Episode 228 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 03 - Velleius Asks "What Woke The Gods To Create The World?"
Date: 05/13/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3843-episode-228-cicero-s-otnotg-03-velleius-asks-what-woke-the-gods-to-create-the-wo/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 228 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 continuing to discuss the Epicurean sections of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. And this week we continue with the arguments of Velleius, the Epicurean spokesman, beginning in section nine. Now, at the time since our last episode, there’ve been several discussions in our forum that have brought up an issue we discussed last week that I think is highly relevant and we ought to go back to and use as a jumping-off point. For example, just this morning we ended up discussing issues that in a roundabout way came back to the question of what things are possible versus what things are not possible from the Epicurean viewpoint. Whether there are divine limits, whether there are logical limits, whether there are limits of some other kind that distinguish what’s possible from what’s not possible. And also in a similar context, we came back to the issue of how long should one seek to live? Relating those two things together, there’s the question of how long is it possible to live? What are the limitations of the human lifespan? Is it possible to extend human lifespan through technology and better medical care over the years? And if it is indeed possible to extend the human lifespan, what does that mean in terms of where is the dividing line between how much life we should wish to have and how much we should realize we just cannot have, and therefore not even wish for so as to set up a craving that certainly cannot be attained?
We’re not going to be able to answer either of those questions in this episode today, but I think they bring us back to an important point that we can emphasize. And that is that while we’re now talking about the nature of the gods, from the Epicurean perspective, not only the nature of the gods but everything else is determined by what Epicurus identified as his physics, going back to the atoms and the void. Epicurus is never going to debate something in isolation and take a position that might conflict with his physics, lest he be accused of being logically inconsistent. And so in every important question, we need to be prepared to apply that requirement of consistency. And where we saw it last week was near the end of section eight — Velleius asked this question. In reference to one of the major positions that non-Epicureans were taking, predominantly the Platonists but perhaps others, Velleius said: “But what is more remarkable, he gives us a world which has been not only created, but if I may so say, in a matter formed with hands. And yet he says it is 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?”
And looking at this question, you need to ask yourself: what is Velleius presuming as his reasoning in saying that someone who says that a created thing can be eternal has no skill in natural philosophy? Is it observation alone of things that we’ve seen in our lives that is his basis for saying that? Is there some kind of identification of a natural law that requires that something that has a beginning have an end? Whatever it is, I think it’s something that we’re going to see played out over and over as an example of Velleius taking Epicurean physics as his starting point for his position about the gods.
I want to take a slight detour and bring up something that is another excellent example of this issue. There’s something that we find in Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy in chapter 13, which is entitled “The True Piety,” in a subsection entitled “Incorruptibility and Virtue.” DeWitt points out that Epicurus himself did not say that the gods are eternal. Many of us, I think, default to the presumption that Epicurus held the gods to be eternal. And that’s what DeWitt says is not the case — they are not by nature without a beginning and without an end. DeWitt says this on page 267 of his book:
“If the adoption and adaptation of the Heraclitean theory of flux to explain the nature of the gods — that is by an afflux and efflux of images — seems astonishing to the modern reader, not less astonishing is the doctrine that the maintenance of their own incorruptibility should be ascribed to the gods as a virtue. This is certainly advanced doctrine and rather difficult to understand and more difficult to accept, yet the evidence for it is sufficient and explicit. At the outset, it must be observed and kept diligently in mind that nowhere in his extant writings does Epicurus call the gods immortal. This might be thought an accident of the tradition were it not for the fact that other considerations rule out this possibility. The reasoning behind this doctrine of incorruptibility is readily discerned. From the doctrine that nothing exists except atoms and void, it follows that the bodies of the gods must be corporeal. Gods are zoa, animate beings. They are thus units in the ascending order of nature as is man. Being in this order and corporeal, they cannot be deathless. If deathlessness were inherent in their nature, they would be in another class by themselves. Since they do belong in the same class as man, it is a logical necessity to think of their incorruptibility as by some means preserved. Since in the cosmos of Epicurus, unlike that of Plato, this incorruptibility lacked a superior being to guarantee its continuance, the sole possibility was that the gods preserved it for themselves by their own vigilance. Thus, it must be discerned that just as the happiness of man is self-achieved, so the happiness of the gods is self-preserved.”
DeWitt then says: “Plutarch, though hostile, wrote with the text of Epicurus before him, and had this to say: ‘Freedom from pain along with incorruptibility should have been inherent in the nature of the blissful being, standing in no need of active concern.’” This manifestly implies that Epicurean gods were unable to take their immunity from corruption for granted, but must concern themselves for its perpetuation.
Then continuing on, DeWitt says, the Christian Eusebius quotes Atticus as saying: “According to Epicurus, it’s goodbye to providence. In spite of the fact that according to him, the gods bring to bear all diligent care for the preservation of their own peculiar blessings.” So it appears to be an example that from the point of view of Epicurean physics, you apply even to the gods the issue of nothing being eternal — that no combination of atoms and void, even that of the gods in the quasi-body form that they have, is exempt from the rule that only the atoms and void are by nature eternally the same. And so before we go into section nine and continue on with new text today, it’s a good time to remember that Epicurean theory of the nature of the gods is an extension of Epicurean physics and Epicurean canonics.
Joshua: Well, Cassius, you have raised a number of questions there. And I think to get to the heart of some of them at least, we can go back to the biography of Epicurus himself in Book Ten of Diogenes Laertius, who writes: “Upon the death of Alexander of Macedon and the expulsion of the Athenian settlers from Samos by Perdiccas, Epicurus left Athens to join his father in Colophon. For some time he stayed there and gathered disciples, but returned to Athens in the archonship of Anaxicrates. And for a while, it is said, he prosecuted his studies in common with the other philosophers, but afterwards put forward independent views by the foundation of the school called after him. He says himself that he first came into contact with philosophy at the age of 14. Apollodorus the Epicurean, in the first book of his Life of Epicurus, says that he turned to philosophy in disgust at the schoolmasters who could not tell him the meaning of chaos in Hesiod.”
I want to take that as a starting point here, because it’s directly related to the question of how did things come to be the way they are? Have the atoms and void as the Epicureans thought always existed in one combination or another, and the stuff that’s made up out of them is temporary? Or do we take this opposing view that everything that exists began to exist in a primordial state of chaos? And I’m going to read a passage now from Wikipedia that deals with that question — this is on the page for chaos in cosmogony:
“The notion of temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the religious conception of immortality. They believed that the world arose out of a primal unity and that this substance was the permanent base of all its being. Anaximander claims that the origin is Apeiron, the unlimited, a divine and perpetual substance less definite than the common elements of water, air, fire, and earth. Everything is generated from this unlimited and must return there according to necessity. In Plato’s Timaeus, the main work of Platonic cosmology, the concept of chaos finds its equivalent in the Greek expression chora, which is interpreted, for instance, as shapeless space — in which material traces, ichne, of the elements are in disordered motion. However, the Platonic chora is not a variation of the atomistic interpretation of the origin of the world, as is made clear by Plato’s statement that the most appropriate definition of the chora is a receptacle of all becoming. Aristotle, in the context of his investigation of the concept of space in physics, problematizes the interpretation of Hesiod’s chaos as void or place without anything in it. Aristotle understands chaos as something that exists independently of bodies and without which no perceptible bodies can exist. Chaos is thus brought within the framework of an explicitly physical investigation. It is now outgrown the mythological understanding to a great extent and in Aristotle’s work serves above all to challenge the atomists, who assert the existence of empty space.”
So this goes some way, I think, in laying out the grounds for the argument here. You have this old mythological interpretation that in the beginning there was chaos, and chaos gave rise to Gaia and Uranus and the other titans and so forth. And then this over time turns into the philosophical understanding of chaos. And it’s this philosophical understanding of chaos that Epicurus — as recorded in Diogenes Laertius — cannot get a straight answer on, cannot get an answer that satisfies his curiosity. And this is sort of the seminal moment in his education, because it’s this moment that leads him to consider other physical theories. And the physical theory that he accepts and builds on is atomism — the atomism of Democritus and Leucippus. And so at the very first moment when he’s branching off on his own as a philosopher, he’s rejecting this old tradition — that there is a beginning, that the beginning was in chaos and that the first product of chaos was something immortal. And I think that deals directly with the question that Velleius is asking here when he says: “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?” So this is the rift — it’s the rift between those who start with chaos and those who start with atomism. Atomism has no beginning: the atoms and the void have always existed. The things that they make up have not always existed, but the atoms themselves have always existed. And in Aristotle, as it says on the Wikipedia page, this conflict between these two positions is made manifest and discrete, because Aristotle is directly responding to atomism.
Cassius: That’s a great place to start the analysis — with the early education of Epicurus — because I think so many people out there think that Epicurus’ views of the gods is shaped by his primary focus on pleasure, and that pleasure tells us how to think about the gods. When the reality I think is exactly the opposite: it is Epicurus’ view of the gods and of the rest of the universe, of which the gods are a part, that tells us where to put pleasure in the great scheme of things.
Epicurus was concerned about where chaos came from. He thought it made no sense to avoid giving an answer to that question, because of course the reason for the question and the reason it is difficult is: what is God’s role in all of this? Did God create chaos? Did God come from chaos? You have to ultimately take a position on whether there is some supernatural being above nature, outside of nature — or whether ultimately nature is everything and everything comes from nature and it’s the rules of nature that ultimately control everything. We should never underestimate the importance of this question, because if you take the position you just don’t know, then you’re not answering the question about whether there is a supernatural God. If you take the position that chaos or the elements are eternal, then you have answered the question that there is no supernatural being that created the elements. And I regularly think about a phrase from St. Paul in the New Testament, who talks about people being “slaves of the weak and beggarly elements.” People want to argue that if you take the position that atoms are the primary constituent of the universe, then you’re basically a slave to the atoms, and it’d be much better to be a slave to God than to be a slave to the atoms. But ultimately, if Epicurus had concluded that there was a supernatural realm, a supernatural being who was dictating to the elements how they should arrange themselves, then anyone of any common sense would have concluded that it’s more important to listen to what this supernatural being is saying than it is to study the elements, because they are just tools of the supernatural being. So ultimately everything in Epicurean philosophy rolls back to that question: whether the ultimate arbiter of truth is the elements, or whether there is some external, supernatural being above the elements that works with those elements to express that supernatural being’s will.
And so before we go into section nine, let’s keep in mind that we saw last week that Velleius is using a physics test, a nature test, to set a basic foundation to his understanding of what a God could be. Then in a very similar type of argument, he moves on in what we have as section nine to say this:
“But I would demand of you both — referring to both the Academics and the Stoics — why these world builders started up so suddenly and lay dormant for so many ages. For we are not to conclude that if there was no world, there were therefore no ages. I do not now speak of such ages as are finished by a certain number of days and nights and annual courses, for I acknowledge that those could not be without the revolution of the world. But there was a certain eternity from infinite time, not measured by any circumscription of seasons, but how that was in space we cannot understand, because we cannot possibly have even the slightest idea of time before time was. I desire therefore to know, Balbus, why this providence of yours was idle for such an immense space of time. Did she avoid labor? But that could have no effect on the deity, nor could there be any labor since all nature — air, fire, earth, and water — would obey the divine essence. What was it that incited the deity to act the part of an aedile, to illuminate and decorate the world? If it was in order that God might be the better accompanied in his habitation, then he must have been dwelling an infinite length of time before in darkness as in a dungeon. But do we imagine that he was afterward delighted with that variety with which we see the heaven and earth adorned? What entertainment could that be to the deity? If it was any, he would not have been without it so long.”
So that’s the first argument: why did the gods, all of a sudden, after an eternal infinity of time, wake up one morning and decide they had to create the human race? And his criticism goes slightly further there, with the mention of the Roman aedile — that was an office in the Roman Republic responsible for the maintenance of public buildings.
Joshua: And his criticism, Cassius, goes slightly further there with the mention of the aedile. This post was usually assumed by young men who were being positioned for higher office, but it was just one of the things they had to do on their ladder — the cursus honorum, the ladder of honor, or the course of power in the Roman Republic. So what was it that incited the deity to act the part of this office, the aedile, to illuminate and decorate the world — to become a mere custodian of public buildings? His rhetoric here is awfully biting in some places.
Cassius: Let me interject there, Joshua — that this seems to me to be another example of Velleius’s willingness to be pretty direct and caustically criticize his opponents. He’s comparing their providence and their god of the universe to basically a bureaucratic functionary of a local city.
And that reminds me, Joshua, in the Letter to Pythocles around section 115, Epicurus himself had said: “The signs of the weather which are given by certain animals result from mere coincidence of occasion, for the animals do not exert any compulsion for winter to come to an end. Nor is there some divine nature which sits and watches the outgoings of these animals and then fulfills the signs they give. For not even the lowest animal would be seized by such foolishness, much less one who was possessed of perfect happiness.” So it seems to me this is a good example of the willingness of Epicurus himself to compare the gods to a foolish person who was watching the movements of the animals. And here we have Velleius making essentially the same point — that a deity possessed of perfect happiness is not going to decide one day to play the role of a lowly bureaucratic functionary and essentially walk around like a street lamp-lighter turning on the lights. It’s just a ridiculous thought.
Joshua: Yes, I think this approach of ridiculing the idea that a god would take so much work on himself was key to the Epicurean response to this. And I think probably one of the best examples comes from a book by Giordano Bruno, who was a fan of Lucretius, called The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. I’ll post to the thread for this episode a passage from that book — it’s rather long, so I won’t read it here. But to tie this back in some ways to the alternative idea — which is atomism, the idea that the laws that govern these things do not come from gods but are woven into the fabric of the nature of things — I do want to quote from Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve, where he talks about how Lucretius was received. He says:
“Such questions were way beyond the competence of anyone before the era of modern science, and men of good sense, from Cicero onwards, laughed at the absurd notion of the atomic theory. Lucretianism was a strictly practical philosophy and free of superstition, but his poetry used classical mythology as a prop. The poem begins with an invocation to Venus, which was hugely appealing to the Florentine artists, and it inspired Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in 1486 and his Primavera in 1481. In a series of annual lectures in the 1490s, the professor of poetry and oratory — and later to be chancellor of Florence — Marcelo Adriani promoted Lucretian thought, but a powerful backlash was engendered by such heretical ideas and a religious reaction, spearheaded by the fundamentalist preacher Savonarola, was brewing. He claimed to be the voice of God and predicted war, famine, and general mayhem if the city did not repent of its evil ways. At Lent 1492, he declared, ‘Any day now, indeed at any hour, the heavens and the earth are going to collapse.’ Today, preaching the end of the world excites only derision, but in 15th-century Florence, the message could still terrify if delivered with the kind of malign force that Savonarola could muster. His hellfire and brimstone preaching coincided with real dangers for Florence, and in 1495 he orchestrated a bonfire of the vanities, burning books and other impious objects. He had Lucretius specifically in his sights, preaching against the absurdity of the atomic theory. ‘Listen, women, they say that this world was made of atoms — that is, those tiniest of particles that fly through the air. Laugh, women, at the absurdities of these learned men.’”
So the conflict we’ve been describing — between the Platonist, Aristotelian, and later Christian view and the atomic, Democritean, Epicurean, and Lucretian view — is one that has a long staying power, and it’s at the heart of all these questions we’re talking about today.
Cassius: And we can pretty easily relate it to some of the things we see today. As we’re recording in the early months of 2024, we’ve been through a period of time with a lot of discussion of a complete solar eclipse and the different thoughts that come to people’s minds when they observe something like that. We’ve just recently been through a period of larger than normal solar flare activity. And so people in different regions who have seen the aurora borealis have experienced something similar. People are generally confronted with the question: is there a God who is sending signs to us to tell us that he’s pleased or displeased with our activities?
Lucretius himself and the Epicureans always identified the principle that things which come together will eventually break apart. And so even in Epicurean philosophy, the world that we live in does have an end at some point. But it makes all the difference in the world whether that ending is going to come as a result of the natural processes that we can observe and come to be able to predict at some point — or whether the ending of the world is going to come because some supernatural being declared that he didn’t like the way things are going, and so he’s going to send a flood to kill everybody.
Maybe the point for the day is just to simply emphasize as strongly as possible that it is the Epicurean view of the nature of the universe — going back to the atoms and the void and the way that things happen in a natural and non-supernatural way — that informs everything about the way we understand the universe, including and especially the nature of the gods. The gods did not live for an eternity of time pining away in regret that they did not have the human race to amuse themselves with. It makes no sense to consider such a thing.
And so this first argument of Velleius is: it’s just ridiculous to think that the gods were asleep for an eternity and then woke up one day and decided to create the universe. He extends that argument in a slightly different direction by saying: “Or were these things made as you almost assert by God for the sake of men? Was it made for the wise? If so, then this great design was adopted for the sake of a very small number of people. Or was it designed for the sake of fools? First of all, there’s no reason why God would consult the advantage of the wicked. And further, what could be his object in doing so? Since all fools are, without doubt, the most miserable of men, chiefly because they’re fools.”
So another very pointed argument here by Velleius: are you suggesting, Balbus, that God made the universe for the sake of men? Well, which men did he make the universe for? Did he make it for the wise? Well, there’s not very many of those around. Or did he make it for the sake of fools? Well, why in the world would he make a universe full of fools, because they’re the most miserable people around?
There was a particular thought experiment that the late Christopher Hitchens was very fond of, and it deals more directly with the idea of God as a saving and intervening being. His question was very similar to some of the questions that Velleius is asking here. His question was: how do you reconcile this God with the fact that if you take the age of the human species to be somewhere between 100,000 years and a quarter of a million years, you have to assume that this being is sitting there watching endless tribal squabbles for 100,000 years — one village wiping out another village, one village dying off from disease. And then finally, after 100,000 years, this being thinks, this has gone too far, I have to intervene. And he sends his emissaries of private revelation not to the Chinese where they could already read, not to the Greeks who’ve developed science and philosophy, or to the Babylonians who have developed astronomy to a high degree — but he sends them to the most backwards, stony part of the Arabian Peninsula. Ridicule has a place in all of this because it’s absurd to think that a God would create the world, let mankind develop, let him struggle for existence for 100,000 years, and only then send a carpenter from the backwater of the Roman Empire to save us all.
Joshua: You just mentioned a lot of different nations that arguably God could have chosen to send his messengers to the world instead of the ones that he allegedly did. And that just brings to my mind how many different types of people there are in the world, how many differences in perspectives there are. And what we’re here today to talk about is Epicurus’ perspective. We’re not going to be able to resolve in everybody else’s minds with certainty whose perspective is right and whose perspective is wrong. But at the very least, we can emphasize that there are so many different perspectives about these issues.
Cassius: Velleius says in section ten: “They who affirm the world to be an animated and intelligent being have by no means discovered the nature of the mind, nor are they able to conceive in what form that essence can exist. But of that, I shall speak more hereafter. At present, I must express my surprise at the weakness of those who endeavor to make it out not to be only animated and immortal, but likewise happy and round, because Plato says that it is the most beautiful form, whereas I think a cylinder, a square, a cone, or a pyramid more beautiful.”
My point there being: everybody has different tastes, including how they would imagine the deity to be. Apparently Plato thinks for some reason that round is the most beautiful form. Well, why can’t I think that a cylinder is more beautiful than being round? A square more beautiful than a sphere? A pyramid more beautiful? And the answer is that Plato has no justification — he has no evidence, he has no authority to stand on that a sphere is the most beautiful object other than that he says so.
Joshua: I think, Cassius, since part of our theme today has been humor and ridicule as it relates to religion, we haven’t even touched on Lucian of Samosata, who has a lot to say on this. But I want to quote today from two letters by Thomas Jefferson. The first is a letter to James Smith from December 8th of 1822. He says:
“The hocus-pocus phantasm of a god like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs. In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three and three but one is so incomprehensible to the human mind that no candid man can say he has any idea of it. And how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does only deceives himself. He proves also that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities, the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility — which they call faith — takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.”
And on the same theme, he says this in a letter to Francis Adrian van der Kemp on July 30th, 1810:
“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them. And no man ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity. It is a mere abracadabra of the mountebanks, calling themselves the priests of Jesus. If it could be understood, it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the cuttlefish, through the element in which they move and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy. And there they will skulk.”
Cassius: That last image is kind of an interesting one — sounds like an octopus!
Joshua: Exactly, yeah. Muddying the waters is a phrase that we use, but that’s a more elaborate image. And it’s a good one, I think. That some of these arguments — that the cosmos was created out of chaos, but nobody knows what chaos is or can explain it — this is just muddying the waters and then living in the darkness that you yourself have created.
Cassius: It’s a very revealing analogy. And when you think about what Lucretius warned people against — that the priests would be spinning tales to upset their plans of life and so forth — is it not just a very good analogy to an octopus excreting a smokescreen? Obscurity is something that people use offensively. And this is a good reminder that what we’re talking about is not necessarily always just men of good faith having different opinions about things. We’re also talking about, as in the case of Plato, “noble lies” that they know are lies and yet are willing to throw out there to confuse people for their own ends. So those are good points to remember today.
We’re coming to the end of a normal-length episode. So let’s see if there are any closing thoughts. We’ll come back next week and continue in section ten. But for now, we’ve been touching on themes of physics and ridicule, sarcasm, and so forth. Any other thoughts as we begin to close today, Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, since we’ve been talking about muddying the waters and so forth, I do want to quote from Lucian of Samosata in his letter on Alexander the Oracle-Monger, who writes: “In this connection, Alexander once made himself supremely ridiculous. Coming across Epicurus’ accepted maxims, his Kuriai Doxai — the most admirable of his books, as you know, with its terse presentment of his wise conclusions — he brought it into the middle of the marketplace. There burned it on a fig wood fire for the sins of its author and cast its ashes into the sea. He issued an oracle on the occasion: ‘The dotard’s maxims to the flames be given.’ The fellow had no conception of the blessings conferred by that book upon its readers — of the peace, tranquility, and independence of mind it produces, of the protection it gives against terrors, phantoms, and marvels, vain hopes and inordinate desires, of the judgment and candor that it fosters, or of its true purging of the spirit, not with torches and squills and such rubbish, but with right reason, truth, and frankness.”
And so as we continue our way through the Velleius material here in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, we should attempt to do so in the only way that Epicurus would countenance — with right reason, truth, and frankness, not by muddying the waters and making it so that no one can see.
Cassius: I completely agree that that is our goal, and we’re going to do our best to do that as we continue in the future. In the meantime, we invite everyone to drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about what we’ve said today or in any of our other episodes. We’re doing our best to incorporate comments that are relevant to this discussion of the gods as we go forward, and we’ll continue to do that. So let us know if you have any thoughts. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week.