Episode 230 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 05 - Velleius Attacks Misplaced Ideas of Divinity
Date: 05/27/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3864-episode-230-cicero-s-otnotg-05-velleius-attacks-misplaced-ideas-of-divinity/
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 230 of Lucretius Today. This is the 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 text 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.
For our new listeners, let me remind you of several ground rules that apply both to our podcast and to our Epicurean Friends Forum. First, our aim is to bring you an accurate presentation of classical Epicurean philosophy as the ancient Epicureans understood it. Second, we won’t be talking about modern political issues in this podcast. How you apply Epicurus in your own life is of course entirely up to you. We call this approach not Neo-Epicurean but Epicurean. Epicurean philosophy is a philosophy of its own and it’s not the same as Stoicism, Humanism, Buddhism, Taoism, or Atheism. It’s unique and must be understood on its own, not in terms of any conventional modern morality.
Third, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that the Epicureans often used words differently than we do today. To the Epicureans, gods were not omnipotent or omniscient. So Epicurean references to gods do not mean at all the same thing as in the major religions today. In the Epicurean theory of knowledge, all sensations are true, but that does not mean that all opinions are true — the raw data reported by the senses is reported without the injection of opinion, as the opinion-making process takes place in the mind where it is subject to mistake rather than in the senses. In Epicurean ethics, pleasure refers not only to sensory stimulation, but also to every experience of life which is not felt to be painful. More than anything else, Epicurus taught that the universe is not supernatural in any way, and that means there is no life after death and any happiness that we’ll ever have comes in this life, which is why it is so important not to waste time in confusion.
Today we’re continuing to review Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. Today we’re at the beginning of Section 11, where just as last week we’re continuing to discuss the errors of other schools. One thing to keep in mind as we go through these other schools is that Velleius is criticizing the schools prior to Epicurus and the other schools like Stoicism and the Academy. He’s then going to present what he believes is the core position that Epicurus took about the gods.
It’s very important to realize as we go forward that Velleius is talking to Cotta, who is an Academic Skeptic, and he’s talking to Lucilius Balbus, who is a Stoic. What we’ll find in Cotta’s response is that Cotta attempts to go through what Velleius has done and point out contradictions in Velleius’ opinion. But it’s important to realize going in that the Stoics are going to be taking a very strong position about what they think the nature of the gods is, and Velleius is taking a strong position about at least certain aspects of the gods. Even though Cotta is going to come in before long and sound like a great cross-examiner of Velleius, it will be important to keep in mind that Cotta never tells us what he really thinks. This Academic Skeptic position comes from the viewpoint that maybe we can say certain things are probable, but we really can’t say anything is certain for sure.
As we hear Velleius go through these criticisms today, it’s going to be interesting to observe how Cotta’s later criticisms of the Epicurean position use some of the same arguments — even to the point where Velleius, at the end of the book, takes the position that he’s significantly more in agreement with Cotta about things than he is with the Stoics. For the time being, the important thing to draw is that it’s not so much a matter of minor amusement or minor interest to hear what Anaxagoras and Pythagoras had to say, but the important thing will be to listen to how Velleius is attacking them and think about the arguments that he’s making — which are largely arguments of logical consistency, some of which prefigure what he’s going to bring up himself about how you rely on prolepsis for your foundation of your opinions about what the gods truly are. There’s a combination of logical inconsistency arguments plus references to things that are not conceivable, which are related to the prolepsis position, that we will want to be on the lookout for today.
Starting in Section 11, Velleius says this: “Anaxagoras, who received his learning from Anaximenes, was the first to affirm the system and disposition of all things to be contrived and perfected by the power and reason of an infinite mind. In which infinity, he did not perceive that there could be no conjunction of sense and motion nor any sense in the least degree where nature herself could feel an impulse. If he would have had this mind to be a sort of animal, then there must be some more internal principle from which that animal should receive its appellation. But what can be more internal than the mind? Let it therefore be clothed with an external body. This is not agreeable to his doctrine, but we are utterly unable to conceive how a pure simple mind can exist without any substance annexed to it.”
This is a continuation of what we discussed last week — this question that began with the contention that some people make that a supernatural God is some kind of a mind floating somewhere and he decides to mix in with something else, whether it’s earth, whether it’s air, whether it’s fire, whether it’s just some other substance. There’s this general contention that some people were making that in order to create the universe, God united with this other substance. And Velleius has previously pointed out that that’s a contradiction in terms — why would a mind which had no body all of a sudden wake up after an eternity and decide, well, I’m going to annex a body to myself and get involved with these specific substances like fire when I’d spent an eternity not being mixed with them before? It really makes no sense to suggest that all of a sudden he would wish to do that.
Now, what we’re reading here in Anaxagoras is that the distinction is that Anaxagoras appears to be saying that all things were contrived and perfected by the power and reason of an infinite mind — and Anaxagoras was potentially realizing the inconsistencies of trying to annex the mind to something else. So he just said it was the mind alone that created the universe. And what Velleius is saying in response is that if you don’t have a body, then there could be no conjunction of sense and motion, and nature itself would feel no sensation, no impulse — which we find to be an essential part of nature. Velleius concludes this paragraph by saying that, OK, well, maybe Anaxagoras would allow that the mind could be clothed with some kind of an external body, but that would be inconsistent with his doctrine. And so therefore his doctrine fails because, quote, we are utterly unable to conceive how a pure, simple mind can exist without any substance annexed to it. Every mind, every intelligence that we’re familiar with on earth, is a mind joined with a body. We have no experience, no ability to conceive a mind disconnected from the body.
Joshua: I think you’re right, Cassius. So Anaxagoras was coming onto the scene here amid a tradition of religion and philosophy in which the gods were seen to embody aspects of objects that existed in nature. He was the first to bring Ionian philosophy from the island chain in the eastern Aegean to mainland Greece. He brought it to the city of Athens. And it was precisely this idea — the idea that objects in nature are not gods — that led to his downfall in some ways.
The story, and I’m going to read it from the New World Encyclopedia, goes like this: “Unlike other pre-Socratic philosophers, Anaxagoras introduced the idea of nous, a mind or reason as the giver of order, purpose, and teleological relationships among things in the cosmos. The nous, however, remained only as the giver of the initial architecture of the world and did not play any other role. In his dialogue, Plato described Socrates’ excitement towards this innovative insight and also disappointment at its limited role. Both Plato and Aristotle criticized the lack of ethical elements in his concept of nous. Anaxagoras brought Ionian philosophy to Athens and gave scientific explanations of natural phenomena. His account of the sun, not as a god but as a blazing stone, evoked a controversy. He was brought to trial on the charge of impiety. Anaxagoras fled to Lampsacus, a Milesian colony, before being sentenced and died there, respected and honored.”
There’s a tradition in ancient Greek philosophy where the civil authorities, particularly in cities like Athens, fall afoul of the philosophers and the philosophers are condemned and either executed — like Socrates, forced to drink the hemlock — or they flee to a more forgiving and more open-minded city again in this eastern Aegean. Lampsacus is the city on the Hellespont. The Hellespont connects the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea, or the Pontus as it was called in the ancient world. And going by all of these records, it seems to be the case that that part of the Greek world was far more prepared to accept unusual ideas coming from the philosophers.
Lampsacus is the city that comes up again and again in this story as a place that people go when they make other cities too hot to hold them. And Epicurus himself, after the Mytilene affair — he was driven out of Mytilene by the Platonists — takes refuge in Lampsacus, which was a colony of Miletus, the city that produced Thales and Anaximander and Anaximenes. But it was this idea from Anaxagoras that the sun was not a god, but a ball of hot metal larger than the Peloponnese, that gets him brought up on these charges — just as Socrates had been brought up on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. It’s the story of many of these philosophers, actually.
And it calls to mind one of the early conflicts in Christianity — in the city of Alexandria. One of the first emerging conflicts was this debate that was ongoing between the Bishop of Alexandria, Bishop Alexander, and Arius. Arius was the father of the Arian heresy. The Arian heresy is a rebuttal of Trinitarianism. Trinitarianism is the position that God is three persons in one God — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — co-equal because they’re all God. Well, Arius had taken the opinion that they were not equal and not even really the same. He had taken the view that God the Father was the greatest of the three, that the Son Jesus proceeded from the Father and was lesser than the Father. And he had gone further in saying that the Holy Spirit proceeded from Jesus and was lesser than both Jesus and the Father. This had created a huge tension in Christianity at the time.
Finally the Roman Emperor Constantine tries to intervene, and he writes a letter to the Bishop of Alexandria and to Arius. In his letter, he writes: “As long as you continue to contend about these small and very insignificant questions, it is not fitting that so large a portion of God’s people should be under the direction of your judgment, since you are thus divided between yourselves. In my opinion it is not merely unbecoming but positively evil that such should be the case. Let me arouse your minds by the following little illustration. You know that philosophers, though they all adhere to one system of philosophy, are yet frequently at issue on certain points and differ perhaps in their degree of knowledge, yet they are brought back to harmony of opinion by the uniting power of their common teachings. If this be true, is it not far more reasonable that you, who are the ministers of the Supreme God, should be of one mind in the profession of the same religion?”
The city of Alexandria at around this time was beset by conflict — between Christians and Jews, between Christians and pagans, between Christians and Christians. Bloody fights in the streets, people dying. Constantine is asking: why can’t you come together as the philosophers come together? Even though they disagree on many and important points, they still agree to come together under the aegis of philosophy and peacefully debate. And in many ways, it’s a miscalculation on Constantine’s part, because Christianity is not like philosophy in this way. With Christianity, the idea is there can only be one truth. St. Augustine said that the church cannot tolerate the spread of false ideas for the same reason that the state should not tolerate the sale of poisoned bread. And Aquinas used a separate metaphor to the same point — the church cannot allow heresy to spread for the same reason that the state cannot allow counterfeit currency to spread. We’re dealing with people’s immortal souls, or that’s the claim. The Catholic Church — universal in the meaning of the word Catholic — is also dogmatic in the sense that there can be no disagreement about truth because disagreement in religion, unlike in philosophy, prevents people from coming to salvation and leads them to hell.
So even though in this text we’re going through all these philosophers and Velleius is pointing out all the problems he has with their views of the gods, we should still consider the fact that unlike Christians fighting Jews or Christians fighting Christians in Alexandria — when you think of a city like Athens, even though the civil authorities many times had problems with the philosophers, the philosophers themselves were able to talk about this stuff without resorting to violence. That’s a key message to take away here. When Anaxagoras says that the sun is not a god, the Epicureans would be very happy to agree on that point. They don’t agree on the point about God being a disembodied mind. And so there are wide disagreements. But as philosophers, I think they can all agree that the ability to freely talk about this stuff is more important than any canon or creed or dogma. Cotta should be able to argue one side or the other. And really Cicero in his book — that’s the whole point of writing these books at the end of his life. He’s going through On Ends, pointing out why he thinks they’re wrong and allowing them to argue the other side and say that they think he’s wrong. So it’s a very different approach, and we should keep that in mind as we go through all of the philosophers we’re going to go through today.
Cassius: Yeah, where a lot of people today seem to place everything that the ancients did as sort of an inferior, primitive way of looking at things, it sounds to me like it’s actually a superior way of acknowledging that differences exist where facts are unsettled, and that you just don’t go out and kill each other over facts that you do not have the ability to settle.
Now, again, we haven’t reached the position where Cotta starts speaking. But it’s very interesting along the lines of what you’re just discussing that Cicero is not participating in this dialogue. And before we started the discussion today, we were looking back into Cicero’s background to see if he had been a member of the College of Pontiffs as is Cotta. And it appears that he was not. It’s interesting that even though Cotta is a pontiff, Cotta is coming at things as a skeptic like Cicero, and maybe what is shared among all of them — Cotta, Cicero, Balbus, and Velleius even — is that they do perhaps have a fundamental commitment to wanting people to live happily. They have different versions of what happiness might mean. Those who are talking about the gods being the basis of it are going to have a significantly different definition, but they seem to share a common understanding that whether it was the gods who set it in motion or not, there’s still this happiness aspect of things that they share a common desire to get to the bottom of. This apparently resulted in that attitude of tolerance that the Romans were famous for — allowing local people to have their own religions and maintain their own forms of worship, while still being able to have these conversations about mind versus body and the nature of the gods in an environment that did not lead to the kind of radicalism that took over the world relatively shortly after the time of this discussion that we’re going through today.
Joshua: Exactly. I mean, if you were a youth in one of these great cities of the ancient world, as part of your education process you would choose a school of philosophy to study under, or your parents would choose one for you. And it’s precisely this word — choice, or hairesis in Greek — which became the word heresy as used by Christians. Arius didn’t just make a different choice in how to pursue Christianity. His choice was verboten. It was heresy because it went against the established orthodoxy, and you don’t find really anything like that in philosophy at this time.
Cassius: Yeah, they’re largely having an intelligent debate about the question that we as human beings perceive that we have the body, but we also seem to have something else — a mind or a spirit or a soul, however you want to describe it — that seems to coexist with the body. The ultimate question becomes: is this soul something separate from the body, or is it a part of a body? Is there some mind or soul which preceded the body and is ultimately superior to it? What is this relationship between the things that we perceive to be true — that we have both the physical body and a set of mental processes that seem to some extent separate from the physical body?
Velleius has started out with those who argued that the mind had united itself with the body and created the universe. He continues on with Alcmaeon of Croton. He says: “In attributing a divinity to the sun, the moon, and the rest of the stars, and also to the mind, did not perceive that he was ascribing immortality to mortal beings.”
Now, Velleius doesn’t have much more to say about Alcmaeon there, but he’s gone back to pointing out the inconsistency that everything that we see that has a body comes into being and then eventually stops being, and that if you allege that the sun, the moon, and the stars are divine, then you’re saying that something is divine which everything we can see tells us cannot be immortal, cannot be deathless.
Velleius goes on to Pythagoras, who “supposed the deity to be one soul, mixing with and pervading all nature from which our souls are taken, did not consider that the deity himself must, in consequence of this doctrine, be maimed and torn with the rending of every human soul from it, nor that when the human mind is afflicted — as is the case in many instances — that part of the deity must likewise be afflicted, which cannot be. If the human mind were a deity, how could it be ignorant of anything? Besides, how could that deity, if it is nothing but soul, be mixed with or infused into the world?”
This criticism is that if you’re going to consider that the deity is one single soul and that our souls are part of that deity, then the fact that we consider our soul to be separate from the deity — we don’t identify or understand that we’re the god of the universe — that separation of our soul from the great single soul of the deity amounts to tearing and rending it from the single master soul, and that would be inconsistent with our view of the blessedness of the gods. We cannot accept that to be something consistent with deity. Then if the human mind is itself a god, how can that be, because we know our minds are ignorant of so many different things? And of course, how could a deity, if it’s nothing but soul, be mixed in with the world itself?
Joshua: Yes. So the first thing we should say about Pythagoras is that he left behind no writings. Everything we know about him comes from the work of his pupils. This is the same story we found recently with the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus, and all of the ideas we associate with him come from things that were written down by his students. You could say the same thing about Socrates — everything we know about Socrates comes from Plato and from Xenophon. So in all of these cases it becomes somewhat difficult to distinguish, especially in the case of Plato and Socrates: where does Socrates end in these dialogues and Plato begin? By the end of Plato’s career, his writings are mostly thought to be his own opinion, and he’s using Socrates as a sort of stock character to get his own ideas across.
Pythagoras also was an esoteric philosopher — in other words, he taught not in public, but to a group of his own followers. A lot of these philosophers in most of these traditions had both exoteric and esoteric aspects to their philosophy. They would lecture on ethics and morality in public, and lecture on physics and epistemology only to more advanced groups. Norman DeWitt makes the claim that the Epicureans were not all that different, that there was a course that you would go through before you would get to the higher level subjects. In the case of Epicurus, I don’t know either way and there’s no direct testimony that that’s the case, but this is a tradition in philosophy.
So we should take with a grain of salt everything we think we know about Pythagoras. His views on the nature of deity seem to me to correlate somewhat with the view of Hinduism, because in Hinduism you’ve got this idea of Brahman or ultimate reality, and the idea being that unlike in Buddhism where there is no self, in Hinduism with this idea of Brahman, if you were to dig down deep enough in each person, your most real and ultimate self is Brahman, is this God, that there is Godhead in all of us. And Velleius is taking issue with this approach, saying that if this were the case, the deity would have to be split apart into as many people as exist. And then he goes on to say: if the human mind were a deity, how could it be ignorant of anything? Well, Plato would say that before you were born, you knew everything. But when you were encased in your body, you lost all of that, and so all learning is recollection of things that you did know but have lost.
Cassius: Yeah, Josh, the way Rackham translates this may be a little clearer than what Young says, because Rackham says: “As for Pythagoras, who believed the entire substance of the universe is penetrated with and pervaded by a soul of which our souls are fragments, he failed to notice that the severance of the souls of men from the world soul means the dismemberment and rending asunder of God, and that when their souls are unhappy — as happens to most men — then a portion of God is unhappy, which is impossible. Again, if the soul of man is divine, why is it not omniscient? Moreover, if the Pythagorean God is pure soul, how is he implanted in or diffused throughout the world?”
So these are high-level criticisms of any kind of a system that’s going to say that your soul inside your human body is a part of God. Well, your soul can be pretty darn unhappy and pretty darn diseased at many times, and is pretty darn ignorant of a lot of different things. Are you saying that God is unhappy, that God is diseased, that God is ignorant? And of course that doesn’t make sense for somebody who has the Greek-Roman conception of a God as being perfectly happy.
Joshua: So this idea that the soul of each person is ultimately the soul of God has had a long shelf life. Ralph Waldo Emerson rather controversially took a very similar view. He wrote an essay called The Oversoul in 1841, sharing most of the same ideas. And three years earlier, in 1838, he delivered his Divinity School Address to the senior class of divinity students, their professors, and local ministers in Divinity Hall at Harvard Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday, July 15th, 1838. This address was, if anything, more controversial than the later essay, and he was never invited back to give any other address. He was the most famous writer in America at the time and was never invited back to Harvard because of the things he had said. He writes: “Every man is a divinity in disguise, a God playing the fool.” As I said, it’s hard to know what Pythagoras really thought, but certainly this idea has had a very long shelf life.
Now, one of Pythagoras’ followers wrote a text that we think Pythagoras himself was probably unaware of — I think he was dead at this point. But this later member of the Pythagorean school, whose name I cannot remember, arrived at the conclusion that the number of the celestial spheres was ten, because ten was the most perfect number. And how do we know that ten is the most perfect number? Well, if you add up a point — which is one — and a line — which is two — and a surface, or a triangle — which is three — and a volume, or pyramid — you get four. And when you add them all together, you get ten. So he thought ten was the number of the celestial spheres, because of course what’s going on in heaven is more perfect than what’s going on on earth.
The idea that what we observe on earth is the same as what goes on in the heavens — that the laws of nature which govern both are the same — is cited by both George Santayana and by the Irish physicist John Tyndall in his Belfast Address as being an important conclusion of Democritean atomism and Epicureanism. George Santayana, in his work Three Philosophical Poets, in his essay on Lucretius, writes:
“This double experience of mutation and recurrence, an experience at once sentimental and scientific, soon brought with it a very great thought, perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon, and which was the chief inspiration of Lucretius. It is that all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance, the atoms. This substance, while remaining the same in quantity and in inward quality, is constantly redistributed. In its redistribution, it forms those aggregates which we call things, and which we find constantly disappearing and reappearing. All things — by which it means compound bodies — are dust, and to dust they return. A dust, however, eternally fertile, and destined to fall perpetually into new and doubtless beautiful forms. This notion of substance lends a much greater unity to the outspread world. It persuades us that all things pass into one another, and have a common ground from which they spring successively, and to which they return.”
And John Tyndall in his Belfast Address writes: “Now as science demands the radical extirpation of caprice, and the absolute reliance upon law in nature, there grew with the growth of scientific notions a desire and determination to sweep from the field of theory this mob of gods and demons, and to place natural phenomena on a basis more congruent with themselves. The problem which had been previously approached from above was now attacked from below. Theoretic effort passed from the super to the subsensible. It was felt that to construct the universe in idea, it was necessary to have some notion of its constituent parts, of what Lucretius subsequently called the first beginnings. Abstracting again from this experience, the leaders of scientific speculation reached at length the pregnant doctrine of atoms and molecules.”
And Tyndall continues, I think quoting Clark Maxwell: “There is moreover a very noble strain of eloquence in his description of the steadfastness of the atoms: ‘Natural causes, as we know, are at work, which tend to modify if they do not at length destroy all the arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system. But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built, the foundation stones of the material universe, remain unbroken and unworn.’”
So up against this Pythagorean view that we should look to divine geometry to understand that ten is the perfect number and therefore ten is the number of celestial spheres, it was this idea of Democritus and Epicurus and Lucretius that the laws which govern the atoms here on earth are the same as the laws which govern the motion of the atoms in the heavens — and not just in the heavens but on other worlds as well. And that idea, as George Santayana says, was the greatest idea that mankind has ever hit upon. It’s a very different approach from what we find in Pythagoras and all of the other philosophers being named here.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, we’re going to take the observations that we have of nature here and we’re going to apply a reasonable analysis to them, and we’re going to come up only with conclusions that are consistent with those things that we can prove to our satisfaction here on earth. We’re not going to let ourselves launch off into some fanciful idea that would contradict or be totally inconsistent with what we see here on earth.
We can contrast that with two additional names listed in this Section 11, and I’m going to switch over to Rackham. Velleius says: “Next, Xenophanes endowed the universe with mind and held that as being infinite, it was God. His view of mind is as open to objection as that of the rest. But on the subject of infinity, he incurs still severer criticism. For the infinite can have no sensation and no contact with anything outside. As for Parmenides, he invents a purely fanciful something resembling a crown — stephane is his name for it — an unbroken ring of glowing lights encircling the sky which he entitles God. But no one can imagine this to possess divine form or sensation. He also has many other portentous notions. He deifies war, strife, lust, and the like — things which can be destroyed by disease or sleep or forgetfulness or lapse of time — and he also deifies the stars. But this has been criticized in another philosopher and need not be dealt with now in the case of Parmenides.”
That takes us to the end of Section 11. And I think that goes right along with what you’ve been talking about, Joshua, in terms of Pythagoras coming up with geometric forms to which he can ascribe his notions of divinity. In the case of Xenophanes, holding that because the universe is infinite, it is God — of course the Epicureans considered issues of infinity to be very important, and it appears that we can deduce from what’s being said here that this is another aspect of it: for what is infinite can have no sensation and no contact with anything outside of itself. So this harks back to the several instances where Epicurus has told people to think closely about issues of infinity.
Rackham is very clear — he says, Xenophanes endowed the universe with mind and held that as being infinite it was God. And the Wikipedia page says, “Xenophanes believed that the earth extended infinitely far down as well as infinitely far in every direction.” So I think the criticism that Velleius is making here, at least partially, is that Xenophanes accepts that the universe is infinite, just as the Epicureans did, but the problem is that the Epicurean universe is also built on atoms at the foundation, and every other body that we see that is not an atom is a composite of atoms. Velleius seems to me to be asking how that’s compatible with what Xenophanes is saying, which is that everything in the world with the addition of intellect is God. But this is not Plato — there’s no ideal form of a table of which this is an emanation or a flickering shadow. When you drill down, it’s just atoms and void.
I may just not be understanding this paragraph very well. You’ve been reading from the Rackham translation for this one, which I agree sounds more clear, but I’m still not sure I get the gist of it. Do you think that that’s part of it, Joshua?
Joshua: I think in addition to that, though, there is something going on here about the hypothetical aspect of infinity, because if you relate this back to the discussion about whether the highest good is limited or not, whether it is perfect and whether it has a limit — in the Philebus in particular we talk about this — if you argue that something can always be made better, if it can infinitely be made better, then it cannot be considered to be perfect and we can’t consider it to be complete. And so one thing we should consider is whether they are concerned that if you ascribe God as being infinite, then you may not be able to say that God is complete or that God is perfect, because you can always make God better by adding more God to him if you’ve got an infinite situation.
Now that may be totally wrong, but clearly issues of infinity and how to get your mind around it is something that the Epicureans were concerned about.
Cassius: So we’ll definitely put this one in the show notes and see if we can find some other translations and see if there are other suggestions that might make more sense of this. Because as we said, Epicurus specifically said that we should study ideas of infinity and make sure that they don’t trip us up.
In regard to Parmenides, who says that there’s something like an orb of constant light and heat circularly surrounding the heavens — Velleius says Parmenides was deifying all sorts of things such as war, strife, lust, and the like. Things that Velleius says can be destroyed by disease or sleep or forgetfulness or lapse of time, and that you can’t and should not deify something that has an ending. If you’re talking in terms of things coming together from atoms, the only way to envision the possibility of something coming together from atoms but not ceasing at some point is the theory that we’re going to be discussing in a couple weeks — of gods composed of flows of atoms with flows that do not cease because the supply of atoms is inexhaustible in an infinite universe. In other words, Parmenides is going down the wrong track by alleging that anything that can be destroyed — in this case by disease or sleep or oblivion or age — can be a God.
Joshua: Last week we were talking about the Milesian school — Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes. And while he doesn’t break them up like this in this text, we should consider Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Melissus of Samos, and in some instances Xenophanes — who we were just talking about — and Empedocles, who we’re going to be talking about next week, are classified under the Eleatic school, which was a school of philosophy in the fifth century centered around the ancient Greek colony of Elea, located around 80 miles southeast of Naples in southern Italy, then known as Magna Graecia — implying the Greek colonies that had been spread away from the Aegean.
One of the confusing things about this whole series of pre-Socratic philosophers is that Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers, breaks them into two schools — the Ionian Philosophers and the Italian Philosophers. And you can see how Parmenides and Zeno of Elea and so forth would be Italian philosophers because they live in Italy, but there seems to be a lot more to it than that. I will read very quickly from Wikipedia, which says: “The Eleatics have traditionally been seen as advocating a strict metaphysical view of monism in response to the materialism advocated by their predecessors of the Ionian school.”
And it’s that Ionian school of Thales and Anaximander and Anaximenes — and Anaxagoras to some extent — that we should consider as in many ways predecessors of the natural philosophy of Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus. This other school is the school coming up with all these weird ideas like motion is impossible, if you read Zeno’s paradoxes. Later on, we’re going to come to Heraclitus, who holds the view that everything is in flux and knowledge is impossible because of that. So it’s important to consider that we often talk about Epicureanism as being in a lot of ways a response to Plato. But as we see when we go through these lists of other philosophers, what we see is that actually a lot of these ideas predate Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle by a considerable distance and involved themselves in a lot of the same problems that Epicurus was responding to in Plato — and also involved a lot of different problems that Epicurus is also responding to. This is all important stuff for getting a hold of the philosophy, understanding the arguments that were made at the time that he is engaging with as he’s formulating his ideas.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, these ideas predate Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but in addition to predating them, they get recycled over and over again through Judeo-Christianity and the different religions that we deal with today — Hinduism, Buddhism. These ideas have been around, it seems like, forever, and it seems like they’re never going to go away. So we’re not just wasting our time talking about ancient Greek names that have no relevance to us. These are just the Greek names that are the first we have record of having brought these ideas to the fore. But what they’re talking about — when you strip away all of the foreign-sounding Greek names and all of the mythology that we sometimes get into in our history lessons — you get the same questions we’re continuing to deal with today. What is the nature of the human mind? How is it related to the human body? Where did everything come from? Where is everything going? What’s going to happen to us when we die, if anything? These are all issues that can sometimes get wrapped up in these arbitrary assertions of religious schools that have no foundations in anything but pure imagination. But they are legitimate questions that any rational person is going to ask.
The important thing we’re seeing is that Velleius is analyzing these questions in a very common-sense rational way — using the information we get from our senses and from our anticipations and feelings as the basis for analyzing what’s true and what’s not true in these discussions. There are at least two important aspects of this: the pointing out of the inconsistencies and contradictions of other schools, and — in the end — what most people of common sense want to know, which is, well, what is the truth? What is really going on?
And we’re already beginning to see the foundation in Velleius of how we’re going to arrive at what he’s going to contend is a correct view. That’s in contrast to what we’re going to see when Cotta starts talking. Cotta’s already said some things at the beginning, but the difference in the approach is that Velleius does believe that there is a way to get to the bottom of these questions and to come up with a firm decision. Velleius is not out there like Cotta is — being a pontiff in ancient Rome, saying one thing to the people and saying something different when he’s in this private conversation, which is what we’re going to find that Cotta is apparently very comfortable in doing. Velleius is criticizing these schools as we go through them and pointing to the reason. He’s not just simply pointing to inconsistencies — the inconsistencies that Velleius is pointing to are resolvable by observation of humans here on earth through the senses, anticipations, and feelings. He’s not going to simply leave you hanging and say, well, I’ve done a great job destroying every other school out there but I’m not going to tell you what I think because I don’t think I have any answers either.
Every time I look at the clock as we begin to end an episode I think to myself, well, is everybody going to get so impatient with us that we’re spending so much time with this that they think it’s a waste of time? I think that a really good thing to think about for anybody who thinks that is just to realize that you’re never going to get past all these questions no matter how long you live. You’re going to see them in a different form, they’re going to be thrown in your face, and it helps to be able to talk about them and to be ready when you confront them. Because if you have not thought about them, if you’ve not talked with people who come at things in a way similar to your own approach, then you’re going to be thrown totally into disarray. You’re going to have nothing but doubt in your mind. And as Epicurus would say, doubt is itself painful — if you don’t need to have doubt, you don’t want to have doubt unnecessarily.
Epicurus thought that by going through these questions and having a firm position on the parts of it that you can have a firm position on — and I’ll repeat again, they were very clear that you cannot have a firm position on everything — living happily is what appears to be the goal that nature has set for us, and achieving the goal that nature has set for us is a pretty good way of looking at things. To try to exceed nature or go beyond nature or go around nature is sort of the prescription for disaster that leads to the imagination and the dreams that these other people are suggesting for the nature of the gods.
So let’s begin to bring today’s episode to a conclusion. Joshua, any closing thoughts today?
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, I think that was a great summary of where we are with this text and where we’re going to be going here. I quoted earlier from the Belfast Address by the Irish physicist John Tyndall, but his most important passage from that I didn’t read, and I think it bears directly on what you were just saying. He writes:
“The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was one of the earliest converts to the new astronomy. Taking Lucretius as his exemplar, he revived the notion of the infinity of worlds, and combining it with the doctrine of Copernicus reached the sublime generalization that the fixed stars are suns, scattered numberless through space and accompanied by satellites, which bear the same relation to them that our earth does to our sun, or our moon to our earth. This was an expansion of transcendent import, but Bruno came closer than this to our present line of thought. Struck with the problem of the generation and maintenance of organisms, and duly pondering it, he came to the conclusion that nature in her productions does not imitate the technique of man. Her process is one of unraveling and unfolding. The infinity of forms under which matter appears were not imposed upon it by an external artificer. By its own intrinsic force and virtue it brings these forms forth. Matter is not the mere naked empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to be, but the universal mother who brings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb.”
I think that’s a very important idea — that nature is not a capacity, not a vessel for the creative god to do his work in. That nature is the universal mother bringing forth all of these things of herself, not requiring any mind to do it, not requiring any deity in order to do it. This is nature acting of nature’s own accord. And I think that this idea, coupled with what I read earlier from George Santayana — that atomism is the greatest idea that mankind has ever hit upon — sets up a huge part of the Epicurean response to some of these other philosophical approaches when it comes to the nature of the gods.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Nature is not a capacity. Nature is something real. And that takes us right back into Epicurus’ suggestions that we really think closely about these issues of infinity and the different meanings even of this word infinity, because we’re talking about the universe being boundless and the atoms being numberless. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that infinity is the right way to describe that, if we invest this word infinity with some kind of a magical connotation which it really doesn’t have.
We’re not going to be able to go much further with that today, but again, that’s where Epicurus says, in the letter to Menoikeus: “Meditate therefore on these things and things akin to them night and day, by yourself and with a companion like to yourself, and never shall you be disturbed waking or asleep, but you shall live like a god among men. For a man who lives among immortal blessings is not likened to a mortal being.”
We are not just reading obsolete details of history that don’t mean anything. We’re doing exactly what Epicurus said to do to live the best possible life. We’ll continue to do that next week. Not everybody can participate immediately in our podcast, but we invite you to join us at least on the forum — help us address these questions, help us bring intelligent conversation and insight and study to these questions that really are so very important. So drop by the forum, we’ll be back again next week. Thanks for your time today. Bye.