Skip to content
Epicurus Today

Episode 249 - Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods - Part 24 - Are the Epicurean Gods Totally Inactive, And Are We To Emulate Them Through Laziness?

Date: 10/02/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4068-episode-249-cicero-s-otnotg-24-are-the-epicurean-gods-totally-inactive-and-are-w/

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

(Add summary here)

Transcript

Section titled “Transcript”

Cassius: Welcome to episode 249 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 to the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we have a thread to discuss this and each of our podcast episodes we’re continuing today in Cicero’s on the nature of the Gods. And I’ll step back for just a second to make this general comment that the issue of the nature of the gods and Epicurus views of the gods is one of the most controversial and probably difficult to understand issues within Epicurean philosophy. People who are new to the study of Epicurus, people who read about him on the internet are often surprised to hear that he took the position that Gods of a type do exist as opposed to the position of being just a total atheist as we might expect him to have taken. Of course, you immediately ask the question, what is a God? And go back into the question of definitions, which is always a very important aspect of Epicurean philosophy to get to the heart of what Epicurus was really saying about God’s and what type of being he was suggesting God’s might be. And of course if you’ve been listening in to the episodes of this series, you’ve heard us s talk a lot about that. But for someone who just drops in, we’re in the middle of discussing where Kata, who is an academic skeptic, is attacking the epicurean position. Kata has been going through a series of arguments that’s going to be sort of a continuation from last week. Kata was giving what is essentially today known as the argument from design that the world is so extraordinarily complex that there’s no way, it did not have a design or behind it. And the last criticism that Cada had mentioned was he was comparing Epicurus views that the gods do not take part in the affairs of men to the views of most other religions, including the Egyptians who regularly give credit to the gods and acknowledge that the Gods have sent different animals, even crocodiles cats and things they read into what they see around them, the blessings of a supernatural God who has acted to benefit them. And that’s where we left off last week, that kata was ridiculing the epicurean by saying, not only do you not appreciate the actions of the gods in benefiting us you, that the gods have no activity at all. And as usual, we in response to Ada, are going to have criticisms of ADA’s, characterizations of the epicurean position, which we’ll see as we go into the text for today. We are starting today at 37, and I’ll read a little bit and that will orient us and we’ll get back into the discussion quote, they have nothing to do. Your teacher says Epicure truly like Indot boys thinks nothing preferable to idleness. Yet those very boys when they have a holiday, entertain themselves in some sportive exercise, but we are to suppose the date in such an inactive state that if he should move, we may justly fear he would no longer be happy. This doctrine divest the gods of motion and operation. Besides, it encourages men to be lazy as they are by this taught to believe that the least labor is incompatible even with divine Felicity. We could probably stop right there and spend the whole episode talking about what is included in just those couple of sentences there, but let me get the rest of 37, at least the part that goes directly with this. So we’ll have the whole thing in context. Kata continues on and says, but let it be as you would have it, that the deity is in the form and image of a man. Where is his abode? Where’s his habitation? Where’s the place where he is to be found? What is his course of life and what is it that constitutes the happiness which you assert that he enjoys for? It seems necessary that a being who is to be happy must use and enjoy what belongs to him. And with regard to place, even those natures which are inanimate have each their proper stations assigned to them so that the earth is the lowest, then water is next above the earth, the air is above the water and fire has the highest situation of all allotted to it. Some creatures inhabit the earth, some the water and some of an amphibious nature live in both. There are some also which are thought to be born in fire and which often appear fluttering in burning furnaces in the first place. Therefore, I ask you, where is the habitation of your deity? Secondly, what motive is it that stirs him from his place supposing he ever moves? And lastly, since it is peculiar to animated beings, to have an inclination to something that is agreeable to their several natures, what is it that the deity affects and to what purpose does he exert the motion of his mind and reason? In short, how is he happy? How eternal, whichever of these points you touch upon, I’m afraid you will come lamely off for there’s never a proper end to reasoning which proceeds on a false foundation for you asserted likewise that the form of the deity is perceptible by the mind, but not by the sense that it is neither solid nor invariable in number that it is to be discerned by similitude and transition, and that a constant supply of images is perpetually flowing on us from innumerable atoms on which our minds are intent. So that from that we conclude that divine nature to be happy and everlasting. Okay, at the end of what I just read, he’s beginning a transition to discussing the gods in terms of the epicurean theory of images and prolapses, which is extremely important to talk about. But let’s go back to the very first paragraph about them being perfectly inactive and that this doctrine of epicurus encourages people to be lazy as they are by this epicurean doctrine taught to believe that the least labor is incompatible even with divine Felicity as usual, if you isolate Ka as questions without looking at the context in which they’re asked, the questions that are asked can appear to be very reasonable. But the general direction caught us going in is challenging the ultimate nature of the gods and even what they mean to us under epicurean doctrine. And that is a far more important question than how many fingers they have or what language they speak or anything like that. Because if it is true that epicure as hell that the Gods refer nothing to idleness, that they do absolutely nothing at all. And if we are to take the gods as an example of the most blessed form of existence, kada has a superficially persuasive argument that we’re setting ourselves up to say that total idleness is the ultimate and best life. And if that’s the case, kata knows Cicero as a lawyer, knows in making this argument that if you’re going to hold total idleness up as the best life, there’s not that many normal healthy people who are going to buy into such an equation. So how do we unwind that?

Joshua: There are several important things to talk about here. I think the first thing to say is for Cicero and Ada, the epicureans are at the bottom of the scale when it comes to ideas about the gods. Earlier in the text, ADA said that even the most vulgar Roman plebeian has a view of the gods that at least is pious. It’s not accurate to the academy tradition out of which Cicero comes or to the skeptical tradition out of which kada comes, but at least it expresses piety. And then they followed up in our episode last week by saying, if you look to the Egyptians, they also hold wrong views concerning the gods, but at least their gods are gods that provide blessings to them. But the criticism here, the epicureans hold that the gods do nothing. Not only are they not prime movers or unmoved, movers, uncreated creators, but they also have no business, no employment, no work, and indeed no motion is the direction he’s going here. And the first place I want to go on that is to vallejo’s explanation of this. And of course we should remind ourselves as I go through this that Valle is a character in Cicero’s pageant here of a sort of small symposium of the philosophical discussion. We’re not getting the words of Epicurus himself here. I don’t know what text Cicero had to hand on this, but this is colored by his interpretation of it. So as I read it, keep that in mind. But Valle in the section that we read before in this series of episodes says this, your sect baus frequently asks us how the gods live and how they pass their time. Their life is the most happy and the most abounding with all kinds of blessings. They do nothing. They are embarrassed with no business, nor do they perform any work. They rejoice in the possession of their wisdom and virtue. They are satisfied that they shall ever enjoy the fullness of eternal pleasures. Such a deity may properly be called happy, but yours is a most laborious God for let us suppose the world a deity. What can be a more uneasy state than without the least cessation to be world about the axle tree of heaven with a surprising solarity. Solarity means speed in that sentence, but nothing can be happy that is not at ease or let us suppose a deity residing in the world who directs and governs it, who preserves the courses of the stars, the changes of the seasons and the vicissitudes and orders of things surveying the earth and the sea and accommodating them to the advantage and necessities of man. Truly, this deity is embarrassed with a very troublesome and laborious office. We epicureans make a happy life to consist in a tranquility of mind, a perfect freedom from care and an exemption from all employment. Again, this is filtered through Cicero’s perception of epicureanism. I think it’s important to keep that in mind. Valis continues, the philosopher from whom we received all our knowledge has taught us that the world was made by nature, that there was no occasion for a workhouse to frame it in. And that though you deny the possibility of such a work without divine skill, it is so easy to her nature that she has made, does make and will make innumerable worlds. So this is the nature of the dispute between the two of them. Val is saying to Baus, Baus is a stoic. Val is saying to baus that actually his God is far too caught up in drudgery and in work and that the epicurean gods are preferable to this because they have no work because nature does everything of herself. Nature provides everything of herself, not just in this world, but in an infinite number of worlds in an infinite void through which move an infinite amount of atoms. There is another text that I think is actually better on this point than NE’s expression there partially because it doesn’t go in the direction of saying the gods do nothing. The gods are totally inert. And that text is from a book by Giordano Bruno called the Expulsion of the triumphant Beast. And I’m going to read a little bit here from a very long passage in Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve, and he is relying on a translation of Giordano Bruno that was done by Ingrid d Roland, and it starts this way. During his stay in England, Bruno wrote and published a flood of strange works. The extraordinary daring of these works may be gauged by taking in the implications of a single passage from one of them, the expulsion of the triumphant beast printed in 1584. The passage quoted here in Ingrid d Roland’s fine translation is long, but its length is very much part of the point. Mercury, the herald of the gods is recounting to Sophia all the things JoVE has assigned him to bring about. He has ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Father Franz’s melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won’t be picked until three days from now when they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same time on the juju be tree at the base of Monte Calo in the house of Giovanni Bruno, 30 perfect juju bees will be picked and he says that several shall fall to the earth still green and that 15 shall be eaten by worms that Vata wife of albino sino when she means to curl the hair at her temples shall burn 57 hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won’t burden her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench but shall endure it patiently and it goes on and on like this. There’s 10 paragraphs of this and at the end Steven Greenblatt concludes this way. He says, the laughter that is expressed in this passage has a philosophical point. Once you take seriously the claim that God’s providence extends to the fall of a sparrow and the number of hairs on your head, there is virtually no limit from the agitated dust moats in a beam of sunlight to the planetary conjunctions that are incurring in the heavens above Oh Mercury. Sophia says, pityingly, you have a lot to do. Sophia grasps that it would take billions of tongues to describe all that must happen even in a single moment in a tiny village in the Campania at this rate, no one could envy poor JoVE. But then Mercury admits that the whole thing does not work that way. There is no artifice or God standing outside the universe barking commands, meeting out rewards and punishments determining everything. The whole idea is absurd. There is an order in the universe, but it is one built into the nature of things into the matter that composes everything from stars to men to bedbugs. Nature is not an abstract capacity, but a generative mother bringing forth everything that exists. We have in other words, entered the Lucian universe. So what we’re setting up here and what we began to set up with our discussion of the Valle section of this text of on ends is a deep contrast between these widely discordant views of the gods. You have this old tradition in many ways the oldest tradition that the gods created us, that they created the world that we’re living in, that they order things for their benefit and for our benefit, and that what we owe them in return is our praise and our worship and our loyalty. And then you have this epicurean view which is quite different. The view is that nature manages everything of her own accord That is done in nature, that the generative capacity of the atoms flowing through the infinite void is sufficient in and of itself to produce everything that we see around us and that there is no need for an artifice or God in his workshop to accomplish all of the things that happen in nature. And that indeed, if it was left to a God to handle everything that happens in nature, it would be far too much work for him. And it shows a wide divergence here of opinion, and I think it’s a very interesting one.

Cassius: Joshua, you’ve closed on what I think is really the most important point, and I’m going to have to just repeat it because I think it’s so important that it has to be emphasized. Kata is an academic skeptic, BU is a stoic. They are representative of two of the largest philosophical groups of Cicero’s time. You don’t have the Christians represented at that particular time. They weren’t there yet. But the bottom line is that every philosophical position other than the epicurean is essentially supernaturally based. They can talk about all the ambiguities they wish, but in the end of the day they are all arguing that everything we see around us was created and is maintained and supervised by supernatural forces. So when they want to spend all their time ridiculing what language and epicurean God might speak, that obscures the ultimate issue, which is that the epicureans have already established at the very beginning of their physics that just like you said, Joshua, it is the atoms moving through the void that has a generative capacity that brings into existence everything that we see. Now, sometimes I have a habit of saying that it’s nature that does this and certainly that is correct, but even that strikes me at this moment as being a little bit broad because the stoics love to deify nature and say that nature is God and nature is intelligent and doing all these things and they try to confuse those concepts together as if we can talk about nature as if it is an intelligent deity. But the real answer to this is not that nature brings everything into existence in an ambiguous supernatural way, but that nature meaning the atoms and the void and their properties and their motions and the way they can come together and the ways they cannot come together, it’s the atoms and the void that bring everything into existence and not anything supernatural whatsoever. So what you’ve just read is really the ultimate issue that is more important probably than any other thing in epicurean philosophy to keep in mind, the universe operates through the atoms and void. It does not operate chaotically in the sense of anything goes anything’s possible. It operates according to what the atoms combining with each other, interacting with each other allow to be possible. So that issue of the gods not being responsible for the creation and maintenance and supervision of the universe is number one foundation of this entire discussion and the great huge dividing line between Epicurus and the other philosophers, what you get past the understanding that the universe operates through the atoms and void and not through the control of the deity. You still have a huge question. So what role do the gods play? The epicurean have written gods out of the creation of the universe or the maintenance of the universe or the supervision of the universe. And to add insult to injury from kada or Baba’s point of view, they’ve not only written him out of the creation and supervision of the universe, but they’ve ascribed to the gods, a character of slothfulness, basically inactivity, idleness doing nothing that is not only an insult to the gods from their point of view, but creates a pattern or a standard of divine life that is awful for men to consider to be something that they should emulate. Because as says here, it encourages men to be lazy and it teaches them that they should believe that even the least labor is incompatible with the best life. So I think virtually everyone who listens to this podcast on a regular basis is very familiar and comfortable with the idea that the operation of the universe is carried out through the atoms and the void and these totally natural principles without any supernatural supervision. But you can take this down the line of either what we call the realist or the idealist interpretation. We do know that epicure as hell, that there are gods of a certain type that are important to his philosophy and to humans to think about. And so when kata raises this question of, okay, let’s just talk about God’s and we don’t even worry about whether they created the universe a lot, he says, be that as you’d have it. If we suppose the deity is in such an inactive state, then we’ve got this problem of your philosophy that’s very similar to the problem we have with your placing the focus on pleasure. It’s already clear to us from kata and Baba’s point of view that epicurean philosophy is basically despicable because it encourages people to focus on the pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of the moment and to put aside the important virtues of life, even things like justice and friendship, all in favor of the belly. Every other philosopher is already coming from the point of view that the epicureans are basically worms or pigs of course, which is the image that’s used because of their low standards of activity and low standards of achievement and ambition and what they want to do with their lives. So transferring that charge to the discussion of the gods kata is making a very serious charge in the presence of Cicero in the presence of all of these very distinguished Romans who if the Romans believe anything at all, they believe in action and virtue and maintaining the state and the glory of Rome and so forth. So no Roman could possibly want to remain a epicurean if the best life in epicurean philosophy is to do absolutely nothing. There can be all sorts of debate about what should be done, what type of activity should be pursued within a wide spectrum of possible choices. But if you’re going to tell the Romans that you should do nothing because your God does nothing, that you should emulate a God of inactivity, then that is not going to play well in the Roman world. And yet as Cicero has said in other places, Epicurean philosophy has taken the Roman world to some extent by storm. There’s an obvious dissonance there of how could a philosophy of doing absolutely nothing take by storm a world of people who are renowned in human history for being one of the most actively engaged with the world, pursuing a system of government, of system, of military activities, of architecture, of science, of learning that remains to this day a standard of successful human achievement. So in that context, how do you reconcile what Epicurus and Vallejo said and what they could have been saying was adopted by so many Romans including Cicero’s friends, including someone as active as torta defending the military exploits of Rome, including in the opinion of many, even someone such as Julius Caesar, who whether he himself was a full epicurean or not, we know for sure that many members of his camp became epicurean such as Cassius longing us. So this issue of what the gods do with their time is something that we really have to dive deeply into. We haven’t spent so much time going back into much of the Dewitt material, but there are several sections of chapter 13 under the true piety which are directly relevant to the actions and the life of the gods. There’s a section called Incorruptibility and virtue on page 267, and there’s also a section directly on point, the life of the gods that begins on page 281. The section, the life of the Gods gives us a lot of information from edemas about the life of the gods and that’s where we’ll get into where Edemas had said that the Gods speak Greek or something like Greek and so forth. But I don’t want to skip over a section that I’ve always thought was extremely interesting about the very basic nature of the God’s activity that would fit in with what Kata is saying here. Kata is mocking the epicurean and saying that you should fear that if the Gods depart from an inactive state or move in any way, we might fear that he could no longer be happy. Well, one argument against Kat’s interpretation there again on page 2 67 under Incorruptibility and Virtue, it says this quote at the outset, it must be observed and kept diligently in mind that nowhere in his accident writings does epicurus call the God’s immortal. This might be thought an accident of the tradition were it not for the fact that other considerations rule out this possibility. The reasoning behind this doctrine of incorruptibility is readily discerned from the doctrine that nothing exists except Adams and void. It follows that the bodies of the god’s must be corporeal. God’s are zoa anate beings. Now to just make an interjection there, that’s a statement that we’ve made numerous times in recent weeks that if nothing exists independently, eternally except the atoms moving through the void, the bodies of the gods, whatever they are like must be made of Adams as well, must be corporeal, especially if they are zoa adamant beings. DWI continues, they are thus units in the ascending order of nature as is man being in this order and corporeal they cannot be deathless. If deathlessness were inherent in their nature, they would be in another class by themselves. Since they do belong in the same class as man, it is a logical necessity to think of their incorruptibility as by some means preserved since in the cosmos of epicurus, unlike that of Plato, this incorruptibility lacked a superior being to guarantee its continuance. The sole possibility was that the god’s preserve it for themselves by their own vigilance. Thus it must be discerned that just as the happiness of man is self achieved, so the happiness of the gods is self preserved. Now, I’m going to go further with what Dewitt has to say, but this would deal with what kata is alleging here in terms of the analogy of if the gods are inactive, then that sets a terrible example for men because that means men will wish to be inactive too what Dewitt says, and he’s going to give citations in support of it In just a moment, the Gods do act to preserve their own immortality, and so having the virtue of an action of preserving themselves would provide a parallel that men also must take whatever action it is that’s required for them to preserve their happiness. Dot goes further and explains it this way, however astonishing this doctrine may seem, it is well authenticated plu tar for example, who though hostile wrote with texts of epicurus before him has this to say freedom from pain along with incorruptibility should have been inherent in the nature of the blissful being standing in no need of active concern. That’s quotation from plu. Tark DeWit says this, manifestly implies that the epicurean gods were unable to take their immunity from corruption for granted, but must concern themselves for its perpetuation. The incongruity between this selfish concern for their own bodily security and their indifference to the good of mankind was certain to elicit condemnation from believers in divine providence. And this has not escaped record. What duets saying is that people who are already offended that the gods aren’t taking care of men will be doubly offended by thinking that the gods are spending all their time taking care of themselves instead of taking care of men to it continues. Thus, the Christian Eusebius quotes his Atticus as saying according to Epicurus, it’s goodbye to providence in spite of the fact that according to him, the gods bring to bear all diligent care for the preservation of their own peculiar blessings. The citations are in the footnotes to the section of DeWitt’s book when once it has been discerned that the gods are under the necessity of preserving their own blessings, the next step is to learn that this activity is ascribed to them as a virtue. Continuing on Dewitt says this notion was so well known as to have been familiar to the dull horatian commentator porphyry. We’ve talked about porphyry recently. I do not remember that Dewitt had called him dull who lived in the early third century ad Horace had quoted frequently from Lucretius, I have learned the lesson that the Gods live a life free from concern. The comment runs quote, this derives from the doctrine of the epicureans who assert that the gods cannot be immortal unless enjoying leisure and immune from all responsibility. Duet has a number of additional references that I’m not going to go into detail during this part of the podcast, but bottom line is that duet thinks that there’s good reason to believe that the epi curing odds are acting to preserve their happiness and immortality, that they’re not just simply supernaturally maintained because of course it makes no sense in an epic curing universe for there to be any supernatural status where a body that has come together through some external force be able to maintain itself because that’s not the way the universe works with atoms and void. The bodies that come together always eventually break apart due to the forces of other atoms impending on them unless some action is taken to restore and keep the body in good health, just like an animal will grow by replenishing its cells from the food it eats, unless you have some force undertake some activity by the living being, then it will eventually die. So DeWitts suggesting, and I think with good reason here, given the sights that he’s talking about, that the gods are not supernaturally maintaining themselves. We’ve heard this over and over as a criticism of supernatural gods, that it would contradict epic curing philosophy. And I think Dewitt is agreeing with that argument. It would contradict epic curing philosophy if you were to suggest that the gods are somehow supernaturally immortal and apparently the epicurus himself did not say that. And the texts give us some leads on how that maintenance might take place. And then once having set the stage that the gods do engage in activity of a kind, we have to which section the life of the gods. The opening paragraph of this section says this, for the life of the gods there is a moderate supply of evidence. The first avenue of approach was by way of traditional belief with which Epicurus was glad to be in harmony where logic permitted. More important are the details arrived at by deductive reasoning because the whole topic lay beyond the sphere of sensory knowledge. The paralysis of the divine nature being certified as a criterion serves as a major premise among logical procedures, a brief chain argument and a smart disjunctive syllogism will stand out. The basis for the traditional account was the doctrine of Homer that the gods live at ease forever. This served as the common ground between Epicurus and the belief of the Greeks in general. Traditional also was the assumption of an ascending order of living, things of which the gods were the top and crown. It was also accepted that the happiness of the gods were superlative. Epicurus gave precision to this belief in the following. Quotation happiness is thought of in two ways. The first being superlative, admitting of no intensification such as belongs to the divine nature and the second admitting of the addition and subtraction of pleasures. And this latter is the kind that falls to human beings as it’s subject to increase and decrease. But okay, the bottom line is that there is no reason to accept ADA’s criticism that the gods are totally inactive and totally slothful and do absolutely nothing. The epicure position is that the gods do not have to engage in laborious work in things that are burdensome to them in things that are painful to them. But that does not mean that the gods are inactive in the same way that pleasure is extended as a concept to all sorts of activities in human life, all activities that are not painful, mental, physical, all kinds of activities, the gods can engage in all sorts of activities and infinite scope of activities. And the only things that are excluded in epicurean theory are those things that are burdensome to them and unlimited scope of activity belongs to the gods because the only part that is denied god’s an epicurean theory is any kind of activity that would be burdensome or painful to them.

Joshua: You have certainly brought a lot into it Cassius, but we are not done looping in texts here. I also need to draw on Lucious as well as on David Sedley, his book Lucious in the Transformation of Greek Wisdom. But before I do that, I need to go back into the text for a moment because what Cicero says here in the third paragraph of the text for today under section 37, is this in the first place. Therefore I ask you, where is the habitation of your deity? Secondly, what motive is it that stirs him from his place supposing he ever removes? And lastly, since it is peculiar to animated beings to have an inclination to something that is agreeable to their several natures, what is it that the deity affects and to what purpose does he exert the motion of his mind and reason in short, how is he happy? How eternal, whichever of these points you touch upon, I am afraid you will come off. I think the fact is, Cassius, you’ve very well answered by going into DeWitt’s text what the motive is that stirs the gods from their place and why they move. But Cicero does go on to say this also for there is never a proper end to reasoning which proceeds on a false foundation. And on that point I would like to take him up on something that he wrote or that kata his speaker said. In the second paragraph, the proceeding paragraph in section 37, he says this, and with regard to place even those natures which are inanimate have each their proper station assigned to them so that the earth is the lowest, then water is next above the earth, the air is above the water and fire has the highest situation of all allotted to it. Some creatures inhabit the earth, some of the water and some of an amphibious nature live in both. There are some also which are thought to be born in fire and which often appear fluttering in burning furnaces. And so the problem that kata sets for us here is an interesting one because it relates to the passage that I think has been hanging over our heads during our entire conversation in here. And that is the hymn to Venus in Lucius’s poem, the Prom to book one of on the nature of things and the longstanding challenge that it lays down for readers who come into this book perhaps expecting atheism or non-belief or something like it. And instead what they’re immediately confronted with is Venus Gentrix Venus, the Rics, the nurturing mother, the sole governor Sola Guas as Lucious says the sole governor of things and who appears according at least to the to book one, to give rise to things that happen in nature. Now David Sedley in his book, Lucious in the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, opens the text by taking on the challenge of thehy to Venus, the pro to book one. And what he does is he connects it back to the Greek poet philosopher, or I should say the poet physicist may be les Les as a literary forebearer of lucious. And David Sedley points out that in book one round line 716 lucious praises edes and he praises edes in the following terms. And let me just read that quickly of those who propose that the world is made of four elements. The foremost is impedes of acro gas born within the three cornered terrestrial coasts of the island Sicily around which the Ionian sea flowing with its great windings sprays the brine from its green waves and from whose boundaries the rushing sea with its narrow straight divides the coasts of the ionian land with its waves here is destructive kbdi. And here the rumblings of Aetna give warning that they are once more gathering the wrath of their flames so that her violence may again spew out the fire flung from her jaws and hurl once more to the sky, the lightning flashes of flame. Although this great region seems in many ways worthy of admiration by the human races and is said to deserve visiting for its wealth of good things and the great stock of men that fortify it, yet it appears to have had in it nothing more illustrious than this man nor more holy, admirable and precious. What is more the poem sprung from his godlike mind call out and expound his illustrious discoveries so that he scarcely seems to be born of mortal stock, but this man and the greatly inferior and far less ones whom I mentioned above, although in making their many excellent and godlike discoveries, they gave responses as from the shrine of the mind in holier and much more certain way than the pythia who makes her pronouncements from Apollo’s tripod and Laurel nevertheless came crashing down when they dealt with the elementary principles of things great as they were their fall here was a great and heavy one. So Cicero is proposing that the classical four elements present a challenge to any epicurean who wants to describe the abode of the gods, right? Everything has its proper nature that it associates with right? Some animals live on the land, some of them live in the water, some of them live in both. Some live in the air and some are even found to live in or be born in fire. But where do the Gods live? What is their habitation is his question. And David Sedley is interesting on this point because he explains the pro of book one on the nature of things, this him to Venus, he explains it by saying that it is and is meant to be recognized as an imitation of the prom to impedes physical poem. Impedes, as I said, was a literary forebear in the sense that like Lucretius, he had written a poem on natural philosophy on nature and what makes up nature. But in Lucius’s view, he was a great man, greatly fallen because he held to the view that there were four elements. And the problem lucious has with that is that these four classical elements are subject to dissolution, right? Earth crumbles, fire is quenched, water evaporates. So the view is if you’re looking for something stable and solid as a foundation of your physics, you can’t point to things that are as changing and as subject to dissolution as earth, wind, fire and air. You need to look beyond those things to the matter that makes up everything. And as I was quoting from Jordano Bruno a little bit ago, this is the atoms. It’s the atoms flowing through the void that make up everything. Everything from the earth and the wind and the fire and the air to animals and men and the gods themselves. It’s all made of Adams. Now, all of this relates back to another problem that is present in the Him to Venus and that is a passage from later in the poem. I think it might be in book two that is in some text but not all of them immediately following the him to Venus itself and that describes the abode of the gods. I just looked in Rolf Humphrey’s text. It’s not there. I think the Loeb edition probably has it though it is sometimes thought that this edition was made by one of the medieval scribes who were copying the text and the lines in question are these, so Lucretius has opened the poem with his invocation to Venus. He’s craving her help in writing his poem. He’s asking her to go to her lover Mars and quiet the savage works of war that threaten the peace of the Roman people and of MEUs, his friend or patron and of himself. He says, for my part, I cannot do my part with untroubled mind, nor can the noble scion of the meme eye at such a season be wanting to the common wheel. And then we have these lines, I pray to you for peace, for the very nature of divinity must necessarily enjoy immortal life in the deepest peace far removed and separated from our affairs for without any pain, without danger itself mighty by its own resources needing us not at all. It is neither propitiated with services nor touched by wrath and it’s possible that a medieval scribe having just read the him to Venus and then getting to this later in the poem said, hold on a minute and then wrote this into the margin. But I think that it’s possible that Lucius had it there as well out of design that he’s building up this homage to impedes as a predecessor physical poet, but disregarding as David Sedley states, the case disregarding impedes as a philosophical forebear because he’s involved in the view of the four classical elements and Lucius is saying Impedes is a great man, greatly fallen. He was wrong about the atoms and the void and because he was wrong about this. It’s just like Kata says in the text here for there is never a proper end to reasoning which proceeds on a false foundation. Lucretius would be quite happy to accept that. But he’s turning it around on impedes and on Cicero and on kata and he does so by saying that the Gods don’t do any of the things I just described. Those things happen in nature. Those things are the products of the operations of nature. They’re not the products of the divine mind and that the gods must necessarily enjoy I mortal life in the deepest peace far removed and separated from our affairs for without any pain, without danger itself, mighty by its own resources needing us not at all. They are neither propitiated with services nor touched by wrath. I think lucious there, Cassius is connecting it to exactly the point that to it was making The gods are mighty by their own resources. They are not lazy boys. They are engaged in the process of preserving and sustaining their own divinity. And if you’re a human, you can look at this as selfish, but the problem generally not just with Kada and Cicero and others like them, the problem generally with religion and the view that all blessings come from God is the fact that people are never prepared to accept the other side of the ledger, right? That all bad things that happen must also come from God, right? People want to charge that to another account. The blessings come from God, the terrible things that happen, they happen because of us. And Lucretius is saying exactly what Giordano Bruno said who was a great reader of lucretius. That’s not the way it works. That’s the fundamental upshot here of the four element theory of the view that the gods intervene that they create and that they sustain what is in nature. That’s just not how it works.

Cassius: Yeah. The false premise that kata and Babas and everybody else builds on to produce a ridiculous conclusion is that Gods are not bound by the same laws of nature that everybody else says their position, that the gods are supernatural, that they can do things to create universes or maintain them and so forth, leads them to conclusions about the nature of the gods, which are just totally contradictory to everything that we can see and observe and conclude about how nature operates through the atoms and the void. So I completely agree with your observation that Vallejo would accept ADA’s challenge that true philosophies, true conclusions are not going to be based on false assumptions, but the real false assumption here is not that the Gods speak Greek or that the Gods have a liver or something like that. The false assumption that turns everything on its head is that the gods are supernatural, which is Kat’s position, Baba’s position. When you focus on the gods being natural, then you can logically construct a reasonable discussion about the nature of physical gods and you don’t have sensory information to be specific about your conclusions, but your conclusions about how a physical God might operate are an awful lot closer to the truth and what we believe will be the truth than a God, which is based on supernatural presumptions that throw everything else out the window.

Joshua: Yeah, even ADA’s proposal that some creatures are born in fire is based on the idea or based on the experience of watching. When you throw a log in the fire and a spider or a salamander crawl out of it to get away from the flames and people would look at that and say, the fire has given rise to the salamander and it’s this view that there are four classical elements that drive people in that direction I think. And so we have right here a very clear way in which this has led kata down a false path exactly what he’s accusing Valle and the epicureans of having done with the gods.

Cassius: Yeah, and speaking of paths, I think it’s pretty easy to imagine how these other philosophers impedes and so forth were used to thinking in terms of everything in its place, whereas you’re going through the earth, air, wind, and fire, how they have places of their own for people who thought that way that, well, if you’re talking about Gods, they must have a place as well. You can imagine how that would’ve led to a discussion of, well, if you have to have some place for Gods, then the place between the worlds might be a logical place to put them where they would not be subject to the same movements and flows of atoms that we see here on earth. You can see how extending the different presumptions could have led to some of these speculations that the epicurean suggested as possibilities, but again, we’re not interested in the details of what languages the gods would speak. The huge issue is we’re interested in knowing whether Gods are supernatural or not and created universes or not and control our lives or not. And we emphatically would reject katas and baba’s suggestions as to that. In the same way for purposes of our discussion today, as we begin to think about bringing today’s episode to a close, the other huge issue is well, regardless of whether they’re physical and regardless of whether they’re just ideals and regardless of how we come into contact with them, how we gain information about them and how much information we gave ‘em about them, are you telling me, Vallejo, that Gods are inactive and that in looking at the God’s way of life, we should try to emulate a way of life which is totally inactive and totally slothful and totally does nothing That I think is as big a challenge as the idea of God’s creating universes and being supernatural, and I think that Valle and the Epicureans would’ve emphatically rejected ADA’s suggestion. Not only is kata wrong in suggesting that the God’s created the universe, kata is absolutely wrong in suggesting that we as epicurean think that the gods simply do nothing at all. That they are simply disembodied minds contemplating disembodied things. As we’ve discussed at different times in the past, epicurean gods, whether we’re just speculating about them or whether we consider them to be absolutely real, are going to have some kind of a physical nature and any kind of a physical nature is going to require maintenance of that physical nature under the epicurean scheme in order to remain deathless. And so at the very least, you have the requirement of maintaining your own existence. And since we can deduce that if we’re talking about a God talking about something that’s worth talking about at all, we’re talking about a living being which has attained a way of life which we would expect to be perfectly happy and that perfect happiness is going to be impossible for us to know about directly because we can’t see or hear or touch the gods. But since we’re talking about what we would expect gods to be like, we can rationally conclude that the Gods are going to be active in maintaining their own happiness, that they’re going to be successful in doing so working within the environment of nature, and that provides us in the epicurean perspective something that’s worthy of thinking about that we ourselves, as part of the natural scheme also have requirements that we must maintain our own actions, our own bodies, our own minds. We must live in particular ways if we’re going to expect to be able to live happily. And so you come back to an epicurean view of God’s as being both natural and worthy of thinking about as logical extensions of the questions that face us as living beings. If we are living beings and we hold that we are. And if Gods are living beings and if they exist at all, they will be living beings does not a living being have to take action of some kind in order to sustain itself and achieve its goals and achieve happiness. And in that respect, gods and men have a commonality which makes sense in the epic curing philosophy and does not destroy man’s happiness as the arguments of baus or kata or any other supernatural religion point of view would achieve. Okay, why don’t we begin coming to a conclusion for today, Joshua?

Joshua: I do still want a deal here at the end with this question of laziness that Kata brought up in the first paragraph when he says, Epicurus truly like indolent boys thinks nothing preferable to idleness yet those very boys, when they have a holiday, entertain themselves in some sportive exercise.

Cassius: Joshua, does that not just burn you up? Are we supposed to look at the life of Epicurus and say that he expended it in a life of idleness? He wrote more books than anybody else. He campaigned to overthrow the philosophical structure of his time. That’s idleness. I don’t think it is.

Joshua: I think that’s a fair point. What Cicero has in his mind is this idea of O tm, which is a Latin abstract term, which is a variety of meanings including leisure time for self-realization activities such as eating, playing, relaxing, contemplation and academic endeavors. I’m quoting from Wikipedia and on the Wikipedia page there’s a reference to a poem by the Roman poet Nes called e Enus was another one of Epicures poetic forebears, and Enus writes it this way. He says, he who does not know how to use leisure has more of work than when there is work in work for to whom a task has been set. He does the work, desires it and delights his own mind and intellect. In leisure, a mind does not know what it wants. The same is true of us. We are neither at home nor in the battlefield. We go here and there and wherever there is a movement, we are there too. The mind wanders unsure except in that life is lived. Lucious takes this view to task in a way that turns the question back on the people who tend to ask it like Cicero and Ada here, and this is what Lucious says. This is at the end of book three, so he’s just given a discussion of death and how death levels everything. He says, Democrat warned by a ripe old age that with his memory, his powers of mind were also failing, gave himself to death and Epicurus perished, that great man whose genius towered over all the rest making their starry talents fade and die in his great sunlight. I think that’s the only time Epicurus name actually appears in the poem. Immediately after this. We have a sort of restructuring of enus here in book three in Lucretius poem. He writes this way, men seem to feel some burden on their souls, some heavy weariness could they but know its origin. Its cause they’d never live the way we see most of them do. Each one ignorant of what he wants except a change, some other place to lay his burden down. One leaves his house to take a stroll outdoors because the households such a deadly bore and then comes back in six or seven minutes. The street is every bit as bad. Now what he has his horses hitched up for him drives like a man going to a fire full speed off to his country place, and when he gets there is scarcely on the driveway when he yawns, falls heavily asleep, oblivious to everything or promptly turns around, whips back to town again. So each man flees himself or tries to, but of course, that pest clings to him all the more ungraciously he hates himself because he does not know the reason for his sickness. If he did, he would leave all this foolishness behind, devote his study to the way things are, the problem being his lot, not for an hour, but for all time the state in which all men must swell forever and ever after death. So lucretius response to kata, to Cicero, to any to everyone who would say that the epicureans are lazy and indolent and think nothing preferable to idleness, he would say basically what Epicurus says, Lucretius ends this passage basically the same way that Epicurus ends the letter to Manus when he says meditate. Therefore, on these things and things akin to them night and day by yourself and with a companion like to yourself and never shall you be disturbed, waking or sleeping, but you shall live like a God among men. For a man who lives among immortal blessings is not like unto a mortal being. I think that’s the upshot here. I think that’s the epicurean answer to the Smithsonian objection, to the objection of Kada and baus and others like them, that this is not laziness, that to turn your attention and focus to nature, to the operations of nature, to an understanding of the way things are, that this is the best kind of life. It’s not shirking one’s duty. It is living up to one’s duty to the best possible extent that one can.

Cassius: Yes, Joshua, I think that’s going to be the theme of this episode for today. Are the epicurean gods totally inactive and are we to emulate them through laziness? That’s what’s caught us trying to suggest is that there’s this ridiculous view that Epicureans are holding inactivity, basically nothingness up as the ultimate way of life, and as you’ve just explained it, the epicure goal of life in pursuing pleasure is in pursuing all of these activities that make life worthwhile, especially for us who don’t have an unlimited time in which to pursue those things, but even in the case of the gods who do theoretically have an unlimited time available to them, they also are going to want to pursue those things that make their lives worthwhile. Epicureans don’t buy into this platonic idea that ideas the mind is all there is to life and that thinking about things which is itself an action of a kind. Let’s make that clear as well. That study and discussion and pursuit of information and knowledge of nature like Epicurus is suggesting that is an activity that’s enjoyable in itself. Philosophy is an activity. It is enjoyable in itself and Epicurus would deny I think clearly that the Gods don’t engage in activities like those and many other activities that we can’t even imagine. The only thing that Epicurus is denying the gods is he’s denying that they have the necessity of undergoing burdensome activity that they find distracting or painful or in any way subtracting from their life of happiness. Again, whether we accept a realist view of epic curing gods, or whether all of this is a mental construction and a mental abstraction that Epicurus came up with for multiple reasons to illustrate the possible nature of god’s, that’s not the question that really should concern us whether they really exist or whether they are just mental constructs. The question that should concern us is what are we suggesting is the best form of life? What are we suggesting? Is the origin of the universe and the way things happen and the way things around us are conducted? Are they controlled by supernatural beings? Would a supernatural being if it had the ability to do anything it wanted, be totally inactive? The best life in epicure in terms is pursuit of pleasure in all of the many mental and intellectual and physical ways that it can be pursued. Epicure was not here to specify to his own people minute by minute how they should spend their time and whether they should eat fish or meet or figs or what activities they should be involved in themselves, and he was not in the business of being specific about what activities a God might be involved in. But what he was specific in suggesting is that we can consider all of these positive activities that bring us pleasure to be under the name of pleasure and that that’s how we should analyze our actions, not according to virtue, not according to divine inspiration, but looking at the feelings of pleasure and pain that nature gives us and using those to construct the best way of life for both ourselves and for any gods that may exist. Okay. Let’s bring today’s episode to a conclusion. On that note, thanks for your time today. As always, please drop by the form and let us know if you have any comments or questions about what we’ve discussed here in this or any of our other episodes. Again, thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.