune if you like, if you want to use figures of speech to call upon the gods — but don’t ever believe that the gods are really involved in your life. Another example would be Lucian, with a lot of statements Lucian makes throughout many of his dialogues, but in particular Alexander the Oracle-Monger. The word superstition and divination can be hard to define and different people are going to consider different things to be superstition. But at least for the moment, the point I would like to stress is that I don’t think Epicurus would have said that they are simply false. They are detrimental to happiness. The whole idea of believing that the gods are intervening in the world, and that we have some connection to them, the ability to predict what they are going to tell us to do or predict what they’re going to do themselves — that’s not something that is simply false and to be avoided. That is something that is the number one key problem in the corruption of the world and the inability to live a happy life from Epicurus’ point of view. And as Lucretius says very early in Book One, the priests and the poets are spinning these tales about hell and the threats that you face and the rewards that you might get because they’re trying to manipulate you, and the way out of that manipulation is to understand that these things are impossible and cannot possibly be true.
This is an example of common perceptions about Epicurean views towards religion that are actually very harmful in keeping people away from understanding what the Epicureans were really going towards. If you simply stop and think “don’t fear the gods” and that’s all you need to know about the gods, then you’re going to be missing a tremendous amount of important Epicurean philosophy that is very helpful to place all the philosophy within one single big picture if you dive into the details of it.
Joshua: So what I’m hearing from you, Cassius, is that this is one extreme of how people have approached this question — to just push it off so remotely that it is of absolutely no importance to the philosophy. And you’ve, I think, stated the case that this is probably actually unproductive and even misleading as to the actual thoughts of Epicurus and his followers on the issue of the gods. Why did they write about it so much if it was of absolutely no importance? But there is another extreme to this problem, and it’s an extreme that I see here in the introduction to John Mason Good’s 1805 blank verse translation of Lucretius. He manages to get it very, very wrong on what they had to say about the gods. So let’s talk about that for just a minute to kind of set the outer limits of where people go wildly wrong here. I’m going to quote from his “Life of Lucretius,” which is about thirty pages long, and nobody knows enough about Lucretius’ life to publish a thirty-page biography. Unfortunately, about 95% of this appears to me to be outright fiction. And I will post a link to this — it’s on archive.org. I am quoting from around page 65. He says:
“But the Epicureans, it may be said, were atheists. They denied the existence of a God and of a future state. And some parts of the poem of Lucretius are expressly written to establish such denial. Let us examine these assertions separately. If in the first place it be atheism to deny the existence of those absurd and vicious deities who were the sole objects of adoration with the multitude, the Epicureans were certainly guilty of atheism, for such they did deny. But it is so far from being provable that they uniformly disbelieved the existence of an eternal first cause of all things that it is perhaps impossible to produce an Epicurean philosopher of any age against whom such a charge can be legitimately substantiated. The philosophers of this school, on the contrary, have at all times as openly avowed the existence of such a deity, and in many instances as strenuously contended for the truth of such an avowal as the disciples of any system whatsoever.”
And then it gets really confusing. John Mason Good says: “Epicurus admitted moreover, the existence of orders of intelligences possessed of superior powers to the human race, whom, like the angels and archangels of the Christian system, he conceived to be immortal from their nature, to have been created anterior to the formation of the world, to be endowed with far ampler faculties of enjoyment than mankind, to be formed of far purer materials, and to exist in far happier abodes. The chief difference which I have been able to discern between the immortal spirits of the Epicurean system and of the Christian Theologist is that while the latter are supposed to take an active part in the divine government of the world, the former are represented as having no kind of connection with it, since it was conceived by Epicurus that such an interference is absolutely beyond their power and would be totally subversive of their beatitude.”
Cassius: This reminds me of a game that children sometimes play which I think is called “Telephone.” You have a bunch of people sitting in a circle and the teacher whispers in the ear of the first kid a sentence, and then they whisper it in the ear of the next kid. By the time you get to the end, maybe there are elements of it that ring true to the original sentence, but it’s become so divergent from what was actually said that while it sounds similar it’s actually completely wrong. And that’s John Mason Good’s introduction to Lucretius. While he talks about some of the things that the Epicureans really did talk about — that the gods exist removed from human affairs, that they are immortal or incorruptible, and that the common understanding of the gods by the multitude is a false understanding — John Mason Good manages to get almost everything important wrong when he says there is a first cause, that there was a creator, that the gods that Epicurus describes as living removed from human affairs are actually created beings created by this first-cause God, and that they are similar to the angels and archangels of Christianity. This is about as bad as I’ve ever seen, in terms of getting this profoundly wrong.
So that sets up for us the two extremes that we’re going to avoid as we work our way through this series. We’re going to avoid the extreme that says the gods are so far removed and they have no effect on us that they’re completely unimportant to the philosophy and they mean nothing. And then on the other side, you have this view which is: well, Epicurus was saying that there is a prime mover and a first cause after all, and the gods he’s talking about that are removed from the world are actually the angels and archangels of the first cause. So that sets up the course that we need to navigate as we go through this series.
And probably before we move on, let me comment just quickly on how that same process works in this chart on the other two categories. The first category listed — virtues — says that the Epicureans held that virtues are useful but not goods, and contrasts that with the Stoics who said that virtues are the highest good and that virtues are their own reward. As usual, it seems like the Stoics can state their own doctrine fairly accurately. But in terms of the Epicurean position on virtues, the implication of saying that they’re useful but not goods, I think, is unfair to the emphasis that Epicurus did place on virtue — that you cannot live happily without being virtuous, and if you’re virtuous you can’t help but be happy — because it’s in a framework of understanding that virtue is not an end in itself, but only pleasure is an end in itself. And while that means that virtue should not be pursued for the sake of virtue alone, it means that there are, as a human being, certain essential things that you have to do with your life. And if you do not understand and practice the wisdom of acting in particular ways, then you’re not going to be successful in achieving pleasure. So Epicurus does not consider virtues unimportant, as this summary might imply, but he has an important perspective on virtue that his opponents often leave totally out of the picture.
The same thing with pleasures. The chart says that Epicurus held that pleasure is the highest good and what we should seek in life, and contrasts him with the Stoics who say that pleasures are preferred indifferents and not essential for a good life. As to the Epicurean summary — that pleasure is the highest good and that we should seek it in life — you’ve got the problem that there’s a grain of truth in that, but it is by far not the whole picture, because you must first understand what “pleasure” really means. The presentation that goes along with this chart falls victim to the predominant problem in outsiders reading Epicurean philosophy: they consider pleasure to be only the stimulations of the senses, and they do not explain that Epicurus held that all activities of life which are not painful are pleasurable. When Epicurus talked about absence of pain, he didn’t mean some new category of experience that’s different from pain and pleasure, because the point these people never explain is that Epicurus held that there are only two feelings — pleasure and pain — and so absence of pain is the exact same thing as pleasure. It is not a different experience that is somehow more important than pleasure itself. Epicurus can be as logically precise as any Stoic ever was, and when you have only two experiences — pleasure and pain — when you’re not experiencing pain you are experiencing pleasure, full stop. And that means that pleasure is not just these stimulations of the senses but is a much wider category of everything in life that is not painful. And that category includes all of the literature and art and philosophy and good feeling and every experience that we find agreeable in life. So again, the point for today is that if you gloss over important differences, you’ll end up butchering the whole process.
Joshua: Yeah, and if people go back to Episode 201, that’s a really good episode where we talk about this issue of how there are only two feelings — pleasure and pain — how absence of pain is pleasure, and so forth. That’s a good episode on that point, from our series on Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends.
Cassius: Yes. And so now to get to the new material — in section seven, let’s first discuss the opening of the scene here. Cicero’s told us that he’d gotten together with his friend Cotta, and there was a discussion going on between Cotta and Velleius about the nature of the gods. And then we get to section seven, which says this — this is Cicero speaking:
“Indeed, said I, I think I’ve come very seasonably, as you say, for here are three chiefs of the three principal sects met together. If Marcus Piso was present, no sect of philosophy that is in any esteem would want an advocate. And then, if Antiochus’ book replied Cotta, which he lately sent to Balbus, is true, you have no occasion to wish for your friend Piso, for Antiochus is of the opinion that the Stoics do not differ from the Peripatetics in fact, although they do in words. And I should be glad to know what you think of that book, Balbus. I said Balbus: I wonder that Antiochus, a man of the clearest apprehension, should not see what a vast difference there is between the Stoics, who distinguished the honest and the profitable not only in name but absolutely in kind, and the Peripatetics, who blend the honest with the profitable in such a manner that they differ only in degrees and proportion and not in kind. This is not a little difference in words but a great one in things.”
So here’s the setting that we should probably talk about for a few minutes to be clear, as we go through this series, about who the speakers are. We’ve got Velleius, who is going to be the Epicurean spokesman. We’ve got Cicero, who is going to represent the Academics. Now as usual with Cicero, he’s kind of hard to pin down on whether to consider him sympathetic to the Stoics or whatever, but for purposes of this discussion he’s largely representing the Academic school. And then we have Lucius Balbus, who is representing the Stoics.
Now we were talking before the episode got started today — there’s a reference here to Marcus Piso that we should be clear about. There is a Lucius Piso who was Julius Caesar’s father-in-law and the apparent owner of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, who would definitely have been an Epicurean. This is not that person being referred to, but another Piso by the name of Marcus Piso. Wikipedia contains some interesting information on him: “In his consulship, Piso gave great offense to Cicero by not asking him first in the Senate for his opinion, and then further increased the anger of Cicero by taking Publius Clodius under his protection after his violation of the mysteries of the Bona Dea. Cicero revenged himself on Piso by preventing him from obtaining the province of Syria, which had been promised to him.” So reading between the lines here, it sounds like that Cicero, by the time he’s writing this book, might not have been exactly the biggest fan of Marcus Piso. Now whether that plays into why he’s not present representing the Peripatetics, hard to say. But at least we know that this conversation is going to be carried on mainly between the Stoics, the Epicureans, and then the Academics.
Joshua: This is a bit of a sidebar, but I looked up this goddess Bona Dea — which of course means “good goddess” — and what her association was in ancient Rome. She was associated with chastity and fertility among married Roman women, with healing, with the protection of the state and the people of Rome. Her rites allowed women the use of strong wine and blood sacrifice, things otherwise forbidden them by Roman tradition. Men were barred from some of her mysteries, and only initiates were given possession of her true name. Given that male authors had limited knowledge of her rites and attributes, ancient speculations about her identity abound — among them that she was an aspect of Terra, Ops, Cybele, Ceres, or a Latin form of a Greek goddess Damia, or possibly Demeter. Most often she was identified as the wife, sister, or daughter of the god Faunus, thus an equivalent or aspect of the fertility nature goddess Fauna, who could prophecy the fates of women. These mystery cults in the ancient world were quite common. Among the Greeks, you had the Eleusinian mysteries. But Epicurus himself was said to have been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. So this was a very important cultural practice for the ancients, and apparently Marcus Piso gave his protection to Publius Clodius after his violation of these mysteries. And Cicero apparently took this to heart.
Cassius: Yeah. And so to be clear on who’s representing who — Gaius Cotta, at whose villa this is taking place, is an Academic skeptic himself, just like Cicero. Cicero in this dialogue claims that he’s neutral and not taking sides, but it appears that Gaius Cotta is being used in the dialogue as the main representative of the Academic school. So we can expect Cotta and Cicero to largely be in agreement. Now Cotta’s pointing out here that there’s disagreement even among the Academic skeptics as to whether the Peripatetics really have the same position about the gods as the Stoics do. And so the next thing that’s said is:
“Now if you think fit, let us return to what we began with. With all my heart, said Cotta, but that this visitor — looking at me, Cicero, who has just come in — may not be ignorant of what we are upon, I will inform him that we were discoursing on the nature of the gods, concerning which, as it is a subject that always appeared to be very obscure to me, I prevailed on Velleius to give us the sentiments of Epicurus. Therefore, continued he, if it is not troublesome, Velleius, repeat what you have already stated to us. I will, said Velleius, though this newcomer will be no advocate for me, but for you, for you have both, added he with a smile, learned from the same Philo to be certain of nothing. What we have learned from him, replied I, Cotta will discover, but I would not have you think that I am come as an assistant to him, but as an auditor, with an impartial and unbiased mind, and not bound by any obligation to defend any particular principle, whether I like it or dislike it.”
So there we have Cicero claiming to be the neutral arbiter. He’s not partial or biased in any way — not Cicero — and he’s not bound by any obligation to defend any principle. He’s going to be absolutely neutral, supposedly, in this conversation.
Joshua: Yes, now we have a new name here that was just mentioned — Philo. He was the last known head of Plato’s Academy during its skeptical phase. Under his leadership, the Academics abandoned the radical skepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades, who professed to live without rationally warranted beliefs, in favor of a form of mitigated skepticism allowing for provisional beliefs that did not claim certainty. One of the things we’re going to see all throughout this text is Cotta and Cicero saying things like, “Well, I only say that I think it is probable, not that it is certain,” which is the whole Academic skeptic approach to things. Claiming that the only wisdom in life is to know that there is no wisdom in life — it’s a self-contradictory position, and yet they’re stated in a very urbane and dramatic and emotional and glorious manner that makes you think, well, obviously everybody should agree with this position, even while they’re basically saying that nobody knows what’s right and wrong, so agreeing or disagreeing itself is questionable. But that’s what we have to learn to live with in reading the Academic position as we go forward here.
Cassius: Okay, and so now we get to Section 8, where we have the first statement by Velleius of any significance. Section 8:
“After this Velleius, with the confidence peculiar to his sect, dreading nothing so much as to seem to doubt of anything, began as if he had just descended from the counsel of the gods in Epicurus’ intervals between the worlds: ‘Do not attend,’ said Velleius, ‘to these idle and imaginary tales, nor to the operator and builder of the world — the god of Plato’s Timaeus — nor to the old prophetic dame, the pronoia of the Stoics, which the Latins call Providence, nor to that round, burning, revolving deity, the world, endowed with sense and understanding — the prodigies and wonders not of inquisitive philosophers but of dreamers.’”
Okay, there’s a lot more to come there, but let’s stop at that paragraph and go ahead and talk about several important aspects of it. First of all, “Velleius, with the confidence peculiar to Epicureanism, dreading nothing so much as to seem to be in doubt of anything” — that’s a sarcasm of Cicero against the Epicureans that does have a lot of importance to it. Epicurus taught that certain things are knowable in life. In Diogenes Laertius, the word that everybody hates — “dogmatism” — is used, that Epicurus said that the wise man will take a position on things that he’s confident of and not waffle around and say, “Well, I don’t know this, I don’t know that,” and act like Socrates or these Academics are doing, claiming that the only thing we can really know in life is that we know nothing. Epicurus took the opposite position — that at least on certain things, if you’ve got enough evidence and you’ve thought them through long enough, you’re going to be confident of your position.
Velleius is going to come at this just like an Epicurean would — charging through straight to the heart of it. He doesn’t start out by saying, “Well, this is a very difficult subject, very hard to know all of these things and to understand all of the different opinions of the philosophers. And you know, Plato had some good ideas but I think he went a little bit too far.” Velleius does not come out and give credit to the positions that he’s going to attack. He immediately goes on the attack and he calls the positions of Plato — which everybody in Greece was supposed to hold in the highest respect — “idle and imaginary tales.” And he starts talking about Plato’s Timaeus and the pronoia of the Stoics, which we could call Providence, and those who would endow the world with sense and understanding. Velleius does not mince any words. He calls these ideas “the prodigies and wonders not of inquisitive philosophers but of dreamers.” The first words out of Velleius’s mouth in discussing religion are that these guys who are taking the position that the gods made the world are dreamers. These are idle and imaginary tales.
Joshua: Yeah, let me read this passage from Rackham because I like the way that he puts Cicero’s little witticism here. Hereupon Velleius began, in the confident manner — I need not say — that is customary with Epicureans, afraid of nothing so much as lest he should appear to have doubts about anything. One would have supposed he had just come down from the assembly of the gods in the intermundane spaces of Epicurus. And he goes on: “I am not going to expound to you doctrines that are mere baseless figments of the imagination, such as the artisan deity and the world-builder of Plato’s Timaeus, or that old hag of a fortune-teller, the pronoia, which we may render ‘Providence,’ of the Stoics.” He seems to have a way with words — “that old hag of a fortune-teller” — that’s creative. And calling them “mere baseless figments of imagination” — so we can probably usefully compare the different translations as we go through and get different ways of expressing the same points. And going back to Young’s translation, he goes on: “For with what eyes of the mind was your Plato able to see that workhouse of such stupendous toil in which he makes the world to be modeled and built by God? What materials? What tools? What bars? What machines? What servants were employed in so vast a work? How could the air, fire, water, and earth pay obedience and submit to the will of the architect? From whence arose those five forms of which the rest are composed, so aptly contributing to frame the mind and produce the senses? It is tedious to go through all, as they are of such a sort they look more like things to be desired than to be discovered.” What he’s saying here, interestingly, in that very last clause, is that this is wishful thinking on the part of people like Plato who were talking about these things. This is something more to be desired than to be discovered — it’s not that he went out into nature as Epicurus would have advised and found these things to be true from a study of nature; it’s that he wanted them to be true and believed them for that reason.
Cassius: Yeah, right there we should include another of the constructions that Rackham used. To quote Rackham, he said: “These are the marvels and monstrosities of philosophers who do not reason but dream.” So a lot of these accusations here come down to wishful thinking. You’re dreaming, you’re imagining these things, your gods don’t exist, they’re not doing the things that you say that they’re doing, and it’s madness basically to take the positions that you’re taking. And as you just started reading, we’re going to go through these criticisms that Velleius gives — right from the very beginning he doesn’t start off by saying, “Well, you know, Plato was a wonderful man who everyone in Greece reveres but he made a couple of small mistakes.” He doesn’t water any of this down. He jumps right into the heart of the issue and levels attacks both at Plato’s gods and at the Stoic conception of God. His beginning attack is: what is your evidence? For with what eyes of the mind was your Plato able to see that these things were taking place? And what materials and tools were used in such vast work? So as we go through this we’re going to start to see the classic arguments that are familiar to many of us today among the free thinkers or different types of atheists over the years who’ve been attacking modern conceptions of Judeo-Christianity and other modern religions. We see how deeply far back into the history of classical philosophy these attacks were stated. There’s very little new under the sun with the different arguments we see in the very popular books that are out there today — most of these arguments occurred to the ancients and were present before Christianity even developed, because they’re logical and they immediately come up to anybody who thinks about this instead of dreams.
Joshua: Yeah, speaking of dreams, Cassius, let me read this passage from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra says: “I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony. O, such another sleep, that I might see but such another man!” Throughout this whole passage, there’s a Roman soldier, Dolabella, who keeps interrupting her and trying to bring her back down to earth, but she won’t listen. Cleopatra continues: “His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck a sun and a moon, which kept their course and lighted the little O, the earth. His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm crested the world. His voice was propertied as all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends. But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, he was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, there was no winter in it; an autumn it was that grew the more by reaping. His delights were dolphin-like: they showed his back above the element they lived in. In his livery walked crowns and crownets. Realms and islands were as plates dropped from his pocket. Think you there was or might be such a man as this I dreamt of?” And the Roman soldier says: “Gentle madam, no.” And Cleopatra says: “You lie, up to the hearing of the gods! But if there be, nor ever were one such, it’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff to vie strange forms with fancy; yet to imagine an Antony were nature’s piece ‘gainst fancy, condemning shadows quite.”
So as a good example of wishful thinking, we have this Queen and Pharaoh of Egypt who is remembering — I think Antony has died at this point and Cleopatra is about to commit suicide at the end of the play. I was interested to learn that Dolabella in the story was Publius Cornelius Dolabella — who was consul in 44 BC, a Roman politician and general under the dictator Julius Caesar. He arranged for himself to be adopted into a plebeian family so that he could become Tribune of the Plebs. He married Cicero’s daughter Tullia, although he frequently engaged in extramarital affairs, and throughout his entire life he was an extreme profligate. Coming in there at the end and saying, “Cleopatra, you’re just dreaming — what you’re describing isn’t real” is sort of what Velleius is doing here in Cicero’s work. This is idle wishful thinking and it has no relation to reality.
Cassius: We’ve talked about a lot today that’s going to be ongoing themes as we go forward. And it’s probably a good time to drop back and make this comment again: that as we found in On Ends, Cicero is not just inventing everything said here out of whole cloth, out of his own mind. In On Ends he was going to existing Epicurean works of his time and summarizing them into his work, just putting them into a dialogue form so it’s more interesting to read. And he’s presumably doing the same thing here. So as Velleius goes from here to present the Epicurean position, I do think we ought to consider that the order and method of presentation of what we’re hearing from Velleius is likely to be the well-developed Epicureanism of Cicero’s day that he’s picking up from Epicurean authorities.
I say that to emphasize that Velleius, as the Epicureans would do, is laying everything out at the very beginning. And I don’t want us to think that this discussion today — which is going to have to come to an end because of time before too much longer — is all we’re going to be able to say about these arguments. Because what Velleius is really doing here is giving us, at the beginning, almost an outline of the Epicurean attack on supernatural religion. And to repeat what Velleius is saying here — which we should probably consider to be that outline — his first attack is: you have no evidence to see what you’re claiming is going on. For with what eyes of the mind was your Plato able to see that workhouse of such stupendous toil? You didn’t see this happen, you don’t have evidence to support it. And so that’s the first attack.
Then you have these logical attacks after this absence-of-evidence attack, by saying that Plato can’t explain how gods created the universe when we look around and see how the elements work and how materials work and so forth — there’s no way that they’re just going to spring to action on their own and carry out the will of the gods. So it simply doesn’t make sense that the gods could have created a place like the universe. And then the third of the arguments that he mentions today is: how could Plato’s God have created an eternal universe? Velleius says: “But what’s more remarkable, Plato gives us a world which has not only been created but — if I may say so — in a matter formed with hands, and yet he says it’s eternal. Do you conceive him to have the least skill in natural philosophy who is capable of thinking anything to be everlasting that had a beginning? For what can possibly ever have been put together which cannot be dissolved again? Or what is there that had a beginning which will not have an end?” So that’s another logical argument: in our experience, things that are put together from other materials don’t have an eternal existence.
This section closes: “Or what is there that had a beginning which will not have an end? If your providence, Balbus who is the Stoic, is the same as Plato’s god, I ask you as before: who were the assistants? What were the engines? What was the plan and the preparation of the whole work? If it is not the same, then why does she make the world mortal and not everlasting like Plato’s god?” Now that’s a reference probably to the Stoic pronoia we were discussing — Providence, referred to in the feminine. Why did she make the world mortal and not everlasting like Plato’s god? So he’s pointing out the split between the Stoics and the Academics there, in that the Stoics apparently thought that the world will come to an end at some point while the Academics were saying that the world was eternal.
Joshua: You know, Cassius, the language they’re using here reminds me of a very famous moment in Homer’s Iliad — actually the moment that Hephaestus forges Achilles a new set of armor, and particularly the shield, which is in particular a widely-praised work of poetry. I’m going to read a little bit of this and we’ll compare it briefly to what we’re seeing here. So Homer writes this way:
“Thus having said, the father of the fires to the black labors of his forge retires. Soon as he bade them blow, the bellows turned their iron mouths, and where the furnace burned, resounding breathed; at once the blast expires, and twenty forges catch at once the fires. Just as the god directs, now loud, now low, they raise a tempest or they gently blow. In hissing flames huge silver bars are rolled and stubborn brass and tin and solid gold before. Deep fixed the eternal anvils stand; the ponderous hammer loads his better hand; his left with tongs turns the vexed metal round, and thick strong strokes the doubling vaults rebound. Then first he formed the immense and solid shield.”
And he goes on and on like that. But one of the things that we see every time Hephaestus is mentioned is several of the things that are mentioned here — that he has automated assistants when he’s working. So looking at Velleius in the previous passage, when he describes “the workhouse of the master builder God” and asks about the materials and the tools and the bars of metals and the machines and the servants working on his behalf — what this is meant to call to mind, I think, is that passage from Homer’s Iliad, which is the description of a great work made by Hephaestus with his automated servants and his forge-bellows that answer to his voice. So as a kind of image of creation, this is pretty important, because it happens in probably the seminal work of classical literature.
Cassius: Yeah, it sure sounds like that they had something like that in mind when they were deciding what issues were the most important to discuss and how to attack them.
So this section eight introduces for us the argument that Velleius is going to present about the impossibility and illogic and unreasoned — “marvels and monstrosities of philosophers who do not reason but dream” — all sorts of wishful thinking that’s really at the basis of these supernatural religious theories, whether they are Platonic and therefore the Academic school, or whether the Stoics try to modify them by talking about providence or not. Neither one of them makes any sense, neither one of them has any evidence to support it. And both of them are positions that an Epicurean is going to be confident about and rejecting. He’s going to take the position: no, these are not possibilities, these are not innocent speculations — these are things that do impact our lives in an extremely negative way and they need to be rooted out and basically trampled underfoot, as Lucretius talks about in Book One. And so with that discussion of section eight, let’s bring today’s discussion to a conclusion. Any final thoughts today, Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, let me just read the passage that you cited from the opening of Lucretius. This is the Rolf Humphreys translation:
“When human life all too conspicuous lay, foully groveling on earth, weighed down by grim religion looming from the skies, horribly threatening mortal men, a man — a Greek — first raised his mortal eyes bravely against this menace. No report of gods, no lightning flash, no thunder peal made this man cower, but drove him all the more with passionate manliness of mind and will to be the first to spring the tight-barred gates of nature’s hold asunder.”
And of course that passage ends with the very famous line: “Religion so is trampled under foot, and by his victory we reach the stars.”
Cassius: So we’ve covered a lot of ground today, but I hope people begin to see the outline of the conversation here. There are a lot of false turns that you can take when you go down this path. You can take the view of John Mason Good that the Epicureans were basically Platonists the whole time. Or you can take the view of Cicero and the Academics that really knowledge about any of this stuff is impossible because knowledge generally is impossible. You can take the view that the Epicureans were outright atheists and that any discussion of the gods is irrelevant and impertinent to the conversation. But what they had to say — they said a lot. I mean, they talked about the gods in most of their texts, and they talked about them in texts that we don’t even have anymore. So there’s a whole wealth of information and context that’s important to the conversation here. And if we just ignore it all, this is a huge hole in the philosophy — as it is in some sense because the texts are missing — and so that’s why this book is important in giving context to the broader story. Pretending that it doesn’t matter I think is the wrong course when it comes to talking about this stuff. And that’s why simply trying to summarize everything about the gods by saying that you should “not fear the gods” is grossly insufficient to understand where the Epicureans were really coming from. And that’s our goal here — to go into the details, the real heart of Epicurean philosophy, and bring it to people so that they can decide whether they agree with it and want to apply it to their lives. And then when they understand truly what Epicurus is saying, they’ll be in a position to make that judgment with accuracy and not just on a superficial, glossed-over basis.
That’s where we’ll end it for today. As always, we invite you to drop by the EpicureanFriends Forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this or any of our other episodes. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week.