Episode 247 - Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods - Part 22 - Cotta Continues To Attack The Epicurean View That Gods Are Natural Living Beings.
Date: 10/31/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4052-episode-247-cicero-s-otnotg-22-cotta-continues-to-attack-the-epicurean-view-that/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 247 works through Sections 32–34 of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, with Cotta pressing three lines of attack against the Epicurean position that gods are natural living beings resembling humans. (1) Section 32 argues that since gods are eternal and men had a beginning, men should be said to be made after the image of the gods rather than the reverse; Cassius responds that in an infinite Epicurean universe there is no “first” god or “first” human-like being — both classes have always existed, just as the atoms have always existed. Lucretius Book 5 (lines 75 and 156) is quoted to show that Epicurus held nature steers the course of the sun and moon without divine design, and that the world was not made for mankind. (2) Section 33 mocks the practical implications of gods having human form — teeth, jaws, lungs, liver — and lists a catalog of Epicurean polemicists: Metrodorus and Hermarchus against Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles; Leontion against Theophrastus; Epicurus himself against Aristotle, Phaedo, Democritus, and Nausiphanes; Zeno of Sidon calling Socrates “the Attic buffoon” (Latin scurra). Joshua discusses Galen and Vesalius as a parallel: Galen used Rhesus monkeys and Barbary apes as analogues for the human body and got some things wrong, but was still moving in the right direction compared to those who refused to study anatomy at all. (3) Section 34 asks why, if gods must be happy and immortal, they could not be the sun, the world, or some eternal mind — and closes with the Platonic thrust: human virtue approaches nearer to divinity than human form, setting up the argument that the Epicurean focus on the body (and pleasure) is what is truly ridiculous. Cassius uses DeWitt (Epicurus and His Philosophy, p. 16) on Plato’s error of applying geometric definition to virtues — analogical reasoning works only between true similars, and virtues and triangles are not true similars. The episode ends with a preview of a forthcoming special episode with Don to discuss the idealist vs. realist interpretations of Epicurean divinity.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 247 of Lucretius Today. This is the podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean text and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we have a thread to discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
Today we’re continuing in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, approximately in Section 32 of Book One. Last week, Cotta was pointing out that Velleius and the Epicureans are using a logical deductive argument — arguing from inference about certain things as to the nature of the gods. And Cotta is attempting to say that the Epicureans are inconsistent in doing so, because the Epicurean should always be reasoning based on the senses as opposed to using logical analysis.
And I think we came to the conclusion that that’s an overstatement by Cotta, in that Epicureans are regularly using logical deductive analysis to determine important aspects of the way the world operates. Perhaps the crowning example of that is the Epicurean position and confidence that atoms and void exist, even though atoms and void are not anything you can see or touch directly. You infer their existence from the circumstantial evidence of things you can see around you. So Cotta’s argument that the Epicureans should not be using logic in their discussion of the gods can be met with that response.
Now today we’ll go further. Let me read a section and we’ll comment on it:
Nor can I conceive why Epicurus should rather say the gods are like men than that men are like the gods. You ask what is the difference? For say you: if this is like that, that is like this. I grant it. But this I assert: that the gods could not take their form from men, for the gods always existed and never had a beginning if they’re to exist eternally. But men had a beginning. Therefore that form of which the immortal gods are must have had existence before mankind. Consequently, the gods should not be said to be of human form, but our form should be called divine.
However, let this be as you will. I will now inquire how this extraordinary good fortune came about. For you deny that reason had any share in the formation of things. But still, what was this extraordinary fortune? Whence preceded that happy concourse of atoms which gave so sudden a rise to men in the form of gods? Are we to suppose the divine seed fell from heaven upon earth and that men sprung up in the likeness of their celestial sires? I wish you would assert it, for I should not be unwilling to acknowledge my relation to the gods. But you say nothing like it. No, our resemblance to the gods, it seems, was by chance. Must I now seek for arguments to refute this doctrine? Seriously, I wish I could as easily discover what is true as I can overthrow what is false.
So there are a couple of things here that I think are particularly important, and the importance of them is going to extend much beyond the discussion of the gods — again, to the nature of Epicurean reasoning on anything that is not directly perceptible.
The first of these arguments is: you should be saying that men are like the gods rather than saying the gods are like men. Cotta asserts that if the gods are immortal, then that means they never had a beginning. And since men had a beginning, the gods came first. And we should be saying that men are like the gods rather than the gods are like men. Cotta is presuming that a god must have always existed. And I’m not so sure that if that’s the position the Epicureans actually took — whether you’re talking about real gods or gods in the form of ideals — it seems to me that if you’re talking about a class, then a class of beings such as human beings who exist on earth definitely had a beginning point, because before the earth came into existence there could not have been any earthlings.
On the other hand, Epicurus has said that throughout the universe there are other living beings who have some similarity to human beings. And so I don’t know that it’s out of the question that Epicurus took the position that human-like beings throughout the universe have always existed, just like god-like beings throughout the universe have always existed. In other words, I’m not so sure that Epicurus would agree with Cotta that the class of gods preceded the class of human-like beings. If the universe is eternal, I don’t know that Epicurus would admit that there was ever a first god or a first human-like being in the universe.
So before we go on to another section of Cotta’s argument, let’s talk about the Epicurean view of the universe as a whole — how it came into being. As we discuss this today, there are a couple of citations to Epicurus and Lucretius that we can talk about. There’s the Letter to Herodotus around Section 73, where he talks about life on other worlds including creatures some of which are similar and some of which are not to human beings. And Lucretius in Book Two, around line 1048, basically says the same thing. So let me see if Joshua has any initial thoughts on which came first — the chicken or the egg, the gods or the men.
Joshua: Well, I think Cotta is raising a number of interesting questions here, particularly this question that we’re going to be addressing probably throughout the episode, which is the question of origins. What was the cosmos like “at the beginning”? And I think the answer to that — and the answer you’re going to probably develop even further as we go on — is that it would be wrong to think of it as having a beginning. It would be wrong to think of there being an original state.
Lucretius in his description of the swerve — the clinamen, as it’s variously called in Latin — describes an atom carrying along its course and then imperceptibly veering slightly from that course. One of the arguments used to support this position is that the atoms would sort of fall in a rain straight down if they didn’t have this ability to swerve ever so slightly from time to time and thereby collide into one another. And those collisions are hugely important for getting everything going.
But of course in the universe that the Epicureans described, there is no beginning. There is no original state. We haven’t always existed. The earth that we’re standing on hasn’t always existed. But things like us — things like the earth — compound bodies have always existed in one form or another, just as the atoms have always existed. You can’t go back and back and back and find a point to stop and say: this is where it all started. It never all started, because something has always been happening. The atoms have always existed. The void has always existed. And compound bodies made from the atoms in the void have always existed. And so this is the difficulty in the text, because we don’t have a really good description — I don’t think — of cosmology as it deals with the problem of origins.
So when Cotta says that humans should be made after the image of gods because the gods came first and have always existed, I think from an Epicurean viewpoint that would be a challenging position to hold to. Lucretius does suggest that on this world — on the planet we’re standing on — higher orders of being did have a kind of origin, because nature is constantly throwing things up. In the period of her fertility, nature is throwing things up, and many of the things nature will have produced were defective or couldn’t reproduce. And so there is in a sense selection in this early process of the development of animals and of mankind. And this is where we start getting into questions that relate of course to Charles Darwin.
I think it was one of the editors of the Cambridge Companion to Lucretius who said that Darwin claiming he had never read Lucretius would be like St. Paul claiming he had never read the Sermon on the Mount. Lucretius does say in Book Five, around line 75: besides, I will explain by what force pilot nature steers the course of the sun and the goings of the moon, lest by any chance we think that these between heaven and earth traverse their yearly courses free of their own will, and obliging for the increase of crops and of animals, or deem them to revolve by some plan of the gods. So he does in Book Five get into some of these questions of origins.
And his description of early man and the development of language is there in Book Five as well. He says at line 156: to say further that for men’s sake they — the gods — had the will to prepare the glorious structure of the world, and that therefore it is fitting to praise it as an admirable work of the gods and to think that it will be everlasting and immortal — and that a thing which has by ancient contrivance of the gods been established for the races of mankind to all eternity may not ever lawfully be shaken from its foundations by any force nor assailed by any argument and overthrown from top to bottom — to feign this and other such conceits one upon another is the act of a fool. For what largess of beneficence could our gratitude bestow upon beings immortal and blessed, that they should attempt to affect anything for our sakes? And the margin note from the Loeb edition is: what profit could it bring to them to do all this for us? And Lucretius goes on: or what novelty could so long after entice those who were tranquil before to desire a change in their former life?
This is the argument against design from Lucretius, and it is in Book Five, and he does continue that theme for most of the book.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, this is deep stuff. It can sound like a useless thought experiment, but you brought up in a recent episode the statement of Richard Dawkins that it was perhaps possible that life on earth could have come from some other part of the universe. Richard Dawkins was being attacked for saying something like that — as if that meant he was a Raelian or something else that we would look at as ridiculous. But Richard Dawkins is a very smart man, not taken to ridiculous positions. And when you think about the implications of space travel — how we ourselves are about to go to Mars and other places further off in the future — you’ve got to separate out the question of what happens in a locality like the earth versus what happens everywhere in the rest of the universe.
Certainly the Epicureans did recognize that the earth had a beginning. So as I mentioned earlier, humans on earth definitely had a beginning at some point since the formation of the earth. But from that statement, from that premise, it does not follow that there are not other living beings at other locations in other parts of the universe.
And I think you started the discussion by talking about atoms falling through the void. It seems clear that Epicurus’s position from a very early age — when he first started examining this issue — would have been that atoms have been moving through the void literally forever. There has never been a time when atoms have not moved through the void and come into combination with each other, in ways such as those we see around us here today, and in many other ways as well that we haven’t seen ourselves but which are consistent with the properties of the atoms.
So again, I would say that it appears likely that Epicurus had concluded that in an infinite and eternal universe, living beings have always existed. And I don’t see any reason why he would have thought that there was a progression of one living being turning into gods. So logically, the class of gods has always existed. Logically, any class that has existed has always existed. Just as we have come into being as individual humans on this earth — that means that this combination of atoms that brought us together is possible in an infinite and eternal universe, and that combination of atoms is going to occur an infinite number of times.
That’s a very mind-blowing thought to consider, but it is a logical deduction from our premises. And I don’t think it’s any less logical or more mind-blowing to think that classes of living beings like humans have always existed. Classes of living beings — whatever the Epicureans are thinking they might be in terms of gods — would also have eternally existed.
Cotta is comfortable saying that gods have always existed but men have not always existed, because he’s starting from the premise that supernatural gods created the universe and created men. He sees that as an unchallengeable premise. I don’t think the Epicureans would agree that that’s an unchallengeable premise. And in order to unwind that, you need to move to the second part of what Cotta is discussing here — which is how does all this come about? When Epicureans deny that there was any reason-force that brought it about, how can you say that everything that has come about has come about by accident? That’s where he says: you shouldn’t even expect me to take that argument seriously. I wish I could as easily say what really did happen as I can say that you guys are crazy to assert that all of this could have happened by chance.
Cotta says he wishes the Epicureans would say that the seeds of men had fallen from the sky by the actions of the gods, because that would mean we really are children of the gods and he’d be happy to accept that. But of course the Epicureans don’t believe that happened, and they assert that it happened based on the actions of atoms moving through the void. And so where we end up is: you’ve once again got this assertion that humans exist, that the world exists, that the universe exists because of a superintending intelligent design — and that’s the only reasonable possibility according to Cotta, which of course the Epicureans refute, because they say it’s not the only reasonable possibility. In fact, your position, Cotta, is the one that makes no sense, because there’s no reason whatsoever to suggest that everything we see around us came into being because of intelligent design.
Joshua: As we get into Section 33, what we’re going to see is that Cotta is still talking about the very specific understanding of the gods as having basically human form. And I do want to point out again that this book is our best source for the Epicureans having thought that way, and without what Epicurus himself said about it, we’re left in a position where we have to take Cicero basically at face value — and I’m not all that willing to do that. But so much of what we’re dealing with here does assume that to be the case.
When we get into Section 33, it’s no less clear, because he starts out this way:
You, Velleius, have enumerated with so ready a mind and so copiously the opinions of philosophers from Thales, the Milesian, concerning the nature of the gods, that I am surprised to see so much learning in a Roman. But do you think they were all mad men who thought that a deity could by some possibility exist without hands and feet? Does not even this consideration have weight with you — when you consider what is the use and advantage of limbs in men — and lead you to admit that the gods have no need of them? What necessity can there be of feet without walking, or of hands if there is nothing to be grasped?
And he goes on to describe the other parts of the human body as well, and says: what need is there of a tongue if you don’t speak? Or of teeth, palate, and jaws if you don’t eat? What use is there in the heart, the lungs, and the liver, abstracted from their use? If you have no need of the use of these things, then what do you need of the organ itself — or what do you need of the hands and feet themselves if you do no walking and no grasping? And he ends that by saying: I mentioned these because you Epicureans place them in the deity on account of the beauty of the human form.
And again, that last part is the part we only get from Cicero, as far as I know — we don’t have this in Epicurus’s own words — that the gods must have a human form. So it’s all related back to that main argument.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, and I think Cotta is really going over the line by again trying to reduce it to the absurd — to ask whether they have teeth and tongues and jaws and whether they have hearts and lungs and livers and so forth. Well, Velleius has not talked about the gods having a liver. To drill down to that level of detail makes it more clear that what Velleius has argued is a generic observation: if gods exist, then — as he does believe they exist — they’re going to have some kind of similarity to human-like beings. That doesn’t mean that every aspect of their bodies is going to be the same, that you’re going to be able to cut them open and find blood inside them. I would suggest the fair reading of where Velleius and Epicurus were going is that they’re making the generic observation that living beings are going to have some things in common with each other, and that doesn’t mean their bodies are going to be the same in every respect.
In fact, Epicurus and Velleius are saying that their bodies are certainly not the same in every respect, because the bodies of the gods are made up of flows of atoms and images that are recognizable through reason rather than through the eyes — with the conclusion being that they’re not the same. And so for Cotta to take this to the extreme of arguing that they are the same and that they have blood and teeth and lungs and livers is just again a misrepresentation of the direction the Epicureans were coming from.
He says: I mentioned these because you placed them in the deity on account of the beauty of the human form. Well, I don’t know about most of the listeners to this podcast, but I don’t consider livers to be particularly beautiful — or even hearts, or the different minute organs of the body. What we’ve seen throughout Cotta’s reasoning is again an attempt to reduce it to the absurd so that he can then ridicule it and say: this is so ridiculous I don’t even need to respond to it. You can’t even expect me to have to respond to it because it’s so easy to show how absurd it is.
That’s not a real response to the specific allegation that there is some commonality between humans and gods. And as Joshua has talked about, the thrust of the reasoning is that life as we observe it has certain common characteristics. If you want to talk about life in some other form, in some other part of the universe, you’re going to start with the presumption that there are common characteristics to life. You’re not going to start with the presumption that maybe that life is supernatural, maybe it’s omnipotent, maybe it’s omniscient, maybe it has always existed and will always exist by its very nature because it’s supernatural.
You don’t take those kinds of positions. You take the kind of positions that explorers will take when they go to Mars, when they go to Venus, when they go to other planets outside the solar system — they will have certain expectations that if they run into a life form, it will have certain aspects that will cause us to consider it to be a life form, but they will not go out there expecting to meet a supernatural god who created the universe. That’s the kind of level of difference in reasoning that I think we’re seeing here.
Now let me take that a little further and go into the last part of Section 33, because I think this is also going to give us a higher level of perspective on what we know about the Epicureans. Cotta says:
Depending on these dreams, not only Epicurus, Metrodorus, and Hermarchus declaimed against Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles, but that little harlot Leontion presumed to write against Theophrastus. Indeed, she had a neat Attic style, but yet — to think of her arguing against Theophrastus! So much did the garden of Epicurus abound with these liberties. And indeed you’re always complaining against them. Zeno wrangled. Why need I mention Apollodotus? Nothing could be more elegant or humane than Phaedrus, yet a sharp expression would vex the old man. Epicurus treated Aristotle with great contumely. He foully slandered Phaedo, the disciple of Socrates. He pelted Democritus — the brother of his companion Metrodorus — with whole volumes because he disagreed with him in some trifling point of philosophy. He was ungrateful even to Democritus whose follower he was, and his master Nausiphanes, from whom he learned nothing, had no better treatment from him.
Okay, the point I would pull out of all that: we’ve discussed many times, as a reference when it comes up, that Diogenes Laertius gives a whole list of names that Epicurus called other philosophers. And this section here would seem to give credence to that — that Epicurus was certainly willing to get involved in pointed disagreement with other philosophers. But what this section here brings out is not only that Epicurus was willing to get into pointed disagreement with other philosophers and use characterizations and labels for their arguments, but in the context in which this discussion comes up, we can infer that it’s likely that Epicurus was using these expressions and conveying his statements so vigorously on this topic of the nature of the gods, the nature of the universe, and where everything comes from — whether there’s a supernatural realm, whether we’re going to heaven or hell and so forth. Those are issues that are worth pointing out in stark terms when you think someone is wrong about them.
And Cotta is portraying some skepticism here because he’s trying to imply or even state explicitly that this was improper of the Epicureans to sharply criticize the other philosophers. But that’s not the Epicurean point of view. As Cotta himself said at the beginning of what we discussed today, Velleius had gone through all these other philosophers and sharply pointed out their differences. As Cotta says, he’s essentially calling these other philosophers mad men. And I think that’s probably not an exaggeration — to suggest that the gods or any other living beings are supernatural, that there’s another realm outside of nature or above nature, is very close to being mad, because you have no rational grounds for it based on the evidence we have here on earth. To just suggest that it’s possible because you can imagine it is not all that far from being insane.
So we’re getting into a section here where Cotta is ratcheting up the sharpness of the dialogue, pointing out that the Epicureans had been very sharp, and he’s going to return the favor with his own characterizations of the Epicurean position. He says: Zeno gave abusive language not only to those who were living — such as Apollodotus, Silo, and the rest — but he called Socrates, who was the father of philosophy, “the Attic buffoon,” using the Latin word scurra. He goes on with others, but again here’s evidence that the Epicureans were calling Socrates “the Attic buffoon.” That’s an indication of the intensity of the Epicureans in holding their positions — that they thought these kinds of words and characterizations were appropriate.
Joshua: And certainly no one in the ancient world could possibly say that the Epicureans didn’t get it just as bad as they apparently gave it — with the accusations that they were swine, that they were eunuchs, that they were women, that they were slaves, and so forth. And there’s probably an element of this going on also in academia today, with people viciously arguing with each other over this stuff.
I do want to go back for just a moment to this question of do the gods have livers and so forth. I just wanted to point out that there was a prominent Greek physician from the city of Pergamon in western Asia Minor — on the eastern side of the Aegean, opposite of mainland Greece — and his name was Galen. Of course his focus was on medical research, which was hugely influential in the Roman Empire at this time. But a lot of what he found turned out in the Renaissance period — from our perspective — to be wrong, because he was using proxy animals as a way of studying the human body. He was using Rhesus monkeys and Barbary apes to study the human body by reference or by analogy.
And it turned out there were anatomists like Andreas Vesalius, who was a Flemish anatomist and physician and physiologist, and his work in the Renaissance sort of disproved some of what Galen had thought was true in the first and second centuries AD — precisely because Galen was using other animals and making the assumption that their internal organ systems were a lot more similar than they actually turned out to be. And all of this is going on over the heads of Cicero and Velleius and Cotta while they’re arguing with each other, of course, because they don’t have the benefit of the Renaissance and later analysis that we have. I don’t know how helpful that is in giving an answer as to whether the gods have hands and feet, but it certainly does reveal the limits of knowledge in antiquity and how that plays out — which I always find interesting.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua. I keep coming back to the best way to deal with this, which is not looking at the specifics of whether they have hands or feet, but dealing with the broader issue of do they have physical existence at all. Because the line of reasoning you go on before you even get to hands and feet — the initial question is: are these beings that we’re talking about physical? Are they going to have some kind of physical nature that we can relate to at all? Their hands may be different than ours, feet may be different than ours, but ultimately a physical being is going to require some kind of method to move around — or so we would think, based on our own rationality. As you’re saying that Galen did when he looked at the bodies of other animals, at least he was starting by looking at the bodies of animals and realizing that yes, there’s a commonality between animals and we can learn something by dissecting other animals — rather than just taking the position: well, my gosh, I’m never going to look inside of a body because we are divine creatures and it’s a sin to do such a thing.
At least he’s moving in the right direction, and as he moves in the right direction and dissects more and more animals and then moves on to human beings, at some point he will arrive at a conclusion that is much closer to what we think today is correct — than if he had started with some kind of imaginary voodoo or religious perspective that says it’s all in God’s hands and I’m not going to even look at it.
So there’s always this tension between the superficial argument Cotta is making versus where he’s really going. In the end, he’s always arguing that since your specific suggestion, Velleius, has a defect in the way it would be implemented, you should toss out your entire effort to relate the nature of these beings to beings we are familiar with — and start saying those beings don’t have to have any relation to the way we are familiar with here on earth. They can be totally supernatural. And that is not valid reasoning.
Unfortunately, Cotta is not constantly saying: put aside your attempts to explain the nature of gods, Velleius; just go ahead and admit they’re supernatural and beyond your understanding. If he was saying that in every other paragraph, it would be easier for us to remember that that’s really what is at stake.
Again, Cotta is not a representative of modern science or a representative of what we would consider today to be the reasonable position. Cotta is the representative of the Roman religion that — as I said last week — is going to go out and cut up goats and other animals and attempt to divine the future based on their entrails. From an Epicurean position, his positions about the gods are absolutely irrational. They’re not just wrong around the edges about the nature of a liver or heart or blood or body. They are totally absolutely wrong and dangerous and harmful, because they lead to the kinds of fears of death and hell and punishment and regulation and determinism that, from an Epicurean point of view, make a happy life impossible.
On this general issue as well, there’s a section in DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy that I think is particularly helpful to get the big-picture comparison. It’s on page 16, near the beginning of the book, where DeWitt is pointing out that Plato had gone wrong by attempting to derive the nature of the universe through mathematics. Here’s the quote from DeWitt. He says: Plato began to transfer the precise concepts of geometry to ethics and politics, just as modern thinkers transfer the concepts of biological evolution to history and sociology. Especially enticing was the concept which we know as definition. This was a creation of the geometers — they created it by defining straight lines, equilateral triangles, and other regular figures. If these can be defined, Plato tacitly reasoned, why not also justice, piety, temperance, and other virtues? This is reasoning by analogy — one of the trickiest of logical procedures. It holds good only between sets of true similars. Virtues and triangles are not true similars. It does not follow, therefore, that because equilateral triangles can be precisely defined, justice can be defined in the same way. Modern jurists warn against defining justice: it is what the court says it is from time to time.
Now, this is a discussion of Plato and the defects of logical reasoning that is disconnected from reality, but I think that’s largely what we’re talking about here in this section too. Because the question of whether the Epicurean position about reasoning from analogy to derive attributes of the gods is going to work or not, is whether gods and human beings are “true similars” — whether there is truly a similarity here or not. And that’s where I think you unravel it all.
The Epicureans are taking the position that gods are not supernatural. Gods are living beings. And living beings are going to have some essential similarities to other living beings. They’re not going to be supernatural, they’re not going to be omnipotent, they’re not going to be omniscient, they’re not going to have all these other properties that people invest their supernatural gods with. The Epicureans are taking the position that there’s no limitation necessarily as to what they’re going to look like — in terms of whether they look male or female, or any other specifics like this. The basic Epicurean position is that gods, like everything else in our universe, have a physical existence. And in having a physical existence, we are going to have some ability to understand how that physical nature operates.
That’s where you end up with the discussion of images and atoms flowing and so forth. The Epicureans are attempting to come up with reasonable explanations as to how a being can physically renew its atoms indefinitely so as to remain deathless, and they’re saying that gods are going to have intelligence and therefore are going to have some way of physically manifesting that intelligence in terms of languages or other attributes of what we know intelligent living beings have.
So I think that’s the direction all this goes in. The Epicureans are attempting to use reasonable analysis to talk about how a deathless, happy being would have a physical existence. Beyond that, the specifics are not important. But what is important is that any beings that exist are physical and therefore have a nature that is natural, not supernatural, in its essence.
Joshua: So Cotta ends the selection of reading for today. This is under Section 34. He says:
Therefore I cannot sufficiently wonder how this chief of yours, Epicurus, came to entertain these strange opinions. But you constantly insist on the certainty of this tenet, namely that the deity is both happy and immortal. This is Principal Doctrine One, isn’t it? Supposing he is so, Cotta continues, would his happiness be less perfect if he had not two feet? Or cannot that blessedness — or beatitude, call it which he will, they are both harsh terms, but we must mollify them by use — can it not, I say, exist in the sun or in the world or in some eternal mind that has not human shape or limbs? All you say against it is that you never saw any happiness in the sun or in the world.
What then? Did you ever see any world but this? No, you will say. Why therefore do you presume to assert that there are not only 600,000 worlds but that they are innumerable? Reason tells you so. Will not reason tell you likewise that as in our inquiries into the most excellent nature, we find none but the divine nature can be happy and eternal — so the same divine nature surpasses us in excellence of mind, and as in mind so in body? Why therefore, as we are inferior in all other respects, should we be equal in form? For human virtue approaches nearer to the divinity than human form.
And I think what we see particularly in that last sentence — human virtue approaches nearer to the divinity than human form — we’re getting a glimpse of where Cotta is going with all of this, which is this: you Epicureans, with your love of pleasure, are wrapped up in the idea of the body and the claims of the body. But is it not the mind and the virtue — which is the domain of the mind — that is more near to divinity than the body and the claims of the body? The pursuit of pleasure, which is associated with the body — is not virtue the only link really that humans can possibly have with divinity? That seems to be where Cotta is going with all of this.
Cassius: Joshua, I think you’re hitting on something extremely important, and I almost wish we’d started with this point as opposed to getting to it at the end, because you can really almost begin to think that the Epicureans would have been motivated to talk about the gods having bodies just for this very reason — that they are so resistant to the position of the Platonists that disembodied reason, disembodied virtue, are all that matters, and that pleasure not only doesn’t matter but is basically evil, that it’s improper, it’s impolite even to suggest that pleasure is a good thing. You can almost see the Epicureans being motivated to want to talk about the gods having some kind of body to preserve the position that the action of the body is as important and as much a part of the makeup of a living being as the action of the mind.
We did not read much of the beginning of Section 34, but Cotta was saying there: you don’t seem to be in the least aware what a task you draw on yourselves if you prevail on us to grant that the same form is common to gods and men. The deity would have to require the same trouble in dressing, the same care of the body that mankind does. He must walk, run, lie down, lean, sit, hold, speak, and discourse. And you need not be told the consequence of making gods male and female.
In other words, Cotta is saying: you’re suggesting, Velleius, that the gods would actually do things that might actually involve pleasure — as if that’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. That bodily pleasure is something to be written out of the discussion of the gods, and implicitly as a result written out as something desirable for human beings for the same reason.
So again, you brought up something that I hadn’t considered before, but I think is potentially pretty significant: the Epicureans would have insisted on any type of living being having some kind of body, because we think everything has a body of some kind in the sense of a material basis to it. Epicureanism 101 is that the only things that have independent eternal existence are the atoms and the void. The atoms come together to form bodies, and you don’t have mind apart from matter. So Cotta is clearly going in the direction of writing all matter, all bodily functions whatsoever, out of the nature of the deity.
For that very reason that you’re talking about, he’s not doing it just because he thinks: well, I’ve got a better idea about how gods exist — they’re really cloud-like or they’re really amorphous or they have some very sophisticated basis that is natural but is much more sophisticated, and you’re being ridiculous, Velleius, by suggesting they might actually have a hand or a foot or a heart or a liver. That’s not the direction Cotta is going in. He’s ridiculing the Epicureans for the sake of ridiculing them, so that he can then dispense of all requirements of material form or basis whatsoever — convert the deity solely into creatures of spirit or mind, and write out pleasure as having anything to do with any kind of basis for determining how to live as a human being.
Joshua: Exactly. It’s the view that the body is not a tool or extension of the mind — the body is a limiting factor. The body is something to be subdued, something to be quieted, something that is holding the mind in its own prison. And this is so much of Platonism: we have the idea that before you existed, you were a spirit or a soul and you knew everything, but it was only after you were encased and imprisoned in the flesh that you became dulled and limited in your mind. And that by subduing the flesh, by quieting the claims of the body — that’s the only time you are able to come back into contact with virtue, with knowledge of pure reason, knowledge of the ideal forms that make up everything, to get back into touch with the realm that the mind comes from — and that the body is chaining that mind into this world, this world of lies and deceit essentially.
So the body is seen as an enemy. And it’s not only in Platonism that the body is seen as the enemy of the mind and the enemy of virtue — it comes to be a particular problem in Christianity, where the body has to be subdued, the pleasures of the body have to be forsworn, and it is the virtue of the mind and the faith of the mind that become all-important. And the Epicureans really stand apart in this regard.
And I think that’s why Cotta is making such a big to-do about this problem of do the gods have a body — because the very idea of a body is seen as something gross and limiting, and this is something that holds the mind back from becoming what it truly can be: divine in essence.
Cassius: Yes. Joshua, why don’t we begin to bring today’s episode to a close? Let me mention that we’re working on setting up a special episode in the near future. We’re going to bring Don back in and discuss the alternative interpretations of Epicurean divinity — what some people call the distinction between an idealist view of the gods versus a realist view of the gods, in terms of whether they had physical bodies of some kind. And we’ll bring a discussion to you of that aspect of things in the coming weeks.
But I think what we’ve been saying over the last few minutes is going to apply to both: regardless of whether Epicurus in the end thought that gods had a true physical existence or not, certainly the Epicurean interpretation of a god being happy would include a god experiencing pleasures. And he would not have allowed pleasure to be written out of the experience of the gods on any kind of reasoning that the Platonist or Cotta here would agree with.
Any further thoughts today, Joshua, before we close?
Joshua: I would just say that if that last few sentences of Cotta’s text here gives an idea of where we’re going in the text, I am curious to see where this leads. And I’m also looking forward to having Don back on the podcast — even just for an episode if we can make that happen — because we have more to discuss as it relates to the gods, and getting a real handle on the idealist versus realist view would be helpful.
Cassius: Yes, indeed. We’ll get that set up as quickly as we can and we’ll continue into Cotta’s arguments next week. Again, the arguments we’re drawing out here apply to the gods, but they also apply to many other aspects of Epicurean reasoning. So I think as we go through this hard example in terms of discussing the gods, we can gain a lot of practical information about how to deal with other things that are not perceptible and are speculative in life — of which there are many.
So let’s go ahead and close for the day. We’ll be back next week. In the meantime, please drop by the forum. Let us know if you have any questions or comments about this episode or any of our other discussions about Epicurus. Thanks again for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you.