Episode 236 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 11 - Lucretian Support For Velleius' Views of Epicurean Divinity
Date: 07/11/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3943-episode-236-cicero-s-otnotg-11-lucretian-support-for-velleius-views-of-epicurean/?postID=31230#post31230
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 236 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucious 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@epicureanfriends.com where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our episodes. We’re continuing to go through Cicero’s on the nature of the gods and we’re approximately in the middle of section 18 of that work where Valle is presenting the epicurean position on divinity and the nature of the gods. Before we get back into that today though, and remembering that we are a podcast dedicated to the memory of the poet Lucretius, I think it would be useful for us to go back and look at a couple of things that Lucretius himself said about the gods and correlate those with the way Valle is presenting this. The first thing that comes to mind in that regard is at the beginning of Book three oh, glory of the Greeks, the first to raise the shining light out of tremendous dark, illuminating the blessings of our life. You are the one I follow in your steps. I tread not as a rival, but for love of your example, does the swallow vi with swans do wobbly legged little goats compete in strength and speed with thoroughbreds? You father found the truth you gave to us a father’s wisdom and from every page almost illustrious, in renowned, we take as bees do from the flowery banks of summer, the benefit of all your golden words, the gold, most worthy of eternal life. Now with that set up, lures is talking about what Epicurus has taught through epicurean philosophy, through his words, through his writings. Lucretius is not in any particular location, not looking at anything in particular, but he’s talking about being under the influence of epicurean philosophy. And here’s what he says next about the gods. For once your reason, your divine sense begins its proclamation telling us the way things are. All tarots of the mind, vanish are gone. The barriers of the world dissolve before me and I see things happen all through the void of empty space. I see the God’s majestic and their calm. A bodes winds do not shake nor clouds befo nor snow violate with the knives of sleet and cold. But there the sky is purest blue. The air is almost laughter in that radiance and nature satisfies their every need and nothing, nothing Mars their calm of mind. So it is the inspiration of epicurean philosophy that figuratively allows lucious to say these things about the gods as if they’re right in front of him, as if he sees them. But obviously from the context here, that’s not the case. He hasn’t gone to the inner mindia himself. He’s using the power of epicurean philosophy to visualize the nature of the gods, and he’s using the power of epicurean philosophy not only to visualize the positive existence of the gods, but also to visualize some things that do not exist. And he continues on by saying no realms of hell are ever visible, but earth forwards the view of everything below and outward all through space. I feel a more than mortal pleasure in all this almost a shudder since your power has given this revelation of all nature’s ways. So that’s one thing I think we should keep in mind as we discuss the epicurean view of god’s that Lucretius is telling us that this wisdom and ability to articulate the type of place where the gods might live comes through us through the philosophy of epicurus comes through us through the mind and not because we can see it ourselves When Epicurus says in the letter to EU that our knowledge of the gods comes through clear vision. Well, there’s more than one kind of vision. There’s the vision of the physical eyeballs and there’s the mind’s vision, the ability to visualize through the mind’s eye as we always say, the true nature of something. And before I leave Lucretius, I wanted to also go back to the beginning of Book one where once Lucretius has finished talking about Mars and Venus and the opening discussion of pleasure and the way everything follows the lead of pleasure, he says at line 60 when all could see that human life leg groveling ignominiously in the dust crushed beneath the grinding weight of superstition, which from the celestial regions displayed its face lowering over mortals with hideous sc, the first who dared to lift mortal eyes to challenge it. The first who ventured to confront it boldly was a Greek. Well, that’s another example of, you can call it poetic license. So you can just call it speaking figuratively, but it’s not plain for everyone to see directly in front of them this history of the world with some figure appearing out of the clouds and glaring down an epicure standing up against it, such as we have a picture of on the front page of our epicurean Friends forum, Lucretius is evoking a picture in our minds through words that is very true to the nature of what actually happened but is not physically in front of us. We’re not actually seeing it with our eyes. It’s through the power of understanding that comes through the words and observations that we are able to make and the way we put everything together, giving the clues that Epicurus has given to us that allows us to see these things clearly we are not seeing them clearly directly in front of us at a particular moment. We’re not hallucinating. We are putting all of these influences together to form this clear picture of important aspects of the gods,
Joshua: Right Cassius. So we have this image of lucious pulling back the veil as it were on nature, on the cosmos and on the gods themselves. And he’s speaking, as you rightfully say, metaphorically in a sense He’s not actually looking with his eyes at the farthest reaches of the cosmos. He’s probing nature with his thought in the way that he describes epic probing nature with his thought and he’s taking the epicurean view of the gods. But this is again in thought, but this image of pulling back the corner of the veil is one that I think has an interesting history. And it seems to be the case that some people who pull back the veil on the epicurean cosmos are able to do it with interest. And as Lucious poetically describes themselves almost with ecstasy, but other people do it and recoil with horror. And one of those people was Horace in his oes, ode 34. He describes it this way. He says, A remiss and irregular worshiper of the gods. While I professed the errors of a senseless philosophy, I am now obliged to set sail back again and to renew the course that I had deserted for Jupiter who usually cleaves the clouds with his gleaming. Lightning lately drove his thundering horses and rapid chariot through the clear serene, which the sluggish earth and wandering rivers and the utmost boundary of atlas were shaken. So this is again Horace being poetic here. Caesar Augustus has come to power and Horace is being brought back into line and part of being brought back into line is paying lip service to the imperial state religion. But the theme does show up again. It shows up again in a poem by Alfred Tenon and this poem is called Lucious and it takes its point of departure from the story that St. Jerome records about the end of Lucretius life about how his wife lucila slipped him a love filter because she thought that he was cheating on her or something. And then in the intervals of his insanity, he wrote the poem Dare Naura, and then he killed himself. Now that story is almost certainly not true, but it does set up an interesting response to what Luke Isha is kind of giving us here in book three, which is, as I said, an ecstatic understanding of nature and of the gods given to him by his study of epicurean philosophy. And Tennyson uses that image connecting it back to this issue of dreams that we’ve been talking about a little bit as we’ve gone through the series. And he writes this, he says, we do but recollect the dreams that come just ear the waking terrible for it seemed a void was made in nature. All her bonds cracked. And I saw the flaring Adams streams and Torrance of her myriad universe fly on to clash together again and make another and another frame of things forever. And this sets up his laps into insanity essentially. And in trying to explain it, the lucious of Tennyson’s poems says, is this dive vengeance Holy Venus thine, because I would not one of thine owned doves, not even a rose, were offered to the thine forgetful how my rich pro eon in book one makes thy glory fly along the Italian field in lays that will outlast th deity. And then he goes on a bit later in the poem and says, the gods who haunt the lucid interspace of world and world where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind nor ever falls the least white star of snow nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar their sacred everlasting calm. And as you mentioned Cassius, we’re going to get into this issue of what exactly do we mean when we talk about the tranquility of the gods and tenon continues and such not also fine nor so divine, a calm not such nor all. Unlike it, man may gain letting his own life go the gods. The gods. If all be Adams, then how should the gods be atomic, not be dissoluble, not follow the great law my master held that God’s there are for all men. So believe I pressed my footsteps into his and meant surely to lead my MEUs in a train of flowery causes onward to the proof that God’s there are and deathless going further in the poem, Tennyson writes, oh ye gods I know you careless, yet behold to you from childly want and ancient use I call, I thought I lived securely as yourselves, no lewdness, narrowing envy, monkey spite, no madness of ambition, avarice none, no larger feast than under plane or pine with neighbors laid along the grass to take only such cups as left us friendly, warm, affirming each his own philosophy, nothing to mar the sober majesties of settled sweet epicurean life. But now it seems some unseen monster lays his vast and filthy hands upon my will, wrenching it backward into his and spoils my bliss in being and it was not great for save when shutting reasons up in rhyme or helicon and honey and living words to make a truth less harsh. I often grew tired of so much within our little life or of so little in our little life, poor little life that toddles half an hour crowned with a flower or two and there an end. And since the noer pleasures seem to fade, why should I beast as I find myself not man-like end myself and therefore now let her that is the womb and tomb of all great nature take and forcing far apart those blind beginnings that have made me man dash them anew together at her will through all her cycles, into man once more or beast or bird or fish or opulent flower. But till this cosmic order everywhere shattered into one earthquake in one day cracks all to pieces and that hour perhaps is not so far when momentary man shall seem no more a something to himself. But he his hopes and hates his homes and wishes and even his bones long laid within the grave, the very sides of the grave itself shall pass vanishing Adam and void Adam and void into the unseen forever, till that hour, my golden work in which I told a truth that stays the rolling ian wheel and numbs the furies ringlet snake and pluck the mortal soul from out immortal hell shall stand. I surely then it fails at last and perishes as I must for oh thou passionless bride, divine tranquility, yearned after by the wisest of the wise who failed to find me being is thou art without one pleasure and without one pain. How be it? I know thou surely must be mine or soon or late yet out of season, thus I woo roughly for thou care not how roughly men may woo so they win, thus, thus the soul flies out and dies in the air. So that’s a fairly grim poem, but Tennyson is picking up on a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about in this series. His mention of the cosmic order shattered into an earthquake one day and cracks all the pieces. That’s a reference to Avid who said that the verses of sublime lucious shall perish only one a single day she’ll consign the world to destruction. But this version of lucious tennyson’s lucious in peeling back the veil on the cosmic order of nature on the gods and on epicurus his work and philosophy far from stimulating in him a feeling of deep and profound pleasure, it actually leads him to recoil with fear and its fear partially of his own impiety, just as in the case of Horace, it’s the fear of his own impiety that leads him into a disastrous course and goodness knows Cassius, what you’re going to make of all this.
Cassius: Joshua, I think what you’ve just brought up is something that we also need to discuss before we get back into this text today because we do see a chasm between certain types of people who can look at what we think is the reality of the universe and find it majestic and inspiring and pleasurable and a place where they can live happily, even though they can only live there for a temporary period of time and we see other people who look at essentially the same facts and just recoil in horror at the result of it. And I think that we see this in the discussion of the gods between Kada and Cicero and Valle as well in that it appears to me that the epicurean perspective, it’s bewildering to people like Kada and Cicero and the stoics especially because especially the stoics see the world as a suffering painful place and that the way to deal with it is to run from it, to hide from it, to suppress the emotion of pain at all costs, even at the cost, especially at the cost of foregoing pleasure because they think if you get interested in pleasure, you necessarily have pain that’s so overwhelming that you can’t deal with it. But that’s not the epicurean position. We see this come up at times when people will come from a Buddhist background or like I say, a stoic background in which the suffering of mankind is the number one thing that they are going to fix their gaze on and they are never going to let their gaze move away because they are so convinced, and again, I’m not trying to criticize or dismiss their feelings. Feelings and epi hearing philosophy are real as the dreams of mad men. Their feelings are real and we have to deal with feelings, but we deal with feelings by understanding that the nature of the universe is not malicious and malevolent and that there’s not a group of gods up there weaving the threads of fate so as to cause us maximum pain and maximum hardship, but to realize that those things are not true, that the universe is not set up to make life difficult for us, and in fact, the reverse is true that the universe allows the universe itself to continue even though while different particular planets people will pass away, the universe itself does not pass away. The process continues and continues and continues over and over again. And if you look at that as a benevolent arrangement of things, which even though it’s not intentional on the part of nature, it still works out to continuation so that destruction does not end the end destroy everything, then you can take a positive view of life and a positive view of the things that we have to go through while we exist and you can focus on the positive. I was working on a post this weekend when we’re talking about some of these issues at the forum and there’s a phrase that’s in one of the letters of Thomas Jefferson this time not to John Adams this time, not to one of his philosophic friends, but this time to Maria Conway in the letter that’s called his head and heart letter, where Jefferson uses the phrase that due to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine. And we all can understand why certain people in certain situations are going to just not agree that the greater part of life is sunshine because for them in their circumstances it’s not, it’s terrible. They’re suffering tremendous pain, but that problem ultimately does not derive from nature. It derives from the circumstances and the people and the situations and events that we ourselves are in at a particular time because not everybody is faced with continuous terrible pain. Principle doctrine three and four, the epicurean analysis of pain is that pain is generally short if intense, it’s manageable if it goes on for a period of time and pain never has it within its power to hold us in its grip forever because we have the ability to exit the stage when the place ceases to please us. So pain is not the central focus of life. Misery, hardship, suffering is not the central focus of life and it’s not part of the analysis of the gods either the gods are not in an epicurean position sitting up there causing us trouble, acting capriciously sending us to hell, picking winners and losers, having chosen friends and chosen enemies. That is not only wrong from the epicurean position that is blasphemous and blasphemous in the sense that it is nature from the epicurean perspective that is implanted in people. As Val has said previously, a disposition to eventually conclude using all the evidence available that Gods are blessed and imperishable. And as epicure says, if you stick with that as your foundation and you do give credit to nature, that nature has no inconsistencies and contradictions within it and stick with the consistency of gods that are blessed and imperishable, then it’ll never even cross your mind to think about Gods who are sending people to hell for crimes that their parents committed before they were born. All sorts of atrocious violations of what we sense to be just and fair and pleasurable and blessed in life is as foreign from the true nature of the gods, as is any fictitious lie put forward by a priest or a poet for some purposes of bribing the gods to give winds to their ships or winning a particular battle. All of those things are not only untruth, but they’re blasphemous from this epicurean perspective and it does not undermine the epicurean perspective for Epicurus to say that we have knowledge of the gods through clear vision or for lucre to say, and I was looking at the Latin a moment ago to try to get the wording from this opening of book three. It looks like the Latin is a parrot Newman, which aart echoes of apparent, and while Lucretius is not saying that he is flying in a helicopter above the inner mindia, observing that God’s directly with his physical eyes, it is still apparent to lucres that a divine existence consists in living imperishable and blessedly and not as Lucretius specifically says in creating hells to send their enemies to for eternal punishment. Those are things that are clearly establishment by reasoning based on the faculties that nature has given us and not something that we need to have any doubt about. Even though we are not able to discuss with confidence exactly what language the gods might speak or exactly what type of blood the gods might have flowing through their veins if they have veins at all, we are still able to construct reasonable hypotheses, reasonable explanations, much as we talk about atoms and void that give us a supernatural explanation of the way the world operates and that freeze us from the fears, the anxieties of these problems and freeze us from having to believe the lies of these people who are often pushing these positions. Again, many people push them because that’s all they’ve ever been taught. That’s all they know and they’re not being malicious in doing so, but the result of the misunderstanding and the error is tremendously bad in human life according to the epicurean diagnosis here. And so these are not things that can be left to implication. They can’t be left just, well, I don’t know. I’m an agnostic. I don’t know. I don’t care. Gods don’t have any influence on me. The world is driven by people who are motivated by their view of what they think Gods are telling them to do. I don’t know that there could be anything more practical or important than to get to the root of whether Gods in fact are telling people to kill each other and hate each other or not. If the gods are not doing that, it seems to me awfully important to produce arguments that these other positions are false and not just because there’s a goodness floating out there in the universe that Plato can tell us about, that we can derive mathematically or geometrically or through calculus or whatever. As Dogen ofAnd would say, you don’t produce happy results in living by putting out false ideas about the gods. The people who are the most religious can be the most vile according to dogen of lander. You can have a society in which people respect each other and live happily with each other based on the reality of understanding how pleasure and pain works and not on fictional stories that have no basis and that just lead people into worse fictions and worse willingness to bend reality to fit their disposition.
Joshua: Yeah, I think today when people want to emphasize their piety, what did they describe themselves as? Cassius, they describe themselves as God fearing lucious. In book four when he’s describing what he thinks of as true piety, he says the true piety does not consist in wrapping one’s head in a veil, turning to every stone and crawling up to every altar, but rather to look on all things in nature with a master eye and a mind at peace. So as you said, people respond differently to this stuff, but to recoil and horror from the idea that the gods don’t exist to cause us pain or harm and that we don’t need to fear them is a recipe for one’s own personal unhappiness. I think.
Cassius: Well, we’ve gone off on a longer tangent than I expected and so let’s bring things back to the text today. But what we’ve been discussing is extremely important and it illuminates, that’s another good word. It illuminates figuratively the things that we’re talking about to have these discussions. We’re not seeing anything differently in front of our eyes at the moment, but the discussion illuminates the text and allows us to grasp with greater clarity the things that are being discussed. When we left off last week, we were approximately in the middle of section 18, Lucrecia says, 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 at Peus 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. That’s what we’ve just been talking about already all today, 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 Nia. But as images perceived by similitude and transition as infinite kinds of these images result from the innumerable individuals and sinner 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 external essence is. There’s a couple of specific references there that I know we’ve talked about in the past, but among the things to talk about here is a textual issue. Yang has taken sides in his translation, but Rackham translates it differently in footnotes it rackham translates it as this he says by our perceiving images owing to their similarity and succession because an endless train of precisely similar images arises from the innumerable atoms and streams towards the gods. Rackham on his footnote number two says probably to be altered into streams to us from the gods. So this is another caution to us that we have the possibility of textual corruption creeping into some of this material, but in the end, I think we have more than enough evidence to be confident in the result because as we go further into the book, there are several other passages where Valle is being attacked about how the images of the gods operate and in the attack it’s clear from the context and the wording that the attacker is understanding Valle to have said that the images stream from the gods to humans. So I don’t think that there’s any reason to get overly concerned about which way the images are going because this appears to be a textual corruption and it’s probably best just to take yang’s position and not even bring it up unless somebody’s interested in the issues of the texts themselves with Latin. The atoms, as we know from general Epic curing discussions from Book four of Lucretius atoms stream away from all bodies in the universe, not only from the gods but from everything else, from trees and ants and from us as well. And images are perceived in the mind as coming from all sorts of locations. So it’s almost certain, it would seem to me that Vallejo is saying that our knowledge of the gods is at least explained in part due to the receipt in the mind of these images, which is something that’s hard to explain. And he starts talking about how we receive them, not by the senses, but by the mind and not materially or individually, but by perceiving images owing to their similarity and succession. And I know people use analogies of movie projections where you have numbers of images just constantly being projected, which gives the illusion of motion or the older flip book style where you can flip the pages and it appears to us that the figure on the pages is moving. There’s all sorts of potential questions to be raised about what Reis is saying here, but it’s all in this context that this part of it is not necessary for us to know. The necessary part is only the imperishable and blessed part and all the other aspects of epicure and canons we’ve talked about in the last several episodes in terms of what we really need is not to fix ourselves on a single explanation that we are sure is absolutely the only one that’s right, but to allow that if we can understand a number of possibilities, any of which could work because they’re consistent with the evidence, then that’s really all that we can hope to do. We are not supernatural gods like the priest like to talk about. There is no sinner of the universe from which one person can get an absolutely objective picture that you can say that that picture alone is correct. There are multiple perspectives in life, multiple ways to explain things, multiple possibilities of the way things could be happening as epicure is explained in the letter to Les. And so by specifying any number of reasonable possibilities, even broadly construed like these are, you achieve what’s necessary, which is making sure that you’re not living in fear of a supernatural God when there’s no evidence to support such a thing being a problem. And in the analogy that Lucretius uses over and over, there is no need to be like a child who is afraid of things in the dark when there is no evidence to support that there is a danger there, but the mind because of its fears creates monsters and other sources of danger for which there’s no evidence in the first place to be afraid of.
Joshua: So you started Cassius reading this issue of virtue. The gods are granted to be perfectly happy and nobody can be happy without virtue, nor can virtue exist where reason is not. And I think last week, possibly the week before you touched on this mental image, thatthe, the stoic tried to cultivate of the virtues serving as the handmaidens of pleasure, pleasure sitting on her throne and the virtues clustered around her as her servants. And the goal of cli anthes was to portray this as a kind of horror, the idea that the virtues serve pleasure and not the other way around. But this is very much the view that Valis takes and that the epicureans took in general. And of course, he’s echoing what Epicurus said himself about virtue principle doctrine. Five. It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly whenever any of these is lacking, when for instance, the person is not able to live wisely. Though he lives well and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life. And we should take it as read in most of these cases that what’s true for humans is also true of the gods, that while humans cannot live ably without living wisely and honorably and justly, it’s also true that the gods cannot live ably without living wisely and honorably and justly.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, there’s several other things I know you want to comment on, but let me jump in on that one before we go further. Because I think again, in relation to principle doctrine five and this whole issue of virtue, we have the same chasm of understanding, the same differentiation where certain people will look at the word virtue and they simply cannot let go of the idea that virtue is painful. Virtue is hard. Virtue is something you do as its own reward for its own sake and in isolation from pleasure. In fact, if you’re getting pleasure from an action, it is disqualified per se, from being virtuous because pleasure is a distraction from this goodness that has an essence that is so holy and high and noble and worthy, that it would never de to have anything to do with pleasure. Just like what kan is trying to evoke in people’s minds using this picture of virtue, associating with pleasure, this whole manner of thinking is an attempt to get people to think that it’s atrocious, that it’s horrible, that it’s vulgar. Vulgar is a good word in this context, vulgar to consider that virtue would have anything to do with pleasure in the first place. But that is not what Epicurus is saying. And as we talk about Epicurus is expansion of the term pleasure to include not only sensory stimulation, but other activities of life which are not painful. I think we’ve got the same thing going on here with this word virtue because in principle doctrine number five, we can see that there’s something going on that explains how virtue and happiness and pleasure can be consistent with each other. If you take the position of the mainstream philosophers, they can’t have anything to do with each other because they’re contradictory by nature. Epicurus is saying that they’re not contradictory by nature, and I think the only way to really get to the root of that is to look at how Epicurus is defining virtue and not say that it’s an absolute, that it’s the same for everybody all the time in every place. It’s not handed down by a God in a final conclusive form that everybody has to adhere to. Virtue is going to be a contextual action, which in the epicurean theme is something that is done for the sake of pleasure, pleasure being the ultimate good happiness, meaning a life of pleasure, the assessment of an action as virtuous. The perspective of an action as being virtuous has to be joined in epicurean terms with a result of living ably. Now, in epicurean terms, you often do things that are painful for a time so that you can experience less pain or greater pleasure later on. So an epicurean perspective would include the possibility that virtue can be painful, but an action is not going to be virtuous unless it leads in the end to greater pleasure. It’s going to be stupid, it’s going to be unwise, it’s going to be imprudent. It’s going to be the difference between being courageous and being a fool to do things that lead to more pain than pleasure because that’s the ultimate organizing scheme of nature to pursue pleasure. And if you’re doing things that are not going to result in more pleasure than pain, then what you’re doing simply makes no sense from any perspective. So it’s easy to imagine how epic cures is applying the same kind of analysis to the gods as well. Whatever the Gods are doing with their time, what they’re doing with their time leads them to experience a life full of pleasure without any pain that is not going to be terminated by death. So the virtues of the gods, which is something we’ve been talking about a little bit, Norma Dewitt brings it up that there’s references in the early church fathers to epicure saying that the gods do take action to maintain their deathlessness and their blessedness, but those actions of the gods to maintain their blessedness and their deathlessness are the virtues of the gods because they result in deathlessness and blessedness, not because the gods have some arbitrary fixed absolute conduct which they themselves have to adhere to. That constitutes courage or self-sacrifice or something else that people would consider to be virtuous because that’s what conventional morality tells us to consider.
Joshua: And on that point of the deathlessness of the gods, we come to the next issue, which is the lay says the form of the gods is not body, but something like body, nor does it contain any blood, but something like blood. For the ancient Greeks, the gods were said to have a substance called ior flowing through their veins and icorp, I’m reading from Wikipedia, here is the ethereal fluid that is the blood of the gods. In ancient Greek mythology, EOR is described as toxic to humans killing them instantly if they come in contact with it. And in book five of the Iliad around line 3 39, Homer writes, blood followed, but immortal or pure, such as the blessed inhabitants of heaven may bleed made of nectar. In other words, for the god’s eat not man’s food nor slake as he woulds wine, their thirst then bloodless and from death exempt. And there’s another interesting citation here on Wikipedia in pathology. IOR is an antiquated term for a watery discharge from a wound or ulcer with an unpleasant or feted smell. And the Christian writer, Clement of Alexandria deliberately confounded ior in its medical sense as a foul smelling watery discharge from a wound with icorp in its mythological sense as the blood of the gods in service of a polemic against the pagan Greek gods. As part of his evidence that they’re merely mortal, he cites several cases in which the gods are wounded physically and then asserts that if there are wounds, there is blood for the icorp of the poets is more repulsive than blood. For the putrefaction of blood is called Icorp end quote. So the epicureans appear to be mapping their understanding of the gods onto the Greek understanding of the gods, but with several very important changes that we’ve talked about a lot today already, we shouldn’t fear them because they live blessed and incorruptible lives in the intermedia removed from human affairs and they don’t threaten us in any way. Then Valle goes on to mention Epicurus who not only discovered and understood the occult and almost hidden secrets of nature, but explain to them with ease, and this is probably a reference to that line in Lucious when he is talking about coming up with new Latin words in order to explain the dark discovery of the Greeks as he describes it. And after that we get into this issue of solidity, and the Greek word is Renia, nor are they to be considered as bodies of any solidity or reduceable to number like those things, which because of their firmness, he calls steria. And the footnote reads this, Steria is the word which Epicurus uses to distinguish betw those objects which are perceptible to sense and those which are imperceptible as the essence of the divine being and the various operations of the divine power. And in the text he finishes section 18 by saying, as infinite kinds of those 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
Cassius: Or as Raku says. And so attains an understanding of the nature of a being both blessed and eternal. Joshua, this whole issue of the way these images are working in this context is not something we’re going to be able to come to a conclusion about ourselves. I don’t know that there’s much better way to deal with it than just to keep in mind that the epicureans were working from a logical chain reasoning approach to things, and we have all of the information we have about atoms and void and how the universe arises from Adams and void. And in order to have anything happen, things have to come into contact with each other that touches a particularly blessed sense that you don’t have things happening mysteriously and supernaturally, but you have things happening because of the flows of Adams through the void. And it seems likely that they’re working on a theory by which the gods can actually have a physical body of a kind so that they can actually live and interact with the universe and therefore be intelligible to us as real true beings. But at the same time, they have to take into account that normally the rule that applies is that bodies which come together from combination of atoms are always at some point going to split apart, always at some point going to cease to exist. So if nature is leading us in the direction of seeing divinity as being deathless, there has to be some kind of mechanism by which a deathless being can maintain itself indefinitely. And the commentaries I’ve read about this in the past all seem to me to center on that type of reasoning that just like a waterfall maintains its existence through the continuous flow of drops of water through a waterfall, we have an analogy that we can understand that a being can not cease to exist if it finds a way to constantly replace the atoms of its structure. And this is all speculation I’m saying right now, but trying to fit the pieces together and as coherent a means as possible. Again, if you’re going to be deathless, you’ve got to have a mechanism for sustaining your existence. And perhaps the epicurean saw the idea that the images flowing constantly and giving rise to the bodies of the gods was a method by which they could have that perpetual existence. Maybe so, maybe not, but it’s certainly not something that Valle is presenting as necessary to believe in the same way that it is necessary to believe that Gods are blessed and imperishable,
Joshua: Right Cassius, and since we are here at the end of section 18, there’s another point I’d like to make, which is it seems whenever we get caught up in confusion surrounding a certain positive claim that they’re making, we tend to lose sight. I think of some of the other auxiliary points that are involved in the discussion. And so when we’re talking about the size of the sun, for example, it’s like, well, is the sun the size that it appears to be? And what does that mean? But don’t lose sight at the point that the sun is not a God, right? When we’re talking about lucious describes the first animals and early humans being born out of the earth, well, how do we describe them being born out of the earth? Are there little wombs in the earth that they’re born out of? Well, he probably didn’t have a very good grasp of Darwinian evolution or other theories of origin, but the important thing is they weren’t put here by God. And so when we’re thinking about this issue of images and how it relates to dreams, there’s a whole lot of controversy here, but we shouldn’t lose sight of one of the major points, which is dreams have no prophetic power. What you’re seeing in dreams is not from the future, in other words, which people really did sometimes think in the ancient world. And I think that when we lose sight of those other points that the epicureans are making, it’s good to get wrapped up in the questions on how big do the epicureans think the sun really was? But if you lose sight of this other stuff, all we’re left with it seems like is confusion
Cassius: And confusion itself is a pain and something that we would like to eliminate to the extent that we can. And what you just said reminds me of a discussion we’ve had this past week on the forum. I don’t know nearly enough about Albert Camou to fairly summarize his position. And the more I read about him, the more favorable I come towards him. But the word that he’s associated with in modern discussion is this term called absurdism. And there are people who want to take the position, I don’t know, and I don’t care who cares what the Gods are doing. The Gods don’t exist. Who cares? Who cares? Who cares is their answer. I don’t know. I don’t even have a reasonable speculation, but who cares is their answer to questions like this. And I think that’s a good way of asking the question because a lot of people care. And when you live in a world that is composed of people who care about those things, then you better care as well because your life is going to be affected by people who do care about those questions. And no man is an island. You don’t live off on a desert by yourself. We are social animals and we are going to be affected by the way people think about the gods. So you should care to have a reasonable explanation, a reasonable hypothesis at least about how things can be going on in people’s minds about Gods, and yet not have some actual supernatural being as the source of it. So again, I don’t want to go too far down the road of Albert Camu or absurdism or anything like that, but there is a practical reason why Epicurus would be concerned with these issues that I think can be tempting to dismiss because we get frustrated. We don’t have the answers that we’d like to have. We don’t even have a complete set of epicurean texts. We know that Epicurus didn’t have all the evidence he wanted to have. We don’t even have what Epicurus did write based on his own speculations in full. And we’re constantly having to fill in the gaps and try to reconstruct and recreate what Epicurus is really saying. And again, even if we weren’t even looking at it from an epicurean point of view, we don’t have the information we would like to have about the way the universe operates. And we can either say, who cares how it operates, or we can construct as reasonable a set of presumptions as we can come up with and then act based on those. And the who cares approach can work for some people at some times, and I’m not going to say that it can never work, says in principle doctrine number 10, if the actions of people who we consider to be despicable in fact leads them to a happy life, then we who talk about pleasure as the goal can have no objection to that because they have actually achieved what it is they set out to achieve. But, and this is the point where we go around them around when we discuss principle doctrine. Number 10, I would submit that human history shows that it does not work to approach life without some kind of an understanding of the way things are and to base your actions on that understanding and to act accordingly. And so target your life or life of happiness rather than just taking a position, I don’t know, I don’t care, and I’m not even going to think about it. That is almost guaranteed to be an unsuccessful way of living your life. Francis Wright took that position to a certain degree in her a few days in Athens. She does not go down the road of following Epicurus projections about life in the rest of the universe or the kind of understanding of Gods that is being presented here by Valle or Lucretius or Epicurus himself. Francis Wright herself did not wish to go in that direction, but I think most of us would agree that closing your thoughts to a subject that is of extreme interest to 98% of the people in the world is not going to necessarily be a successful strategy for dealing with the world. And Epicurus is offering a strategy and a perspective that allows us to live happily and still take into account what nature has apparently implanted in the minds of just about anybody, that this is a subject that needs to be examined and that needs to be dealt with in a reasonable way. Alright, well we’ve come to the end of section 18, so let’s take closing comments today and come back next week to start with 19. So Joshua, any closing thoughts today?
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, I quoted the beginning of the episode today from Alfred Tennyson’s poem Lucious, and I have a lot of caveats when it comes to this poem, but I’m going to post a link to it. I think it’s interesting to at least give it a read because he is touching on a lot of important issues, particularly relating to the question that Valis and Kata and everybody else in this text are concerned about, which is the nature of the gods. So while his higher level conclusions I disagree with, I think the poem does give us insight into the conversation because he’s drawing a lot out and it’s probably worth looking into. So I’ll post that to the thread for the episode today, and it looks like next week we’re getting into the issue of is Sonoma the equitable distribution of living things throughout the universe? And I know Cassius, you’ll have a lot to say about that next week. So I’m excited to get into that topic,
Cassius: Right, Joss, where that discussion of is Sonoma is going to be challenging, but it is fascinating and I think we can get some very interesting material out of it. But we’ll do that next week. In the meantime, please drop by and see us@theepicureanfriends.com forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this episode or any other episodes or topics relating to Epicurus that we can discuss. All of these are very interesting topics and we look forward to coming back and discussing them with you again next week. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back soon. See you then. Bye.