Episode 255 - Episode 255 \u2013 Cicero's OTNOTG 30 \u2013 Cotta Argues That Epicurean Gods\
Date: 11/13/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4141-episode-255-cotta-argues-that-epicurean-gods-are-as-despicable-as-are-epicureans/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 255 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucious who wrote on the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the epicurean texts and we discuss how epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com. Today we’re bringing our main discussion of Book one of Cicero’s Own the Nature of the Gods To a conclusion next week we’ll have one more episode on this topic of the gods and we’ll have our fellow podcaster Don come back with us and we’ll have a discussion of the differing interpretations of whether Epicurus thought that the gods were really real or whether he thought they were mental constructs useful for idealistic purposes or some combination or perhaps none of the above. That topic is something that can sometimes overwhelm the entire rest of the discussion of epicurean gods. And one of the things we’ve been trying to do by going through Book one is to get into the details that are not so often discussed and see if there are other important aspects of the issue of Gods that can be brought out into the open and found to be useful For those who are interested in studying Epicurus, rather than just hinge everything on whether Gods are real or not, it’s obvious that Epicurus had a significant role for the concept of Gods for the attitude toward Gods to play in his philosophy. And as we’re coming to the end of this book, I think we’re going to see that brought out again today. Last week we closed out talking a little bit about Democrat and how Democrat ideas of images seemed to have played a significant role in the Epicurus own view of the gods, but the argument that Cicero was bringing out is going to take us through the end of the book. So let me remind us of that argument which Cicero stated as follows, but Epicurus, when he divest the gods of the power of doing good extras all religion from the minds of men. For though he says the divine nature is the best and the most excellent of all natures, he will not allow it to be susceptible of any benevolence by which he destroys the chief and peculiar attribute of the most perfect being for what is better and more excellent than goodness and beneficence to refuse your gods that quality is to say that no man is the object of their favor and no Gods either that they neither love nor esteem anyone in short, that they not only give themselves no trouble about us, but even look on each other with the greatest indifference. Now, we did not spend much time with that last week, so let’s talk about that for just a minute. I do think that if this episode is going to have a theme, it’s going to be that we need to look beyond the specific objections about what an epicurean God would be and realize that the basic ground in which Cicero is attacking the epicurean gods is very similar and may in fact be identical to the grounds on which he’s attacking Epicurean philosophy as a whole. We recall from on ends that there was a lengthy attack on Epicurus position on friendship, and this paragraph that I just read is basically transferring that criticism of the epicurean view of friendship to the epicurean gods themselves, Cicero and the academic skeptics, the Platonist, all these opponents of Epicurus argued that epicurean philosophy destroys the very basis of friendship that if you’re always looking for something in return and getting something out of having a friend, then you’re never going to have a true friend in their point of view. Quata rejected that argument and said that in fact the epicurean focus on happiness and pleasure is the greatest foundation of friendship that could possibly exist, that otherwise if you don’t get something out of friendship, if you don’t continue to pursue pleasure and find it in your friends, there’s no reason to pursue friendship in the first place. A similar argument seems to be going on here. ADA’s alleging that the chief and peculiar attribute of the most perfect being would be benevolence, and he says it in this way, what is better and more excellent than goodness and beneficence seems to me that that’s sort of an echo of the anti epicurean argument, that there is some abstract good floating in the air. There’s some abstract beneficence that is essentially virtue that is a goal in and of itself, goodness, beneficence, virtue or their own reward, and you should not seek or ask for pleasure from it saying that because epicureans don’t look to abstract goodness and beneficence as a reason for calling the gods excellent, there’s no reason to call them excellent, there’s no reason to look up to them because Gods are essentially self-interested and not to be admired just as they consider epicureans in general to be. And as we proceed today, the remainder of this argument from Kada is basically it seems to me an extension of that premise that the epicurean gods, just like epicureans themselves, are essentially unworthy, ignoble despicable in a sense because they are pursuing pleasure or happiness as opposed to being virtuous.
Joshua: I was reading a book recently on the kings and queens of medieval England and the author David Mitchell, who’s a British comedian, ended the book with a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard II about the death of kings and some of what I’m about to read, particularly at the end I think bears on the question. Richard II in a monologue says this, for God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings, how some have been deposed to some slain in war, some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed, all murdered for within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king keeps death his court and there the antic death as a fool or a clown, sits scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, allowing him a breath, a little scene to monarchies be feared and kill with looks, infusing him with self and vain conceit as if this flesh, which walls about our life were brass, impregnable, and humor. Thus comes at the last and with a little pin bores through his castle wall and farewell king, cover your heads and mock knot flesh and blood with solemn reverence, throw away respect, tradition, form, and ceremonious duty for you have but mistook me all this while I live with bread like you feel, want, taste, grief, need friends subjected. Thus, how can you say to me, I am a king Richard ii feeling very despondent there contemplating his own mortality, I think touches on some of the themes and some of the criticisms that Cicero makes about the epicurean gods, but it touches on it in kind of an opposite way to the way that Cicero describes these things, right? So Richard II ends by saying, cover your heads mock not flesh and blood you have but mistook me all this while I live with bread like you feel, want, taste, grief, need friends subjected? Thus, how can you say to me, I am a king? But what Cicero is saying here is how can you say that the gods are gods or why would you reverence them as gods if they don’t need friends, if they don’t taste grief, if they don’t feel desire or if they don’t have favor? And as you rightly say, Cassius, this is a criticism that Cicero applies not just to the epicurean view of Gods, but to epicurean philosophy more broadly, to talk about things in terms of pleasure and pain and to say of the gods that they live in the pursuit of pleasure and yet don’t have any native friends and don’t display any favor towards human beings. There’s no benevolence there. Why do you call them Gods? Now the comparison is not a perfect one, but I do think that some of what is happening here in the monologue and Richard II bears on the question because he ends it with those words, how can you say to me, I am a king? What Cicero is saying is how can you epicurus say of these beings that you are describing that they are gods?
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I think that’s very helpful to get at some of the issues here because again, we have to be careful about accepting Katas Cicero’s characterization of the epicurean gods we know from Philas and other epicurean sources that the epicureans help that the gods spoke a language like Greek. Now if they’re speaking a language like Greek, they’re presumably speaking it to someone besides themselves, so presumably they’re speaking it with each other. In other words, I don’t think we should agree with ADA’s contention that the Gods don’t have friends among their own kind. When Ada says that Gods should be beneficent towards men, that’s akin to saying that humans should be beneficent towards ants or microbes or something else that don’t even come to their attention. But that does not mean that just as men have friends among themselves, the gods don’t have friends among their own kind.
Joshua: Cassius, I think that’s exactly right. If you go to principle doctrines 27 and 28 where Epicurus talks about friendship, he says this in 27, he says, of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends and in 28, the same conviction which inspires confidence that nothing we have to fear is eternal or even of long duration also enables us to see that even in our limited conditions of life, nothing enhances our security so much as friendship. And if we look to the Vatican Sans, we find a very similar discussion here in Vatican San 52, friendship dances around the world bidding us all to awaken to the recognition of happiness. And Vatican saying 78, the noble man is chiefly concerned with wisdom and friendship. Of these, the former wisdom is a mortal good, the latter friendship and immortal one and so to say of the gods that they do not enjoy friendship I think would be hugely mistaken. They personify in many ways the pursuit of pleasure. And Epicurus says repeatedly, the surest means to happiness is the acquisition of friends. So you are right to caution that ADA’s description of the epicurean gods is very misleading in a number of ways, and this affects of course his criticisms of the epicurean gods. If you don’t understand them correctly, you have no ground from which to criticize them. And so many of his criticisms fall flat and we saw the same thing with Cicero’s understanding or misunderstanding as I would say, of justice on ends. In book two, when he’s responding to torti, he gives an explanation of the epicurean view of justice that is wholly at odds with what the surviving texts tell us about what epicure is thought of Justice
Cassius: Joshua. That’s a reminder of this most important aspect of everything we read here in on the nature of the gods. Cicero is unalterably against the epicurean philosophy. You use the word misunderstanding. You could also use the word misrepresentation because Cicero is well aware of what todos in own ends has previously said about Epicurean philosophy. You quoted some of it before, but as a reminder, section 20 of book one tota says one topic remains, which is of prime importance that relating to friendship which you declare will cease to exist if pleasure be the supreme good. Yet Epicurus makes this declaration that of all the age to happiness procured for us by reason none is greater than friendship. None more fruitful, none more delightful, which Tous winds up by saying in section 70 about the epicurean perspectives on friendship, that from all these different views we may conclude that not only are the principles of friendship left unconstrained, if the supreme good be made to reside in pleasure, but that without this view it is entirely impossible to discover a basis for friendship. So we have this continual back and forth about whether it makes sense to set everything up, whether you be a man or you be a God on the basis of pleasure and Cicero is just not going to accept it. He’s not going to even acknowledge that there’s any force in the argument. He’s going to put out his own representation of Epicurean philosophy and hope that his words are the last ones people here and that those words will stick in terms of this chapter. Let’s go ahead and let me read quickly the final section of book one, how much more reasonable is the doctrine of the stoics whom you censor? It is one of their maxims that the wise are friends to the wise, though unknown to each other for as nothing is more amiable than virtue. He who possesses it is worthy our love to whatever country he belongs. But what evils do your principles bring when you make good actions and benevolence, the marks of iil for not to mention the power and nature of the gods, you hold that even men, if they had no need of mutual assistance, would neither be courteous nor beneficent is there no natural charity in the disposition of good men. The very name of love from which friendship is derived is dear to men. And if friendship is to center in our own advantage only without regard to him whom we esteem a friend, it cannot be called friendship, but a sort of traffic for our own profit. Pastures, lands and herds of cattle are valued in the same manner on account of the prophet we gather from them. But charity and friendship expect no return. How much more reason have we to think that the gods who want nothing should love each other and employ themselves about us? If it were not so why should we pray to them or adore them? Why do the priests preside over the altars and the augers over the auspices? What if we’d ask the gods and why do we prefer our vows to them? But Epicurus you say has written a book concerning sanctity, a trifling performance by a man whose wit is not so remarkable in it as the unrestrained license of writing which he has permitted himself for. What sanctity can there be if the gods take no care of human affairs or how can that nature be called animated, which neither regards nor performs anything. Therefore, our friend Pius has well observed in his fifth book on the nature of the Gods that Epicurus believed there were no gods and that what he said about the immortal gods was only said from a desire to avoid unpopularity. He could not be so weak as to imagine that the deity has only the outward features of a simple mortal without any real solidity, that he has the members of a man without the least powers to use them, a certain unsubstantial, pellucid being neither favorable nor beneficial to anyone, neither regarding nor doing anything. There could be no such being in nature. And as Epicurus said this plainly, he allows the gods in words and destroys them in fact. And if the deity is truly such a being that he shows no favor, no benevolence to mankind away with him for why should I entreat him to be propitious, he can be propitious to none since, as you say, all his favor and benevolence are the effects of iil and that’s the close of book one on the nature of the gods. And I do think Cicero has saved what he thinks is his most compelling argument for the end because after all of this discussion about whether the gods have bodies, whether they have livers, whether they have friends, whether they like pleasure, what the gods are doing with their time, all of those things that are sort of technical criticisms of the logical consistency of the epicurean view of the gods give way to this condemnation, that the epicurean gods are despicable, basically just like an epicurean himself is who concerns himself only with his own welfare and who could care less about any beings around them and who could care less about having any friends. Cicero says, why should I care about such a being away with him? Cicero says, if that’s the way he is and his closing line, he can be propitious to none since, as you say, all his favor and benevolence are the effects of iil. While yang uses the word iil, this is the way Rackham concludes book one, he says quote in the first place of being of this nature is an absolute impossibility and Epicurus was aware of this and so actually abolishes the gods though professionally retaining them. Secondly, if a God exists yet it is of such a nature that he feels no benevolence or affection towards men, goodbye to him. Say, aye, not God. Be gracious to me. Why should I say that? For He cannot be gracious to anybody since as you tell us all benevolence and affection is a mark of weakness, that’s probably more clear than the way Y has it. Iil sounds a little bit unusual, but weakness is basically what we understand the criticism to be and harks back to the way Epicurus has said it himself in the way principle doctrine number one is translated when epicure says that the blessed and incorruptible nature knows no trouble nor causes any trouble so that it’s never constrained by anger or favor because all such things exist only in the weak. So sit through is picking up on that and saying that well, all of your epicure and philosophy about why you want to have a friend is because of weakness and that if you weren’t weak you would not want any friends. And I think what we have here is another illustration of how Cicero is using his lawyer skills to make an argument seem ridiculous and seem to undermine itself when in reality he’s taking something out of context and attempting to apply it to another context where it does not apply. Epicurus is saying that a God has no weakness, that God is in fact continuously happy because of the way, as we’ve discussed before, we define a God as blessed and incorruptible. That means that a God is not needing anything other than to sustain its own happiness. It’s not lacking anything that it needs to go out and find and worry about not being able to find. That’s a situation that applies to the gods, but human beings are not Gods in that definition. And Epicurus, as we’ve just said earlier in this podcast over and over says that friendship and the relationships that we have with other people that bring us pleasure is in fact for human beings. One of the most important things that the wise man is going to do for himself to obtain a life of happiness that in fact you’re not going to be able to live a life of happiness as a human being unless you do have friends. Those positions do not conflict with each other because humans are not god’s under this epicurean definition. And when Epicurus talks about living as a God among men, he’s not saying that you are in fact a God as he has defined it. In principle doctrine number one, he’s saying that you can supply yourself with the happiness of a God but in a different way than a God does it. And one of the most important ways you’d supply yourself with happiness as a human being is through friendship and through these relationships and through these other activities that you have to engage in life in order to obtain the life of happiness. Gods are a different story and the criteria that we apply to a happy life as a man is not going to be identical to the life of a God, the particular way that a human being achieves happiness is going to be different from the way a God achieves happiness. But in the end, from a logical abstract point of view, the goal for both is a life of happiness. When Epicurus talks repeatedly about a life of pleasure as a life of happiness, Epicurus does not tell us which pleasures in life to pursue. He does not give us a list of 10 or a hundred or a thousand commandments telling every individual exactly what to do at every moment of their lives. People find different things pleasurable, they have different interests, and there’s no inconsistency in saying that all humans pursue pleasure and also to observe that they pursue pleasure in different ways. As I said, Cicero is attempting to take this argument that Gods would be weak if they needed anything and apply it to human beings and go back and forth and say this is inconsistent when it’s not inconsistent. When you look at the big picture and realize that a life of happiness and pleasure is the same for both gods and men, but is attained in very different ways.
Joshua: I think that’s a very good point. So Kata says here in the first paragraph of section 44 for you, Epicurus hold that even men if they had no need of mutual assistance would be neither courteous nor beneficent is there no natural charity in the dispositions of good men? The very name of love from which friendship is derived is dear to men. And if friendship is to center in our own advantage only without regard to him whom we esteem a friend, it cannot be called friendship but a sort of traffic for our own profit. I know Cassius, that you’re going to want to get into Vo Wanda and some of what he has to say, particularly on this idea of friendship and what Kada calls courtesy and beneficence. But if we go once again to the principle doctrines, it’s infuriating that the piso needed to send Cicero a pamphlet. I think because almost every objection could be met just by reading the principle doctrines in Principle doctrine 39, Epicurus writes this, he who best knew how to meet fear of external foes made into one family, all the creatures he could and those he could not. He at any rate did not treat as aliens and where he found even this impossible, he avoided all association and so far as was useful kept them at a distance. And principle doctrine 40, the last one on the list, those who were best able to provide themselves with means of security against their neighbors being thus in possession of the surest guarantee passed the most agreeable life in each other’s society. And their enjoyment of the fullest intimacy was such that if one of them died before his time, the survivors did not mourn his death as if it called for sympathy. And then perhaps the most galling thing from Cicero is the claim that for Epicurus friendship solely exists in advantage without any regard to him whom we esteem a friend and that this cannot be called friendship but a sort of traffic for our own prophet. This totally ignores Vatican saying 56 and 57 where Epicurus says The wise man feels no more pain when being tortured himself than when his friend is tortured and will die for him for if he betrays his friend, his whole life will be confounded by distrust and completely upset. So Epicurus view of friendship far from being transactional in precisely the way that CA’s view of the gods is transactional is so selfless that he says that a friend feels no more pain when being tortured himself than when his friend is tortured and will die for him. I think that’s perhaps the most gall of the many, many lies that Kada is spreading here at the end of Book one. But there are many like them. Kada goes on to say, how much more reason have we to think that the gods who want nothing should love each other and employ themselves about us? If it were not so why should we pray to or adore them? Why do the priests preside over the altars and the augers over the auspices? What if we to ask of the gods and why do we offer our vows to them? And I think the response to this, and it comes from the passage in book five, when Lucretius is discussing piety, pietas is the Latin word. He says this, oh, humankind unhappy when it described 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 under 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 do altars with profuse blood of four foot beasts nor vows with vows to link, but rather this to look on all things with a master eye and a mind at peace. And so it’s a somewhat complicated response. What he’s saying is caught up the things that you’re describing as if they are most important concerning the gods. Things like prayer and adoration, things like priests presiding over altars, the augers performing the auspices, linking vows with vows. Lucretius would say those are actually the veneer that people apply to religion, but actually the piety does not consist in performing any of those. Piety consists in looking on all things with a master eye and a mind at peace. And so there will be no need for priests like kada to preside over the altars. There will be no need to read the entrails of sacrificed animals. There will be no need of augers to perform auspices and there is no need to worship the gods or to demand anything from them. And so I think here as elsewhere to a large extent Cassius ADA’s objections are born out of a misunderstanding of epicurean philosophy and of epicurus and lucius’s view of the gods.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I think there’s an awful lot going on in Cicero’s mind here, and I do think that misunderstanding is a word that describes part of it. I’m going to go back to what I said before though and say that I think that intentional misrepresentation is also something that’s going on here because you can see as Cicero gets to the end here, he started out this section by saying, how much more reasonable is the doctrine of the stoics whom you sense? And it is one of their maxims that the wise are friends to the wise that one known to each other for as nothing is more amiable than virtue. He who possesses it is worthy of our love to whatever country he belongs. He’s bringing his closing argument here back to this question of the glory of virtue, and it reminds me of how Quata says in own ends that those who praise virtue to the skies our beguiled by the glamor of a name, it’s almost as if Cicero is invoking the image ofthe that he’s discussed earlier about how ridiculous and revolting it would be to picture a painting in which the virtues were the handmaidens of pleasure and serving pleasure. He’s going back to this emotional argument that virtue is the most important thing in the world, that we must therefore associate the gods with virtue as the most important thing in the world. And as you cannot have virtue without rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies, then this God of epicurus has nothing to do with virtue and he’s revolting to even think about and to add insult to injury, not only have you overthrown the gods in human affairs, but you’re doing it because you’re a coward. You’re doing it to avoid unpopularity and not because you really believe that this is true, despite the fact Valle has been very plain to him. Cicero says that there can be no such being in nature. An epicurus has said this plainly. Well, that’s because Cicero continues to reject the whole epicurean theory of atom and how various beings can be composed of different types of atoms and that the gods in the epicurean system are constructed in a different way than human beings are live in a different place than human beings do live and are able to sustain their happiness in a different way than human beings are. I think I really want to hit that again, that the gods live in a different way in the epicurean structure, in a different place, in a different environment than we do here on earth. And there is therefore going to be a comparison between the life of gods and the life of men, mainly in terms of the goal of both. Mainly in terms of the way we understand the goal, the way we explain the goal, the words we use to describe what their goal is. The God’s goal of happiness is attained by them in a totally different way than we attain a life of happiness here on earth. There are analogies when we think in terms of abstractions, when we think in terms of the goal being pleasure, the goal being happiness, there are going to be ways in which you must act to sustain your happiness and your pleasure, but the particular ways in which you do act to sustain it are going to be as different between men and gods as it is different between the many different types of men, between fishermen versus shepherds versus farmers versus hunters. Everybody sustains their happiness in a different way here on earth, but their goal can be said to be the same thing, happiness, pleasure, no matter how you go about attaining him. Cicero is trying to say that if the gods don’t live like we do, if they don’t live like a shepherd or a fisherman or a farmer, if they don’t have concrete bodies and have to go out and work with each other face the problems of nature that we face here on earth, then they can’t really exist. Well, that’s just again, a slide of hand lawyer-like argument to appeal to our emotions about what we are familiar with and how we live our lives and attempt to transfer that over to the gods and say that they can’t really be real because they don’t fish, they don’t hunt, they don’t farm, which all comes back down if we consider the very last thing that Cicero says here to be what he might consider to be his final words to the jury. In this book. One, he’s coming back again to this question of weakness. Yong uses the word il, but I really like the way Rackham is focused on weakness here because the last words out of ADA’s mouth are that all benevolence and affection in your view, Epicureans is a mark of weakness. Now again, you cannot accept ADA’s description of epicurean philosophy here or else you’re going to turn yourself on your head and you’ve given up the fight by agreeing with his premises. All benevolence and affection are not a mark of weakness for mankind. Rewarding friends and punishing enemies would be a sign of weakness to Gods, but they’re not a sign of weakness to men who have to engage in those activities in order to live Happily. Epicurus over and over and over says that friendship is the way that men are going to sustain their happiness. There’s no way Cicero did not understand that that was the epicurean position and that Epicurus did not consider those actions of mankind to be weakness, but the way in which you obtain a happy life and so far from agreeing with ADA’s criticisms and accepting ADA’s premises about the way Epicurus viewed the gods, I think we can, again, as you referenced earlier, Joshua, go back toes of oanda and see repeatedly over and over in fragment 20 that dogen of oanda does not admit for a second that the epicurean view of gods is a negative thing or detracts from the human experience or is something to be justified because we don’t like it. Dogen needs of lander takes the position over and over, for example. So with regard to righteousness, neither does our doctrine do harm nor does the opposite doctrine help that not only is our doctrine helpful, but the opposite doctrine is harmful, is shown by the stoics as they go astray. And he goes on to explain how the stoic position of gods as being the makers and creators of the world leads to all sorts of problems and unhappiness in human beings. The bottom line being that kata is turning the epicurean argument on its head and trying to take what the epicureans considered to be one of the strengths of their doctrine and portraying it as if it’s a weakness. And it comes back to what Epicure said in section 1 24 of his letter to menaces where he says, for men being accustomed always to their own virtues, welcome those like themselves, but regard all that is not of their nature as alien, which is what he has just said after he’s talked about how the gods are not such as the many believe them to be. For indeed, they do not consistently represent them as they believe them to be. And the impious man is not he who popularly denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods. The beliefs of the many as we’ve said before, Epicurus position is that your god’s kata, your gods who are getting involved in the affairs of men, determining the results of wars, prompting people to do all sorts of crazy things, are not only wrong, but they’re impious, they’re just ridiculous. Yours is the construction of gods that is ridiculous, not ours, and it is not proper to transfer our understanding of virtue to the gods because virtues are a tool towards the goal. It makes sense to transfer our understanding of the goal, which is a life of happiness to the gods, but it does not make sense to transfer to the gods the way we achieve happy lives. The gods are not going to be farmers, hunters, fishermen, and the light just as we always have to explain when we talk about how the goal of life, the guide of life is pleasure in epicurean terms, that does not mean that the goal of life for every person is to eat ice cream all day. It does not mean that they are to pursue sex, drugs, and rock and roll or any particular set of pleasures. Pleasure as a category includes all these particulars, but it’s not the same as any particular. It is proper to see God’s as embodying happiness, as embodying pleasure in the widest sense of that term. But that does not mean that a God is a particular type of pleasure. The Greeks may have seen each activity of human life in terms of the God of farming or the God of war or the God of love and so forth. They may have personified each of these activities as having their own gods, as being gods in themselves. But Epicurus is bringing all of that misconception back to a more logical understanding that a true God is not going to be doing these individual activities that the Greeks have saddled their own gods with. So as I summarize the point I’ve just been making, I see that Rackham translates one of these sentences we’ve been reading as quote apart altogether from the nature and attributes of deity. Do you think that even human beneficence and benignity are solely due to human infirmity? Is there no natural affection between the good? You’ve got this basic fundamental divide and our attitude towards what is good and whether it’s a platonic ideal, something that we can encapsulate in the words good and virtue or whether those words in the end have no meaning unless we can refer them back to something solid, something like pleasure and pain, which nature gives to us ourselves rather than as something we have to construct in our own minds. So with that, we’re coming to the end of today’s episode and the end of book one. As I said earlier, next week we’ll come back with a discussion that deals specifically with what POed Donius is alleging here, that epicures really didn’t believe in the gods at all. He just came up with it as a mental construct in order to avoid unpopularity, but we’ll save that part to next week. In the meantime, any closing thoughts on today’s material? Joshua?
Joshua: There’s a letter from Gusta Lobert that I sometimes hear quoted and what he says is this, just when the Gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius when man stood alone, nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur. The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderates, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that black hole is infinity itself. Their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony, no crying out, no convulsions, nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze. Now, while I share his interest in that historical period, I think what we’re finding in Cicero is that certainly as it concerns him, this is not the case. Cicero, through his speaker Kada, has been absolutely disgusted by what he thinks to be epic’s view of the gods. What we’re going to get into next week with our friend Don, is the longstanding discussion between the realist and the idealist positions regarding the epicurean gods and whether mankind stands alone in that sense. And so I am very much looking forward to that conversation. I have to say, my final thought on Cicero’s book here is I’m very disappointed with the way he said he’s chosen to end it. I think you were right earlier to say, Cassius, that what we’ve been dealing with today is his final. I mean, this is his final address to the jury as it were, and he might think it’s his strongest argument, but it’s so deeply misrepresents what epicure actually had to say about the gods, about friendship, about pleasure, about happiness, about all of the most central and important things in our lives. And for that reason, I would find it very difficult to recommend this particularly ADA’s response. I would find it very difficult to recommend as a good text to read to understand Epicurean philosophy. I think on ends, which we’ve already done c R’s response, there was misrepresentation, but I think it was a better response and didn’t quite so often, stoop as low as kata has been willing to stoop in his criticism of epicurean philosophy. But I’m looking forward to next week.
Cassius: Yes, we’re going to bring all this to a conclusion next week with Don. We’re not going to be reading book two at this point because we’re trying to focus our attention, as you were saying, on those parts of the texts that are most helpful to us in understanding the epicurean position. I completely agree with what you just said, that flatly reading through Book one would not be the best use of a new student of Epicurus time because there is so much in it that you have to have a grounding in where Epicurus is really coming from before you can see through Cicero’s arguments against it. You can take I think the quata section of own ends. You can take the Valle section on the nature of the Gods and read those and get a lot out of it. But if you continue on into reading Cicero’s responses to it, it’s going to take some experience and comfort with the Epicurean position before you can really see what Cicero’s doing, because he’s so frequently taking things out of context, misrepresenting them as to what the epicurean position really is, that you’re unavoidably left. Having to sift through it yourself to decide what you believe and what you don’t believe, which is unfortunately true with a lot of Epicurean philosophy, just even reading the principal doctrines of the letter to Mia, so the letter to ISTs and so forth. Until you get a grounding on the big picture, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with some of these details and not realize why different things are being talked about. But once you do get the big picture, I do think these things come into focus and you begin to understand that Cicero’s attacking epicurean philosophy, epicure views of the gods, and on virtue and lots of other topics because he simply disagrees with them. He is not an objective observer who is weighing the evidence and fairly determining which is most persuasive. Cicero has an agenda and it is to put Epicurean philosophy in an unattractive light, and unfortunately he’s very good at doing that. He was very successful at doing that, and many of the positions that Cicero is arguing are the accepted majority position about Epicurean philosophy today. These positions probably did not originate with Cicero because Epicurus opponents had been arguing them ever since Epicurus time, apparently, where the letter to Menaces says that people are misrepresenting what he’s saying about pleasure, but Cicero is the one who’s preserved these arguments for us in probably their most complete form, and we have to go through them in order to understand where he is coming from and see what the correct responses really would be from an Epicurean position. We’ll come back and do that next week. In the meantime, drop by the form and let’s know if you have any questions or comments about this or our other episodes on Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.