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
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Cassius and Joshua continue from the middle of Section 18 of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, with Velleius presenting the Epicurean position on divinity. Before returning to the text, they discuss how Lucretius himself speaks about the gods — in the famous “glory of the Greeks” passage from Book 3 and the superstition passage from Book 1 — as a way of illuminating what Velleius is saying. Joshua then brings in Horace’s Ode 34 (recanting Epicureanism) and Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Lucretius” to explore two opposite human responses to the unveiled Epicurean cosmos: ecstasy vs. horror. Cassius discusses the chasm between those who find the Epicurean view life-giving and those who recoil from it, touching on Jefferson’s “head and heart” letter and Principal Doctrines 3 and 4 on pain. The episode returns to Section 18 — Velleius on the gods’ human-like form, the concept of images (steréa), virtue and happiness (Principal Doctrine 5), and the mechanics by which the gods may maintain their deathlessness. Joshua explains ichor (the fluid of the gods in Greek mythology) from Wikipedia and its Christian polemical misuse. The episode closes with reflections on Albert Camus and absurdism, and a preview of isonomia next week.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 236 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 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 Velleius 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 Velleius is presenting this.
The first thing that comes to mind in that regard is at the beginning of Book Three: “O 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 vie 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 renown — 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, Lucretius 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 terrors 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 gods majestic in their calm abodes. Winds do not shake nor clouds befoul 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 Lucretius 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 intermundia himself. He’s using the power of Epicurean philosophy to visualize the nature of the gods — 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 gods — that Lucretius is telling us that this wisdom and ability to articulate the type of place where the gods might live comes through the philosophy of Epicurus, comes through the mind, and not because we can see it ourselves. When Epicurus says in the Letter to Herodotus 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 lay 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 scowl, 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 — you can call it poetic license, or you can just call it speaking figuratively — but it’s not something that’s 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 Epicurean standing up against it, such as we have a picture of on the front page of our EpicureanFriends.com 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 Lucretius 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 Epicurus probing nature with his thought, and he’s taking the Epicurean view of the gods. But this is again in thought. And this image of pulling back the corner of the veil is one that I think has an interesting history. 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 Lucretius poetically describes, almost with ecstasy — but other people do it and recoil with horror. And one of those people was Horace in his Odes, Ode 34.
He describes it this way: “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, by 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 Tennyson. This poem is called “Lucretius” and it takes its point of departure from the story that St. Jerome records about the end of Lucretius’ life — about how his wife Lucilia slipped him a love potion because she thought that he was cheating on her or something, and then in the intervals of his insanity he wrote the poem De Rerum Natura, and then he killed himself. Now that story is almost certainly not true, but it does set up an interesting response to what Lucretius 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:
“We do but recollect the dreams that come just ere the waking, terrible; for it seemed a void was made in nature, all her bonds cracked; and I saw the flaring atom-streams and torrents of her myriad universe fly on to clash together again, and make another and another frame of things forever.”
And this sets up his lapse into insanity essentially. And in trying to explain it, the Lucretius of Tennyson’s poem says: “Is this thy vengeance, Holy Venus, thine, because I would not one of thine own doves, not even a rose, were offered to thee — thine, forgetful how my rich proem in Book One makes thy glory fly along the Italian field in lays that will outlast thy deity?” And then he goes on a bit later in the poem: “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 we mean when we talk about the tranquility of the gods. And Tennyson continues: “And such, not all unlike it, man may gain letting his own life go. The gods, the gods — if all be atoms — how then should the gods be atomic, not be dissoluble? Not follow the great law? My master held that gods there are, for all men so believe: I pressed my footsteps into his, and meant surely to lead my Memmius in a train of flowery causes onward to the proof that gods there are, and deathless.”
Going further in the poem, Tennyson writes: “O 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.”
And: “Poor little life that toddles half an hour, crowned with a flower or two and there an end… and since the nobler pleasures seem to fade, why should I not at last — I find myself not man-like — end myself?”
And: “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 fancies, and even his bones long laid within the grave, the very sides of the grave itself shall pass vanishing, atom and void, atom and void, into the unseen forever — till that hour, my golden work in which I told a truth that stays the rolling Ixion wheel and numbs the Furies’ ringlet-snake and pluck the mortal soul from out immortal hell, shall stand.”
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 is a reference to Ovid, who said that the verses of sublime Lucretius shall perish only on the day she shall consign the world to destruction. But this version of Lucretius — Tennyson’s Lucretius — in peeling back the veil on the cosmic order of nature, on the gods, and on Epicurus’s work and philosophy, far from stimulating in him a feeling of deep and profound pleasure, actually leads him to recoil with fear. And it’s 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 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 Cotta and Cicero and Velleius as well — it appears to me that the Epicurean perspective is bewildering to people like Cotta and Cicero and the Stoics especially. The Stoics especially 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 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 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. And I’m not trying to criticize or dismiss their feelings. Feelings in Epicurean 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. 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 itself to continue even though while different particular planets people will pass away — if you look at that as a benevolent arrangement of things, which even though not intentional on the part of nature, still works out to continuation so that destruction does not in the end destroy everything, then you can take a positive view of life.
I was working on a post this weekend 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, not to one of his philosophic friends, but this time to Maria Cosway 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.
Principal Doctrine 3 and 4 — 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 has implanted in people, as Velleius has said previously, a disposition to eventually conclude — using all the evidence available — that gods are blessed and imperishable.
And as Epicurus says, if you stick with that as your foundation and 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 are as foreign from the true nature of the gods as 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 untrue, 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 Lucretius to say — looking at the Latin a moment ago — apparent, meaning “it appears.” While Lucretius is not saying that he is flying in a helicopter above the intermundia observing the gods directly with his physical eyes, it is still apparent to Lucretius 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 established 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, we are still able to construct reasonable hypotheses — reasonable explanations, much as we talk about atoms and void — that give us a natural explanation of the way things operate and that free us from the fears and anxieties of these problems. And again, many people push these positions because that’s all they’ve ever been taught. 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 with “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. There could hardly 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. As Diogenes of Oinoanda 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. 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 work — and not on fictional stories that have no basis and that just lead people into worse fictions and a greater willingness to bend reality to fit their disposition.
Joshua: Yeah. I think today when people want to emphasize their piety, what do they describe themselves as, Cassius? They describe themselves as God-fearing. Lucretius in Book Four, when he’s describing what he thinks of as true piety, 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 in 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 — that 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. Velleius 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. 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” — 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 sterea. But as images perceived by similitude and transition, as infinite kinds of these images result from the 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.”
There’s a couple of specific references there that I know we’ve talked about in the past. Among the things to talk about here is a textual issue — Young has taken sides in his translation, but Rackham translates it differently. In a footnote, Rackham translates: “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 says this is 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 Velleius 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 Velleius to have said that the images stream from the gods to humans.
So I don’t think 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 Young’s position and not even bring it up unless somebody’s interested in the issues of the Latin texts themselves.
The atoms, as we know from general Epicurean discussions and from Book Four of Lucretius, 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 Velleius is saying that our knowledge of the gods is at least explained in part due to the receipt in the mind of these images. 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 Velleius 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 Epicurean canonics that 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 priests like to talk about. There is no center of the universe from which one person can get an absolutely objective picture that you can say 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 Epicurus explained in the Letter to Herodotus. 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.
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 that 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 Cleanthes 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 Velleius takes and that the Epicureans took in general. And of course he’s echoing what Epicurus said himself about virtue. Principal Doctrine 5: “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 happily without living wisely and honorably and justly, it’s also true that the gods cannot live happily without living wisely and honorably and justly.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, there are 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 Principal Doctrine 5 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 deign to have anything to do with pleasure.
Just like what Cleanthes 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, it’s horrible, 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’s 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 Principal Doctrine 5, 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.
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 happily. 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.
So it’s easy to imagine how Epicurus is applying the same kind of analysis to the gods as well. Whatever the gods are doing with their time, what they’re doing 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 — Norman DeWitt brings it up, that there are references in the early church fathers to Epicurus 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 that Velleius 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 ichor flowing through their veins. Ichor — I’m reading from Wikipedia — is the ethereal fluid that is the blood of the gods in ancient Greek mythology. Ichor 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 339, Homer writes: “Blood followed, but immortal ichor, pure, such as the blessed inhabitants of heaven may bleed — made of nectar — in other words, for the gods eat not man’s food nor slake as he would wine their thirst, then bloodless, and from death exempt.”
And there’s another interesting citation here on Wikipedia: in pathology, ichor is an antiquated term for a watery discharge from a wound or ulcer with an unpleasant or fetid smell. And the Christian writer Clement of Alexandria deliberately confounded ichor in its medical sense — as a foul-smelling watery discharge from a wound — with ichor 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 ichor of the poets is more repulsive than blood, for the putrefaction of blood is called ichor.
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 intermundia, removed from human affairs, and they don’t threaten us in any way.
Then Velleius goes on to mention Epicurus, who not only discovered and understood the occult and almost hidden secrets of nature but explained them with ease. And this is probably a reference to that line in Lucretius when he is talking about coming up with new Latin words in order to explain the dark discoveries of the Greeks as he describes it. And after that we get into this issue of solidity — the Greek word is sterea — “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 sterea.” And the footnote reads: this is the word which Epicurus uses to distinguish between 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 Rackham 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. We have all of the information we have about atoms and void and how the universe arises from atoms and void, and in order to have anything happen, things have to come into contact with each other — that touches on a particularly blessed sense that you don’t have things happening mysteriously and supernaturally, but you have things happening because of the flows of atoms 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 the 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. This is all speculation I’m saying right now, but trying to fit the pieces together as coherently as possible — again, if you’re going to be deathless, you’ve got to have a mechanism for sustaining your existence. And perhaps the Epicureans 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 Velleius 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 that it seems whenever we get caught up in confusion surrounding a certain positive claim that they’re making, we tend to lose sight of some of the other auxiliary points that are involved in the discussion. When we’re talking about the size of the sun — well, is the sun the size that it appears to be and what does that mean? But don’t lose sight of the point that the sun is not a god. When we’re talking about how Lucretius 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 that 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 when we lose sight of those other points that the Epicureans are making and get wrapped up in questions like “how big do the Epicureans think the sun really was?” — if you lose sight of this other stuff, all we’re left with seems to be 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 Camus to fairly summarize his position, and the more I read about him, the more favorable I come towards him. But the word 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 — that is their answer to questions like this. And I think that’s worth asking about because a lot of people do 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. 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 Camus 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 the “who cares” approach can work for some people at some times. Principal Doctrine 10 says that if the actions of people who we consider to be despicable in fact lead 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 they set out to achieve. But — and this is the point where we go around when we discuss Principal Doctrine 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. Frances 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’s projections about life in the rest of the universe or the kind of understanding of gods that is being presented here by Velleius or Lucretius or Epicurus himself.
Frances 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. Joshua, any closing thoughts today?
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius. I quoted the beginning of the episode today from Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Lucretius,” 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 Velleius and Cotta 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 isonomia — 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, Josh. That discussion of isonomia 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 at the EpicureanFriends.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.