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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”

Section 37 of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods: Cotta charges that Epicurean gods are completely inactive and slothful, and that this doctrine encourages human laziness by holding total idleness up as the divine ideal. The hosts respond across multiple angles: Velleius’s own text showing that the Epicurean god’s freedom from burdensome labor is superior to the laborious Stoic god who must govern the world’s machinery; Giordano Bruno’s satirical passage from The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (via Greenblatt’s The Swerve) mocking the absurdity of divine micromanagement; and DeWitt’s analysis in Chapter 13 of Epicurus and His Philosophy (pages 267 and 281) showing that Epicurean gods actively preserve their own incorruptibility — their happiness is self-preserved, not supernaturally guaranteed. Joshua draws on David Sedley’s Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom to connect the Hymn to Venus in Lucretius to Empedocles as literary forebear, and reads the famous passage from Lucretius Book 3 on otium and human restlessness, concluding with the Letter to Menoeceus’s exhortation to “live like a god among men.” The core Epicurean answer to the laziness charge: philosophy, study, friendship, and the pursuit of pleasure are all activities — and Epicurus himself was one of the most productive writers in antiquity.

Transcript

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Cassius: Welcome to episode 249 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and 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 each of our podcast episodes.

We are continuing today in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. I’ll step back for just a second to make this general comment: the issue of the nature of the gods and Epicurus’s 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 being just a total atheist as we might expect him to have been.

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 gods and what type of being he was suggesting gods might be. If you’ve been listening to the episodes of this series, you’ve heard us talk a lot about that. But for someone who just drops in: we’re in the middle of discussing where Cotta, who is an Academic Skeptic, is attacking the Epicurean position. Cotta has been going through a series of arguments that will be a continuation from last week. Cotta 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 designer behind it.

The last criticism Cotta had mentioned was comparing Epicurus’s 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 such things — reading 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: Cotta was ridiculing the Epicureans by saying not only do you not appreciate the actions of the gods in benefiting us, but you hold that the gods have no activity at all. As usual, we, in response to Cotta, are going to have criticisms of Cotta’s characterizations of the Epicurean position, which we’ll see as we go into the text for today.

We are starting today at Section 37, and I’ll read a little bit to orient us before we get into the discussion:

“They have nothing to do. Your teacher 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, but we are to suppose the deity in such an inactive state that if he should move, we may justly fear he would no longer be happy. This doctrine divests 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. But let me get the rest of Section 37, at least the part that goes directly with this, so we’ll have the whole thing in context. Cotta continues:

“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 is his habitation? Where is 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 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 lamely off, for there is 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 the divine nature to be happy and everlasting.”

At the end of what I just read, Cotta is beginning a transition to discussing the gods in terms of the Epicurean theory of images and prolepsis, which is extremely important. But let’s go back to the very first paragraph about the gods 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 Cotta’s questions without looking at the context in which they’re asked, the questions can appear to be very reasonable. But the general direction Cotta is going is challenging the ultimate nature of the gods and even what they mean to us under Epicurean doctrine. That is a far more important question than how many fingers they have or what language they speak.

Because if it is true that Epicurus held that the gods prefer 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, Cotta 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, Cotta knows — Cicero as a lawyer knows — that if you’re going to hold total idleness up as the best life, there aren’t 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 Cotta, the Epicureans are at the bottom of the scale when it comes to ideas about the gods. Earlier in the text, Cotta said that even the most vulgar Roman plebeian has a view of the gods that is at least pious — not accurate to the Academic tradition out of which Cicero comes, or to the Skeptical tradition out of which Cotta comes, but at least it expresses piety. And then they followed up in our episode last week by saying that if you look to the Egyptians, they also hold wrong views concerning the gods, but at least their gods provide blessings to them. But the criticism here is that 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. That’s the direction Cotta is going here.

The first place I want to go on that is to Velleius’s explanation of this. And of course we should remind ourselves, as I go through this, that Velleius is a character in Cicero’s pageant here — a sort of small symposium of philosophical discussion. We’re not getting the words of Epicurus himself; I don’t know what text Cicero had to hand on this, but it is colored by his interpretation of it. Keep that in mind. But Velleius, in the section that we read earlier in this series, says this:

“Your sect, Balbus, 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 whirled about the axle-tree of heaven with a surprising celerity? 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 — it’s important to keep that in mind. Velleius 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 craftsman to frame it, 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. Velleius is saying to Balbus — Balbus being the Stoic — that actually his god is far too caught up in drudgery and work, and that the Epicurean gods are preferable because they have no such work: 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 number of atoms.

There is another text that I think is actually better on this point than Velleius’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. I’m going to read a little bit here from a very long passage in Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve, relying on a translation of Giordano Bruno done by Ingrid Rowland:

“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 Rowland’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 jujube tree at the base of Monte Cavo, in the house of Giordano Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that several shall fall to the earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms; that Vasta, wife of Albino Sano, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven 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 are ten paragraphs of this, and at the end Stephen Greenblatt concludes:

“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 motes in a beam of sunlight to the planetary conjunctions 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, meting 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 Lucretian universe.”

So what we’re setting up here — what we began to set up with our discussion of the Velleius section of On the Nature of the Gods — 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, created the world 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, 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 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 a craftsman-god in his workshop to accomplish all the things that happen in nature. And indeed, if it were left to a god to handle everything that happens in nature, it would be far too much work for him. It shows a wide divergence 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 repeat it because it has to be emphasized. Cotta is an Academic Skeptic, Balbus 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 an 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 as you said, Joshua, it is the atoms moving through the void that have a generative capacity bringing 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 — that 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 is not that nature brings everything into existence in an ambiguous supernatural way. It is that nature — meaning the atoms and the void, and their properties and their motions, and the ways they can come together and cannot come together — it is 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 — 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 that anything goes, anything is possible. It operates according to what the atoms combining and interacting with each other allow to be possible.

So that issue of the gods not being responsible for the creation, maintenance, and supervision of the universe is the number-one foundation of this entire discussion — the great dividing line between Epicurus and the other philosophers.

Once you get past the understanding that the universe operates through the atoms and void and not through the control of a deity, you still have a huge question: what role do the gods play? The Epicureans have written gods out of the creation of the universe, the maintenance of the universe, the supervision of the universe. And to add insult to injury — from Cotta’s or Balbus’s point of view — they’ve not only written the gods out of creation and supervision, 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 it creates a pattern or standard of divine life that is awful for men to consider as something they should emulate. Because as Cotta says here, it encourages men to be lazy — it teaches them that even the least labor is incompatible with the best life.

So I think virtually everyone who listens to this podcast regularly 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 Epicurus held that there are gods of a certain type that are important to his philosophy and to humans to think about. And so when Cotta raises this question of — okay, let’s just talk about gods, never mind whether they created the universe — he says: “Be that as you would have it.” If we suppose the deity is in such an inactive state, then we’ve got this problem in your philosophy that’s very similar to the problem we have with your placing the focus on pleasure.

It’s already clear from Cotta and Balbus’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, that’s the image that’s used — because of their low standards of activity and achievement and ambition. So transferring that charge to the discussion of the gods, Cotta is making a very serious charge in the presence of Cicero, in the presence of all of these very distinguished Romans. If the Romans believe anything at all, they believe in action, in virtue, in maintaining the state, in the glory of Rome, and so forth. So no Roman could possibly want to remain an 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 — 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: how could a philosophy of doing absolutely nothing take by storm a world of people renowned in human history for being one of the most actively engaged with the world — pursuing a system of government, military activities, architecture, science, and learning that remains to this day a standard of successful human achievement?

So in that context, how do you reconcile what Epicurus and Velleius said with what was adopted by so many Romans — including Cicero’s friends, including someone as active as Torquatus 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 Longinus?

So this issue of what the gods do with their time is something we really have to dive deeply into. We haven’t spent so much time going back into the DeWitt material, but there are several sections of Chapter 13, under “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 Epicurus about the life of the gods — and that’s where we’ll get into where Epicurus 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 gods’ activity that fits with what Cotta is saying here.

Cotta is mocking the Epicureans and saying that you should fear that if the gods depart from an inactive state — or move in any way — we might fear they could no longer be happy. Well, one argument against Cotta’s interpretation: on page 267, under “Incorruptibility and Virtue,” it says this:

“At the outset it must be observed, and kept diligently in mind, that nowhere in his extant writings does Epicurus call the gods 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 atoms and void. It follows that the bodies of the gods must be corporeal. Gods are zoa — animate beings. 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 lacks a superior being to guarantee its continuance. The sole possibility was that the gods 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 Cotta is alleging here in terms of the analogy that if the gods are inactive, then that sets a terrible example for men, because it 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 — is that the gods do act to preserve their own immortality. And so having the virtue of action in preserving themselves would provide a parallel: men also must take whatever action is required to preserve their happiness.

DeWitt goes further and explains it this way:

“However astonishing this doctrine may seem, it is well authenticated. Plutarch, 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.’”

DeWitt 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 the record. What DeWitt is 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. DeWitt continues:

“Thus, the Christian Eusebius quotes 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: ‘This derives from the doctrine of the Epicureans, who assert that the gods cannot be immortal unless enjoying leisure and immune from all responsibility.’”

DeWitt has a number of additional references that I’m not going to go into in detail during this part of the podcast. But the bottom line is that DeWitt thinks there’s good reason to believe that the Epicurean gods 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 Epicurean universe for there to be any supernatural status where a body that has come together could 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 some activity is undertaken by the living being, it will eventually die.

So DeWitt is suggesting — and I think with good reason, given the sources 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: it would contradict Epicurean philosophy. And I think DeWitt is agreeing with that argument.

Then once having set the stage that the gods do engage in activity of a kind, we move to the 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 prolepsis 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 was superlative. Epicurus gave precision to this belief in the following: ‘Happiness is thought of in two ways: first, being superlative, admitting of no intensification — such as belongs to the divine nature; and second, admitting of the addition and subtraction of pleasures — and this latter is the kind that falls to human beings, as it is subject to increase and decrease.’”

Okay. The bottom line is that there is no reason to accept Cotta’s criticism that the gods are totally inactive and totally slothful and do absolutely nothing. The Epicurean 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 or physical — the gods can engage in all sorts of activities, in an infinite scope of activities. The only things excluded in Epicurean theory are those things that are burdensome to them. An unlimited scope of activity belongs to the gods, because the only part denied to gods in 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 Lucretius as well as on David Sedley, his book Lucretius and 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 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 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 lamely off — for there is never a proper end to reasoning which proceeds on a false foundation.”

I think, 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 Cotta goes on to say 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 Cotta says in the preceding paragraph of Section 37:

“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.”

So the problem that Cotta 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: the Hymn to Venus in Lucretius’s poem, the proem to book one of On the Nature of Things, and the longstanding challenge that it lays down for readers who come to this book perhaps expecting atheism or non-belief, and instead are immediately confronted with Venus Genetrix — Venus the rectrix, the nurturing mother, Sola gubernans, as Lucretius says, the sole governor of things — who appears, at least according to the proem to book one, to give rise to things that happen in nature.

Now David Sedley, in his book Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, opens the text by taking on the challenge of the Hymn to Venus. And what he does is he connects it back to the Greek poet-physicist Empedocles as a literary forebear of Lucretius. David Sedley points out that in book one, around line 716, Lucretius praises Empedocles, and he praises Empedocles in the following terms — let me just read that quickly:

“Of those who propose that the world is made of four elements, the foremost is Empedocles of Acragas, born within the three-cornered coasts of the island of 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 strait divides the coasts of the Italian land with its waves. Here is destructive Charybdis. And here the rumblings of Etna 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 poems 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 a 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 Cotta is proposing that the classical four elements present a challenge to any Epicurean who wants to describe the abode of the gods. Everything has its proper nature that it associates with — some animals live on the land, some in the water, some in both, some in the air, and some are even found to be born in fire. But where do the gods live? What is their habitation?

And David Sedley is interesting on this point because he explains the proem to book one of On the Nature of Things — this Hymn to Venus — by saying that it is, and is meant to be recognized as, an imitation of the proem to Empedocles’s physical poem. Empedocles, 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 Lucretius’s view, Empedocles is a great man, greatly fallen, because he held to the view that there were four elements. And the problem Lucretius has with that is that these four classical elements are subject to dissolution — 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 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 Giordano Bruno a little bit ago, this is the atoms — 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 atoms.

Now, all of this relates back to another problem present in the Hymn to Venus — and that is a passage from later in the poem. I think it might be in book two — it appears in some texts but not all, immediately following the Hymn to Venus itself — and it describes the abode of the gods. I just looked in Rolfe Humphries’s text; it’s not there. I think the Loeb edition probably has it, though it is sometimes thought that this addition was made by one of the medieval scribes who were copying the text. The lines in question are these: 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 Memmius — 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 Memmii at such a season be wanting to the common weal.” 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.”

It’s possible that a medieval scribe, having just read the Hymn to Venus and then getting to this later in the poem, said “hold on a minute” and wrote this into the margin. But I think it’s possible that Lucretius had it there by design — that he’s building up this homage to Empedocles as a predecessor physical poet, but disregarding Empedocles as a philosophical forebear because he’s involved in the view of the four classical elements. Lucretius is saying: Empedocles 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 Cotta says in the text — 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 Empedocles and on Cicero and on Cotta. He does so by saying that the gods don’t do any of the things just described — those things happen in nature, they are the products of the operations of nature, not the products of the divine mind — and that the gods must necessarily enjoy immortal life in the deepest peace, far removed and separated from our affairs: without any pain, without danger, mighty by their own resources, needing us not at all, neither propitiated with services nor touched by wrath.

I think Lucretius there, Cassius, is connecting to exactly the point that DeWitt 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 Cotta and Cicero and others like them, but the problem generally with religion and the view that all blessings come from God, is that people are never prepared to accept the other side of the ledger: that all bad things that happen must also come from God. 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 — Bruno 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 sustain what is in nature. That’s just not how it works.

Cassius: Yeah. The false premise that Cotta and Balbus 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 is subject to. 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 Velleius would accept Cotta’s challenge — that true philosophies, true conclusions, are not going to be based on false assumptions. But the real false assumption that turns everything on its head is not that the gods speak Greek or that the gods have a liver or something like that. The false assumption is that the gods are supernatural — which is Cotta’s position, Balbus’s position. When you focus on the gods being natural, then you can logically construct a reasonable discussion about the nature of physical gods. 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 based on supernatural presumptions that throw everything else out the window.

Joshua: Yeah. Even Cotta’s proposal that some creatures are born in fire is based on the experience of watching: when you throw a log in the fire and a spider or a salamander crawls out to get away from the flames, people would look at that and say the fire has given rise to the salamander. It’s this view that there are four classical elements that drives people in that direction, I think. And so we have right here a very clear way in which this has led Cotta down a false path — exactly what he’s accusing Velleius 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 — Empedocles and so forth — were used to thinking in terms of everything in its place. Going through the earth, air, wind, and fire, they each have places of their own. For people who thought that way, 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: if you have to have some place for gods, then the space 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 Epicureans 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, whether they created universes or not, whether they control our lives or not. And we would emphatically reject Cotta’s and Balbus’s suggestions as to that.

In the same way, for purposes of our discussion today, as we begin to bring 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 and how much information we have about them — are you telling me, Velleius, that gods are inactive? That in looking at the gods’ way of life, we should emulate a way of life that is totally inactive, totally slothful, that does nothing? I think that is as big a challenge as the idea of gods creating universes and being supernatural, and I think Velleius and the Epicureans would’ve emphatically rejected Cotta’s suggestion.

Not only is Cotta wrong in suggesting that the gods created the universe — Cotta is absolutely wrong in suggesting that Epicureans 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 absolutely real — are going to have some kind of physical nature. And any kind of 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 worth talking about at all — we’re talking about a living being that 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 with something that’s worthy of thinking about — that we ourselves, as part of the natural scheme, also have requirements: 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 gods 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, achieve its goals, and achieve happiness? And in that respect, gods and men have a commonality which makes sense in Epicurean philosophy and does not destroy man’s happiness, as the arguments of Balbus or Cotta 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 to deal here at the end with this question of laziness that Cotta 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 otium — a Latin abstract term with 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 Ennius — who was another one of Epicurus’s poetic forebears — and Ennius writes it this way:

“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 movement, we are there too. The mind wanders, unsure — except that life is lived.”

Lucretius takes this view to task in a way that turns the question back on the people who tend to ask it — like Cicero and Cotta here. And this is what Lucretius says, at the end of book three — he’s just given a discussion of death and how death levels everything:

“Democritus, 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’s name actually appears in the poem. Immediately after this, we have a sort of restructuring of Ennius in book three of Lucretius’s 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 household’s 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 dwell forever and ever after death.”

So Lucretius’s response to Cotta, to Cicero, 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 Menoeceus, 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 Stoic objection — to the objection of Cotta and Balbus and others like them — that this is not laziness. To turn your attention and focus to nature, to the operations of nature, to an understanding of the way things are: that 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 Cotta is trying to suggest — 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 Epicurean goal of life — in pursuing pleasure — is in pursuing all of these activities that make life worthwhile. Especially for us who don’t have unlimited time in which to pursue those things. But even in the case of the gods, who do theoretically have 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 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), 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 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 Epicurean 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 gods — that’s not the question that should really 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? Are the things around us 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 Epicurean terms is the pursuit of pleasure in all of the many mental, intellectual, and physical ways that it can be pursued. Epicurus was not here to specify to his own people minute by minute how they should spend their time — whether they should eat fish or meat or figs, or what activities they should be involved in — 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’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 forum 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.