Episode 235 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 10 - Velleius Explains the Epicurean Proleptic View of Divinity
Date: 07/02/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3935-episode-235-cicero-s-otnotg-10-velleius-explains-the-epicurean-proleptic-view-of/?postID=31145#post31145
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Cassius and Joshua continue through Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, covering Sections 16, 17, and 18. The episode focuses on Velleius’s claim that Epicurus grounded his understanding of the gods in prolepsis — the natural pre-notion that all humans share. Section 17 establishes that the universal human recognition of gods as “blessed and imperishable” is sufficient as a foundation for piety without superstition. The episode explores the contrast between Epicurean prolepsis and Plato’s theory of anamnesis (recollection of innate ideas), with Joshua reading from the Wikipedia article on anamnesis to clarify the distinction. Cassius discusses the natural development of language, law, and bodily organs as analogies for how prolepsis functions — not as innate conceptual content but as a natural disposition. Section 18 is read in full, covering Velleius’s claim that the gods have a human-like form and that the mind perceives them through images. The episode also includes passages from Lucretius Book 5 on nature’s “pattern” for creation, Darwin’s famous passage on the evolution of the eye, Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the dignity of man, Montaigne on human self-importance, and Jefferson’s letter to John Adams on materialism and sensation.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 235 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for this and each of our episodes.
We are continuing to go through Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. We’re going to focus on of course the Epicurean sections, but we have a lot more material before we’re finished. We’re currently in the Young edition at the bottom of page 16, but in whatever edition you’re checking, we are in Section 16. Last week we spent most of the episode talking about Epicurean canonics and some of the basics that we understand the Epicurean approach to knowledge to include, and we focused on how prolepsis is one third of the canon and we talked a little bit about the workings of prolepsis and some of the possibilities that are involved there.
And today we’re going to see where Velleius is going in relation to the Epicurean picture of the gods. We focused mostly last week on the first part of Section 16, and now let’s turn to what Young has as his second paragraph, which reads as follows: “Now whoever reflects on the rashness and absurdity of these tenets — talking about the other philosophers — must inevitably entertain the highest respect and veneration for Epicurus and perhaps even rank him in the number of those beings who are the subject of this dispute. For he alone first founded the idea of the existence of the gods on the impression which nature herself hath made on the minds of all men. For what nation, what people are there who have not without any learning a natural idea or pre-notion of a deity? Epicurus calls this prolepsis, that is, an antecedent conception of the fact in the mind without which nothing can be understood, inquired after, or discoursed on, the force and advantage of which reasoning we receive from that celestial volume of Epicurus concerning the rule and judgment of things.”
Now let’s go into the first section of 17 and wrap it together. As Velleius goes forward in 17, he says here: “Then you see the foundation of this question clearly laid. For since it is the constant and universal opinion of mankind independent of education, custom, or law, that there are gods, it must necessarily follow that this knowledge is implanted in our minds or rather innate in us, that opinion respecting which there is a general agreement in universal nature must infallibly be true. Therefore it must be allowed that there are gods, for in this we have the concurrence not only of almost all philosophers but likewise of the ignorant and illiterate. It must be also confessed that the point is established that we have naturally this idea, as I said before, or pre-notion of the existence of gods. As new things require new names, so that pre-notion was called prolepsis by Epicurus, an appellation never used before.”
“On the same principle of reasoning, we think that the gods are happy and immortal.” Now let me repeat that. “On the same principle of reasoning, we think that the gods are happy and immortal. For that nature which hath assured us that there are gods hath likewise imprinted in our minds the knowledge of their immortality and felicity. And if so, what Epicurus hath declared in these words is true: that which is eternally happy cannot be burdened with any labor itself, nor can it impose any labor on another, nor can it be influenced by resentment or favor, because things which are liable to such feelings must be weak and frail. We have said enough to prove that we should worship the gods with piety and without superstition if that were the only question.”
Okay, now he continues on in 17 to make some additional points, but what I’ve just read is major new material that we have not covered yet at all. And so we pick up again with this question: when Velleius says that something is implanted in our minds, what is it exactly and how is that going on? And what is Epicurus saying about how that has occurred and what is implanted? Because there’s a lot of controversy about that, and I would say that probably the major question is whether what is implanted is a concept of gods, a concept that gods exist, a concept that gods are happy, a concept that gods are imperishable — or whether the very things that I’ve just said, “God exists, God is imperishable, God is blessed,” whether those are themselves concepts, conclusions, which in Epicurean canonics would come only after the proleptic process, the canonical process.
Epicurus has insisted that while abstract logic is something to be avoided and that leads you into all sorts of difficulties, he’s very firm that practical reasoning, deductive reasoning — the same way he deduced that atoms exist — is critical for your analysis of controversial things. You have to have confidence in the senses in order to make judgements about anything, even those things that are right in front of you. You cannot begin to speculate about things that are not in front of you if you do not accept that the senses are reporting truly and without opinions of their own. And so therefore I would suggest, in regard to the gods — which are much further away than even the stars, where Epicurus has told us that we have to rely on multiple explanations and we cannot arbitrarily grasp a single explanation when multiple possibilities are consistent with the facts — in the case of the gods who are even further away from us than the stars, we’re going to be relying on multiple possible explanations for what might be true.
But even that is putting the cart before the horse. The real question — the horse — is what we’ll address in getting our discussion going today. Prolepsis being the horse, pulling the cart in Epicurean philosophy. I think most of us who are reading this material come to the conclusion that no canonical faculty is going to give you an idea. And so to the extent that these sections that we’re reading — translated by Young or translated by Rackham or translated by anybody else — is implying that a concept of God is implanted in us at birth, I think most of us have come to the conclusion that that cannot be what he is saying here.
When I say “cannot be what is being said here,” what I’m referring to is that the entire subject of prolepsis is so fragmentary in our remaining texts that there’s going to be a tendency on all sides to identify what Epicurus is saying with some other text, some other position — Platonic, Aristotelian, Pythagorean — which we’re expecting to see. Those of us who are raised in the Platonic academic tradition are expecting conceptual reasoning to be the foundation of anybody’s argument about anything. But whether that is actually true in the case of Epicurus is open to question. When Epicurus is clearly in revolt against Platonic views of ideal forms which supersede the canonical faculties, Epicurus is going with the canonical faculties above all. Epicurus is telling us that even the dreams of mad men are real in a sense. He’s telling us that centaurs are real in the sense that images coming to us recombine while they’re moving through space and make us think that we see centaurs, even though centaurs do not exist independently. In reality, the images that give rise to centaurs in certain people’s minds at certain circumstances are in fact real. The dreams of mad men are in fact real in that there is a real stimulus that leads them to these incorrect conclusions.
Just as it’s incorrect that centaurs exist, the dreams of mad men are incorrect and the majority of ideas that people have about the gods are incorrect. So as we discussed last week, the terms “correct” and “incorrect” are applicable to the conceptual reasoning process — the part of the process at which we have formed a concept in our minds, and then we compare it to other evidence and we talk about whether our concept corresponds with reality or not. That process, which certainly takes place, seems to be what Diogenes Laertius is describing when he says that we see numbers of oxen, we form a picture of an ox in our mind and we therefore at that point use that picture of an ox in the future to decide whether new things that we see are oxen or not. That’s a process that clearly does exist, but that is also a process which could probably be better compared to the process of conceptual reasoning — where you read a book, you form a concept, and then you apply that concept in new experiences.
If Epicurus is talking about a pre-conceptual process, he’s not talking about conceptual reasoning. He’s talking about a process that leads into conceptual reasoning, that disposes us to do conceptual reasoning, that gives us input that we include in conceptual reasoning, but is no more conceptual reasoning itself than the eyes are doing conceptual reasoning or the ears are doing conceptual reasoning or the feelings of pleasure and pain are forming concepts and then evaluating new experiences according to their concepts. That’s not the way pleasure and pain work. That’s not the way the eyes and the ears work, and I would suggest it’s probably in an Epicurean viewpoint not the way that prolepsis works either.
Joshua: Cassius, as I hear you describe and set up the episode for us today, it becomes very clear how convoluted and difficult to grasp some of these concepts can be. So one thing I thought we could start off by doing is looking at the Platonic view of things, which you’ve already hinted at. This sets up for us a distinction between the two systems, and I hope it’s going to make a couple of things more clear. I’m going to start by reading from the Wikipedia page for the Greek word anamnesis and its use in philosophy:
“In Plato’s theory of epistemology, anamnesis refers to the collection of innate knowledge acquired before birth. The concept posits the claim that learning involves the act of rediscovering knowledge from within oneself. This stands in contrast to the opposing doctrine known as empiricism, which posits that all knowledge is derived from experience and sensory perception.”
“Plato develops the theory of anamnesis in his Socratic dialogues, the Meno, the Phaedo, and the Phaedrus. And in the Phaedo, Plato develops his theory in part by combining it with his theory of forms. First, he elaborates how anamnesis can be achieved. The body and its senses are the source of error. Knowledge cannot be regained except through the use of reason and contemplating things with the soul. While the body’s perceptual faculties are deceptive, Plato also argues that the falsehoods that they communicate to the soul can be used to trigger or prompt recollection.”
So in Plato’s idea, the soul predates the body. The soul is older than the body, and when the soul was free, it fully understood the whole theory of forms. And so the knowledge that the soul had is still innate in the soul, but when the soul was imprisoned in the flesh, the flesh has a dulling effect on the soul’s ability to acquire and keep hold of knowledge. And so philosophy for Plato is the process of recollecting what is innate in terms of knowledge in our soul.
And the Wikipedia page goes on to describe the influence of this idea on Neoplatonism: “For later interpreters of Plato, the concept of anamnesis or recollection became less epistemic and more ontological, meaning it had less to do with knowledge and more to do with being. Plotinus himself did not posit recollection in the strict sense of the term because all knowledge of universally important ideas or logos came from a source outside of time and was accessible by means of contemplation to the soul as part of nous.” Nous is the Greek word, especially in the ancient world, for the capacity to reason, to think through things. “They were more the objects of experience of inner insight or knowledge than of recollection. However, in Neoplatonism, the theory of anamnesis became part of the mythology of the descent of the soul.”
So we have here from this Wikipedia article two systems. We have the Platonic system — that before you were born, your soul existed and knew everything there was to know, and then once you were encased in your flesh, you forgot all that, and everything you think you learn is a process actually of recollecting what you already knew before you were born. And as it says, this stands in contrast to the opposing doctrine known as empiricism, which posits that all knowledge is derived from experience and sensory perception. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Epicurus was an empiricist, he certainly does think that knowledge is derived from experience of a kind and certainly places a high value on sensory perception in order to learn new things. We’re not recollecting things. We have no innate ideas that we’re born with. We can throw pretty much all of that out when we’re talking about Epicurean philosophy because you didn’t exist before you were born.
In fact, this is the key insight of Lucretius in offering an argument for why death is nothing to us — because you’re going to cease to exist for an eternity after you die, just like you didn’t exist for an eternity before you were born. So birth is the starting point for acquiring knowledge in this world, and death of course is the end point. There’s nothing after that. So everything that we are ever going to know we’re going to learn while we’re alive in this world. And if you want to call that empiricism, I think we’re getting pretty close to empiricism. It’s mainly this issue of prolepsis that still needs to be resolved, but what we learn from this is that prolepsis certainly is not any innate content in the mind that exists as an idea. We’re not born with it and it’s not really knowledge at all. We can derive knowledge from prolepsis in the same way that we can derive knowledge from our vision or from touching stuff or from tasting things, but prolepsis in itself is not an idea.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua — prolepsis not being an idea is going to be a theme today. And I’ve mentioned a couple of other analogies in the Epicurean texts, talking about centaurs for example, or the dreams of mad men for example. I want to throw into the pot again today a couple of other things you’ve mentioned, Joshua, numbers of times — the issue of the development of language and linguistics, which is going to be relevant to this. I think we’re also going to have relevant to this in Lucretius Book Five, section 1081, where Lucretius argues that the gods could not have designed a world or anything else unless they had in their minds some pattern or some disposition to do so that had been given by nature. I think that’s another data point.
And another data point is another issue you’ve mentioned many times, Josh — the issue of the development of eyes and ears and the parts of the body that were not placed in men because there was some divine idea or intent to do so, but came into being and then were given the use to which we give them today. Our eyes were not born so that I could be staring at this computer screen today. Our eyes developed naturally, just like language developed naturally, just like justice concepts in terms of relations of people to one another developed naturally. They were not developed because some immortal God or some particularly divinely inspired or golden Platonic person announced to the world that we would use such and such a word for dog and such and such a word for cat, or that the law of Athens today should be the law of Rome forever, or that our arms or legs or eyes or any other part of us should be used in a particular way for a particular purpose.
It certainly seems to be a theme within Epicurean philosophy that nature — not intentionally, not with any goal in mind — but that nature through the natural movement and combination of atoms, which again is not random or chance in the sense of it could happen totally differently. Yes, the events of tomorrow can and will be different from the events of today, but all of the events in the past, today, and in the future arise from the natural combinations of the atoms, which are limited in being able to combine in certain ways and being unable to combine in other ways. Just because we can think about some possibility in our minds — just because we can contemplate something as Plato suggests — does not mean that our contemplation gives actual reality to the thing that we are contemplating within an Epicurean perspective. If an image comes to us and we think of a thing, there is a certain reality to that image, but we never make the mistake of thinking that the image that we are seeing or thinking about is necessarily existing outside us in the external universe. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s our job using the canonical faculties to determine when it’s real and objective and something we’re going to repeatedly see day after day, or whether it’s something that we are combining in our minds as a result of combinations of images coming together in different ways that are in fact not repeatable, not verifiable, and not going on in external reality.
So we have all of these issues to think about as we construe what Velleius is saying here. Cicero is presumably taking some source of Epicurean writing in his time period — 50 BC or so — which I would suggest is probably reliable in many ways, but it’s not Epicurus writing it himself. And we already know from Cicero’s other writings that the Epicureans had differing opinions among themselves about how to construe certain things — whether there are three legs of the canon or four, whether friendship starts and remains as a matter of advantage or whether it somehow at some point transmutes itself into a good of its own, a pleasure of its own. You have differences of opinion arising even among Epicureans, which hopefully are consistent to a large degree with the founder and the direction that Epicurus himself would have gone, but which we always have to keep in mind might be somewhat different.
At least so far, in what we’re discussing and what we’re reading here in Velleius, I don’t see any reason to conclude that what Velleius is saying is necessarily inconsistent with anything that we can read in the Letter to Menoikeus or other fragments that we’re beginning to get from surviving texts from Herculaneum. All Velleius has said to this point in the discussion is that when you consider all of the evidence that’s available to us, something is going on that is creating in the minds of men a disposition to think that there’s some being higher than themselves. And Epicurus is saying — so far according to Velleius — that the thing that we can be sure about is that such beings, in whatever form of reality they exist, are blessed and imperishable. Because the natural logical progression of talking about what we are familiar with in terms of blessedness, in terms of happiness, in terms of pleasure and what we are familiar with in terms of life, is that you’re not going to have the best possible being limited in those areas — not going to be only partly happy and have certain pains remaining, not going to be subject to death. It’s not going to be reasonable to attribute those characteristics to a being who has reached the maximum level of whatever we can conceive.
And I think it’s extremely important to note the concluding statement by Velleius: “We have said enough to prove that we should worship the gods with piety and without superstition if that were the only question.” Rackham translates that slightly differently. Rackham says: “If we sought to attain nothing else besides piety in worshiping the gods and freedom from superstition, what has been said had sufficed, since the exalted nature of the gods, being both eternal and supremely blessed, would receive man’s pious worship; for what is highest commands the reverence that is its due. And furthermore, all fear of the divine power or divine anger would have been banished, since it is understood that anger and favor alike are excluded from the nature of a being at once blessed and immortal, and that these being eliminated, we are threatened by no fears in regard to the powers above.”
So the heading I would place on this statement is: Velleius is emphasizing that nature has implanted in men a proleptic faculty, which leads to the consideration of gods, and that when we extend that reasoning process we conclude that gods are imperishable and totally blessed. That’s all we really need to know about the gods, and as long as we keep those at the center, as long as we never let anything into our minds that is inconsistent with that, that’s all we really need to focus on.
Velleius is going to explain why we’re going to go further here. Let’s go ahead with that. Young says it this way: “To confirm this opinion, our curiosity leads us to inquire into the form and life and action of the intellect and spirit of the deity.” Rackham has that rendered as: “But the mind strives to strengthen this belief by trying to discover the form of God, the mode of his activity, and the operation of his intelligence.” So we start at the base that any gods we’re going to think about are blessed and imperishable. If we wish to speculate — just like in regard to the stars, if we want to talk about the different possibilities that are consistent with what we can observe and that are not inconsistent with what we observe, so as to construct possibilities that allow us to rule out supernatural explanations — we can do so. And that’s what Velleius is going to go into next in Section 18.
Joshua: One thing I would note, Cassius, before we go on to Section 18. In the sentence you just quoted there — “to confirm this opinion, our curiosity leads us to inquire into the form and life and action of the intellect and spirit of the deity” — I do want to clarify that there’s this issue in translations from Greek: we shouldn’t necessarily assume, given that the text here says “the deity,” that there’s just one, that there’s one highest supreme being and that these other gods we’re talking about are lesser beings. I think that would be a wrong interpretation here.
I don’t know if this is something related to the problem of a definite versus an indefinite article. If I say “I saw a squirrel yesterday,” we know we’re only talking about one squirrel and it’s just an average squirrel out of a whole set of squirrels. But if I say “I saw the squirrel yesterday,” it places more emphasis on that particular squirrel — yet that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not one of a set or one of a series. We’re just talking about a specimen standing in place for a whole genus. There’s a proverb in the English language: “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” When we’re talking about “a horse,” it’s not one specific horse — it’s just the idea of a single horse standing in for all horses, if that makes sense.
Cassius: Not only does it make sense, Joshua, I think it’s a really important point and I’m glad you brought it up before we moved on to 18. Because I think there’s more to be said about this last sentence. And in fact, when I was reading the Young translation, I was kind of implying that curiosity was maybe not the most important thing we should feel in regard to this subject, but now that I think about it further, this subject of the gods is so important in human life to so many people. Again today we tend to think, “Okay, the whole subject’s ridiculous — the traditional religions are so full of imagination and dream work that there’s just no reason to pay any attention to them at all.” But Epicurus is telling us that this is a subject of concern for people, that they need to come to a level of confidence about. And you don’t come to confidence about the subject by just saying, “Gods don’t exist, forget about it.” That’s not the way people and their minds work.
We need to pay attention to that just like we pay attention to all of our feelings and the things that we sense through the canonical faculties. We don’t dismiss them as being simply wrong. We work to confirm our understanding of how these things are happening so that we gain confidence in dealing with the subject. And I think that’s where Velleius is really going to go here as he does go further. If your only goal was that of worshipping the gods piously and not being superstitious toward them, then all you really need to know is that the gods are blessed and imperishable — don’t ever let anything interfere with that and you’ll be fine. Well, that is in fact the most important thing, but the way people’s minds work is it is hard to keep conclusions in your mind unless you’re constantly refreshing the reasons for them, especially on something controversial and difficult and that we are tempted to wish were otherwise than it is.
Many of us are tempted certainly to wish that there were a divine creator who was leading us by the hand and who rewarded us with a paradise for living well. It’s something that’s constantly thrown in our face — not only by people who are mistaken, but just whenever we run into difficult situations, whenever we run into death. We wish that death were not a part of life. We wish that death did not have to occur. We wish we could continue on. And it’s just natural to confront these questions and have to deal with them. And just like Epicurus says, think about death so that you’re ready for it when it confronts you — it would be consistent to say you should think about the issue of the gods so that you’re confident in dealing with it, so that when these parts of life that call you to think about these questions occur, you’re ready to deal with them confidently and not allow them to knock you too far off of your stride.
So it does make sense, I think, for the Epicurean to have wanted to go further than simply thinking that the gods are blessed and imperishable. And the development of possibilities as to how gods might really exist and be non-supernatural is something that would naturally occur to them. It naturally occurs to us today. We certainly have a whole lot of science fiction movies out there that address issues of what happens when we do eventually get out into the stars and what are we going to find and what type of beings are we going to find. One of the most interesting and fascinating aspects of fiction in general — going all the way back to Lucian and his True Story about flying to the moon — is that it is a part of the human constitution to be curious about things that we don’t know about. And so the Epicureans, at least at the time of Cicero, had gone further and developed more speculation about the nature of the gods.
Joshua: I think it’s right in line, Cassius, with what you were just saying — that the two issues you’re talking about are the first two of the Principal Doctrines. “A blessed and indestructible being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; so he is exempt from anger and partiality, for all such things imply weakness.” It’s critical to understand that much to understand Epicurean philosophy, but the fact that they wrote other books in addition to just this one means that this isn’t where the discussion stops. There’s other things to talk about related to the gods, but this is sort of the kernel. And likewise the second Principal Doctrine: “Death is nothing to us, for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensation, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us.” So the curiosity issue comes in and is more than acceptable to pursue once we have this foundation already laid.
Cassius: Okay, we’ve covered a lot already today. There are a couple of sections — 18 and 19 — as we go forward that are going to give us a lot of details to talk about for the remainder of the time today. Why don’t we read a little bit out of 18 and apply it to what we’ve been discussing already. Young translates it this way:
“With regard to the form of the gods, we are directed partly by nature and partly by reason. All men are told by nature that none but a human form can be ascribed to the gods — for under what other image did it ever appear to anyone, either sleeping or waking — and without having recourse to our first notions, reason itself declares the same. For as it is easy to conceive that the most excellent nature, either because of its happiness or immortality, should be the most beautiful — what composition of limbs, what confirmation of lineaments, what form, what aspect can be more beautiful than the human? Your sect, Lucilius, not unlike my friend Cotta, who sometimes says one thing and sometimes another, when they represent the divine art and workmanship in the human body are used to describe how very completely each member is formed not only for convenience but also for beauty. Therefore if the human form excels that of all other animal beings and God himself is an animated being, he must surely be of that form which is the most beautiful. Besides, the gods are granted to be perfectly happy and nobody can be happy without virtue, nor can virtue exist where reason is not, and reason can reside in none but the human form. The gods therefore must be acknowledged to be of human form. Yet that form is not body, but something like body; nor does it contain any blood but something like blood.”
“Though these distinctions were more acutely devised and more artfully expressed by Epicurus than any common capacity can comprehend, yet depending on your understanding, I shall be more brief on the subject than otherwise I should be. Epicurus, who not only discovered and understood the occult and almost hidden secrets of nature, but explained them with ease, teaches that the power and nature of the gods is not to be discerned by the senses but by the mind, nor are they to be considered as bodies of any solidity or reducible to number like those things which because of their firmness he calls steréa, but as images perceived by similitude and transition. As infinite kinds of these images result from innumerable individuals and center in the gods, our minds and understanding are directed towards and fixed with the greatest delight on them, in order to comprehend what that happy and eternal essence is.”
Okay, that’s all of 18 and that’s going to occupy us for quite a while. But as we begin the discussion of it, one thing I’d point out at the very beginning: the very first sentence of Section 18 is that Velleius says “in regard to the form of God, we are directed partly by nature and partly by reason.” So there are clearly a combination of things going on in the Epicurean analysis, some of which involve reason and therefore I would say conceptual reasoning, and some of which do not involve conceptual reasoning but are influences from nature itself.
And as we go through this process of dissecting the different conclusions that Velleius is reaching, it’s going to be really important to keep in mind that we are talking now about opinions. We think the opinions that we’re about to discuss are right, but in saying that these opinions are right, we are now very likely outside of the proleptic canonical faculty itself and we’re analyzing things based on attempting to lay out the observations and detect whether they’re consistent with each other, whether we can grasp patterns or generalities about them. And while we are confident that our conclusions make sense, that’s not the same thing as saying that nature implanted these conclusions into our minds at birth — that if we had a big enough microscope and a strong enough ability to understand it, we could look into the brain of a fetus and see somewhere that some parts of this are implanted. That’s not what Epicurus and Velleius would be saying.
And we have to dig through this explanation to try to separate out what part is reason and what part is nature. And as Joshua, you’ve mentioned several times in the past — if we could listen to the pigs talk, they would make God in the image of a pig. And the very first of the observations that Velleius includes here is that men can imagine gods only in a human form, which is probably an example of that observation that living beings are going to imagine and think in their own terms and not in some absolute terms inscribed on their minds in the form of ideas.
Joshua: Yeah, exactly. You know right where I’m going with this, Cassius, because I was just looking up the quote: “If triangles had gods, they would have three sides.” I think you do right to separate out the issues that we were talking about a little bit ago relating to the blessedness of the gods and the incorruptibility of the gods and so forth — that is on a different standing to the issue of whether the gods are shaped like humans and whether they speak Greek and so forth. I know you’ve made that reference many, many times throughout the history of this podcast — that some of these ideas that we come across in here are difficult for us to accept today perhaps.
Cassius: Yeah, Josh. Today in our science fiction and all the different people who talk about life on other worlds, a lot of them think in terms of beings that have much different shapes than humans. And would Epicurus say, “No, we must conceive of all gods as being in the shape of humans” — and that your conception of a god in the shape of a cat or a dog or just in some figure that is totally foreign to us currently — would those necessarily conflict with an Epicurean core position? And I would say no. In his terms of reference, humans are generally ascribing human forms to the gods, but the confirmation of any conclusion based on how many Frenchmen believe it is always going to be a dicey proposition. Epicurus is not saying that 50,000 Frenchmen can’t be wrong because they all believe in a supernatural God. He’s saying 50,000 or 50 million or 50 billion Frenchmen would be wrong if they concluded that gods created the universe and are sentencing people to heaven and hell.
I’ve seen descriptions of this argument attacking it under the heading of “the common consensus of human beings is what he’s arguing here,” and I don’t think that’s what Epicurus or Velleius are arguing. He’s arguing that at a more basic level, all humans are disposed to think about this subject and to think about the nature of how gods might exist. It’s hard to give any description of all this, but I would submit that that’s closer to a description of the proleptic level than the conclusion that a particular god at a particular place at a particular time has a particular shape or speaks a particular language or does a particular thing. Those are going to be at the level in which Velleius is talking right now — speculations of the human mind — and those speculations are going to be right or wrong, but the disposition to have begun the discussion in the first place is not right or wrong.
It’s something that everybody does. And what everybody does is no less real than the dreams of mad men or centaurs coming through images under our minds. Those things are part of human nature. They exist as part of human nature and they’re not to be disposed of as voluntary speculations of a Platonic type that were implanted in us before we were born. And the whole process that people like Plato are suggesting is just absolutely wrong. Gods don’t hand down laws. Gods don’t hand down language. Gods don’t hand down eyes with the intent that we use them in a particular way. Nature, on the other hand, has created human beings — intelligent beings of many types who have brains that function in particular ways. And this question that we’re discussing in general would not be something we would be discussing at all if we were not so constituted to consider this to be an important subject.
Going back again to Lucretius Book Five, section 1081, let me read the Martin Ferguson Smith translation of that. He says: “Furthermore, how is a model for the creation of things implanted in the gods? How did they obtain the conception of human beings so that they might know and perceive in their minds what they wished to produce? And how did they ever recognize the capacity of the primary particles and the potential effect of their different arrangements if nature herself did not furnish them with a pattern for creation? The fact is that from time everlasting, countless elements impelled by blows and by their own weight have never ceased to move in manifold ways, making all kinds of unions and experimenting with everything they could combine to create. It is not surprising, therefore, that they have at last fallen into such arrangements and acquired such movements as those whereby this aggregate of things is maintained and constantly renewed.”
When I was looking at that a few minutes ago in preparation for talking about it, it occurs to me that Epicurus and Lucretius are not saying that the gods are not capable of creating a planet — within our own human expectation, we might well be able to create a planet ourselves in the reasonably foreseeable future. In this context, the object is not that the gods are sitting idle, twiddling their thumbs and being eternally happy because they have all the pleasure they need and they don’t need any more, so they’re just going to sit there and do nothing. The issue is that no matter how active the gods are in their own sphere — and Velleius is going to be stating as this goes forward that gods seem to be active in their own spheres in terms of being perfectly happy and having bodies and living among themselves — the question is more basic than “how are the gods spending their time?”
The issue is: even as a god, you had to have come from atoms, you had to come from somewhere. And when Lucretius asks, “How could the gods have created a world or created humans without some conception of them beforehand?” — he’s saying that that could not have happened if nature herself had not furnished them, in Martin Ferguson Smith’s translation, a pattern for their creation. Where I’m going with that is: whether we’re talking about humans here on earth or Martians on Mars or Epicurean gods in the intermundia, you still always face the same question — that everything did not start as a result of some intellectual intention to go in a particular direction. Everything that has ever happened, whether it’s language, whether it’s laws, whether it’s eyes and ears, has happened through nature using atoms, combining in ways that are consistent with the properties of those atoms.
And again, whether you’re talking about the actions of humans who are on earth or the actions of gods in the intermundia or anything else, nothing ever happens unless the atoms have the ability to combine in such a way as to make such a thing come into existence, as to eventually become conceivable through human minds. Everything that happens happens because the atoms combining among themselves have the capacity to do so. And it’s in that sense that nature is furnishing a pattern for creation — nature being the atoms moving through the void has provided a framework in which certain things can happen and certain things cannot happen, and it’s within that framework that we have to look for the explanation of what human beings are doing and what anybody else, including gods, are doing.
Joshua: Cassius, let me connect to what you were just saying there, back to something you mentioned earlier — which was the development of the eye and how the eye doesn’t develop in a way toward the purpose of allowing you to see. I don’t want to get into teleology yet. We’re going to have to do that before this series of podcasts is over — get into Aristotle and this issue of final causes. But Lucretius does mention partially in relation to teleology that things in nature don’t happen in order that the use can be achieved; things in nature happen according to their own developments and then are put to use in that way.
And for Charles Darwin in particular, one of the most famous passages — often mis-cited and misquoted by young-earth creationists — is his discussion of the evolution of the eye. Let me quote that. Darwin writes: “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” And if you’re a creationist, that’s where you stop — that’s where you stop the quotation. But Darwin continued. He said: “When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false. But the old saying of Vox Populi Vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor — as is certainly the case — if further the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case, and if such variations should be useful to any animal under the changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated.”
This process occurs over a hugely long span of time with minor variations in each new iteration of the form. And so while it seems to us to be astounding that this could happen naturally, when you think through the process systematically, it becomes very clear actually that it is quite possible for such a thing to happen. One of the editors to the Cambridge companion to Lucretius — or something like that — said that Darwin’s claim that he had not read Lucretius would be rather like St. Paul claiming that he had never read the Sermon on the Mount. And one thing I’ve often said in response to that claim is that actually these two proposals are very, very different, for the reason that nature according to the Epicureans was at least to a certain extent predictable, whereas the kind of divine revelation that you get in the Gospels is revelation precisely because it’s not predictable and it’s not repeatable. You can’t work your way to it in the same way that Charles Darwin worked his way to an understanding of the eye.
And the other thing I want to mention, partially in relation to this question of whether the gods have a human form — this is the speech, a monologue that comes from Hamlet, of course by William Shakespeare. And it deals with the question of how do we compare ourselves to these beings that we’ve used the prolepsis and reason in order to discover their existence? In what way are they similar to us and how do we understand these things if we don’t have a pattern — using ourselves as the pattern in a way? And so Shakespeare writes:
“I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you — this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire — why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”
And on the Wikipedia page, it’s mentioned that there’s some comparison to be made between that passage in Hamlet and a passage that you find in Montaigne, who wrote: “Who was it who persuaded man that this admirable moving of heaven’s vault, that the eternal light of these lamps — the sun and moon so fiercely rolling over his head, that the moving and continual motion of this infinite, vast ocean — were established and continue so many ages for his commodity and his service? Is it possible to imagine something so ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature, which is not even master of himself, exposed and subject to offenses as he is, and yet he dare call himself master and emperor?”
So I guess I make those points with a view partially to pointing out this: while the Epicureans may have thought that the gods had a human form, for example, there’s nothing really unusual about comparing humans to gods in a way that isolates their similarities. And one of those ways is what Shakespeare does here in Hamlet — he points to the apprehension, or to the mind’s ability to reason and to think things through, that this capacity — which other animals appear either not to have or to have only in a reduced capacity — is something that we might be able to ascribe to the gods, who are even higher than we are.
Cassius: So yes, Joshua, it’s reasonable to ascribe to beings who may exist on other planets attributes that correspond to things that we’re familiar with here on earth, just like we attribute the likelihood that there are animals in the continent of Africa who are probably in many ways alike the animals that we’re familiar with in the continent of Europe or the continent of North America. It is reasonable to extrapolate from our experience a prediction about areas that we have not yet visited. And there are certain limitations to that that you have to be very careful about, but it’s not unreasonable to be extrapolating in that way.
And the reasonableness of extrapolating about these things is a key aspect of this, because what you mentioned in regard to Darwin and the eye — it seems to me that that is in fact one of the big arguments that creationist supernaturalists will use, that there’s just no way to conceive that the eye could have been formed without an intelligent being essentially assembling it from some kind of a divine pattern. But that’s not necessarily so, and it is not necessarily more reasonable to reach a supernatural conclusion than to reach a natural conclusion. You quoted what Darwin had said as an excellent example of that.
And in support of that, I’ll also include Thomas Jefferson in his letter to John Adams of August the 15th, 1820. We’ve talked about it before. Jefferson is talking about his habitual anodyne where he says: “I feel, therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself. There are other existences then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation and matter and motion we can erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.” And then immediately he goes into this very same issue that Darwin is talking about. Jefferson continues: “I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular organization of matter formed for that purpose by its creator. I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular organization of matter as well as I can think of attraction as an action of matter or magnetism of loadstone. When he who denies to the creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking shall show how he could endow the sun with the mode of action called attraction — which reigns the planets and tracts of their orbits — or how an absence of matter can have a will and by that will put matter into motion, then the materialist may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking.”
But of course they can’t do those things, and so the materialist is not at a disadvantage in Jefferson’s view. And Jefferson concludes: “When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial is to say that they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise.”
We have lots of different people who listen to these podcasts. Some people love and adore Charles Darwin and some don’t. Some people love and adore Thomas Jefferson and some don’t. But you can go and look at almost every side or segment of human thought in history and find people on all sides of different spectrums coming to this same kind of conclusion — that there’s nothing supernatural that has to be brought into these processes, which Epicurus is explaining as actions of nature. And that’s ultimately where we go with this whole concept of prolepsis as being the basis — that it is a word attached to a natural functioning of the human mind that provides inputs that lead us to be able to talk about these things, and then once we start talking about them and speculating about them and forming opinions that are potentially right or potentially wrong.
Now we have a lot more of this to discuss as we go further through Sections 18 and 19, but we’re about at the end of our episode for today. So let’s talk about closing thoughts for now. Joshua, any closing thoughts for today?
Joshua: Cassius, we’ve talked about a lot of very deep issues today and some of the stuff is stuff that we’re going to continue to talk about on the forum and elsewhere. And the issue of the prolepsis in particular is one that I find very difficult — not just to get hold of but to keep hold of when I need to talk about it two weeks after I thought I understood it, but now I’ve forgotten everything. I think it’s important for any individual to have some idea of where you stand on issues like this one, because we do have people shouting on street corners, we do have people knocking on our doors expecting that we are going to fall in line — not just with the idea of the gods, but with their particular understanding of what they think is true about the gods or about God.
And you can write off the whole discussion, and I’ve done that. You can ignore these people. But having some ability to interface with these ideas I think continues to be very important, and it was clearly not an unimportant aspect of Epicurean philosophy. And so it’s very important for people who hold forth under the name of Epicurus — as to some extent we do — to be able to talk about this stuff, even though some people are already tired of hearing about it. But I would point people once again back to the Principal Doctrines, particularly the First Principal Doctrine, where he says: “A blessed and incorruptible being has no trouble itself and brings no trouble on any other being. Hence it is exempt from anger and partiality and all such emotions which imply weakness.” And if that’s as far as you get in this whole discussion and that’s where you want to stop, I’d say that’s the baseline. But there is a lot more to it, and there’s a lot more in these ancient Epicurean texts that I think is at the very least worth talking about.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, we run into all sorts of people in our daily lives who are consumed with questions of religion, and Epicurean philosophy would not be practical if it were not recognizing the reality that existed then — just as well as it exists today — that the discussion of supernatural beings, the question of whether they exist, things like that are part of the human condition that is certainly not going to go away anytime soon and probably won’t ever go away as long as people face death and hardship in their lives. They’re going to be wondering if there are not beings who have an ability to help us with our problems. And as you mentioned Joshua, when the issues are difficult, that means it’s more important than ever to regularly attend to them. As mentioned in this episode previously, Epicurus said to meditate about death even though the state of being dead is in fact nothing to us — the implications of the fact that we cannot live forever are hugely important for us in living happily, and we cannot therefore just dismiss the question as being unimportant to us.
That’s not the sense in which death is nothing to us. Death is extremely important to us. It’s just that the state of being dead is a state of nothingness to us. And it seems like in many cases in statements like that, Epicurean philosophy is extremely deep and not something that we have repeated to us every day. Which is going to make it important that we do regularly refresh in our minds the idea of pleasure as being the way we should regard all experiences in life that aren’t painful to us — that is foreign to the way most people think today. And the idea of talking about gods or perfect beings — the whole issue of divinity in a productive way as opposed to an unproductive way — is not something that’s done regularly today, but I think Epicurus does point out to us how we can reverse those problems and start to deal with them in a more productive way.
You have people of many different religions today who among themselves are freely willing to admit that they don’t understand the ways of their gods, that they don’t know whether a God wants them to do this or to do that, and so they end up defaulting that whatever happens, whatever they do, is what God wanted because that’s the way God set all of the universe in motion from the beginning of time. He fated everything to happen that does happen, and so they just end up defaulting on those questions and say, “Well, we’re going to trust that what has happened has happened for the best,” even though they know that it’s also confusing to them — that if they really think about it, they can’t come to a consistent, reasonable explanation. And so therefore they throw reason out. The reason of man is banished, according to the New Testament, to be replaced by some kind of reasoning of God above the ability of the normal person to understand, but not really beyond the ability of the Pope or the leaders of the particular churches to understand, because they’ll be happy to come every Sunday when they bring forward their offering plate to tell you what God’s really thinking.
And so you have that way of approaching things — or you have the way that Epicurus suggested, which is to go back to nature, use nature’s promptings as your guide, and not accept anything that is not established through the promptings of nature. When I say promptings, of course I’m referring to the canonical faculties, the prolepsis and so forth, none of which is easy to get a grasp of and keep a grasp of. But nobody said life is easy, and that’s where Epicurus comes in as someone who’s able to articulate a rational way of looking at things, which will allow us to live happily.
Okay, we’ll come back next week and finish up Section 18 and then move into Section 19. And as we do so, I think we’ll confirm that the fundamentals of Epicurean theology, Epicurean divinity, are very well supportable and acceptable even in the light of the most recent science and different discoveries in physics and astronomy that we have. We’ll come back and deal with those specifics as we go forward. In the meantime, please drop by the forum. Let us know if you have any thoughts, any questions, any suggestions about what we’re saying in the podcast. We thank you for your time in listening to us. We’ll be back next week. Bye.