Episode 233 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 08 - An Epicurean Attack On The False God Of Stoicism
Date: 06/18/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3905-episode-233-cicero-s-otnotg-08-an-epicurean-attack-on-the-false-god-of-stoicism/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”- Rejection of Supernatural Elements: The episode emphasizes Epicurus’ teaching that the universe is entirely natural, rejecting any supernatural elements, including the belief in life after death.
- Critique of Platonic and Stoic Theologies: The discussion critiques Platonic and Stoic views of gods, highlighting the Epicurean stance that gods are blessed, incorruptible, and uninvolved in human affairs.
- Nature of Epicurean Gods: Epicurean gods are described as animate beings that are deathless and perfectly blissful, contrasting with Stoic beliefs that deify abstract concepts like the law of nature.
- Epicurus’ View on Free Will: The podcast underscores Epicurus’ rejection of determinism and the importance of free will, opposing Stoic fatalism.
- Natural Law and Morality: The episode critiques the Stoic idea of natural law as an imposed divine order, arguing instead that Epicurean philosophy derives ethical guidance from the natural pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain observed in living beings.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 233 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 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 we follow in our podcast and on our forum. First, our aim is to bring you an accurate presentation of classical Epicurean philosophy as the ancient Epicureans understood it. Second, we don’t talk about modern politics in this podcast. How you apply Epicurus in your own life is of course entirely up to you. Third, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that the Epicureans often use words differently than we do today. To the Epicureans, gods were not omnipotent or omniscient. So as we discuss Epicurean gods, we don’t mean the same thing as in major religions today. More than anything else, Epicurus taught that the universe is not supernatural in any way, and that means there’s no life after death, and any happiness we’ll ever have comes in this life, which is why it’s so important not to waste time in confusion.
Today we’re continuing to review the Epicurean sections of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. We’re still in Book One, but we’re up to Section 14. Last week we spent most of the time talking about the Platonist view of the gods, and setting out Epicurus’s objections to the ways that Plato and his Timaeus had erected a general picture of an active god who was in charge of the universe, created the universe, and directs it even today. We’ve seen a series of similar arguments advanced by Velleius on behalf of Epicurus, mostly based on the contention that the only thing we can really be sure of about the gods is that they are deathless and incorruptible. We’re going to get more into that argument when we get to Velleius presenting the positive side of his approach, but for the time being, the major point has been that if we stick firmly to the understanding that a god has no problems, is totally blessed, and has total deathlessness, then we won’t get off on these other crazy ideas that gods are intervening in the affairs of men, or that gods are big spheres hurtling through the universe, or that gods are spending their time watching the animals to decide what season it should be.
Of course, the context of the dialogue is that Velleius is talking to Cotta, who is a representative of the Academic Skeptics, and Velleius is representing Epicurus in his remarks. And the third party to the dialogue is Lucilius Balbus, who is a Stoic. And so in Section 14, we now reach the analysis from an Epicurean perspective of the Stoic position. Young translates Section 14 as follows:
“Zeno, to come to your sect, Balbus, thinks the law of nature to be the divinity, and that it has the power to force us to what is right and to restrain us from what is wrong. How this law can be an animated being I cannot conceive. But that God is so, we would certainly maintain. The same person says in another place that the sky is God. But can we possibly conceive that God is a being insensible and deaf to our prayers, our wishes, and our vows, and wholly unconnected with us? In other books, he thinks that there is a certain rational essence pervading all nature, endued with divine efficacy. He attributes the same power to the stars, to the years, and to the months, and to the seasons. In his interpretation of Hesiod’s Theogony, he entirely destroys the established notions of the gods. For he excludes Jupiter, Juno, and Vesta, and those esteemed divine from the number of them. But his doctrine is that these are names by which some kind of illusion are given to mute and inanimate beings. The sentiments of his disciple Aristo are not less erroneous. He thought it impossible to conceive the form of the deity, and asserts that the gods are destitute of sense, and he is entirely dubious whether the deity is an animated being or not.”
Let’s go ahead and set the stage by discussing this initial set of observations about Zeno, the founder of the Stoic sect, because the first observation that Velleius makes is that the Stoics held that the law of nature is divine, and that the law of nature has the power to force us to what is right and to restrain us from what is wrong.
Before we go further in Velleius’ criticism, when Velleius says that Zeno held that the law of nature has the power to force us to what is right and to restrain us from what is wrong, I’m immediately called back to a statement that Cicero makes in the Republic, in Section 22 of Book Three of the Republic, where Cicero says this in relation to justice and law:
“True law is right reason in agreement with nature. It is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting. It summons to duty by its commands, and it averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it. And it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or people. And we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens or different laws now and in the future. But one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times. And there will be one master and ruler — that is God over us all. For he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature. And by reason of this fact he will suffer the worst punishments, even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment.”
I would submit that this attitude that Cicero is embodying in Republic Book Three is indicative of what Zeno had suggested and taught as the foundation of Stoicism — that this law of nature, this law of God, is divine, and that it has the power to force us to what is right and restrain us from what is wrong. Velleius says that it’s impossible to conceive this law as an animated being. And that is one of the flaws of this logic, because if a god is blessed and incorruptible, then a god is an animated being. And some abstract concept of a universal law is not itself an animated being.
Velleius says that at times Zeno says that the sky is God, but then he also says this, which is very closely related to this natural law idea: “In other books, he thinks there is a certain rational essence pervading all nature, endued with divine efficacy.” So the Stoics were submitting that this divine law, this divine reason, is itself the god that we should be paying attention to — so pervasive and so much in control of everything that we can’t be freed from its obligations either by the Senate or by the people.
Joshua: So let me review what we’ve gone over so far, Cassius, in Section 14. It says this in the Young translation: “Zeno, to come to your sect, Balbus, thinks the law of nature to be the divinity and that it has the power to force us to what is right and to restrain us from what is wrong. How this law can be an animated being I cannot conceive, but the God is so we would certainly maintain.”
So let me take first this issue of whether God is an animated being, and then we’ll take up this issue of natural law. And I want to connect this back in Epicureanism at least to the understanding that Epicurus looked to animate beings — and specifically to the young of all species — to determine in part what the telos is, what should we be looking to? And this is going to help us delineate where we think Epicurus is going in a different path here. He is looking to nature, but he’s not looking to a normative law that exists as an emanation of the divine mind and that we’re all bound to no matter where we are. Nothing like that really exists in Epicurean philosophy because nature is, in the most perfect possible sense, amoral. All questions of morality are relevant to mankind but irrelevant in nature, because nature doesn’t have a mind.
Let me quote from Norman DeWitt’s book, Epicurus and His Philosophy, on page 129, in The Canon, Reason, and Nature. DeWitt writes:
“The priority of nature was also insisted upon in establishing the identity of the end or telos. Aristotle had furnished a precious hint in this connection. He wrote that perhaps even in the case of the lower animals there is some natural good superior to their scale of intelligence which aims at the corresponding good. To this principle, Epicurus adapted his procedure, but the promptings of nature alone, apart from reason — every animate thing the moment it is born reaches out for pleasure and shrinks from pain. Consistent with this reasoning is the steady practice of referring to pleasure as the end of nature, which occurs five times in our scant remains of Epicurean writings. As analogous phrases may be cited ‘the good of nature’ and ‘the pleasure of nature,’ all of them implying that reason played no necessary role in establishing the truth.”
This is crucial, I think, in Epicurean philosophy — to understand that there is no natural reason, natural law, natural order that tells us how things are supposed to work. As humans we look to the young of all species in order to understand pleasure and the pursuit of pleasure in the most natural state. But there’s no divine moral law saying that this is what we should do.
DeWitt goes on to say: “Similar is the implication of parallel phrases such as ‘the wealth of nature,’ signifying that nature and not reason reveals the true meaning of wealth, and also ‘the limits of nature,’ implying that nature and not reason teaches the true limits of the desires.”
Norman DeWitt continues this discussion in Chapter 12, The New Hedonism, starting on page 216. He says:
“Epicurus was following the lead of his predecessors when he found in the behavior of animate creatures the evidence for identifying pleasure as the end or telos, but he improved upon their procedure by narrowing his observations to the behavior of newborn creatures, which as yet possessed neither volition nor intelligence. By narrowing the field to the newborn, Epicurus was also reducing animate life to its minimum value, because at the moment of birth, even some of the senses have not yet begun to function. Consequently, as Cicero says in the same context, since nothing is left of a human being when the senses are eliminated, the question ‘what is according to nature or contrary to nature’ is of necessity being judged by nature herself.”
And then finally, the relevant passage for us in this text that we’re going through also comes from DeWitt — from Chapter 13, The True Piety, on page 249. He writes:
“Epicurus approached the topic of piety as a reformer, a materialist, and a dogmatist. As a reformer, he believed that the natural piety of mankind had suffered perversion and that his mission was to recall men to true piety. As a materialist, he rejected belief in all incorporeal existences. As a materialist, he felt bound also to reject all divine causation, including divine movers and divine creators. He was an evolutionist, postulating the continuous birth of the unintended. As a dogmatist, declaring the possibility of certitude and knowledge, he felt bound to furnish a rationalized account of the gods, their numbers, attributes, form, abode, and manner of life. The new theology that resulted is astonishing. Some of the findings are as follows: The gods are not by nature deathless. They were never called immortal by Epicurus himself, though they were by his followers. And most importantly, the gods are animate creatures, resembling human beings — that is, atomic in composition and structure. As such, they are theoretically not immune to the contingency of dissolution. But in practice, this event is avertible. Thus, they may be styled incorruptible in the sense that they are subject to a contingency that need never occur.”
So from all of this DeWitt, we take away a few things. The first is that we look to animate beings in their most natural state — the state of the newborn being, almost devoid of sensation in that state, just barely awakening their senses — to understand that the telos is the pursuit of pleasure, that we should pursue pleasure, and that this is what’s appropriate for us to do. Because like these animate beings, we are of nature ourselves, and when nature judges pleasure to be the good, it’s the good for us as philosophers as well. But of course, as DeWitt said there, the gods are animate creatures — zōia in Greek. Then pleasure is good for the gods too. This is the connection I’m trying to bridge here: that we don’t look to natural law to understand these things, but we do look to nature for our hint, we do look to nature for our guide. And what we learn from that guide is that pleasure is the beginning and the end of the best mode of life, and that if it’s true for the newborn animals and it’s true for us, it has to be true for the gods as well, because the gods are just like us — they are animate creatures in nature, a part of nature, not above nature, not outside of it.
And then to continue with Zeno here in Section 14, we take up this issue of natural law. Let me quote Wikipedia on natural law in Stoicism: “The development of this tradition of natural justice into one of natural law is usually attributed to the Stoics. The rise of natural law as a universal system coincided with the rise of large empires and kingdoms in the Greek world. Whereas the higher law that Aristotle suggested one could appeal to was emphatically natural, in contradistinction to being the result of divine positive legislation, the Stoic natural law was indifferent to either the natural or divine source of the law. The Stoics asserted the existence of a rational and purposeful order to the universe, a divine or eternal law, and the means by which a rational being lived in accordance with this order was the natural law, which inspired actions that accorded with virtue.”
And now from the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, under a section called The Qualities of the Natural Law: “The natural law is universal — that is to say, it applies to the entire human race and is in itself the same for all. Every man, because he is a man, is bound, if he will conform to the universal order willed by the creator, to live conformably to his own rational nature and to be guided by reason. However, infants and insane persons who have not the actual use of their reason and cannot therefore know the law are not responsible for their failure to comply with its demands. The natural law is immutable in itself and also extrinsically, since it is founded in the very nature of man and his destination to his end.”
So to pick one point out there — it’s this issue of looking to the young of all creatures, to the newborn. But natural law is actually in many ways the very opposite of this project. Because as it says there, infants who have not the actual use of their reason and cannot therefore know the law are not responsible for their failure to comply with its demands. We shouldn’t look to infants because infants have no capacity for reason or virtuous behavior. And as we know from going through Cicero for the last year or so, Cicero doesn’t look to infants either. He looks to the illustrious figures of the Greek and Roman past. That’s the difference here.
And I know we’ve talked about this issue a lot — looking to the young of all creatures — but Cassius, I’m connecting that to the issue of the gods. If the gods are animate beings and if humans are animate beings, and if we look to the young of all animate beings to understand the telos, then the same is also true for the gods as well — that they would be motivated by the pursuit of pleasure in the same way that we are and for the same reasons.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I think that’s exactly where this goes. Back to where Torquatus is telling us that Epicurus looked to the young of all species before they have been corrupted for the guidance as to what nature is telling us. And when you look back to that point, you see that nature is giving us only pleasure and pain as the guidelines, and not some kind of abstractions, not some kind of innate ideas. You’re not born knowing some text of natural law that tells you what’s right and wrong. Those things only come through reason as you grow older. And those are subject to corruption and they cannot be taken with the same authority as what nature itself has given us as pleasure and pain.
I don’t want today to turn into a quote fest, but the best analysis of the Stoic position that I have found in my reading comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter One, Section 9, where he addresses this aspect of Stoicism. Nietzsche says:
“You desire to live according to nature? Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud of words. Imagine to yourselves a being like nature — boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain. Imagine yourselves indifference as a power. How could you live in accordance with such indifference? To live — is not that just endeavoring to be otherwise than this nature? Is not living, valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavoring to be different? And granted that your imperative ‘living according to nature’ means actually the same as ‘living according to life,’ how could you do differently? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you. While you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in nature, you want something quite the contrary. You extraordinary stage players and self-deceivers. In your pride, you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to nature — to nature herself — and to incorporate them therein. You insist that it shall be nature according to the Stoa, and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism. With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see nature falsely, that is to say stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise. And to crown it all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the bedlamite hope that because you are able to tyrannize over yourselves — Stoicism is self-tyranny — nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over. Is not the Stoic a part of nature? But this is an old and everlasting story. What happened in the old times with the Stoics still happens today. As soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself, it always creates the world in its own image. It cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual will to power, the will to creation of the world, the will to prima causa.”
And there’s an awful lot in there. But I think that does summarize the point that the Epicureans were making against the Stoics. The Stoics attempt to take their own ideas of reason and logic and their own ideas of right and wrong and project those onto nature as if these fully formed ideas that they have decided are correct are inherent in nature itself. When Epicurus has properly pointed out that the only thing inherent in nature herself, that she’s given all living beings to guide by, is the faculty of pleasure and pain. And everything else that we decide to choose and avoid has to be built on that foundation, or else you’ve gone off totally astray on your own ideas of what you should be doing, which may be right and may be wrong, but have a tendency to just be projections of your own desires onto nature rather than reflections of the way nature is herself.
Joshua: Cassius, I think that was absolutely brilliant. And that quote from Nietzsche, so perfectly on point — it’s almost as if he’s daring the Stoics to say, you want to follow natural law, you want to follow nature and what she does in her own way — nature is extravagant in giving and ruthless in taking away, so far beyond our conceptions of human morality that it’s almost impious to even talk about nature in that way. I don’t know if an Epicurean would go that far, but it so perfectly exposes the perspective of the Stoics and their endeavor to take their own ideas and wrap them up in this idea of natural law, which has no foundation in nature. It has no foundation in the nature of which we are a part, and it has no foundation in human nature.
Cassius: Okay, let’s go a little further here in Section 14 because here’s another issue that modern Stoics like to throw out and confuse people with. They say, oh, we’re just trying to be happy and Stoicism will lead us to happiness. And they ignore this issue that Stoicism was an absolute enemy of the word pleasure and everything that Epicurus did. Let’s get this from the next section. Velleius says, quote:
“Cleanthes, who next comes under my notice, a disciple of Zeno at the same time with Aristo, in one place says that the world is God. In another, he attributes divinity to the mind and spirit of universal nature. Then he asserts that the most remote, the highest, the all-surrounding, the all-enclosing and embracing heat, which is called the sky, is most certainly the deity. In the books he wrote against pleasure, in which he seems to be raving, he imagines the gods to have a certain form and shape. Then he ascribes all divinity to the stars. And lastly, he thinks nothing more divine than reason, so that this God, whom we know mentally and in the speculations of our minds, has at last actually no visible form at all.”
Of course this is another in the series of criticisms — that you’ve got to have a particular form in order to be a living being. But the part I really want to pull out of here is to go ahead and remind everybody that Cleanthes wrote books against pleasure, which Velleius says he seems to be raving about. And he thinks that nothing is more divine than reason. If there’s any common thread that deserves to be focused on by people who evaluate the differences between Stoicism and Epicureanism, it’s this effort by Stoicism to deify reason and logic and to deprecate emotion and say that pain and pleasure are distractions and that we’re indifferent to those things. And that once we bring our minds under our control, we won’t be affected by pleasure and pain anymore — we won’t need pleasure anymore at all because we have this virtue that is so much more important than pleasure.
The idea of putting a painting together and considering that the virtues could be the handmaidens to pleasure is to Cleanthes the ultimate expression of how revolting a picture Epicurus has erected of how to live your life. Because they want to put virtue in the seat of everything without explanation, actually, as to what that virtue is — other than what they’ll tell you about the heroes of the past they selectively go through and pick among. That’s the Stoic mentality — that pleasure, that happiness based on pleasure, is the enemy that has to be defeated. And so the Stoics have invested thousands of books attacking the Epicurean view of living a happy life based on pleasure as not only impractical but also perverse and depraved. And they try to erect logic and reason in its place.
In regard to what I just said about selectively going through the men of the past and holding them up as examples of virtue, Velleius goes on in the opening of Section 15 and says this:
“Perseus, another disciple of Zeno, says that they who have made discoveries advantageous to the life of man should be esteemed as gods. And the very things he says which are helpful and beneficial have derived their names from those of the gods. So he thinks it not sufficient to call them the discoveries of gods, but he urges that they themselves should be deemed divine. What can be more absurd than to ascribe divine honors to sordid and deformed things, or to place among the gods men who are dead and mixed with the dust, to whose memory all the respect that could be paid would be but mourning for their loss?”
And I just wanted to go ahead and continue into that one because, as we’ve seen with Torquatus on On Ends and other Epicureans criticizing — the Stoics love to talk about these lives of great men of the past, and they essentially deify them by saying, you should emulate these men. Well, I don’t necessarily want to emulate a particular man. I’d like to go to the best example, to the actual god, if I am going to emulate somebody. But the Stoics confuse the two together and suggest that these men of the past who are embodying the virtues that they selectively choose should be essentially deified themselves.
Joshua: Yeah, apotheosis was the word for it — the raising of a mortal into a state of divinity, which in the Roman world was usually reserved for the emperors and their families, all of whom were made gods after they died, which is as ridiculous as anything.
Let me just go back to Plato’s dialogue, the Philebus, and see if I can pull anything out here that is of significance for us as we go through Velleius’ arguments against Stoicism. Because while the two positions I think are quite different, there’s a lot of commonality to them. One of the things that I think I’ve gradually understood as we’ve been doing this podcast is that from the vantage point of the 21st century, it’s very easy to think that Stoicism was the greatest rival of Epicureanism. But a lot of what Epicurus was actually writing was in response to things that Plato was saying that he thought were ludicrous. And so I think it’s always important to go back and take in that additional context.
In this particular passage, Socrates takes up the argument. He says: “Very good. Let us begin then, Protarchus, by asking a question.” And Protarchus responds: “What question?” Socrates says: “Whether all this, which they call the universe, is left to the guidance of unreason and chance merely, or on the contrary, as our fathers have declared, ordered and governed by a marvellous intelligence and wisdom.” And Protarchus responds: “Why, the sunder are the two assertions, illustrious Socrates, for that which you were just now saying to me appears to be blasphemy. It’s blasphemy to say that the universe is left to the guidance of unreason and chance. But the other assertion, that mind orders all things, is worthy of the aspect of the world, and of the sun, and of the moon, and of the stars, and of the whole circle of the heavens, and never will I say or think otherwise.”
Cassius: OK, so let’s turn to the final part of Section 15 today and deal with Chrysippus, who was one of the most influential Stoics of the ancient world. Velleius says this:
“Chrysippus, who is looked upon as the most subtle interpreter of the dreams of the Stoics, has mustered up a numerous band of unknown gods. No one knows them, so that we are not able to form any idea about them, though our mind seems capable of framing any image to itself in its thoughts. For he says that the divine power is placed in reason and in the spirit and mind of universal nature, that the world with a universal effusion of its spirit is God, that the superior part of that spirit, which is the mind and reason, is the great principle of nature, containing and preserving the chain of all things, that the divinity is the power of fate and the necessity of future events. He deifies fire also, and what I before call the ethereal spirit, and those elements which naturally proceed from it — water, earth, and air. He attributes divinity to the sun, moon, stars, and universal space, the grand container of all things, and to those men likewise who have obtained immortality. He maintains the sky to be what men call Jupiter, the air which pervades the sea to be Neptune, and the earth Ceres. In like manner he goes through the names of the other deities. He says that Jupiter is that immutable and eternal law which guides and directs us in our manners. And this he calls fatal necessity, the everlasting verity of future events. But none of these are of such a nature as to seem to carry any indication of divine virtue in them. These are the doctrines contained in his first book of The Nature of the Gods. In the second he endeavors to accommodate the fables of Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer to what he has advanced in the first, in order that the most ancient poets who never dreamed of these things may seem to have been Stoics. Diogenes the Babylonian, who was a follower of the doctrine of Chrysippus, in that book which he wrote entitled A Treatise Concerning Minerva, separates the account of Jupiter’s bringing forth and the birth of that virgin from the fabulous and reduces it to a natural construction.”
Okay, this will be the last section we discuss in today’s episode, but there are several important things going on here. One of the first things I’d comment on is that what Velleius is saying is that the Stoics — as many religious people do today — attempt to adopt prior works as their own and defend these prior works by saying, well, you shouldn’t take them literally, but let’s take them figuratively. The true divinity within them is not the specific statement about a particular person at a particular time and place, but the story being conveyed behind it — that if we just look behind the words, we can see that Homer, when he’s writing his poems, that Hesiod, that Orpheus, that the other great writers of the ancient past, they were not just on the face of it writing down history and telling you facts. They were really in tune with and essentially Stoics themselves, embodying in their work this natural divine law, which we as the modern Stoics are able to tell you was hiding in the pages of these stories all the way along. All you have to do is reconcile these stories that are otherwise virtually impossible to believe and take them as fables that contain a grain of moral truth to them.
The other thing that bears extreme emphasis is that buried in all of this rationalization of the ancient stories of the Greeks is something that we see today as clearly as it existed 2,000 years ago. Because even though today we don’t spend as much time reading the fables of the past and looking for hidden messages in them as the Stoics were doing 2,000 years ago, what many people do today is this part: Chrysippus says that the divine power is placed in reason and in the spirit and mind of universal nature. They deify reason itself and logic as if it is God, so that by pursuing reason and logic and trying to say I’m a rational person, that is making them essentially God-like simply by being rational.
But of course it comes with more than just rationality, because the real core of it is — as Velleius says — the Stoics held that the superior part of that spirit, which is the mind and reason, is the great principle of nature, containing and preserving the chain of all things, that the divinity is the power of fate and the necessity of future events. In other words, this concept that everything that happens to you has been pre-programmed from the beginning of time, that you have no free will whatsoever, that you have no control over your actions, that the power of fate and necessity are what’s behind everything, and that there’s no need for you to question anything that goes on, there’s no need for you to question the decisions of your rulers, there’s no need for you to question what your priests tell you is right and wrong, because everything that has happened has been preordained from the beginning of time by this divine fire that set everything in motion.
And if there’s one aspect of Stoicism that ought to cause people to recoil in horror and ought to cause people to reject this latent Stoicism that is involved in so much of culture today, it’s this issue of necessity and fate and the contention that you have no control over your own existence. At the risk of trivializing the example, it’s the same struggle that’s embodied in the Terminator series of movies — the question that arises in the struggle of the characters in those movies to determine whether they have the ability to affect the future or whether they are bound by fate. There’s a line that many people recognize on the internet: “No fate but what we make” is the theme adopted by the lead characters who struggle with that issue. And that is the issue behind Stoicism that everyone needs to struggle with. Are you a prisoner of fate or do you have the ability to affect your future? If you have no ability to affect your future, then you’re just an amused bystander to life because you can’t change anything that happens to you. It was all sent by God, ordained by the universe, and you’re just being petty if you don’t accept everything that happens to you as a part of divine fate.
That’s not the position of Epicurus. And Epicurus clearly held that this issue of determinism, necessity, and fate are incredibly important and have to be thought through, because they simply are not true. They are part of what Nietzsche is referring to as the fraud of words of Stoicism. So regarding this issue of free will, I have two quotes I want to use. The first comes from Epicurus’ Letter to Menoikeus near the end:
“Who then is superior in your judgment to such a person? He holds a holy belief concerning the gods and is altogether free from the fear of death. He has diligently considered the end fixed by nature and understands how easily the limit of good things can be reached and attained, and how either the duration or the intensity of evils is but slight. Destiny, which some introduce as sovereign over all things, he laughs to scorn, affirming rather that some things happen of necessity, others by chance, others through our own agency. For he sees that necessity destroys responsibility, and that chance or fortune is inconstant, whereas our own actions are free, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach. It were better indeed to accept the legends of the gods than to bow beneath destiny or fate which the natural philosophers have imposed. The one holds out some faint hope that we may escape if we honor the gods, while the necessity of the naturalists is deaf to all entreaties. Nor does he hold chance to be a god, as the world in general does, for in the acts of a god there is no disorder, nor to be a cause, though an uncertain one. For he believes that no good or evil is dispensed by chance to people so as to make life happy, though it supplies the starting point of great good and great evil. He believes that the misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool. It is better, in short, that what is well-judged in action should not owe its successful issue to the aid of chance.”
Now, turning to Lucretius in Book Two — I’m reading from the Rolf Humphreys translation:
“If cause forever follows after cause in infinite undeviating sequence, and a new motion always has to come out of an old one by fixed law, if atoms do not by swerving cause new moves which break the laws of fate, if cause forever follows in infinite sequence cause — where would we get this free will that we have, wrested from fate, by which we go ahead each one of us wherever our pleasures urge? Don’t we also swerve at no fixed time or place, but as our purpose directs us? There’s no doubt each man’s will initiates action, and this prompting stirs our limbs to movement. When the gates fly open, no racehorse breaks as quickly as he wants to, for the whole body of matter must be roused, inspired to follow what the mind desires.”
So the Epicurean response to the Stoic claim that fate is the shadow that hangs over every moment of our life is to say that it would be better to believe in the fables that we were talking about a little bit ago. It would be better to believe in these old stories of Homer and Hesiod and so forth than to believe in this determinism, even though we know they’re not true.
Yeah, Joshua, those quotes from Lucretius and from Epicurus’ letter are right on point. It’s an absolutely central aspect of Epicurean philosophy and ought to be a central aspect of anybody’s philosophy no matter what direction they come from. They have to ask this question: do we have any kind of control over our existence at all, or is everything preordained and outside of our ability to control — in which case we have no reason to take any actions or try to change our course whatsoever, because everything that happens to us was intended to happen.
And if you end up taking that position, which is embedded at the heart of Stoicism, then you’re going to become a passive citizen — just as Plato was, and as the Stoics were going in that direction. Everybody has the choice of looking to nature in the way that Epicurus did, looking to the young of all species before they are corrupted by false thoughts and opinions and mistakes and illusions, or they can adopt the Stoic way of pursuing what Velleius calls the dreams of the Stoics — projecting their own desires onto nature rather than looking at what nature has specifically given to us.
Okay, we are coming to the end of our episode today. Let’s go ahead and take stock of where we’ve been. We’ll come back next week starting with Section 16, and we will finally be getting into the Epicurean position as Velleius presents it. So with that, any final thoughts for today, Joshua?
Joshua: I think you’re right, Cassius, to say that fate as an aspect of Stoicism is hugely problematic for Epicurus — probably even more so than virtue-seeking, probably even more so than natural law, although all these things are linked. It’s this issue of fate — that philosophy, that studying these things may not even be useful to us because we’re destined to do what we’re destined to do, that things are going to happen the way they’re going to happen, and we have no say over this.
It makes me think of one of the interlocking arguments here from the Greek world — the interlocking argument with the idea that the future is known is that there are people who can predict it. We have a letter from Lucian of Samosata that is directly on point to this question, this question of whether the future has already been laid out and people just have to go to the oracle to learn what their future holds. And Lucian says this, referring to the prophet Alexander:
“He had a wide circle of influential friends to whom he communicated the news brought by his successive messengers, not without additional touches of his own. All of Rome was full of his tales. There was quite a commotion, the gentlemen of the court being much fluttered, and at once taking measures to learn something of their own fate. The prophet gave all who came a hearty welcome, gained their good will by hospitality and costly gifts, and sent them off ready not merely to report his answers but to sing the praises of the god and to invent miraculous tales of the shrine and its guardian.”
And in response to the Epicureans, the course that Alexander the prophet took is also laid out by Lucian. He says:
“The prosperity of the oracle is perhaps not so wonderful when one learns what sensible intelligent questions were in fashion with its votaries. Well, it was war to the knife between him and Epicurus, and no wonder. What fitter enemy for a charlatan who patronized miracles and hated truth than the thinker who had grasped the nature of things and was in solitary possession of that truth? As for the Platonists, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, they were his good friends. He had no quarrel with them. But the unmitigated Epicurus, as he used to call him, could not but be hateful to him, treating all such pretensions as absurd and puerile.”
Alexander consequently loathed Amastris beyond all the cities of Pontus, knowing what a number of Epicurean friends and others like-minded it contained. He would not give oracles to Amastrians. And did one oracle given to a man named Saccardos, Alexander said this: “Shun Lepidus, an evil fate awaits him” — because Lepidus was an Epicurean. And Lucian says: “As I have said, Alexander was much afraid of Epicurus and the solvent action of his logic on imposture.”
And the importance of this problem of fate to the Epicureans is brought up in another place as well. We find it in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when Cassius Longinus, in a conversation with Brutus about Caesar, has this to say:
“Why man, he — Caesar — doth bestride the narrow world, like a Colossus? And we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. Now in the names of all the gods at once, upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed! Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods. When could they say till now that talked of Rome, that her wide walls encompassed but one man? Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough, when there is in it but only one man? O, you and I have heard our fathers say there was a Brutus once that would have brooked the eternal devil to keep his state in Rome as easily as a king.”
That’s a reference to one of Brutus’s ancestors who was involved in deposing the last king of the Roman people and founding the Republic — and Cassius is appealing to Brutus’s ancestry to say that the kings are back, and as a Brutus you need to do your job, because Caesar is not fated to rule over us. This is our fault that we’ve allowed this to happen.
Cassius: Exactly, Joshua. Brutus being identified classically as an ultimate Stoic — you can read clearly into what Shakespeare is saying that when he says “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves,” he’s telling Brutus to forget fate, forget divine fire as controlling everything, and realize that this situation where Julius Caesar is on the verge of becoming an absolute dictator — the reason we’re in this situation is not because the gods ordained it, is not because it was fated, but because we ourselves have not done the things that our forefathers had done and that we had within our capacity to do to stop this situation from happening. So that’s one of, I think, probably the greatest examples in English literature of this conflict of views between people who think that everything is fated and people who take the Epicurean position that we do have control over our futures and need to act properly to make sure that those futures are happy.
Joshua: So as we close the episode, I do have one more selection from Nietzsche. This time from his Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I think this is the Walter Kaufmann translation. Nietzsche said:
“I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes. Poison-mixers they are, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life they are, decayed and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary. So let them go.”
And I think that’s what the Epicureans would say about all of the Stoic position that the world is controlled by fate and destiny and gods, as well as the expectation of reward or punishment after death. They would say that these otherworldly fixations amount to poison, amount to the despising of life, amount to being decayed and poisoned whether they know it or not. And of that type of perspective, the earth is weary. And so the best thing that we can do is let those positions go and look at the direction that Epicurus was pointing in and see if we can’t truly come to an understanding of nature that allows us to live our lives happily.
Cassius: Okay, with that, let’s close for the day. As always, we invite you to drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this or any other episode of the Lucretius Today podcast. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then.