Episode 232 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 07 - Velleius Attacks The Platonist And Aristotelian Views Of Gods
Date: 06/15/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3894-episode-232-cicero-s-otnotg-07-velleius-attacks-the-platonist-and-aristotelian-v/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Democritus significantly influenced Epicurean philosophy, particularly in atomism, but Epicurus diverged on determinism and the attainability of truth. - Epicurus emphasized the importance of determining knowable truths to achieve happiness, contrasting with Democritus’ skepticism. - Epicurus critiqued traditional theological views, asserting that gods are blessed and incorruptible, unlike Democritus’ divine images linked to knowledge. - Sensation and preconceptions (prolepsis) are crucial in Epicurean thought, with Epicurus trusting these faculties for understanding the gods through non-visual images. - The podcast criticizes Plato and Aristotle’s inconsistent and contradictory theological views, which Epicurus and his followers found logically and empirically flawed.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 232 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.
This week, we’re continuing in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. We’re focusing on the Epicurean sections of that book. We’re currently in Section 12, where Velleius has begun giving us Epicurus’s views of the other positions that schools and philosophers and religions have taken about the nature of the gods — before we get to a discussion of Epicurus’s own views. Last week, we talked about Empedocles and Protagoras and issues that were involved in taking a position that we don’t know one way or the other the nature of the gods. And this week, we move on in Section 12 to discuss Democritus, who is a major influence on many aspects of Epicurean philosophy. So let’s see first of all what Velleius has to say about him.
In the Young translation, Velleius is translated this way: “What shall I say of Democritus, who classes our images of objects and their orbs in the number of the gods? As he does that principle through which those images appear and have their influence, he deifies likewise our knowledge and understanding. Is he not involved in a very great error? And because nothing continues always in the same state, he denies that anything is everlasting. Does he not therefore entirely destroy the deity and make it impossible to form any opinion of him?”
That’s what’s recorded here. There’s not very much of Democritus’s own writing that’s preserved, but there are numbers of quotes available from different sources, and Lucretius mentions Democritus a number of times in talking about physics. So there are very interesting hints here about relationships between Democritus’s positions and those of Epicurus, including this issue of images — which apparently Democritus thought could be related to divinity — and then issues involving knowledge and understanding. Rackham translates this as saying that Democritus at one moment ranks as gods his roving images, at another the substance that emits and radiates these images, and at another again, quote, “the scientific intelligence of man.”
So before we get into the specifics of each of these, let’s talk in general about Democritus and what we know about his relationship to Epicurus, because there’s certainly a major influence in terms of atomism on Epicurus. But at the same time, Epicurus departed strongly from Democritus in coming up with the swerve of the atom and all the issues involved in determinism. Epicurus did not go along with Democritus’ point of view, especially on determinism, but also on issues of dogmatism versus skepticism and whether it is possible to have knowledge about certain things. So let’s talk for a few minutes about the general relationship between Democritus and Epicurus.
Joshua: So we haven’t encountered Pyrrho yet in this list of philosophers that we’re going through. But Pyrrho went with the army of Alexander the Great into Persia, Bactria, and maybe as far as what you might have called India at the time. And there he met the gymnosophists — these Hindu sages. And when he came back, he came back to Greece having heard so many different opinions about things that it led him to the conclusion that maybe nobody really knows anything — maybe knowledge is impossible. And so he took up this skeptical position that truth was beyond our reach. And actually Diogenes Laertius, in his description of Pyrrho’s philosophy in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, records that Epicurus was very curious what Pyrrho had learned abroad, and he would often go to hear him speak.
Democritus has a slightly similar story. He didn’t travel with the army, but he was born into a wealthy family, it’s said. And when he devoted himself to philosophy, he spent many years traveling all over the known world — to Egypt, the Babylonian Empire, Persia, India, and of course, Greece. And during this time he met people of all different backgrounds — Babylonian astrologers, Egyptian priests, and the gymnosophists from India. And it’s interesting that he also comes to a similar conclusion when it comes to the truth. There are a series of fragments from Democritus that talk exactly about this point. He says: “A man should know from this rule that he has cut off from truth.” And: “This argument too shows that in truth we know nothing about anything, but every man shares the generally prevailing opinion.” And: “Verily we know nothing; truth is buried deep” — or alternatively translated: “Of truth we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of a well.”
So the prevailing skepticism of Democritus is going to be a problem when it comes to tracing his influence on Epicurus, because Epicurus, while he did take a lot from Democritus, and while he was very interested to hear what Pyrrho had to say about his travels, thinks that skepticism — the belief that the grasp of the truth is impossible for mankind — puts us in an awfully precarious position, because a lot of the claims that are being made are profoundly threatening to our happiness. And so Epicurus, for that reason and many others, is really devoted to finding what he can know, if it’s possible to know anything. And Lucretius, in the first book of his poem, describes Epicurus as a conqueror beyond the flaming ramparts of the world, bringing back knowledge of what can be and what cannot, setting limits of what is knowable and what is not knowable. And so this approach is very different from the one you appear to find in Democritus. None of his writings survive, as you mentioned, Cassius, but the fragments that do survive suggest a more skeptical bent than we’ll find in Epicurus himself.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, on that issue of certainty — that does seem to relate to one of the ways in which Democritus’ view of the gods is relevant to this current discussion. Because it’s pretty clear that Democritus also had some kind of a theory that, as Young says, he classed our images of objects and their orbs in the number of the gods, as he does that principle through which those images appear and have their influence. So there’s something about images that is closely related to the issue of gods, even for Democritus and not just for Epicurus.
Looking over at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on Democritus, I see a paragraph that says: “The idea that our knowledge is based on the reception of images from outside us is employed in Democritus’ discussion of the gods.” Now, right there, there’s a premise that knowledge is based on the reception of images. It bears repeating that we’re not talking about vision and visible images — we’re talking about films of atoms that are not the same thing as what we see, that Democritus apparently thought were closely related to human understanding and human knowledge. And it appears that Epicurus adapted or adopted those into his own views as we see in Book Four of Lucretius and the lengthy discussion of images at that location.
But to continue with the Stanford article: “The idea that our knowledge is based on the reception of images from outside us is employed in Democritus’ discussion of the gods, wherein it is clear that our knowledge of the gods comes from idola or giant films of atoms with the characteristics we ascribe to the gods, although Democritus denies that they are immortal. Some scholars take this to be a deflationary attack on traditional theology as based on mere images, but others suppose that the theory posits that these idola are really living beings. Although atomism is often identified as an atheist doctrine in later times, it is not clear whether this is really Democritus’s view.”
And that, unfortunately, is all that article really goes into. But it seems clear that we need to expand our understanding of Epicurus’s position about the gods by comparing and contrasting and looking for source material in the views that Democritus had stated. And I do think this probably relates to what Velleius is going to say later on when he talks about prolepsis as Epicurus’s basis for knowledge of the nature of the gods, because Velleius at this moment says that Democritus “deifies likewise our knowledge and understanding.” Well, if knowledge and understanding comes through these films of atoms, as Democritus is apparently saying, then we clearly are circling around a central issue here of whether this faculty of images — which may or may not be the same thing as saying prolepsis — how that faculty relates to humans either generating or accepting the idea that there are beings behind these images.
Of course, when you then compare that with Democritus’ skepticism and his statements about how difficult it is to be certain about anything, you have an even stronger case than people sometimes make with Epicurus that Democritus may have been saying that the whole idea of gods results from humans assembling these non-visual images into some thought process in their minds. It’s interesting to consider whether Democritus took a more skeptical view of the knowledge that comes from those images than did Epicurus — because it does seem like Epicurus generally tells us that from a canonical point of view, we have to accept the honesty of the information that the five senses gives to us, that pleasure and pain gives to us, and that the prolepseis give to us. So if the knowledge of the gods is going to be coming to us substantially through these prolepseis, and these prolepseis are significantly related to images, it seems like you would have to take a position as to the reliability of those images and how to assemble them — how to determine which are true and which are not — as crucial to your idea of assembling the nature of the gods, whether you’re Democritus or Epicurus.
Joshua: I just want to add to that, Cassius, that there are a number of other areas in which the sayings of Democritus that survive bear a lot of similarities to what would become Epicurus’ philosophy. For example, Democritus says: “Men have fashioned an image of chance as an excuse for their own stupidity, for chance rarely conflicts with intelligence, and most things in life can be set in order by an intelligent sharpness of sight.” And Principal Doctrine 16 says: “Fortune but seldom interferes with the wise person; his greatest and highest interests have been, are, and will be directed by reason through the course of his life.” So very similar on that point.
And what I often quote from Democritus is what he says about convention: “By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color — in reality, atoms and void.” It parallels what we find in Epicurus’ understanding of the atoms, where things like color are an effect produced by atoms coming together into compounds, but the atoms themselves only have a number of very specific characteristics.
Cassius: Yeah, we could almost devote a whole episode at some point to going through the sayings of Democritus and comparing them to the sayings of Epicurus, because there are many reflections in what Epicurus had to say that seem to take their origin in what is preserved that Democritus had said before him.
I want to circle back for just a minute to what Velleius has already said about Democritus. After criticizing Democritus for deifying our knowledge and understanding, Velleius then says: “And because nothing continues always in the same state, Democritus denies that anything is everlasting.” And Velleius asks whether Democritus does not thereby destroy the deity and make it impossible to form any opinion of him. I think there’s a good bit of information we can mine out of that question, because it looks like Velleius is saying that there is grounds for taking the position that to be a deity, you must have the capacity at least to be everlasting.
Now, where canonically in Epicurean theory would Velleius get that assertion that we must consider a deity to be everlasting? Clearly that’s a reflection of what Epicurus has said — that the two characteristics that are most important to hold are blessedness and incorruptibility. And so presumably the conclusion that those two characteristics are mandatory comes from somewhere. It likely does not come directly from the five senses. It may be related to pain and pleasure, but it seems more likely that it is related to this prolepseis issue that we’re talking about. And so regardless of anything else you can say about Velleius’ position, he’s following Epicurus that incorruptibility is a requirement of your conception of being a god. And he’s criticizing Democritus for not following that conclusion. So however Democritus was reasoning, he was able to talk about the gods without concluding that they had to be deathless. And it’s hard to say whether Epicurus was just using some kind of logical process involving pleasure — that you can’t be totally blessed if you’re worried about dying — or whether there was another grounds for it. But this is clearly an area in which Epicurus was going further than Democritus did on the nature of the gods.
Joshua: Yeah, that appears to be the case. Unfortunately, like with most of these early philosophers, we have so little surviving from what they wrote. So without having that to rely on, we’re very lucky to have as much as we do from Epicurus himself and from Lucretius, because without that, we’d be reading a list of fragments just like we have here for Democritus.
Cassius: Yeah, this could easily be an example of Epicurus deviating from Democritus’ skepticism — Democritus taking the position that truth is at the bottom of a well and it’s just impossible to know. And so Democritus didn’t derive any firm conclusions about the nature of gods, whereas Epicurus is willing to go further and say that it is possible under certain circumstances to make general conclusions based on the evidence that you have. And although he only has two — incorruptibility and blessedness — he is firm that those two are reasonable to accept. So this listing of Democritus I think is particularly helpful for us in understanding Epicurus’ own reasoning.
Now, the next one Velleius mentions is Diogenes of Apollonia. Velleius says: “Diogenes of Apollonia looks upon the air to be a deity. But what sense can the air have, or what divine form can be attributed to it?”
Now, to me, that’s a reflection of what’s been said previously about some of the other philosophers who attempt to identify matter of some kind — whether it be fire, water, earth, or air — as divinity. So I’m not sure that this brief mention of Diogenes of Apollonia adds a whole lot, but it certainly reinforces that Velleius and Epicurus are taking the position that a divine form must have some kind of form associated with it, and that it’s not just some amorphous, infinite blob.
Joshua: It’s interesting, Cassius, in almost all of these cases where they’re talking about the gods as being either incorporeal or reduced to one element or another, one of Velleius’s criticisms is that such a being would lack sensation. And the importance of sensation in Epicurean philosophy is described in Book Two of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius. He writes: “Again, here are hot fire and cold frost, toothed in different fashion to prick our bodily senses as the touch in either case proves to us — for touch, so help me the holy power of the gods, it is touch that is the bodily sense, whether when a thing penetrates from without, or when hurt comes from something within the body, or when it gives pleasure in issuing forth by the creative acts of Venus.”
So it’s sensation, it’s the universe or the cosmos coming into contact with the body. And as we’re going to see here in a minute in Plato, he describes the god as asōmatos — without a body. If a god is without a body, then it has to be without sensation. And if it’s without sensation, how does it interface with the cosmos? Because the senses are really all we have on that front. It appears to be very, very important to Lucretius because he elevates it to a level that he elevates few other things. The only other thing I think that he describes as divine in that way, apart from the gods themselves, is pleasure — divine pleasure, the guide of life. So sensation, the ability to feel pleasure — this is so critical to Lucretius’ understanding of what makes a person or a thing in nature that to imagine a god without it is just foolish. Of course the gods have sensation. How could they otherwise?
Cassius: Yeah, and I don’t want to go too far in speculating about what this would mean, but one question I would ask about all this is that even today there’s lots of debate in physics about what, over the years, I’ve heard called action at a distance. In other words, when you have one thing over in one location and something else over in a distant location, how does the one influence the other? There has to be some mechanism — the planets and gravity, the way that electrons and protons move around and so forth. It seems like these ancient philosophers were aware that you need to have an explanation, including in Lucretius’ discussion of magnetism. There has to be some kind of explanation about how you in one location can be affected by something in another location when you don’t see or have direct sensation of the relationship between those two things.
And so in terms of these images that are non-visible, that are falling off of everything including the gods, and that we are deriving a lot of information from even without using our eyes — I could see the possibility that people would consider that process or those images to be extremely important to understand and take a position on, again even though they’re not visible to us. That’s the method by which you can understand easily how an atom or body touching another body can influence it — so you bounce off, you have impact and reactions to impacts. And that touching of bodies directly has to have some analog in when those bodies are not near each other, if they’re going to have any influence at all. And so it seems to me that this whole theory of these non-visible images and the films that are given off by things must be this early attempt to give some kind of a concrete mechanism for how all this works. And rather than considering this non-visible function to be God itself, there has to be a rational naturalistic way of explaining this process that’s not visible. And it sounds like the touch that is inferred from these non-visible films or images or specters — whatever name you want to use for these images — serves that function of allowing us to understand how things can influence each other over distances when we don’t see them touching directly. So that either touch or a mechanism which takes the place of touch is critical for the whole system to remain naturalistic and not just positing, well, I don’t see what caused these reactions, so it must be God. Rather than going off in that direction, you’ve got to have a theory of how it occurs in nature. And the touch that occurs at a distance using these films may well serve that function. That’s speculation, but probably a direction that would be useful to think about if somebody were trying to trace that down.
OK, so let’s at this point move to the big guy and start talking about the major influence on what we understand the Greeks to have thought about — Plato. Because the next section, Velleius goes and attacks Plato’s views. Young has it this way. Velleius says, quote: “It would be tedious to show the uncertainty of Plato’s opinion. For in his Timaeus, he denies the propriety of asserting that there is one great father or creator of the world. And in his book on the Laws, he thinks we ought not to make too strict an inquiry into the nature of the deity. And as for his statement when he asserts that God is a being without any body — what the Greeks call asōmatos — it is certainly quite unintelligible how that theory can possibly be true. For such a God must then necessarily be destitute of sense, prudence, and pleasure, all which things are comprehended in our notion of the gods. He likewise asserts in his Timaeus and in his Laws that the world, the heavens, the stars, the mind, and those gods which are delivered down to us from our ancestors constitute the deity. These opinions taken separately are apparently false, and taken together are directly inconsistent with each other.”
Now, let’s stop there and talk about Plato for just a moment. But what we’re really doing here for the next several sections is we’re breaking down the Academic position, which starts with Plato but will then continue and go on to discuss Xenophon and Antisthenes as well. And then we’ll shift over and talk about the Peripatetic position, starting with Aristotle, and then covering a couple of the followers of Aristotle. But for the time being, the big guy here to discuss is the founder of the Academic position, Plato. And Plato’s Timaeus is the go-to source for the Academic position on the nature of the gods. And Velleius is pointing out to us that we can go there if we like, but we’re going to find ambiguity, error, and we’re not even going to find internal consistency.
Joshua: So we’ve already discussed probably the greatest influence on Epicurus in a positive way — that being Democritus. Plato is in many ways the greatest influence on Epicurus in a negative way. It was by rejecting so much of what Plato held to be true that Epicurus begins to sketch out the outlines of his own position. And one of those points being that Plato asserts that God is a being without any body — what the Greeks call asōmatos. It is certainly quite unintelligible how that theory can possibly be true. And for the reasons that we were just discussing, Cassius — if sensation, if contact, if action at a distance, if these things are how we interface with the cosmos — how can a being that doesn’t have a body either affect other beings or be affected by them?
The word asōmatos, which means without a body or incorporeal, has at its root the word soma, which means body. And I did a word search in Book Ten of Diogenes Laertius, and the word soma and all of its inflections and variations appears 45 times in Book Ten. Most notably, it appears in the Letter to Herodotus quite frequently, because it’s the same word we use when we’re talking about bodies — bodies and void, atoms coming together to form compound bodies, that the universe is made of bodies and that which is empty of bodies. And so how can a god not have a body seems to be part of the problem here.
And then Velleius goes on to say that such a God must then necessarily be destitute of sense, prudence, and pleasure — all things which are comprehended in our notion of the gods. So the Epicurean understanding of the gods, which we’re going to get to throughout this whole text, is that they are beings that exist in nature, they don’t exist above or beyond nature, that they are made of the same thing that everything else in nature is made of — they’re made of bodies and void, atoms and void — that they affect each other, and while they don’t influence our world directly, they also are capable of interfacing with us through the images, through the idola, or through our capacity for prolepsis. This is all quite complicated stuff, and we’re going to be talking a lot about it later on. But you can see how clearly this understanding of the gods — the Epicurean understanding of the gods — is totally contradictory to Plato’s understanding. But the other problem that Velleius brings up is that Plato’s understanding of the gods, depending on which book you’re reading, is actually internally inconsistent among his own works. So the question is: which version of Plato’s god should we take to be the god?
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, because Velleius has started out by pointing out that Plato was uncertain in the Timaeus about the gods, and said that it’s not a good idea to assert that there’s one great father or creator of the world, and that in the Laws, Plato had said that we ought not make too strict an inquiry into the nature of the deity — presumably because he didn’t think there was an answer to that. But then later on, he likewise asserts in the Timaeus and in the Laws that the world, the heavens, the stars, the mind, and those gods that are delivered from our ancestors are deities. So which is it, Plato? Are all of these things out there clearly deities? Or are we just barking up the wrong tree in the beginning to even think about the nature of deity?
The direction that others seem to go in, as we’ll talk about later, definitely puts a single entity — in a Stoic-like way — as the single instigator of all things, as the prime mover of all things. But Plato apparently didn’t want to go there. Plato, the leader of the Academy, thought that created contradictions he didn’t want to try to unwind. I think those who go into Plato in more detail are going to find that Plato started talking about lesser gods as the likely creators of the world we live in so that he could explain errors and pain and the bad things we see around us that he did not want to associate with a single prime mover. That’s beyond the scope of what we’re discussing here now. But it certainly sounds like Plato, at one point, is telling his students that we don’t know the nature of the gods and we better be careful about speculating about it. And then at other times — potentially when he’s talking to those who are not his golden chosen few, maybe when he’s talking to the world at large with his noble fictions — he’s willing to talk about and accept all sorts of possibilities for who the gods are, possibly as it serves his purposes for the ideal state.
Joshua: I can quote a number of passages from the Timaeus dialogue that I think will at least give us a flavor of where he was going. In one section, Timaeus says this: “All men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling, at the beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great, always call upon God. And we too, who are going to discourse of the nature of the universe — how created or how existing without creation — if we be not altogether out of our wits, must invoke the aid of gods and goddesses, and pray that our words may be acceptable to them and consistent with themselves.” A fairly basic invocation of the Muse, as it’s sometimes called — and Lucretius has one at the beginning of his poem as well, in his Hymn to Venus.
He goes on later to say: “Such was the whole plan of the eternal God, about the God that was to be, to whom for this reason he gave a body, smooth and even, having a surface in every direction equidistant from the center.” So the God that he’s making is a sphere — a body entire and perfect and formed out of perfect bodies. “And in the center, he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also to be the exterior environment of it. And he made the universe a circle, moving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to converse with itself and needing no other friendship or acquaintance.”
And a little bit further down, he says: “To know or tell the origin of the other divinities is beyond us and we must accept the traditions of the men of old who affirm themselves to be the offspring of the gods. That is what they say, and they must surely have known their own ancestors. How can we doubt the word of the children of the gods?” That is deliciously circular — we have to trust what the children of the gods say because how can we doubt the word of the children of the gods? Although, he continues: “They give no probable or certain proofs, still as they declare that they are speaking of what took place in their own family, we must conform to custom and believe them.” And then he goes into the whole history of Greek mythology, of the children of earth and heaven, Kronos and Rhea, and then Zeus and Hera and all their siblings and all their children and so forth. And so those are all gods too, in a way.
And just one more quote, he says: “First, then, the gods, imitating the spherical shape of the universe, enclosed the two divine courses in a spherical body — that namely which we now term the head, being the most divine part of us and the lord of all that is in us. To this the gods, when they put together the body, gave all the other members to be servants of the head, considering that it partook of every sort of motion. In order then that it might not tumble about among the high and deep places of the earth, but might be able to get over the one and out of the other, they provided the body to be its vehicle and means of locomotion, which consequently had length and was furnished with four limbs, extended and flexible. These God contrived to be instruments of locomotion.”
That gives you, I think, a flavor of what the Timaeus dialogue of Plato has to say about the nature of not only the chief God that created everything, but also all of the lesser deities and how they created mankind.
Cassius: Joshua, listening to those statements from the Timaeus takes me in two directions. The first is to remember that in the Letter to Menoikeus, Epicurus had said that “the impious man is not he who popularly denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many.” In other words, Epicurus is coming at the subject from the point of view that when you go down these crazy roads of speculation — like we’re just listening to Plato do — you’re actually being blasphemous, because all you really know about the gods is that they’re blessed and imperishable. But all of this speculation about circles and forms is just not something that we have knowledge of, and is actually not just erroneous but impious to talk about.
And Velleius goes on in the next section, commenting on Xenophon, to make a similar objection. He says, quote: “Xenophon has committed almost the same mistakes, but in fewer words. In those sayings which he’s related to Socrates, he introduces him disputing the lawfulness of inquiring into the form of the deity and makes him assert the sun and the mind to be deities. He represents him likewise as affirming the being of one God only, and at another time of many — which are errors of almost the same kind which I before took notice of in Plato.”
So Xenophon, who many people infer is more accurate to Socrates than Plato himself was, says that Socrates basically held that it’s unlawful to inquire into the form of the deity. I don’t know that you interpret that to mean that it’s unlawful to dispute that the deity has form — if you take it literally as Young has translated it, it’s actually unlawful to even talk about the form of a god, and to assert anything in particular about a god would be equally unlawful. It’s almost as if the subject is off-topic, which would call to mind Epicurus’ position that this subject is not off-topic. If there’s one thing you can say about the gods in addition to their being blessed and incorruptible, it’s not unlawful to talk about them. It should be lawful and it’s important to talk about them for all of the many reasons that we do pursue the issue in terms of contributions to happiness. You can’t simply take the position that it’s off limits to talk about the gods.
But Xenophon is telling us that Socrates had totally inconsistent positions — that at one time there’s only one god and at another time there’s many gods. And both of those cannot be true.
And Velleius includes in his review of the Academic position a reference to Antisthenes. He says: “Antisthenes, in his book called The Natural Philosopher, says that there are many national and one natural deity. But by this saying he destroys the power and nature of the gods. Speusippus is not much less in the wrong, who following his uncle Plato, says that a certain incorporeal power governs everything, by which he endeavors to root out of our minds the knowledge of the gods.”
Now after that, Velleius is going to turn to Aristotle and the Peripatetics. But let’s go back and summarize the Academic perspective. The Academy is the most prestigious of the Greek schools. And if anybody speaks for orthodox Greek views of the gods, it’s the Academic school. With the result that Epicurus is saying, your leaders — the Academicians — are all over the board, even on how many gods there are, much less about the nature of the gods. I’m tempted to take from Velleius’s comment that Xenophon committed almost the same mistakes as Plato but in fewer words — I’m tempted to take that as a reinforcement of the important thing to believe about the gods: that they are blessed and that they are incorruptible, and don’t believe anything about the gods that is inconsistent with blessedness and incorruptibility. But beyond those two basic attributes, it’s very easy to waste your time as Plato was doing.
Joshua: Cassius, I’ll just echo what you said about Xenophon — that the lawfulness of inquiring into the form of the deity is something that Epicurus would never dispute. I think that he would say that inquiry, that looking into the nature of things including the gods who are natural, is not only a proper thing to do, but it’s also the most necessary thing to do for our happiness. That studying nature — of which the gods are a part — is the source, as he describes himself, of his own happiness and tranquility. And so to say that it’s impious to even ask questions about the gods is very far from what Epicurus himself was saying.
And Antisthenes, in saying that there are many national and one natural deity, is making another problem that Epicurus would respond to by saying that the gods are not associated with this world or its problems or its joys — that they exist apart. And so to say that each nation has its own deities that all exist would be the wrong way to look at it.
Cassius: Yeah, there are many wrong ways to look at this subject from Velleius’s position. And so let’s move from the Academy to the Peripatetics and finish today on the Peripatetics. We’ll move next week to the Stoics, who are the key opponents as usual to the Epicurean position. But it’s interesting to see what Velleius has to say about what the Peripatetics and Aristotle had said.
Velleius says this: “Aristotle, in his third book of philosophy, confounds many things together as the rest have done, but he does not differ from his master Plato. At one time, Aristotle attributes all divinity to the mind. At another, he asserts that the world is God. Soon afterwards, he makes some other essence preside over the world and gives it those faculties by which, with certain revolutions, he may govern and preserve the motion of it. Then he asserts the heat of the firmament to be God, not perceiving the firmament to be a part of the world, which in another place he had described as God. How can that divine sense of the firmament be preserved in so rapid a motion? And where do the multitude of gods dwell if heaven itself is a deity? But when this philosopher says that God is without a body, he makes him an irrational and insensible being. Besides, how can the world move itself if it lacks a body? Or how, if it is in perpetual self-motion, can it be easy and happy?”
To continue with the Peripatetics, Velleius goes further and says: “Xenocrates, his fellow pupil, does not appear much wiser on this head, for in his books concerning the nature of the gods, no divine form is described. But he says the number of them is eight. Five are moving planets. The sixth is contained in all the fixed stars, which dispersed are so many several members, but considered together are one single deity. The seventh is the sun, and the eighth is the moon. But in what sense they can possibly be happy is not easy to be understood.”
“From the same school of Plato, Heraclides of Pontus stuffed his books with childish tales. Sometimes he thinks the world a deity, at another time the mind. He attributes divinity likewise to the wandering stars. He deprives the deity of sense and makes his form mutable. And in the same book again, he makes earth and heaven deities.”
“The unsteadiness of Theophrastus is equally intolerable. At one time, he attributes a divine prerogative to the mind, at another to the firmament, at another to the stars and celestial constellations.”
“Nor is his disciple Strato, who is called the naturalist, any more worthy to be regarded. For he thinks that the divine power is diffused through nature, which is the cause of birth, increase, and diminution, but that it has no sense or form.”
Now, that takes us to the end of Section 14. And what we’ve just gone through is the Peripatetics — the breakoffs from the Academy that constitute Aristotle and his followers, such as Theophrastus and Strato. And Velleius is not cutting them any more slack than he cut the Academy. He’s saying that their positions about the gods are as inconsistent and illogical as are those of the Academy. And given that Aristotle is held in such high esteem in many quarters — how influential he was later on with the Catholic Church, with St. Thomas Aquinas and people like that — we probably ought to emphasize that Aristotle is not getting any better treatment here from Velleius than was Plato himself.
Joshua: Right, and on a lot of the same points with all of the Peripatetics, he’s making the point here that he’s made several times before — that when you describe the god as lacking a body or lacking sense, or when you say that a planet is a god or a moon is a god or the fixed stars are a god, or when you say that nature itself is a god, you’re inviting a whole host of other philosophical questions to which it will be very difficult to offer an answer. Because if the gods are insensate and incorporeal, then how do they do anything? It seems to be a boundary that Velleius is not willing to cross — to say that the gods are without sense or literally senseless, or that the gods are without a body, incorporeal. And most of the philosophers we’ve looked at here have taken that approach. But it is interesting to see the sheer variety that exists even in one school — that you could say the fixed stars are a god, and the planets are a god, and nature itself is a god, the sun is a god, the world is a god, and so forth. It does make it look like nobody knows what they’re talking about, which of course was the position of Pyrrho and certainly to an extent was the position of Democritus, who talked to people all over the world.
So how do you set the Epicurean position apart is the question, and it’s one we’re going to have to answer going through this book.
Cassius: Yeah, and we’ll postpone the Stoics until next week. But maybe it would be worthwhile to say here that even while Velleius is criticizing the inconsistency of the positions that the Academicians and the Peripatetics had taken, it hasn’t yet really come into focus that what Epicurus would really object to is going to come with what we hear from the Stoics and how the Stoics would go off — so to speak — in terms of the involvement and the dictatorial powers of the god in men’s lives. The Stoics, as we’ll discuss again next week, take the position that everything is fated, that everything is predetermined. And of course we can recognize all sorts of commonalities between that position and the position of some schools and religions today.
But to give the Platonists and the Aristotelians a little bit of credit, it sounds like they were, at least in their wild speculations about the natures of the gods, not going quite so strongly in the direction of taking the position that the gods are so dictatorial in every aspect of human life. They certainly did believe they were involved, and so they were negative influences, and Velleius is criticizing them ruthlessly. But to me, at least, there’s a difference between the errors of the Academicians and the Aristotelians versus the logical extreme to which the Stoics took it, which we’ll discuss next week.
And it does seem, even with Socrates and Plato, that there are references here from Velleius that they’re being inconsistent and to some extent limiting their inquiry into the nature of the gods — at least acknowledging the difficulty of the subject. Well, if there’s one way to make errors worse, it’s going to be to take the position that there’s no difficulty here. The gods control everything, and it’s ridiculous and unacceptable even to question that, which is the direction the Stoics end up going. But at least for the moment, we have Velleius treating the non-Epicurean positions as erroneous and absurd, but still potentially open to question in at least some of the details.
It does seem as we go through this list that we’re barely scratching the surface on most of this stuff, because as you rightly say, when we get into the Stoics, that’s probably going to be a really good time to talk about natural law as it’s employed — not just by the Stoics but by Catholics today when they say things are immoral because they’re unnatural, because they don’t exist in nature, or because they exist in nature and lead to bad things or something like that. And we’re going to have an opportunity to present Epicurus’ own view of justice, which is that it exists by convention between people and not from on high and so forth. So there’s a whole lot to talk about here beyond what we’ve merely gone into in this long list of philosophers.
Okay, so to begin to close for today’s episode — we’ve treated today the Academic school with Plato as the head, and we’ve treated the Peripatetics with Aristotle and his followers, with the general conclusion, again, that all of these positions fall short because of their inconsistency, their illogic, but probably most of all from the Epicurean point of view, their inconsistency with the core attitude that the most important thing to believe about gods is that they must be incorruptible and they must be blessed, and that these different directions that these other philosophers had gone are inconsistent with those presumptions that are our starting point for analysis of deity. And certainly because they’re deviating from that starting point, they’re without foundation, either in terms of good logic or in evidence that we can observe. So Velleius has just been continuing today to lay the groundwork to move to Epicurus’ own position, which we’ll discuss after we deal with the Stoics.
So with that, Joshua, any thoughts as we begin to close today?
Joshua: So what we’ve seen today is that when you talk about the gods, it relates to a whole host of issues — everything from skepticism about whether truth is really knowable, sensations and their relation to how we interface with nature and with reality. And of course a lot of these opinions that we’ve read about today will go on to be influential in a whole number of other areas as well. For example, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, where bread is turned into body and wine is turned into blood, and even though the appearance is still that of bread and of wine, the substance — the underlying substance — is the body and blood of Jesus and so forth. So the lifespan of these ideas is quite long and it’s something we’re still struggling against today in a lot of important ways.
And I’ve already mentioned the natural law issue and how that conflicts with Epicurus’s understanding of justice. And we haven’t gotten to it yet, but we should probably talk about teleology going forward and how that relates to Lucretius’s understanding of the origin of mankind and so forth. And even more importantly, how it relates to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, because there are still those today who say that the absence of teleology in Darwin’s theory of evolution should be considered to render it false, and that we should instead look at theories of origins that are based on teleology — the understanding that everything was created with a purpose or a final cause, as Aristotle would say. So we are by no means done with any of these ideas — not just in this text, but in everything we talk about on this podcast going forward. And a lot of what we’ve already talked about relates back not just to the issue of the gods, but to the inferences that people make from their opinions on the gods.
Cassius: Yeah, absolutely right. So much of what we’re talking about today emphasizes that everything comes back — from the Epicurean perspective — to what Epicurus has said at the beginning of the Letter to Menoikeus, where he said these are the first principles of the good life. And again, let me quote, this is the Bailey version: “First of all, believe that God is a being immortal and blessed, even as the common idea of a God is engraved upon men’s minds. And do not assign to him anything alien to his immortality or ill-suited to his blessedness. But believe about him everything that can uphold his blessedness and immortality.”
It’s just over and over — blessedness and deathlessness are the two characteristics that Epicurus is focusing on. And you’ve got to rigorously, from this perspective, blot out every possibility that is inconsistent with or would contradict blessedness or immortality. And in the same way, only entertain things that are consistent and that uphold this idea of blessedness and immortality. And so from the Epicurean perspective, that’s the starting point — the lodestone, the guiding star of everything in the discussion of deity. And Velleius is just systematically going through Plato and Aristotle and the others, dismantling their systems because they don’t consistently hold to blessedness and deathlessness as the main characteristics of gods.
So next week we’ll come to the much more aggressive assertions of the Stoics about how all of nature emanates from and is dictated by this divine fire — which alone from any kind of logical perspective can justify the Stoic assertions that pleasure is worthless and that we should be indifferent to all the things that most common people think are the most important aspects of life. To reach extreme moral conclusions like the Stoics do, you have to take some extreme positions about the nature of God and his involvement in the world. And we’re going to see those and examine them and take them apart from the Epicurean perspective next week. So with that, let’s close for today. As always, we welcome you to drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum and join with us in discussion of these and other issues related to Epicurus. Thanks for your time today, we’ll be back soon. Bye.