Episode 254 - The Skeptic Asks: Does Not Epicurus Undermine Religion?
Date: 11/09/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4137-episode-254-the-skeptic-asks-does-not-epicurus-undermine-religion-as-much-as-any/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 254 continues through Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, focusing on Sections 42-43 and Cotta’s threefold argument that the Epicurean view of the gods destroys religion as thoroughly as outright atheism. Cotta lists a series of positions he sees as corrosive to religion: the radical atheists Diagoras and Theodorus who denied the gods entirely; Protagoras who was uncertain whether gods exist; those who treat religion as state invention to control the populace; Prodicus of Ceos who made gods into personifications of useful things; Euhemerus who reduced gods to deified kings (as adapted in Latin by Ennius); and finally Democritus, whose views on divine images Cotta finds equally incoherent.
The episode includes a close examination of three Latin words — superstitio, religio, and pietas — and how Epicureans and Romans understood them differently: Lucretius in Book 1 tramples religio underfoot, but elsewhere praises pietas as “looking on all things with a master eye and a mind at peace.” Joshua reads from John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration and Thomas More’s Utopia on the social function of religious belief, then the Rackham Loeb footnote on Democritus’s views of divine images is read and discussed alongside DeWitt’s suggestion that Epicurean gods are “imperishable” rather than “immortal.” The episode closes with Emily Austin’s Living for Pleasure and Thucydides 2.53 on how the plague of Athens stripped away religious illusions and drove the Athenians toward an Epicurean realization — that pleasure is what remains when the gods do not intervene.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 254 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 discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
Last week, we took an excursion to discuss the Riddle of Epicurus as it comes down to us from Lactantius through David Hume and in the various versions found on the internet today. We spent the entire episode talking about the meaning of that riddle and the extent to which Epicurus may not have been the real author of it — that he might have agreed with a large part of it, but not all of it. I think we had a good discussion on that riddle, which is important because it is so well known in the world of philosophy today. Most people who know much of anything about Epicurus have heard about the Epicurean riddle.
Today we’re going to get back into Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods as we begin to come to a conclusion of Book 1, and we’re going to revisit the general context that helped us go through the riddle and decide what parts of it were consistent with Epicurus and what parts were not. When we were last in On the Nature of the Gods, we were finishing up the end of Section 41, but what we can do to bridge the gap is to note that Cotta was asking a series of questions that reinforced his viewpoint that if you’re going to have a proper religion, it’s got to be based on some kind of relationship between human beings and the gods. He asked a series of questions which included these: Furthermore, how can you owe piety to a person who has bestowed nothing upon you, or how can you owe anything at all to one who has done you no service? Piety is justice towards the gods, but how can any claims of justice exist between us and them if God and man have nothing in common? Holiness is the science of divine worship, but I fail to see why the gods should be worshiped if we neither have received nor hope to receive benefit from them.
Now, we discussed that two weeks ago. We’ll continue now into Section 42. Cotta goes further and says this:
On the other hand, what reason is there for adoring the gods on the ground of our admiration for the divine nature, if we cannot see that that nature possesses any special excellence? As for freedom from superstition, which is the favorite boast of your school, that is easy to attain when you have deprived the gods of all power — unless perhaps you think that it was possible for Diagoras or Theodorus to be superstitious, who denied the existence of the gods altogether. For my part, I don’t see how it was possible even for Protagoras, who was not certain either that the gods exist or that they do not. For the doctrines of all these thinkers abolish not only superstition, which implies a groundless fear of the gods, but also religion, which consists in piously worshiping them. Take again those who have asserted that the entire notion of the immortal gods is a fiction invented by wise men in the interest of the state, to the end that those whom reason was powerless to control might be led in the path of duty by religion — surely this view was absolutely and entirely destructive of religion. Or Prodicus of Ceos, who said that the gods were personifications of things beneficial to the life of man — pray, what religion was left by his theory? Or those who teach that brave or famous or powerful men have been deified after death, and that it is these who are the real objects of the worship, prayers, and adoration which we are accustomed to offer — are not they entirely devoid of all sense of religion? This theory was chiefly developed by Euhemerus, who was translated and imitated especially by our poet Ennius. Yet Euhemerus describes the death and burial of certain gods — are we then to think of him as upholding religion, or rather as utterly and entirely destroying it? I say nothing of the holy and awe-inspiring sanctuary of Eleusis, where tribes from earth’s remotest confines seek initiation, and I pass over Samothrace and those occult mysteries which throngs of worshipers at dead of night in forest coverts deep do celebrate at Lemnos — since such mysteries, when interpreted and rationalized, proved to have more to do with natural science than with theology.
Okay, I’ll stop there. But I think what we’re going to find, as we go into this for the rest of the book, is that Cotta is ending his criticism of Epicurean philosophy on the argument that, say what you want, Epicurus — you’re essentially destroying the foundation of all religion, and you might as well just come out and be an atheist, like several of the people Cotta has mentioned here actually were. Of course we know that Velleius has at length been denying that Epicurus is an atheist, but Cotta is saying that your doctrine amounts to the same thing. You’ve given us no reason to think that the gods are particularly excellent. You’ve given us no reason to be appreciative of anything the gods do for us. You’ve given us no reason to think that religion has not just been invented by politicians to control people — that’s of course a common position that people continue to take today, and Cotta is throwing that at Epicurus too. You’ve given us no reason whatsoever to take you seriously, and so you might as well just go ahead and dispense with religion entirely instead of engaging in what Cotta is describing as a fictional fantasy of a God that Cotta cannot even grasp as being real in any sense of the word. So let’s first discuss these particular criticisms. As I said, we ended up last week on: why are you caring about the gods if they don’t do anything for us? And now Cotta is giving us a series of other reasons that Epicurus’s views on religion make no sense.
Joshua: Cotta is making three interconnected arguments here, one of which we’ve already kind of dealt with — when he says he fails to see why the gods should be worshiped if we neither have received nor hope to receive benefit from them. We kind of dealt with that transactional understanding of the gods in a previous episode. In Section 42, he’s offering two further problems.
The first he says: On the other hand, what reason is there for adoring the gods on the ground of our admiration for the divine nature, if we cannot see that that nature possesses any special excellence? That’s the second argument. And the third argument is that in eradicating superstition, the Epicureans are actually eradicating religion itself — they are denying the power of the gods and might as well go down this path of atheism, like Diagoras and Theodorus are alleged to have done, or Protagoras, who wasn’t certain whether the gods existed or not.
Now, the second argument that he opens the passage with is one he doesn’t really expand on. He says: even if we don’t get anything from the gods, I’m still prepared to allow that they might be worthy of our adoration and admiration if their nature was found to possess any special excellence. So even if our prayers were not efficacious, even if the gods did not produce results, even if they were not interested in human affairs — if there was anything in them that could be called excellent or virtuous, then that alone would be worthy of our adoration. But as he’s already said in this series, he thinks that the way Epicurus describes the gods deprives them of any virtue and of any excellence — because he deprives them of any weakness. The idea was: if the gods are incapable of feeling anger, then they also are incapable of feeling partiality. That’s again from Principal Doctrine 1. And so Cotta has gone on to say: if the gods are incapable of developing emotional bonds either with humans or with other gods, then they’re incapable of virtue. And if they’re incapable of virtue, then there’s no reason to worship them — even allowing that we don’t get anything from them. If there’s no virtue in the gods, then there’s no ground for worship.
Cassius: Because Cotta rejects the idea that perfect happiness, perfect blessedness, and imperishability by themselves are things to be considered excellent. As you’re saying that, Joshua, it comes home to me that Velleius has been very clear that as Epicurus said: believe that a god is a living being, blessed and imperishable. Well, those are two very specific attributes that I consider to be very worthy of emulation to the extent that I can. I consider those to be very valuable, because I value happiness and pleasure as what life is all about. But Cotta rejects happiness and pleasure in exchange for this virtue argument that all the other philosophers have come up with. So as you describe that, it helps me to see that’s where Cotta is coming from when he says, you can’t see that that nature possesses any special excellence. Well, what’s your definition of excellence, Cotta? I consider happiness and imperishability to be pretty excellent — worthy of emulation, worthy of respect. To the extent that any living being can embody that, I consider that to be worthy of respect. So again, Cotta’s perspective on all this is so different from Epicurus’s.
Joshua, let me also add in there before you go further. I think when I first read this I didn’t place enough emphasis on this issue of freedom from superstition. I kind of read it as if it was just another example of “you’re destroying religion.” But now that I read it again and listen to you talk, it seems to me that this argument is saying: okay, Epicurus, you do accomplish for your people freedom from irrational fear of the gods. Cotta is accepting that yes, it’s desirable to be free from superstition, free from unreasonable fear and anxiety about the gods. But Cotta is saying: that’s easy. All you have to do is say there are no gods at all — all you have to do is do what Diagoras or Theodorus does and simply dispose of them. Or you can be like Protagoras and be a world-class skeptic like Cotta himself is, and say: I don’t know anything about the gods, and so therefore there’s no reason for me to be concerned about them because I don’t know anything about them. So I wanted to amend the way I presented this part of Section 42 when I first read it. I think that’s the direction he’s going: freedom from superstition is a good thing, and yes, you deliver that — but you deliver it in a way that anybody else could deliver simply by denying that the gods exist or saying, I don’t know whether the gods exist or not. So you’ve not done anything special — sort of the way I read it now.
Joshua: Yeah, and he’s almost saying that if the only way to abolish superstition is to tear up religion by the roots, then we should err on the side of caution and keep the understanding of religion even if it does instill superstition. And I find the contrast between those two words interesting. There’s a longstanding argument in the footnotes to Lucretius’s poem, because in the section where he describes Epicurus raising his eyes against the gods, that section goes like this — I’m reading from the Loeb edition:
When man’s life lay for all to see foully groveling upon the ground, crushed beneath the weight of superstition, which displayed her head from the regions of heaven, lowering over mortals with horrible aspect, a man of Greece was the first that dared to uplift mortal eyes against her, the first to make stand against her; for neither fables of the gods could quell him, nor thunderbolts, nor heaven with menacing roar, but all the more they goaded the eager courage of his soul, so that he should desire, first of all men, to shatter the confining bars of nature’s gates.
And the word that in the Loeb edition is translated as “superstition” has a footnote attached to it. The footnote says: Superstition — or false religion — and not religion, is the meaning of the Latin word religio. The Epicureans were opposed not to religion, but to the traditional religion which taught that the gods govern the world. And yet what we see here in Cicero’s text is that he’s using two words in the Latin — one of them is superstitio and the other is religio — to distinguish between these two positions. So I think there is an added element when you have people coming from two very different perspectives: the way they use words. Words like religio, for example, need to be understood in the context of their perspectives.
But when Cotta uses the word religio, this is a high priest of Rome — he means it in a positive sense. This is something we need to cultivate in ourselves and in the people. And it’s fine if you want to uproot superstition, but to go so far in uprooting superstition that you also rip up religio by the roots would be a great crime — that’s the argument. And it is essentially the argument that he’s making: you Epicureans have gone too far. You have gone almost as far as early philosophers who denied the very being of the gods themselves.
Cassius: Joshua, which word did Lucretius use when he talks about trampling underfoot? Was it religio or superstitio? I’m thinking he trampled religio underfoot rather than superstitio.
Joshua: That’s exactly right. The word he uses is religio in this passage. Now, there’s a later passage in the book where he uses the word pietas, and Lucretius does use that word in a positive sense — but he uses it to mean: this is not groveling toward altars; this is to look on all things with a master eye and a mind at peace. That’s his understanding of piety. So we have these three words: superstitio, religio, and pietas — and we have to deal with the fact, I think, that these words mean different things to different people, and Lucretius certainly uses them differently than Cotta would use them.
Cassius: That’s an interesting observation, and it might be another one of the words to add to the list of definitions we need to be very careful about. Clearly in what we’re reading today, Cicero is being very clear when he says that these thinkers abolish not only superstition, which implies a groundless fear of the gods, but also religion, which consists in piously worshiping them. So you really have almost a clear definition there: Cicero is definitely stating that superstitio equates to groundless fear of the gods, while religio apparently doesn’t carry that groundless fear but consists in piously worshiping them. So it’s very interesting that you see Lucretius talking about trampling religio underfoot in Book 1, but then also taking a position that pietas can be a good thing — obviously not liking superstitio, groundless fear of the gods, but advocating his own version of a view of the gods.
I’ve sometimes seen people say that the word religio comes from re-ligare, things that bind. And if we could trace back the Latin origins of superstitio versus religio, maybe we could come to a greater understanding of how Cicero and Lucretius understood the different words. But again, you come back to the conclusion that the Epicureans were not atheists — they had a view of gods that they maintained was correct, and whether they used the word religio to describe their own view or not, I’m not sure right now. Probably they would’ve called it true religion if they used the word. But it’d be interesting to look back at some point and see if there’s an Epicurean reference using the word religio to describe their own viewpoint. I think that when we talk about Philodemus and the work that he did on this, I believe that’s entitled On Piety. So perhaps pietas would be the word that the Epicureans prefer. That’s something to look into.
Joshua: Yeah, I don’t know if the etymology of religio in Latin is well understood. The dictionary gives a few possible derivations under the etymology section, and let me quote: Attested in classical Latin for several centuries BC; perhaps from the unattested word rego to observe or to venerate, which could go back via Proto-Italic *lego to Proto-Indo-European. This word was frequently used by Cicero, who alternatively linked the word with rego — and rego can mean to go over or go through again in reading, speech, or thought, to recite. In other words, it’s something you keep going back to again and again. The passage continues: Afterwards, the word was linked mainly by Christian authors to the word re-ligo, and also to the word ob-ligare — but the scholar De Vaan tentatively suggests a connection to ligare, which of course is where you get those words to tie or to bind. So anyway, there are a lot of different possibilities, and this is not a settled question by any means.
Cassius: And after that sentence which gives that description of those two words, Cicero takes the argument in another direction, which we can spend some significant time on — because here in approximately 45 BC, when this is being written, long before the example of Constantine coming into power and employing religion for purposes of the state, Cicero makes reference to how people assert that the entire notion of immortal gods is a fiction invented by wise men in the interest of the state, so that those whom reason is powerless to control might be led in the path of duty by religion.
Joshua: When I was in college, I went to Italy and Greece on a school trip and we went to Rome. We were in the Roman Forum, and the tour guide told us a story about a spring or marsh that was in that spot, known as the Lacus Curtius — the lake of Curtius. And she told us a story about this lake and how it came to be. The story comes down to us from the Roman historian Livy, and it goes like this. During a period when Rome was endangered by a great chasm that opened up in the Forum, an oracle directed the people to throw into the chasm that which constituted the greatest strength of the Roman people, and doing so would make the Roman nation last forever. After dropping various things into the ravine without result, a young horseman named Marcus Curtius saved the city by realizing that it was virtue that the Romans held most dear. In full armor, on his horse, he jumped into the chasm, whereupon the earth closed over him and Rome was saved. The story, though clearly epic in nature, was likely a copy of another very similar Greek story concerning King Midas.
That has lingered on in my mind as an example of the power of myth and religion over the imagination — taking what Cotta suggests here in the text, that there are those who have asserted that the entire notion of immortal gods is a fiction invented by wise men in the interest of the state, to the end that those whom reason was powerless to control might be led in the path of duty by religion. Stories like the story of Marcus Curtius reinforce precisely those same ideas that you would think Roman magistrates would want to reinforce. You want courage in your soldiers, you want virtue in your people. And so you develop this mythic base — or it develops naturally over time among the people themselves — and it reinforces precisely the kind of behavior you want reinforced.
Now, Cotta seems to be highly disturbed by the idea that the primary purpose of religion is to control people who might otherwise be uncontrollable. But in later Christian thinking, I think it’s clear that this is one of the real benefits of religion. And I’ll quote now from John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration and from Thomas More’s Utopia.
John Locke, in his letter, writes this way — the letter was written in Latin, and I don’t know who translated it, but this is the text:
All the life and power of true religion consists in the inward and full persuasion of the mind. And faith is not faith without believing. Whatever profession we make, to whatever outward worship we conform, if we are not fully satisfied in our own mind that the one is true and the other well-pleasing unto God, such profession and such practice, far from being any furtherance, are indeed great obstacles to our salvation.
And a little further down he says:
No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed. I may grow rich by an art that I take not delight in. I may be cured of some disease by remedies that I have not faith in. But I cannot be saved by a religion that I distrust and by a worship that I abhor.
So in this letter, John Locke is arguing in favor of the British state tolerating religious opinions other than perhaps Anglican orthodoxy. We have to learn to all get along, and one of the ways we have to learn to do that is by accepting that our neighbor may have different views regarding Christian theology. But then he goes on to say:
Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. Besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration. As for other practical opinions, though not absolutely free from all error, if they do not tend to establish domination over others or civil impunity to the church in which they are taught, there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated.
So he’s arguing in favor of greater toleration, but you cannot — you cannot have a functioning society in John Locke’s view — tolerate the spread of atheism. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all, because promises, covenants, and oaths can have no hold upon an atheist.
Thomas More strikes essentially the same point in his Utopia. He says this:
Utopus made a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature as to think that our souls died with our bodies, or that the world was governed by chance without a wise overruling providence. For they all formerly believed that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life, and they now look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul and reckon it no better than a beast. Thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth — since a man of such principles must needs, as often as he dares, despise all their laws and customs. For there is no doubt to be made that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law and apprehends nothing after death will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country either by fraud or force, when by this means he may satisfy his appetites.
So Cotta presents the idea that religion can be used as a form of social control; Cotta presents that as a horrifying idea. And indeed that view itself, in his opinion, destroys religion. But this is not the opinion of all later thinkers. We have two British thinkers here who on other matters are quite diametrically opposed. Thomas More is a dedicated Catholic and John Locke is a philosopher of the liberal Enlightenment — so in other areas they’re quite far apart. But on this, they come together and agree that one of the functions of religion in a healthy society is that it underwrites all promises, covenants, and oaths, and that it prevents crime and immorality and a lack of virtue. And so I think that contrast is interesting. Cotta finds this idea abhorrent, but clearly there are people in later centuries who are fully on board with it. I have to suspect there were people in the ancient world who thought very similarly to how John Locke and Thomas More think on this issue.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, and let me bring this back into the context of where Cotta is going after this as well. This issue of religion being something that manipulators use for the benefit of the state is something we’re all familiar with. And it’s interesting to think about why Cotta is bringing it up here. Cotta obviously is aware of that contingent as well. What he draws from it is an interesting implication that I think probably Velleius would agree with: that advocating the use of religion for purposes of maintaining the state is one of the worst things you could do to undermine confidence in religion. If you have a position that there is a true religion, then people like Constantine — whatever — who go out and overtly use religion in the service of the state are doing a disservice to religion. And that’s the context, I think, in which Cotta is listing these different positions of these other people: starting out with the absolute atheists, then talking about Protagoras, the radical skeptic who says he doesn’t know anything. Now he’s listed those who take a very practical, pragmatic view of religion and essentially say, I don’t care whether it’s right or wrong — it’s useful for maintaining the state, and so therefore we’re going to use it.
Cotta is saying: are not their opinions subversive of all religion? And so then he goes on — lest we get too far into this issue of using religion to support the state — and lists a series of other examples of people whose views of religion undermine religion itself. He lists Prodicus the Cean, saying that everything beneficial to human life should be numbered among the gods — that apparently strikes Cotta as something so ridiculously broad as to drain any meaning out of religion. What about those people who talk about deities as valiant, illustrious, and mighty men who arose to divinity after death? And he lists Euhemerus as an example of that — basically talking about politicians, kings, Caesars, and so forth who claim to become gods by dying, which is a ridiculous notion that undermines any rational view of religion.
And Cotta also says: what about those in Eleusis who, along with the Samothracians, have mysteries and solemnities in secret at night, surrounded by thick groves — who Cotta seems to be saying are ignoring the nature of the things that they’re worshiping instead of going after true knowledge of the gods? And the last in this series, as we begin to get into Section 43, he even mentions Democritus. Cotta says in Section 43:
Even that great man Democritus, from whose fountains Epicurus watered his little garden, seems to me to be very inferior to his usual acuteness when speaking about the nature of the gods. For at one time, he thinks that there are images endowed with divinity inherent in the universality of things; at another, that the principles and minds contained in the universe are gods; then he attributes divinity to animated images, employing themselves in doing us good or harm. And lastly, he speaks of certain images of such vast extent that they encompass the whole outside of the universe — all of which opinions are more worthy of the city of Democritus than of Democritus himself. For who can frame in his mind any ideas of such images? Who can admire them? Who can think they merit a religious adoration?
Okay, I’ll stop reading there — because we probably could devote an entire episode to what we’ve just read about Democritus, given how important he is to Epicurus. But in going through this list of alternative positions and coming back to Democritus, Cotta is saying that all of these positions are destructive of religion. Why should Epicurus not just go ahead and throw the baby out with the bathwater and end religion?
Joshua: Yeah, we’ll get to Democritus. Let me say something first about this other paragraph that you read, because I think this shows a fairly major difference between a polytheist understanding of the gods and a monotheist — particularly an Abrahamic — understanding of the gods, where knowledge of God comes from revelation. You have established orthodoxy: the following things were found in the Bible, they’re true, all you have to do is believe them. That’s a very different view of religion from what you find in the ancient world. And this passage gives a number of examples of the different kinds of belief systems you find all around the Mediterranean.
So you have first the apotheosis theory — that brave or famous or powerful men have been deified after death. You also have, of course, the pharaohs of Egypt who are considered gods in their own right while still alive. And you can see here, by the mention of Euhemerus, that some of the Egyptian myths surrounding their native gods are spreading into the Greek and Roman worlds — because Cotta says that Euhemerus describes the death and burial of certain gods, and that is a key feature of the myth of Osiris in the Egyptian pantheon. And then he talks about the Eleusinian mysteries. So essentially we have a wide expression of religious feeling and religious sentiment. And because Rome was a polytheistic society, it has — much more than the world of John Locke and Thomas More — the power to absorb all of these ideas in a hodgepodge of essentially different beliefs and folk ways and religious systems. And Cotta isn’t necessarily happy with this situation — he’s very critical of these views — but we don’t get the sense that there’s about to be an inquisition to drive the worship of Isis out of Rome, for example, or the worship of Mithras. They were just much better at absorbing different views, partially because their religions were not revealed in the same way that the Abrahamic religions are revealed. So I think that difference between the two societies is interesting and bears on the question.
But then we get to Democritus, and I love the way he describes this. He says: for my own part, I believe that even that very eminent man Democritus, the fountain head from which Epicurus derived the streams that watered his little garden, has no fixed opinion about the nature of the gods. The way he depicts Democritus as a colossus and Epicurus as a figure peeping out from behind one of his toes is very interesting. Now, we don’t have any writings directly from Democritus — we have fragments; he was quoted in several works — so I don’t know how much we’re going to get to the heart of what he really thought about the gods. We’ve seen all through this series the problem with relying on Cicero for an interpretation of Epicurus’s view of the gods. He’s fine when he quotes Epicurus, but when he summarizes and when he expresses a list of things like he does here, I think he’s probably less reliable. But nevertheless, there are features of interest in this, and we can go through those.
So the first thing he says is: at one moment, Democritus holds the view that the universe includes images endowed with divinity — and those images come up twice more. He says again at another that they are animate images which are wont to exercise a beneficent or harmful influence over us, and again that they are certain vast images of such a size as to envelop and enfold the entire world. Now, we did get from Velleius in his section of this text arguing with all of these other philosophers, including arguing against Democritus and his views on the gods. But it’s very clear, I think, from the text here — because of all these mentions of images — that that was a really important component of Democritus’s views of the gods. I don’t know how well Cicero has preserved his views, but the frequent mention of images means this was clearly very important. And it comes into Epicureanism as the eidola — these films shed off by objects that are the foundation of sensation and also, to some extent, of prolepsis. So that’s the main thing about Democritus’s view of the gods: a lot of discussion of images. And then we have a few other things, like he thinks all minds compounded in nature are gods, but most of the discussion here is about images.
Cassius: Which Cotta seems to characterize in the same way he does when Velleius talks about it — as something that makes no sense — things like: who can frame in his mind any idea of such images? Who could admire them? Who can think they merited a religious adoration? Cotta just rejects the idea that images have anything to do with gods at all.
Joshua: There’s one more thing I have to point out in this passage, because I think you were reading from the Yonge translation in the Rackham Loeb edition. There’s a footnote under the section where Cotta says: All of these fancies are more worthy of Democritus’s native city, the city of Abdera, than of himself — for who could form a mental picture of such images, who could adore them and deem them worthy of worship or reverence? And the footnote simply says: Abdera in Thrace had a reputation for stupidity. So he’s saying that Democritus is a really smart guy — even though I, Cotta, think he’s wrong about atoms, even though I think he’s wrong about the gods, I still have a high opinion of him as a philosopher — but when he talks about the gods as images, he sounds like the village idiot from Abdera. I think this is what we should get from what Cotta is saying here. And as you rightly said, Cassius, Epicurus takes up this understanding of images and how it relates to the gods — and Cotta’s opinion of the Epicureans is even worse than his opinion of Democritus on this question.
Cassius: Joshua, thanks for picking up that footnote and reading it. The footnote you’ve just quoted — I see that Rackham has a footnote right before that which might be interesting for us to read, because he seems to be summarizing Democritus’s position. I don’t know how much confidence we can place in Rackham’s summary, but do you mind reading the footnote before that one?
Joshua: I can. Yeah. This is on page 116 of the Rackham Loeb edition:
In the actual teaching of Democritus, these scattered doctrines formed a consistent whole. The basis of the world is particles of divine fire floating in space. Groups of them form deities — vast beings of long life, but not everlasting. Some of the particles floating off from these enter the mind, itself composed of similar particles, and give us knowledge of the gods.
Cassius: That is a very interesting footnote. And if we were confident that’s what Democritus said, that strikes me as very similar in important ways to some of the things we’ve been picking up — especially: vast beings of long life, but not everlasting. Wow. That strikes me as something that, if there is good evidence of it in Democritus, would support DeWitt’s observation that the gods are actually not immortal but imperishable, and that in order to maintain their existence they have to act in order to maintain their existence, rather than being naturally or supernaturally immortal. I think a lot of people have that problem with saying gods are immortal and trying to fit that into Epicurean theology. When they say that something is immortal, that implies to them that this is a supernatural aspect of the gods — and they rightly point out that the gods cannot be supernatural. So they don’t think gods can be immortal, and they say, hey, this doesn’t make sense.
Well, maybe there’s more grounds than we’ve really picked up so far in our discussions for saying that Epicurus didn’t call the gods immortal — that he followed Democritus in saying that they have a long life, but they’re not everlasting. That’s way too strong a conclusion to place on such a slender set of evidence as is included in this footnote, but nevertheless, that’s an interesting aspect of what Rackham is saying about Democritus. And then when he concludes that particles float off from these beings and enter the mind — which is itself composed of similar particles — and that’s how we gain knowledge of the gods: that sure sounds a lot like what Epicurus has said, and what Velleius has previously explained in this work about the nature of the gods coming from prolepsis, coming from images directly received by the mind rather than from direct observation through the five senses. So interesting connections here with Democritus.
Joshua: Yeah, I have to wonder how much of that footnote is constructed from the fragments and the later commentary, and how much of it is reverse-engineered from Epicurus’s own view of the gods — but there are very interesting parallels there.
Cassius: Yes. So this material about Democritus is definitely something we’re going to want to consider when we have our episode — which looks to be in two weeks from today — where we discuss the realist versus idealist division about Epicurus’s views of the gods themselves. Why don’t we begin to bring today’s episode to a conclusion, think about whether we have anything to say in closing, and then we’ll come back next week with the second paragraph of Section 43 and go to the remainder of Book 1. Any closing thoughts today, Joshua?
Joshua: You know what occurs to me, Cassius? There’s a book we don’t often cite and we should cite more often, and that book is Living for Pleasure by Dr. Emily Austin, whom we had the pleasure of interviewing. In the chapter titled “Pandemics and Other Comforting Horrors,” she talks about the plague in Athens and the effect it had on the religious views of the people witnessing this unimaginable horror around them. She writes this way:
The plague impacted the survivors’ religious beliefs chiefly because they recognized that death did not discriminate between the pious and impious. They saw all alike perishing and concluded religious sacrifices and prayers made no difference. Thucydides reports that in the early stages of the plague, the Athenians tried desperately to please the gods with supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth — all such efforts proving fruitless once it became clear that the gods were not in the business of preserving or ending life, or of otherwise intervening in the natural world. Thucydides says they lost their fear of gods. [He] most likely considers these lapses into impropriety regrettable, a breakdown of social norms to be righted once the plague retreats. Lucretius, had he finished his recounting of those events, might very well have turned the assessment on its head. After all, the plague transformed the Athenians into something more closely resembling Epicureans, and Lucretius might recommend they make the change permanent. In fact, if Lucretius had access to Thucydides’ full text, I suspect he intended to add something about the Epicurean lessons Athens learned from the plague.
I think, since we’ve been talking in this episode particularly about the utility of religion in cultivating virtue and fear and piety in a population — what Emily describes here, in the end of Book 6 of Lucretius’s poem, this horror beyond imagining of the plague in Athens, people dying in the streets — is that all of the illusions, all of the stories, all of the legends and myths about the gods just fall apart in the face of bare reality and trauma unlike anything most people have ever personally witnessed. And the direction she goes is in saying that when the people realized that the gods took no care in preserving or even in destroying human life, that they were totally absent from this equation, they started to live for pleasure.
And I think that Emily’s position on that is very unique and very interesting. It’s an excellent reading of Lucretius, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that would be totally abhorrent to Cotta and to Cicero. I told the story about Marcus Curtius riding in full armor on his horse into the chasm in the Roman Forum — a human sacrifice to seal this chasm and ensure that Rome would last forever. But this very human response — the acuity of suddenly realizing we don’t have forever, we don’t have forever to entertain some of these ideas — as you say, Cassius, we have to come down to some kind of firm conclusion. And the firm conclusion that the people suffering from that plague came down to was that gods are not lifting a finger to do anything for us. And so the only thing left to us is to live a life of pleasure in a world of pain.
And I think that even people like us, sitting today rather comfortably, not witnessing horror on the level of a plague decimating a city — those same conclusions have value for us as well. But you have to come down to some kind of firm conclusion. The conclusion is that the gods do not intervene, they do not sustain, they do not preserve, they do not destroy. These things happen naturally. And the lot of humankind in response to that is: you can choose whether you’re going to fall into despair and tear your clothes and gnash your teeth, or you can reframe the question in light of this new information and start living your life in the way that the ancient Epicureans lived their lives. And I think that’s a very refreshing approach to some of these questions.
Cassius: Joshua, I completely agree with that. Emily Austin’s Living for Pleasure contains a lot of great perspectives on Epicurean philosophy, but the one that has struck me from the first time I read the book as one of the most insightful is this suggestion she makes about the way that Book 6 of Lucretius would’ve ended had he revised it. Pointing out that the plague led to a change in the attitudes of the Athenians is the important thing that really appears to be missing at the end of Book 6. It leaves it on such a horrible note that we wonder what could possibly have been in Lucretius’s mind to end on that note. And I think Dr. Austin’s suggestion is brilliant.
And I’d like to go back and cite Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. There is a section 2.53 that gets into this specifically, and it’s worth reading in its entirety. I have this from the Perseus website in front of me now. Section 2.53 says this:
And the great licentiousness, which also in other kinds was used in the city, began at first from this disease. For that which a man before would dissemble and not acknowledge to be done for pleasure, he durst now do freely, seeing before his eyes such quick revolution of the rich dying and men worth nothing inheriting their estates — insomuch they justified a speedy fruition of their goods, even for their pleasure, as men that thought they held their lives but by the day. As for pains, no man was forward in any action of honor to take any, because they thought it was uncertain whether they should die or not before they achieved it. But what any man knew to be delightful and to be profitable to pleasure, that was made both profitable and honorable. Neither the fear of the gods nor laws of men awed any man — not the former, because they concluded it was alike to worship or not worship, from seeing that alike they all perished; nor the latter, because no man expected that his life would last until he received punishment of his crimes by judgment. But they thought that there was now over their heads some far greater judgment decreed against them, before which fell they thought to enjoy some little part of their lives.
Now, that may be a little bit awkwardly worded, and probably could be rewritten into something even more clearly Epicurean than it is. But it clearly shows that what Thucydides recorded happening was that people woke up from this superstitious fear of religion. They realized that gods were not going to come save them or come punish them either. And that there was over their heads some far greater judgment decreed against them — and I would suggest that what he’s referring to there is what Lucretius says: that the problem is not how we’re going to spend our time right now, but how we’re going to spend our time in eternity. And the fact that after we die there is nothing — so what we need to do now is to enjoy some little part of our lives, at the very least, as Thucydides says it here.
So you can easily imagine the possibility that maybe Lucretius did finish Book 6, and that this kind of strong conversion to Epicureanism through seeing the error of false religion was something that somebody might’ve edited out along the way. We don’t know any of that — it’s all speculation — but I think it’s just an absolutely brilliant suggestion by Emily Austin to go back into Thucydides, look at what happened after the plague of Athens, and realize that this is just the ultimate endorsement and persuasive argument in favor of Epicurean philosophy. That once you realize the true nature of the gods, once you realize what happens to you after death — which is nothing — it makes no sense to do anything but go out and pursue pleasure, avoid pain, and implement Epicurean philosophy to make the most of whatever part of your life is available to you.
So I think that’s a great way to close this episode. It was a great way to close Lucretius, and it’s really the heart of where Epicurean philosophy is coming from. And it’s why Cotta started out the material we had today saying that he fails to see any excellence in the Epicurean gods — it’s because these people who are devoted to virtue above all, who think that the mind and their idealism is worth everything, they totally reject the idea that the real heart of life, whether it be for a human being or for a god, is the experience of pleasure and the pursuit of it in an intelligent way. So Cotta cannot appreciate why this makes the Epicurean gods excellent, but from an Epicurean point of view, I think it makes total perfect sense. Okay, let’s close there for today. As always, please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about today’s episode. Thanks for your time again today. We’ll be back with you next week. See you then. Bye.