Episode 252 - Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods - Part 27 - Where Do We Go From Here?
Date: 10/26/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4108-episode-252-why-reverence-the-epicurean-gods/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Picking up after Section 40, the hosts explore some broader themes before returning to the text: the question of what is “real” in Epicurean philosophy (contra the reductionist “nothing but atoms” reading that leads to Democritean determinism and Academic Skepticism); the Sorites heap paradox and how it parallels Epicurus’s definition of pleasure; and the nature of pleasure as absence of pain. They then read Sections 41-42: Cotta’s argument that if the Epicurean god “does nothing but think about his own happiness” he cuts a ridiculous figure — countered by reasserting that the gods do engage in physical activity to preserve their existence. Joshua reads Epicurus’s deathbed letter to Idomeneus (Diogenes Laertius Book 10, section 22) to rebut the Ciceronian slur that Epicureans value only bodily pleasure. A passage from On Ends Book 1 — where Cicero flatly denies that Epicureans ever found pleasure in literature or history — is called out as a flat misrepresentation. The episode closes with a discussion of Epicurean piety vs. Roman religio, drawing on Lucretius’s distinction between pietas (positive reverence) and religio (fearful superstition), Vatican Saying 32, and the analogy between Lucretius’s reverence for Epicurus and the Hymn to Venus. Preview for next week: Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the Riddle of Epicurus.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 252 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 text 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 discussion thread for this and each of our podcast episodes.
As we’ve been doing, we are continuing in On the Nature of the Gods by Cicero. Last week, at the end of Section 40, we were discussing the criticism of the Epicurean position that everything derives from the belly — that your version of pleasure is so grounded in the body that your gods can’t experience the kind of pleasure that you say is the goal of life, the meaning of everything. And as Section 39 ended, it said: “I am now showing that your gods are destitute of pleasure and therefore, according to your own manner of reasoning, they are not happy.” Now of course that’s a reference to the fact that happiness in Epicurean philosophy is tied tightly to an analysis of pleasure and pain — and that if you don’t have pleasure, there’s no way to be happy. That happiness, like virtue, has no meaning unless it’s grounded in something real. And what is real to us — given through our natural faculties — is not only the five senses, but also the feelings of pleasure and pain. Those ultimately are the real motivations of life, and everything reduces down in the end to either pleasure or pain.
Now before we get on into Section 41, we are closing in on the end of Book One of On the Nature of the Gods, and as we begin to close, we’re going to find ourselves bringing a lot of threads together so that all of the different details we’ve gone through in the book so far will hopefully crystallize into an overall big picture. We are still planning, as we get to the end of Book One, to have a special session in which we have at the very least our podcaster friend Don come back in, and we’ll go in at that point and discuss the various opinions about whether the Epicurean gods actually had a physical existence in the intermundia — as is discussed in different locations — or whether they are really more of a construction of the mind in which they serve an idealistic purpose but don’t necessarily exist with physical bodies in the intermundia. We’ll come back and discuss that at the end of this whole section.
But as we bring together these big picture items, I was reminded by a post I saw on the Epicurean Philosophy Facebook group this morning about how one of these big picture issues is, in Epicurean terms, what it means to be real. Many times I’ve made reference to an article that I’ll make sure is in today’s thread — written by David Sedley — in which he discusses the issue of what is real, which involves all sorts of different aspects to it. But one of the continuing questions that occurs to people is this issue that divided Epicurus from Democritus apparently: whereas Democritus took the position that there’s nothing real other than atoms and void, Epicurus has a wider perspective on what he considers to be real when he says even the dreams of madmen can be real.
What he’s talking about, it seems, is that he is taking the canonical faculties — the five senses, the feelings of pleasure and pain, and the prolepsis images — and considering them to be real in the sense that we are receiving motions of particles that prompt reactions in us that are essentially real to us. As a matter of fact, we never can see or touch or taste atoms. But the bodies that are formed when the atoms come together — the emergent properties that occur when molecules and bodies assemble into all sorts of different things, including human beings — are real to us at this phenomenal level, even though ultimately they can be reduced to particles moving through the void.
It’s a perspective we’ve discussed a number of times: there is reality at both levels of existence, and the fact that everything can be reduced to particles moving through void does not mean that there is not reality at the level at which we experience life through the five senses, anticipations, and feelings of pleasure and pain. That’s definitely a subject we’ll be discussing when we come back to this ideal versus real aspect of the gods. But it underlies so much of Epicurean philosophy that it’s really important to keep it in mind all the time.
People who are new to the philosophy tend to have picked up along the way — whether from the Letter to Herodotus or from some other sources — that Epicurus was ultimately a reductionist in the sense of “well, there’s nothing but atoms and void.” But if you go down that direction, as David Sedley points out in his article, you’ll end up with determinism, you’ll end up with skepticism, you’ll end up with major problems that Epicurus rejected and came up with solutions to in his epistemology, in his canons, in his overall worldview.
That’s a perspective that’s not familiar to a lot of us, and one that we don’t employ regularly today. And so as we think about how that applies to all sorts of issues — including the gods, including pleasure, including pain, including virtue — there’s this constant reference back to how you relate the particles and the void to the level at which we live. We discussed recently, as Joshua has been talking about the Sorites paradox, the question of the heap — the fact that a heap is made up of individual grains of sand or some other object that makes up the heap, but that there’s no single number of particles that you can say constitutes the heap. You can remove some number of particles, you can add some number of particles, but there’s no objective definition that a heap is three or more grains of sand.
What Epicurus seems to have been talking about when he was saying that he could not recognize the good but for certain pleasures that he listed — which turned out to be sensual pleasures — it’s probable, at least from my point of view, that you’ve got a similar question going on. Epicurus is telling us that everything is not simply atoms and void at our level of existence. We have to understand how the atoms and void give rise to our level of existence, but that our level of existence also is real — so that a heap is real, even though if we want to be overly precise about it, we can get consumed down a rabbit hole of trying to itemize how many grains of sand go into a heap. And if we do that, we lose track of the reality that we all understand what “heap” means to us.
Just like if we were to get overly precise and legalistic about which pleasures constitute the overall concept of pleasure, we would tend to confuse ourselves about the fact that we all understand what the concept of pleasure means. And we understand it through the concept’s relationship to particular pleasures — but when we refer to the concept of pleasure, we are not necessarily referring only to the pleasures of sex, the pleasures of drugs, the pleasures of rock and roll. All the other pleasures also constitute pleasure, and to list a couple of them is not to exclude all others from the overall concept of pleasure.
The reality of pleasure is that, as Epicurus says, it ultimately gets resolved not down into a particular list of sex, drugs, rock and roll, food, drink, and air. It gets resolved down to the thing that unifies it — which is that whatever it is, we feel it to be agreeable to us. And that leads Epicurus to ultimately define pleasure not in terms of a particular list of pleasures but in terms of absence of pain. There are only two feelings: pleasure and pain. When you do not have pain, what you have is pleasure. So even though that is not the way we normally speak, Epicurus is telling us that just as we’re not going to define a heap in terms of certain numbers of grains of sand or certain types of grains of anything, pleasure is not reducible to a specific set of actions that are objectively always going to be pleasurable to us. It’s reducible only to what we recognize in our reality as being pleasurable to us.
That leads us into where we are today. Because this question of pleasure as the absence of pain is a constant stumbling block to everyone who gets into Epicurean philosophy. Cicero totally rejected Epicurus’s view that it is appropriate to call absence of pain pleasure — which leads to a quote from Norman DeWitt, which I don’t have in front of me, but we’ve used a lot in the last several months, about how DeWitt says that one of Epicurus’s major contributions to the whole philosophy of hedonism was to expand the view of pleasure to include not just the sensual pleasures that everybody recognizes — sex, drugs, and rock and roll — but also all other experiences which are not painful. You do that by recognizing that ultimately there are only the two feelings, and the feelings have to be divided into one or the other: agreeable or not agreeable. And life is agreeable to us except when we are in certain types of pain that so overwhelm the pleasures of life that it becomes logical to consider leaving the stage when the play ceases to please us.
It is only going to be in an extremely unusual condition that the play would ultimately cease to please us. Because as Torquatus says in Book One of On Ends, the wise man is always going to have more reason for joy than for vexation — and that is because, except in the most extreme of situations, it’s always going to be possible to summon from within yourself, from your memory, from your appreciation of life, from your hope for the future, from your simple pleasures, complex pleasures, all the different options that are generally available — except in extreme circumstances, the wise man is always going to be able to appreciate that he has more reason to find joy in being alive than to find pain and to wish for death.
Certainly certain situations can become so extreme in terms of physical agony that death becomes the better option — but that is not the norm. That is an extremely unusual situation. And the wise man who organizes his affairs properly is always going to be able to find more reason — in his mind and in his body — to continue to live than to give up life and become a nihilist and to decide that he’d be better off dead.
Okay, here’s Section 41 and how Cotta attempts to turn the standard Ciceronian criticism — the absence of pain — against the Epicurean idea of the gods. Cotta says:
“But they are free from pain. Is that sufficient for beings who are supposed to enjoy all good things and the most supreme felicity? The deity they say is constantly meditating on his own happiness, for he has no other idea which can possibly occupy his mind. Consider a little — reflect what a figure the deity would make if he were to be idly thinking of nothing through all eternity but ‘it is very well with me and I am happy.’ Nor do I see why this happy deity should not fear being destroyed, since without any intermission he is driven and agitated by an everlasting incursion of atoms, and since images are constantly flowing off from him. Your deity therefore is neither happy nor eternal.”
Okay, we probably have some material we want to carry over from last week as well. But let me stop with the quotations there and let’s start discussing this first paragraph, where Cotta is raising the old argument that absence of pain has really nothing to do with happiness or pleasure, and it’s ridiculous to think that a god could sit around idly thinking of nothing but “it’s well with me and I’m happy” — and that type of notion of a god is absolutely ridiculous. So the first part of Section 41 is an attempt to ridicule the idea that absence of pain is a worthy occupation for a human, much less a god. How ridiculous an idea it is to think that he’s just sitting there thinking, “I’m happy all the time.”
The second part of Section 41 is a reminder again of this attack on the physical nature of gods — because Cotta is trying to say: “I don’t understand why the gods don’t fear being destroyed, since they’re being constantly driven and agitated by an everlasting incursion of atoms, and since images — which are also atoms — are constantly flowing off from them. Your deity therefore is neither happy nor eternal.”
Cotta and these guys are just constantly reminding us that they reject the entire premise of atoms. They think it is ridiculous to think that bodies can receive influxes of atoms from the outside. They think that it’s ridiculous to think that we see things or hear things because of an emission of atoms off of bodies. And they just simply reject the idea that bodies are made up of particles moving through the void. They are totally devoted to the idea that the mind is what is important — that the body is essentially a jail or a shell that restricts our ability to do what we would really like to do. And they can see no way of being happy for either men or gods when you’re focused on the body as being a good thing, instead of thinking as they do that the body is something lower and that the mind is higher, and that we should all seek to escape the confines of the body and of the senses and move to this higher level of experience that they’re constantly praising as something much more worthy than anything Epicurus has ever thought about.
Joshua: I think that’s a good place to start. Cassius, last week in Section 40 we did start on this question and I think it deserves maybe a fuller response. So in Section 40 of the text from last week, Cotta starts this way: “Let us now inquire into his happiness. It is certain that without virtue there can be no happiness, but virtue consists in action. Now your deity does nothing — therefore he is void of virtue and consequently cannot be happy. What sort of life does he lead? He has a constant supply, you say, of good things without any intermixture of bad. What are those good things? Sensual pleasures, no doubt — for you admit no delight of the mind but what arises from the body and returns to it.”
We did talk at length in last week’s episode about the question of the belly and whether, as Metrodorus is said to have thought, everything should be judged by the standard of the belly. But I think what we’re dealing with here from Cotta in this passage from Section 40 is slightly different, because I think what Cotta is doing here is exploiting a certain claim of Epicurus — which is that of course, because he is a materialist, because he is an Atomist, the soul or the mind is rooted in the body and cannot survive without the body. As Principal Doctrine 2 says: “Death is nothing to us — for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us.” The soul does not survive the body. And because Epicurus is an Atomist, the soul is made of matter, it’s made of atoms.
And I think what Cicero loves to do — and what Cotta is doing here — is exploiting that aspect of Epicurean physics to wash away any distinction between mental pleasures and bodily pleasures, between mental pains and bodily pains. And while it’s certainly the case that the mind is rooted in the body, the pains and pleasures of the mind are quite different from the pains and pleasures of the body. And to suggest — as Cicero does repeatedly, and we’ve been dealing with this not just in this book but in On Ends as well — to suggest that Epicurus does not value mental pleasures is, I think, absolutely absurd.
Diogenes Laertius records from Epicurus — he records his will and he also records a fragment from the letter to Idomeneus. And that fragment goes like this, in section 22 of Book 10 of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers. And he writes this way: “When Epicurus was on the point of death, he wrote the following letter to Idomeneus: ‘On this truly happy day of my life, as I am at the point of death, I write this to you. The disease in my bladder and stomach are pursuing their course, lacking nothing of their natural severity. But against all this is the joy in my heart at the recollection of my conversations with you. Do you, as I might expect from your devotion from boyhood to me and to philosophy, take good care of the children of Metrodorus.’”
So here we have an insight into the last moments of Epicurus’s life, and he is racked with pain in the body — possibly because of kidney stones or some disease of the kidney. And even while his body is experiencing this pain, his mind is able to experience pleasure — and it’s the pleasure of the recollection of his past conversations with his friends. And of course, having conversations with your friends does involve the body. But to say that that is a sensual pleasure is, I think, something of a scandal. And I’m very impatient with Cicero when he continually makes this slur.
The pleasures of the mind and the pleasures of the body are both pleasures, and they are both to be pursued and lauded for that reason. But they are nevertheless experienced differently by us. And to say that Epicurus was only a sensualist and that mental pleasures and mental pains were of no importance to him is beyond misrepresentation, I think.
But in today’s text, in Section 41, Cotta proposes a slightly different problem. He says: “The gods are free from pain. Is that sufficient for beings who are supposed to enjoy all good things and the most supreme felicity? The deity they say is constantly meditating on his own happiness, for he has no other idea which can possibly occupy his mind — consider a little, reflect what a figure the deity would make if he were to be idly thinking of nothing through all eternity but ‘it is very well with me and I am happy.’”
So even though in the previous section Cotta has implied or suggested that bodily pleasures are the only pleasures of any importance to an Epicurean and to a hedonist, he’s now saying — regarding the gods — that the pleasures of the mind are insufficient. And that to think of a god doing nothing except thinking about his own happiness is to behold an absurd figure in that god. This is sort of similar, I think, to the argument that Velleius makes regarding the Stoic god when he’s talking to Balbus — and he says, “Imagine the Stoic god in his workshop trying to understand how he should create a world” — and we’re supposed to smile at that image, laugh at that absurd idea. And what Cotta I think is saying here is that the Epicurean idea is at least as absurd. And of course because he’s Cotta and because Cicero is writing the book, it’s more absurd to think that the god should be totally inactive, concerned with nothing but their own happiness, and that this wouldn’t in fact make them happy.
Cassius: Joshua, let me jump in for a second. To be concerned with nothing but their own happiness is one thing — that would mean to me that you are devoting your attention to the activities that do make you happy, regardless of what those activities are. But when Cotta goes on and talks about how they’re totally inactive, that is a portrayal of an Epicurean god that Cotta is reducing to an extreme, absurd position — because I don’t think that is an accurate representation of an Epicurean god.
The gods are not simply idly contemplating their own happiness. There’s every reason to think that — as Epicurus and Velleius have talked about — there is a bodily or quasi-bodily aspect to the gods, where atoms are flowing into them all the time and atoms are flowing out of them all the time, just like everything else. And there is going to be, as we’ve discussed in recent weeks, the need for the gods to have activities of their own to maintain their own happiness. No Epicurean would think that you can simply think about something — that you can have some spiritual or non-physical existence that just continues itself — because everything in the universe is made up of particles and void. And if you’ve got particles and void that have come together to form any kind of a body, much less a god, there have got to be forces at work to maintain, to conserve, to preserve the existence of that thing, or it will eventually be destroyed.
So this is Cotta representing that — “I guess what you’re saying, Epicurean, is that he’s just sitting there doing nothing but thinking about his own happiness.” But I don’t think for a moment that we should accept that kind of characterization of what a god is doing. We start with the presumptions I’ve just talked about — what physical existence really means. If we have a god — whether the gods speak Greek or something else, that’s an entirely different matter — but as we’ve been discussing, there’s a definitional aspect to the Epicurean view of the gods in which a god — whatever else he is or is not — is a living being that is happy and imperishable. Happy and imperishable means that there are activities going on. They’re not just some Platonic, idealistic feelings of happiness floating ambiguously in the atmosphere or in some other dimension that’s beyond the real world.
And let me go back also and comment on something you said about Cicero. It’s a very interesting question — we keep talking about how much of Cicero do we accept, how much do we reject, how much of what he says is true but slanted, how much of what he tells us is a half-truth. But even though I do personally think that when he has Velleius say something, or when he has Torquatus say something, he is at least giving us a part of the truth — and what they do say is at least a part of the truth — it’s not going to be wrong if he puts it in their voices. It may be incomplete from my point of view and probably is incomplete in most cases.
But there are certain times we can see Cicero say things that I think are just flatly not acceptable as true. And here is an example from Book One of On Ends — and Cicero doesn’t even put this in somebody else’s mouth. He says this himself, in his discussion with Torquatus — this is in section 7 of Book One of On Ends, from the Yonge translation: “What pleasure do you, Torquatus, or does our friend Triarius here derive from literature, from records and the investigation of historical facts, from reading the poets, from learning by heart — so laboriously — so many lines?” Do not say to me: “Why, these very actions bring me pleasure, as they do to me.” Cicero says:
“Never indeed did Epicurus or Metrodorus or anyone possessed of any wisdom or any knowledge of the tenets of your school ever maintain such a position by such arguments.”
I don’t see how it’s possible to read that other than Cicero trying to flatly assert that Epicureans don’t consider mental activities such as literature, or talking with each other, or investigating history, and so forth, to be pleasure under the Epicurean scheme. And that is just a flat lie. It’s a flat misrepresentation of where Epicurus has said pleasure is the absence of pain. There’s no pain involved in reading poetry — it is pleasure. There’s no pain involved in reading history or literature to gain knowledge — it is pleasurable. As Epicurus has said about philosophy, it is pleasurable to discuss these things. Cicero is trying to reduce Epicurean philosophy to nothing but bodily pleasure. And by taking it to that extreme, he’s now put it in Cotta’s mind that: “Well, your gods can’t have any pleasure because they don’t have a body. So that leaves them with nothing but the mind. And since you’ve never said that the pleasures of the mind are pleasurable, then the god is just doing absolutely nothing — just sitting there, not even contemplating pleasure, because frankly, contemplating pleasure would be a philosophical endeavor, which Epicurus has said is pleasurable.”
Cotta and Cicero are misrepresenting the nature of Epicurean philosophy, misrepresenting the nature of Epicurean gods, and attempting to make them look ridiculous. But they fail because they are lying about the ultimate nature of what Epicurus held pleasure to be. There are many other examples of Cicero distorting this definition of the word “pleasure,” but I can’t think of many that are more explicit than this part of Book One where Cicero says: “Never did Epicurus or Metrodorus or anyone possessed of any knowledge of your school ever maintain a position by such arguments” — and that’s just flatly wrong. There’s just no way to get around it — he’s misrepresenting the history and the truth of Epicurean philosophy.
So everything that Cotta is constructing here in his argument about the Epicurean gods is simply based on a false understanding of the nature of pleasure in the Epicurean view. That’s why he can say “your deity therefore is neither happy nor eternal” — because just like Cicero, he rejects everything Velleius says about how this does work in Epicurean philosophy, and says: “Well, I reject it, and therefore your deity can’t be happy or eternal, because I’m not going to even consider your suggestion as to how he can be happy and eternal.”
To get back to the text: the next short section says this: “Epicurus, it seems, has written books concerning sanctity and piety towards the gods. But how does he speak on these subjects? You would say that you were listening to Coruncanius or Scaevola the high priest, and not to a man who tore up all religion by the roots and who overthrew the temples and altars of the immortal gods — not indeed with hands like Xerxes, but with arguments. For what reason, therefore, is your saying that men ought to worship the gods, when the gods not only do not regard men, but are entirely careless of everything and absolutely do nothing at all?”
Joshua: Yeah, I think Cotta is posing an interesting question here, and I think it’s one we’ve talked about many times before. In some ways it bears on the way Lucretius opens his poem with this Hymn to Venus and all of the questions that that opening brought up for readers who saw the Epicurean essentially as an atheist — and then asked: why is he invoking help from a goddess? So the question of sanctity and piety towards the gods is an interesting one. That word “piety” is used by Lucretius himself in the Latin form pietas, and he uses it in distinction with the word religio. So in the proem to Book One, we have the Hymn to Venus and he asks the goddess for help in writing his poem, and then he asks her to bring peace to the Romans. But maybe two dozen lines after the end of the Hymn to Venus, we have the very famous passage about human life, all too conspicuously lying foully, groveling on earth, weighed down by grim religio looming from the skies. And then we have this very Promethean image of Epicurus — who is not named, he’s referred to simply as “a Greek” — who first raised his mortal eyes bravely against this menace.
So we have there in Book One their understanding of religio, and then we have Lucretius in Book Five of the poem, and he says this:
“Oh, humankind unhappy, when it ascribed unto divinities such awesome deeds and coupled thereto rigors of fierce wrath! What groans did men on that sad day beget even for themselves — and oh, what wounds for us, what tears for our children’s children! Nor, oh man, is thy true piety in this — with head beneath the veil still to be seen, to turn fronting a stone, and ever to approach unto all altars, nor so prone on earth forward to fall, to spread upturned palms before the shrines of gods, nor yet to drench altars with profuse blood of four-footed beasts, nor vows with vows to link — but rather this: to look on all things with a master eye and a mind at peace.”
So while Lucretius is very critical of religio — which is sometimes in English translated as “superstition,” but other times merely as “religion” — we get a sense that the word “piety” here in Book Five for Lucretius carries a much more positive meaning for the poet. And of course for someone who thinks that the Epicureans are atheists — or someone like Cotta here, who goes in the direction of regarding any piety or any praise for the god as being merely transactional: “What am I going to get out of this?” — that’s what Cotta says, that’s what the priest says, which I think is funny.
For someone who has that view, I think Lucretius’s attitude towards piety — which, as I read there, he says consists in this: “to look on all things with a master eye and a mind at peace” — part of the reason that we can look on things with a master eye and a mind at peace is because we know that the gods don’t intervene. We know that the gods don’t threaten us. We know that the supernatural doesn’t exist and holds no terrors for mankind. And all of those things I think are wrapped up in this idea of piety.
Cotta says: “You would say that you were listening to Coruncanius or Scaevola the high priests, and not to a man who tore up all religion by the roots.” Well, it’s certainly the case that Lucretius tried to tear up religio by the roots. But he draws this distinction between religio and pietas, and I think it’s one worth keeping in mind. Those two high priests are Tiberius Coruncanius — who died in 241 BC and was the first plebeian to hold the position of Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of the Roman Republic, a position that had previously been monopolized by the Patricians — and there are several Scaevolas, but I believe the Scaevola in question is Quintus Mucius Scaevola Pontifex — that reference again to Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of Rome. He died in 82 BC, much closer to Cicero’s own lifetime. Wikipedia says that he took the opportunity to regulate more strictly the priestly colleges and to ensure that the traditional rituals were properly observed.
And so for a Roman who holds what Cotta — a priest himself — thinks are pious views of the gods, to compare Epicurus to these high priests is itself scandalous, because he is the man who “tore up all religion by the roots, who overthrew the temples and altars of the immortal gods — not with hands like Xerxes, but with arguments. For what reason is there for your saying that men ought to worship the gods, when the gods not only do not regard them but are entirely careless of everything and absolutely do nothing at all?”
There is another important distinction that needs to be drawn — the distinction between the gods of an ancient polytheist religious culture and the God of a modern monotheist religion. Because I can see a modern theologian saying that we ought to worship the one God even if he does nothing for us, even if he did not regard men, even if he was entirely careless of everything — because he created everything. That’s the view. And in fact I think deism, with its constant talk of providence as a creative force, goes in that direction. So this very transactional view of the gods that we find in these ancient cultures is in conflict with, I think, modern monotheism to an extent. Certainly there are people today who approach modern monotheisms in a very transactional way — “Jesus, help me find a parking spot” and so forth. But it’s interesting to see Cotta — a priest of Rome — saying that this transactional relationship with the gods is actually what we’re supposed to be striving for. We’re supposed to be worshiping the gods because they provide us the wind that billows the sails in our ships, because they provide us the grain, because they declined to punish us even though they can. It’s kind of an alien idea, I think, to how people think today. Cassius, do you have any commentary on that aspect of it?
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, it is very alien to the way people think today. Let me draw out an analogy in this way as well. For example, the first sentence of Section 42 that we’re about to read says: “And why should we worship them — from an admiration only of that nature in which we can behold nothing excellent?” Now, as you said, in the modern world we have these elitists in the Stoic mold who hold that virtue is an end in itself and that really the idea of asking for a reward is unworthy and degrading in itself. And so there’s a certain segment, as you indicated, who will take the position that we shouldn’t care about what we get from the gods — we should just worship them just because, for some reason that they’re not really ever very clear about. And then you have the majority who have this transactional viewpoint: “God gave us this land to be ours, God gave us this blessing, and so therefore we need to praise him and worship him for having given us this blessing.” And it is transactional, as you say — it gives them the reason to want to worship a god.
But the Epicureans, I think, would’ve considered that to be blasphemous — because the Epicureans held that the gods are above all of that kind of thing and that they’re not giving us rewards or punishing us. And so for us to be motivated by the idea of hoping for some benefit or hoping for some release from some pain is as unworthy of us as it is unworthy of the gods.
You were talking a few minutes ago, Joshua, about the opening of Lucretius and the Hymn to Venus and so forth, and I think we can get a very useful parallel by drawing that out. Because I do think that there is a strong parallel between the positive way — and this is what I really want to say about reverence and admiration and so forth — these things in the Epicurean viewpoint appear to be positive things, things to be happy about. There’s not this groveling on the ground, this throwing yourself in front of the altar and putting your head on the ground and abasing yourself and putting sackcloth and ashes on. That kind of piety and reverence is a very negative thing.
The Epicurean view of piety and reverence is a positive thing. Vatican Saying 32 says: “The veneration of the wise man is a great blessing to those who venerate him.” Velleius earlier in this book had said that “the exalted nature of the gods, being both eternal and supremely blessed, would receive man’s pious worship — for what is highest commands the reverence that is its due.” In other words, reverence does not mean a self-abasing negative emotion. When you reverence something, the analogy I would draw is clearly the way in which Lucretius reverences Epicurus himself. He calls Epicurus worthy of being considered a god. He considers Epicurus to be a father. He considers Epicurus to be someone who has dispensed golden words that give us the ability to live happily.
I think that’s the way he’s seeing Venus in the opening as well. Just as he’s asking Venus to assist him in writing his poem because he can’t do so with a troubled mind — that’s exactly the kind of relief that Epicurus brings to humanity from this viewpoint as well. Because Epicurus gives you the answer and the antidote to all these ridiculous fears and concerns about supernatural gods. Now, even though Epicurus is dead in Lucretius’s time — Epicurus certainly is not somebody who was a personal friend of Lucretius, because he was long dead — the fact that Epicurus was no longer there is sort of again analogous to the situation with Venus. He’s not expecting Venus to bodily come down and help him write his poem, or to bodily seduce Mars and thus end the wars in Rome. These are figurative analogies. But they are real analogies in the sense that he knows what Epicurus can do for people who will take up Epicurean philosophy and look at the world in a new way.
The people he was writing to were used to thinking in terms of Venus and Mars and the different gods who were known to everyone at that particular time. But there had long been a movement — and it appears the Stoics wind through all of this drawing of analogies and considering things to be figurative and so forth — so just as Lucretius says that you can call upon Neptune, call upon Ceres if you like, just so long as you don’t let your mind be seduced by religious error and thinking that things that are supernatural are going to take place. You’ve got a strong analogy that Epicurean philosophy is not just some spiritual non-entity that we’ve dreamed up. Epicurus was a real living human being who wrote and produced a movement that delivered this philosophy down to Lucretius’s age. So he was a real being who produced benefits to Lucretius and to other people that Lucretius observed — benefits that are worthy of appreciation.
“Appreciation” is a good word, I think, to really focus on when you’re talking about Epicurean piety and reverence and so forth. There’s so much pollution that we have to get out from under in discussing all these things. Whenever we think of worship, piety, reverence — all these things that are associated with religion — it’s natural for us to associate them with all these negative things and all of the suppression and oppression that goes along with the type of gods that Epicurus was seen by Lucretius to be delivering us from. Looking at the gods glaring down at us from the skies, and Epicurus standing up face-to-face to point out to us what is possible and what is not possible — that’s the central analogy I think that Lucretius is using over and over in his poem. And the Epicurean would’ve fully understood that Epicurus is not supernatural. Epicurus is not a mortal god who can do supernatural things. But the perspective that Epicurus brings is so powerful and so helpful that he deserves to be appreciated for all of the benefits that he’s brought.
Just as we can look at nature and see that nature has given us pleasure as a guide for a happy life, we can look at Epicurus as someone who has assisted in helping us understand how all that works. And that turns into a pious reverence that is entirely positive and doesn’t involve anything supernatural, doesn’t involve debasing of mankind, doesn’t involve rejecting logic, reason, science — all these other things that we see to be so helpful to us. It doesn’t involve setting father against son, husband against wife, brother against brother, as certain other religions say they came to do. It involves understanding how the universe works according to nature, living happily as a result, and being appreciative of those who see things the same way and who’ve helped us reach that realization.
So that’s the reason under Epicurean philosophy that you would reverence the gods — or reverence Epicurus, or reverence anything else. Not because you expect them to do something for you. Epicurus is dead — he can no longer do anything for you. But the benefits that you can get from understanding Epicurean philosophy deserve to be appreciated. And you can have a sense of reverence and appreciation and piety toward the right attitude toward nature that doesn’t involve any of these negative ideas that Cotta and Cicero and everyone else in the ancient world — all the major philosophers — think is an absolutely essential part of life. To think that everything was created by supernatural gods and so forth is just a path that was never necessary, and Epicurus shows how to get out of that.
Okay, we made a little headway into Section 41 today. We’ll need to take up Section 42 next week, but we probably ought to bring today’s episode to a conclusion. So any final thoughts as we begin to close for today?
Joshua: Yeah, I’m going to suggest that for next week we take a look at David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, because in that text he deals with many of the same questions. But he also brings up something that we haven’t talked about yet in this series and that I do want to talk about — and that is the so-called Riddle of Epicurus. And since we are right in the thick of questions relating to the gods and whether they do anything and whether they are worthy of reverence and so forth, I think that would fit right in with what we’re talking about here. So I’d like to do the Riddle of Epicurus next week, and I’ll post some links. We have David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Cassius — on your website EpicurusToday.com, there is a page regarding the derivation of the Riddle of Epicurus, tracing it back to a Christian Church Father. So I think that would be something good to go into, and something we haven’t dealt with yet.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua, that’s a very good idea. The Riddle of Epicurus is something that a lot of people know about, and it really focuses in on a lot of the same issues that we’re talking about here. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, we’re bringing together threads that we’ve discussed before. I think we’ve brought some perspectives to all of this discussion that probably none of us here on the podcast really had at the beginning of the discussion. And as we work towards the discussion of the idealist view versus the realist view, the Riddle of Epicurus and how all this fits together, I think we have a much more clear understanding and appreciation of where the Epicureans were coming from. And there’ll be a significant number of people, I think, who can see how this relates to their implementation, their understanding of Epicurean philosophy, who might’ve dismissed some of this in the past.
We’ll come back and do that next week and in the next several episodes. In the meantime, please drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum. Let us know if you have any comments or questions about this or anything else you’d like to discuss about Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.