Episode 238: Velleius Erupts Against Stoic Fate And Supernatural God-Making

Episode 238 - 07/24/24 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 13 - Velleius Erupts Against Stoic Fate and Supernatural God-Making

Transcript of Episode 238. Note: The following transcription was prepared with speech to text software, and has been only lightly edited for accuracy. This file has been prepared primarily as an aid in searching for material in the audio episode. This transcript likely contains errors, and should not be relied on for anything other than searching for discussions relevant to particular topics. Please consult the original audio episode for accurate information. If you come across egregious errors in the transcript below, please let us know in the Epicureanfriends.com forum!

Welcome to episode 238 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week, we walk you through the Epicurean texts and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we have a thread to discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

Today, we're continuing in Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods. We are at the very end of section 19 and the beginning of section 20, depending on which edition of the text you're reading. If you're following along in the Yonge edition, we're on page 19; if you're in the Rackham edition, we're on page 51.

Before we go further, I'd like to take just a second to revisit something we discussed last week in terms of isonomia. We compared the Yonge translation to the Rackham translation of a particular sentence that I'd like to emphasize. Rackham translated section 19 this way: he said, "Moreover, there is the supremely potent principle of infinity which claims the closest and most careful study. We must understand that it has the following property, that in the sum of things everything has its exact match and counterpart."

That last phrase is the issue I wanted to point out, as we've been discussing it since last week. Rackham's choice of "exact match and counterpart" is some interpretation on his part, and since it seems very strange to us what is being said, it's natural to place a lot of weight on his choice of words. The caution we should remember is that it's always dangerous to put too much weight on a particular translation and a particular set of words without considering the general context of the philosophy. Yonge had translated that section as saying, "Surely the mighty power of the infinite being is most worthy of our great and earnest contemplation, the nature of which we must necessarily understand to be such that everything in it is made to correspond completely to some other answering part." That's the equivalent of Rackham saying everything has its exact match and counterpart.

In this case, we might conclude that Yonge's translation might be a little better because when Yonge refers to "corresponding completely to some other answering part," the Latin of that phrase is ut omnia omnibus paribus paria respondeant, with the operative verb form being respondeant. Yonge has rendered that into "answering" as opposed to "responding," but that might be a better way of looking at it than having an "exact match and counterpart." At the very least, the interpretation that everything has an exact match and counterpart is one of the issues involved in this question, and you wouldn't want to presume the answer to that question—about whether there are an infinite number of Epicuruses in the universe—you wouldn't want to presume the answer "yes" or "no" based on one single translation of this word by Mr. Rackham as opposed to by Mr. Yonge.

I know in thinking about this issue, Joshua suggested last week that there are, in fact, an infinite number of Epicuruses under this theory, and I said I wasn't sure about it, but the more I think about it, the more I tend to agree with that point—that it's not just a matter of an infinite number of individuals within a class, but it's more likely that if you have a single thing in existence, the same processes that have brought that single thing into existence will be duplicated an infinite number of times. The mathematical expression of infinity times one is infinity is likely to be the way that Epicurus might have taken that thought process.

Joshua, any thoughts on that?

Well, I think you're exactly right. I don't remember if we discussed this last week, but if you take, for example, a number like pi that has an infinite number of digits behind the decimal point, every possible string of digits will occur in that string of digits behind the decimal point. And it's not just that it will occur—every possible string of digits will occur an infinite number of times.

There's a line in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that I mentioned the other day. We were talking about this, and it does kind of call to mind what we're dealing with here. This is Benvolio speaking, and he is describing to Romeo's parents a skirmish between the Capulets and the Montagues. Benvolio says:

"While we were interchanging thrusts and blows
Came more and more and fought on part and part."

The idea there being, in almost as few words as Shakespeare could put it, that for every Montague that came, there was a corresponding Capulet that came along, and they fought each other. That's the image that this phrasing puts into my head.

When you look at the Latin in Cicero, ut omnia omnibus paribus paria, it's written in the style of a chiasmus, which is an ABBA style that ancient texts are well known for. Our conversation over the last few days has been about what exactly this means in terms of the cosmos that we live in—the universe that we live in. One of the ideas was that for every mortal, there is an immortal; that's kind of the stated implication here.

But you can push it even further than that, keeping in mind what I said about the infinite variety of strings of digits behind the decimal point in the number of pi. If the universe is truly infinite and eternal, and the atoms that make up the universe are infinite in number, we have a situation in nature sort of like the situation we have in the number pi. The example I used was, if you were to take the axis of the Milky Way galaxy and project that out into space another 50 billion galaxies away, you might find a galaxy that was an awful lot like ours, not just in structure but in history. That's the interesting thing about this: in this universe, there would be an infinite number not just of each of us, but each of them would have the same history that we've had, just because that's the nature of infinity. There would also be an infinite number of variations on an infinite number of other versions of us. Some of them would have gotten exactly as far as we are with the same history; some of them will have wildly diverged. That's just the nature of infinity.

It's one of these things that's strange to talk about, and I don't know to what extent the ancient Epicureans were thinking about things like this. But as you've been guiding us all recently, Cassius, Epicurus does want us to think about this stuff.

Yes, agreed. One of the interesting things that Don contributed in the forum over the last week was to point out just how many times Epicurus uses a form of this word, talking about limits or without limits, or finite or infinite. There clearly are lots of implications of this concept of there not being an end to something that bleed over into probably the ethics as well. We all know Principal Doctrine number three: the limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful. It certainly seems like Epicurus is looking to explore the implications of things having limits versus not having limits, and that's going to apply not only to the infinite void and the infinite number of atoms but also to limits involving pleasures and pain and so forth.

It's not just a mathematical issue that has no relationship to the rest of the philosophy. Epicurus is seeing this as a question that has to be explored to make sense of the philosophy and the way we should live, so as to make sense of everything. Now, for the sake of moving forward in The Nature of the Gods, we're going to begin to move forward from here, but this is a continuing issue. Once you start looking for this, you realize that it shows up everywhere, doesn't it?

I've noticed it twice yesterday in the hymn to Venus that this issue of eternality shows up in that unlikely place. So we've maybe been sleeping on this a little bit, but it's there to be talked about, not just in this text by Cicero, but all across the surviving texts.

Yeah, and now that you said that, I have to add this: I keep rolling over in my mind the issue of people who get mesmerized by religion and then fall back on supernatural explanations. It seems like they get obsessed with this idea of an all-powerful God, or they get obsessed with "I can't imagine that things were not created," because there's this primordial sort of depth to these issues that are, in a sense, attractive to think about and call you to think about them. I can't help but wonder if Epicurus saw in this principle of infinity sort of an offsetting fascination—that in focusing on something that is entirely natural, like the idea that everything is without bound in all directions, you've got a corresponding direction for your thought that is entirely natural and provides potentially an antidote to being mesmerized by looking for something supernatural. There's no reason to go looking for something that is supernatural when you've got the awesome implications of infinity that are natural to think about. It strikes me as something that has at least the same power of fascination as does the idea of a supernatural God.

Speaking of the ideas of the gods and so forth, let's move on. At the very end of section 19 here, I'll read the Yang translation as we go forward:

"Your sect, Balbus, frequently asks us how the gods live and how they pass their time. Their life is the most happy and the most abounding with all kinds of blessings which can be conceived."

And here's a sentence that I'm going to have to talk about: "They do nothing. They are embarrassed with no business, nor do they perform any work. They rejoice in the possession of their own wisdom and virtue. They are satisfied that they shall ever enjoy the fullness of eternal pleasures."

Now before we go further, let's talk about that. One of the ongoing challenges to Epicurean philosophy and the implications of the word "pleasure" and how you spend your time in life is this question of being active versus inactive. When I see Yang translate something as "they do nothing," I see red meat for those people who are going to want to argue that if the gods don't do anything, why should I? If the gods don't spend their time pursuing pleasure, why should I pursue pleasure? Epicurus says that when you don't have pain, you don't have need of pleasure, so what do you need pleasure for if the gods don't have it themselves? That would be a way that you could take this sentence out of context, and I would say warp it, but I don't think that's the right direction.

Yang uses separate sentences here: "They do nothing." Period. But the context in which he's saying this is that they are embarrassed with no business, nor do they perform any work. I would argue that what Velleius was intending to convey is that the gods are not burdened with any activity that they find to be painful. Unlike us, who have to work for a living and who have to exert ourselves to even breathe and find the next meal, the gods don't have to exert themselves in a way that they find stressful or painful in any way. Given their arrangements, they are constantly able to sustain themselves in a pleasing environment without any experience of pain at all. But to say that they don't do anything would not be a proper understanding of that.

They are doing something—they are experiencing pleasures. Just as Epicurus says that when we're not in pain, we experience pleasures, even when our hand is doing its normal activity or when a host is pouring wine for a thirsty guest. We may not think of those things as pleasures, but they are pleasures just as much as those that involve sensual stimulation, satisfying thirst, or satisfying hunger. When you look at the Latin for this passage, there's a cumulative weight to all of the words it uses to describe labor, work, and endeavor, and it's supposed to just drag you down.

This translation literally would be something like: they do not act; they have no occupation or endeavor; they have no work or labor; and a variation on the word endeavor again. So, there are like five words just in this one sentence—ait, acup, onibus, impus, opera, and mur—that are all meant to convey something that's hard to do or difficult to do, something that requires energy and straining labor. When we imagine the life of happiness, that is how I would like to imagine it. I wouldn't want to have to go to work every day if I were a god.

But your problem with the sentence, Cassius, is more that it's implying that they're totally passive, that they don't even move, right? That they just sit there like an object in nature, not actually doing anything. They don't even talk to each other.

That's right, and if I was standing in the presence of Velleius in 50 BC, I wouldn't criticize him for saying that. I would simply say, "Velleius, you're exactly right, but if you could live for another 2,000 years, you would see how sentences can be taken out of context, and people can pull out a sentence like 'they do nothing' and make not only the gods but all of humanity seem as if the ideal state is when they are sitting on the floor staring at the wall in a cave." And I know you don't mean that, Velleius, and I know that you haven't said that, but that's why these things have to be explained at length, and you have to be aware that people will try to take your words out of context. So always be careful, to the extent that you can, to explain things in as great detail as possible.

And of course, in fairness to Velleius, we haven't even begun to reach the end of this passage, because as you were saying, Joshua, there's a weight to these words that we've already read. He's going to go on and on and on to make it even more clear as we go further in this text that what he's talking about is work. We're not talking in a vacuum—he's talking to Balbus. He's talking to the conventional Greek theory of the gods that the gods are behind all of the machinery and are actually operating the machinery of the universe at every moment, almost chained to the machinery to keep it functioning.

At this point, what Velleius has done is introduce the topic and said that they don't perform work. Using Yang's translation, "they rejoice in the possession of their own wisdom and virtue; they are satisfied that they shall ever enjoy the fullness of eternal pleasures," which reminds me of Book One of Cicero's On Ends, where he gives us the illustration of the best life being involved in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures of body and of mind. If that's the best life for a human being, then using the standard Epicurean principle of using, by analogy, what we know to make predictions about things that we don't know with certainty, then you would presume that a totally blessed being is also going to be continuously surrounded by numerous and vivid pleasures of body and of mind.

Right, and there was a book, Cassius, published in the 15th or 16th century in Italy by a Dominican priest named Giordano Bruno, and his book was called The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. There's a passage in that book that deals with the question of whether it takes toil and effort by the gods in order to sustain the operations of nature. It's very long, and I'm not going to read it all, but I'll read the beginning part and then the end part just to give an idea of how these words have a cumulative weight that kind of drag you down when you're reading it.

He writes:

Mercury, the herald of the gods, is recounting to Sophia all the things that Jove has assigned him to bring about. He has ordered that today at noon, two of the melons in Father Fran's melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won't be picked until three days from now, and they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of Mount Echalo in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that several shall fall to the earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms; that Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savalino, when she means to curl her hair at the temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won't burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently; that from the dung of her ox, two hundred and fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albino's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random.

I'm actually quoting here from Stephen Greenblatt's description of the book, and he describes it this way:

Once you take seriously the claim that God's providence extends to the fall of a sparrow and the number of hairs on your head, there is virtually no limit, from the agitated dust motes in a beam of sunlight to the planetary conjunctions that are occurring in the heavens above.

“Oh Mercury,” Sophia says pityingly, “you have a lot to do.” Sophia grasps that it would take billions of tongues to describe all that must happen even in a single moment in a tiny village in the Campania. At this rate, no one could envy poor Jove. But then Mercury admits that the whole thing does not work that way. There is no artifice or god standing outside the universe barking commands, meting out rewards and punishments, determining everything. The whole idea is absurd. There is an order in the universe, but it is one built into the nature of things, into the matter that composes everything from stars to men to bedbugs. Nature is not an abstract capacity but a generative mother, bringing forth everything that exists. We have, in other words, entered the Lucretian universe.

So that was very long, but I think it gives an idea, Cassius, of what the Epicureans are up against here—not only in trying to convince other people that the gods have no effect or impact on nature but also in trying to convince other schools that their view of a laborious god is not only wrong, it's absurd.

Yes, Joshua, it's absurd. In regard to how difficult it is to deal with people who want to attribute everything that happens to a supernatural god, we are recording this on July 21, 2024. The United States is consumed at this moment with discussion of an event that happened a week ago, where, had a particular bullet arrived at a particular location an inch off from where it did arrive, the entire course of the country and potentially the world could have been dramatically altered. Without going into any type of evaluation of whether the event could have been better or worse for any particular individual or group of people, it is very tempting when something like that happens to be shocked by the realization of how such a small degree of change could have produced such a huge implication.

That's pretty much the argument that people will make in terms of the creation of the universe—that other than the Earth being exactly at a particular distance from the sun and having a particular temperature range and all these other things, there could have been no life on Earth. From this apparently amazing coincidence, they deduce that there has to be a god behind it. The illustration I made from Butler, Pennsylvania, a week ago, or whether you're talking about the creation of the Earth and life on Earth, that's a continuing issue that people have to deal with. Do these things, which appear to be so unlikely or difficult to explain on their own, require us to resort to a supernatural explanation for them?

Even in the example I mentioned from Butler, Pennsylvania, the Epicurean position on that is that whatever happened and whatever the implications are, it was not the result of divine intervention. That a week later, the world is as it is, as opposed to having been thrown potentially into turmoil had it happened differently a week ago. Had that bullet been traveling several inches in a different direction, so much would have changed in the lives of so many different people all across the world.

That's the continuing frustration, and that kind of incident is the kind of thing that drives certain people wild in terms of supernatural frenzy, even though they can't seem to see for themselves that, well, God allowed the bullet to be fired. God allowed all these different things to happen every step along the way, and it wasn't the result of supernatural forces that it happened.

So, part of this issue in terms of unwinding whether gods are intervening every moment for good or ill in the world we live in, Velleius is saying we should consider what the gods are actually doing, because that type of god who is intervening is exactly what all the other philosophers at that point were promoting. Velleius continues and says this:

Such a deity as I have described here, such a deity who is constantly consumed in eternal pleasures and not in working—such a deity may properly be called happy. But yours is the most laborious god, for let us suppose the world a deity: what can be a more uneasy state than, without the least cessation, to be worlded about the axle-tree of heaven with a surprising speed? Nothing can be happy that is not at ease. Or let us suppose a deity residing in the world who directs and governs it, who preserves the courses of the stars and changes of the seasons and the vicissitudes and the orders of things, surveying the earth and the sea and accommodating them to the advantage and necessities of man. Truly, this deity is embarrassed with a very troublesome and laborious office. We make a happy life to consist in a tranquility of mind, a perfect freedom from care, and an exemption from all employment. The philosopher from whom we received all of our knowledge has taught us that the world was made by nature, that there was no occasion for a workhouse to frame it, and that though you deny the possibility of such a work without divine skill, it is so easy to her that she has made, does make, and will make innumerable worlds.

Velleius is repeatedly using this image of a god at his workbench, fashioning a world. Earlier in the text, we discussed how the passage was reminiscent of a passage in Homer describing Hephaestus at his forge, making a new set of armor for Achilles, and that we're supposed to imagine the gods making a world through their workmanship much in the same way that Hephaestus might make a shield that bears a depiction of the world. For the Epicureans, this is so far afoul of the truth. The truth is that nature does all of these things—it's like what I just read from Steven Greenblatt, that nature does all of these things out of herself, of her own accord. We don't need an artifice or god standing above creation, admiring his work. This is actually not just wrong to the facts, but it also represents the gods as toilsome and living a laborious and uncomfortable, painful life. For the Epicureans, the gods are supposed to represent all of the best that is in life, all of the happiness, all of the pleasure, and none of the toil or the pain.

Right, and Joshua, the way you described that reminds me to get in a jab here at another group that I think would have been so much better off if they had just followed Epicurus in the first place. I'm referring here to those eighteenth-century Deists of the Thomas Paine variety—all of those Deists of that particular period who came up with the so-called clockmaker example. Just because they think that the clockmaker made the clock and then stepped back from the world, and so they sort of try to rescue a separation of church and state or whatever from the fact they say that God doesn’t intervene anymore, well, it's still a work issue involved in creating that clock and setting it in motion in the first place. That doesn't solve the problem that Velleius and Epicurus were properly addressing 2,000 years ago, which is that there's an inconsistency that just can't be accepted to say that a god is going to engage himself in all of this workmanlike production to produce all of the things that go on in the world.

So, it doesn't solve the problems that need to be addressed by saying, "Well, I'm a deist; I believe there was a God who set everything in motion, but He doesn't intervene any further." That's just not a logical answer to these questions, unlike the more coherent view that Epicurus came up with himself. Epicurus's answer—that there was no chaos originally organized by a God and that the universe has always been as it is today—is a much more logical and reasonable explanation of the universe than these Deists, whom I did a lot of reading about when I was in college myself. Their views were certainly more attractive than those who say that everything is constantly mandated and controlled by the gods, but still, they don't go far enough to the conclusion that Epicurus, I think, persuasively reaches and explains as Velleius is conveying to us now.

Sometimes, Epicurus himself is referred to by some people as a Deist, but the important thing to note with Deism, as you rightly explained, is that Deism involves an act of creation. In fact, the whole reason that Deism exists as a position to take in the first place is because the person who takes that position is trying to explain why there is something rather than nothing. Without that philosophical problem, there's no reason to invoke the creator god who then steps back from his work. So, Epicurus is not a Deist, even though he's sometimes referred to as a Deist, because like the god of Deism, the gods of Epicureanism are removed and don't intervene. But the seminal act of creation in Deism is what makes it Deism, and that is absent in the Epicurean view of things. The gods do not stand outside of nature; they are part of nature.

Yeah, it's really frustrating how Epicurus is called an atheist, a Deist, and all sorts of things other than what he really is saying. It doesn't take that much effort to get down to the basics of what he actually did say, and people are much better off when they do read this original material. And Velleius is not finished yet. He's continuing along the same lines. After he makes the comment that nature finds it easy to create worlds and has made, does make, and will make innumerable worlds, he says:

But because you do not conceive that nature is able to produce such effects without some rational aid, you are forced, like the tragic poets, when you cannot wind up your argument in any other way, to have recourse to a deity whose assistance you would not seek if you could view that vast and unbounded magnitude of regions in all parts where the mind, extending and spreading itself, travels so far and wide that it can find no end, no extremity to stop at. In this immensity of breadth, length, and height, a most boundless company of innumerable atoms are fluttering about, which, notwithstanding the interposition of a void space, meet and cohere and continue clinging to one another, and by this union these modifications and forms of things arise which, in your opinion, could not possibly be made without the help of bellows and anvils. Thus you have imposed on us an eternal master whom we must dread day and night, for who can be free from a fear of a deity who foresees, regards, and takes notice of everything—one who thinks all things his own, a curious, ever-busy god?

And I guess I can't help raising my voice as I read that, thinking that Velleius would be raising his voice when he's emphasizing that because you can't imagine the power of infinity in the universe to do these things without a God, you have harnessed humanity with the worst possible slavery of oppression through a being who does not even exist. You've imposed upon us an eternal master whom we must dread day and night. It's not just an innocent mistake that leads to no consequences; it's the worst possible result because you haven't thought through these principles of infinity and, therefore, seen what it is possible for nature to make without an intelligent design behind it.

Exactly, that is such a powerful passage. He starts out here, and I'm reading from the Rackham translation. He says, "You, on the contrary, cannot see how nature can achieve all this without the aid of some intelligence, and so, like the tragic poets being unable to bring the plot of your drama to a denouement, you have recourse to a God." The footnote mentions the deus ex machina, introduced near the end of some Greek tragedies to cut the knot of the plot. The poet has written himself into a corner, and he can't find a way out, so he just has Zeus come down from the ceiling by a rope and wave a hand to fix it all instantly. To me, this is really reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." That's the kind of god that Velleius is charging Balbus and his sect with cleaving to—right, a god that is so plasticky and plywood and paper-thin. It's ludicrous that you're doing this, and it's even more ludicrous and absurd that you're demanding that we pay homage to that god as well.

There was a guy named Hero of Alexandria, and the books of his contemporaries describe him as a "wonder worker." So, he was responsible for making all of these neat little toys, and they would do a lot of interesting things. If you're an Alexandrian, for example, living in the first or second century BC, some of the things that his marvels are doing seem to be impossible. Stage props that use falling sand on a rope that's wound around a post to roll out onto the stage at the prescribed time and then roll themselves back off the stage at a prescribed time. And if you put water under pressure, you can use it to spin things around—right, essentially the invention of hydraulics. Temple doors that would fling open on their own if you set fire to the brazier on the altar—all kinds of stuff. This was sort of his trade: hydraulics, engineering, carpentry, all of this stuff. He would use it as a freelance designer in the temples but also in the theaters.

I don't remember if it was Hero of Alexandria, but there was one of these guys around that time period because one of the problems you have is, yes, you can have stage props that wheel themselves out and then wheel themselves back at a prescribed time. But if the actor in the scene is too slow, then the prop wheels itself away too quickly before the scene is actually over. And if he's too fast, then the prop stays there too long after he's done speaking. So, one of the things they did was to automate entire plays—the whole play, the speaking of the little mechanical puppets, everything was done automatically. There's one story from the ancient world about how the way they achieved this effect was by setting the theater on the edge of a cliff and then using hanging weights over the cliff. As the weights pulled down, that would direct the behavior of the pieces in this mechanical play, and on one occasion, the play ended when the whole theater fell over the cliff and exploded into a million pieces at the bottom of the ravine. But certainly, yes, they did have the capacity to have a god—which could be an actor or some kind of construct with just a human voice—descend into the theater and wave his magic wand to fix all the problems. So, yeah, it's not just allegorical; they really could do this stuff.

Yeah, I'm still fixated on this as a very useful example, and there's a part of this section that I just read that I think has a strong parallel in Lucretius. This one particular argument is beautifully written, and Lucretius, I think, does echo it, so this argument is worth repeating, where he says:

"But because you do not conceive that nature is able to produce such effects without some rational aid, you are forced, like the tragic poets, when you cannot wind up your argument in any other way, to have recourse to a deity whose assistance you would not seek if you could view that vast and unbounded magnitude of regions in all parts where the mind, extending and spreading itself, travels so far and wide that it can find no end, no extremity to stop at."

That is a specific statement to Balbus and all people on the supernatural team that you would not reach the conclusion that you have reached if you would just view the unbounded magnitude of the infinite universe and keep that part of reality in mind. So it really is almost as if Epicurus is suggesting that the antidote to supernatural disposition, to supernatural fear, to the temptation to resort to the supernatural, is the understanding of infinity and what it means for the universe and all of its parts. It's infinity and boundlessness that allows these things to happen, and it is that which, when properly understood, renders this whole idea of a supernatural being who turns into your oppressive master unnecessary and unbelievable.

There's a quote from John Stuart Mill in his autobiography where he's describing his father, and he says this:

"My father's rejection of all that is called religious belief was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence; the grounds of it were moral still more than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction. His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius; he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies—belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies not connected with the good of humankind—and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue; but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals, making it consist in doing the will of a being on whom it lavishes, indeed, all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful."

We get a taste of that here with imagining the slave-driver god that Velleius is constructing in our minds, that we're supposed to fear this prying busybody day and night. I tell you, Joshua, as we go forward through this ending here, this is some of the most powerful Epicurean writing that compares, I think, with anything almost that Lucretius has to say. It consolidates in my mind that I don't think Cicero dreamed up this wording to put Epicurus in a good light. I think this is dramatically a pattern of argument that he's picked up somewhere and carried over for us and preserved for us in this work because I don't believe that Cicero, left to his own desires, would have framed it as powerfully as I think Velleius is saying here.

After talking about the ever-busy god and saying that we'd have to be living in fear of him, Velleius says:

"Hence first arose your high maironya, as you call it, your fatal necessity, so that whatever happens, you affirm that it flows from an eternal chain and continuance of causes. Of what value is this philosophy, which, like an old woman and illiterate men, attributes everything to fate? Then follows your mantia, in Latin called divination, which, if we would listen to you, would plunge us into such superstition that we should fall down and worship your inspectors into sacrifices, your augurs, your soothsayers, your prophets, and your fortune tellers. Epicurus, having freed us from these terrors and restored us to liberty, we have no dread of these beings whom we have reason to think entirely free from all trouble themselves and who do not impose any on others. We pay our adoration, indeed, with piety and reverence to that essence which is above all excellence and perfection."

From there on, he's going to segue out, and the argument is going to be turned over to Cotta. But that closing there adds additional layers of intensity to what we've already read previously. As alluded to earlier in regard to the events of Butler, Pennsylvania, everything happens by necessity in the views of some people so that whatever happens, they affirm that it flowed from an eternal chain and continuance of causes. The proper response to that kind of argument is exactly what Velleius says: of what value is that philosophy, or any philosophy, that, like an old woman and illiterate men, attributes everything to fate and divination?

If we listen to people who say they can predict the future, that would plunge us into superstition and make us have to fall down and worship the very people who are giving us these divine oracles, which is, of course, what they want. It's Epicurus who frees us from these and restores us to liberty. That's a phrase that certainly rings powerfully in this discussion: restoring us to liberty so that we need have no dread of beings whom we believe are not existing to cause us trouble but who are instead entirely free from all trouble themselves, don't impose trouble on anybody else, and provide for us an example of the way we would like to live ourselves. That's a complete picture of the god situation that is totally the reverse of what the majority orthodox view of the gods was in ancient Greece. It was at the time of Cicero in Rome and continues to be the majority view today.

The two words that Velleius has isolated here are heimarmene and mantike, and the reason he uses both of them is because they're both very important, actually, in Stoicism—this idea of fate or destiny and then the divination (mantike) that allows you to read your fate or destiny. I could pick any Stoic philosopher—I'm on the Wikipedia page for Chrysippus right now—and it says this:

"Chrysippus also argued for the existence of fate based on divination, which he thought there was good evidence for. It would not be possible for diviners to predict the future if the future itself was accidental. Omens and portents, he believed, are the natural symptoms of certain occurrences. There must be countless indications of the course of Providence, for the most part unobserved, the meaning of only a few having become known to humanity. To those who argued that divination was superfluous, as all events are foreordained, he replied that both divination and our behavior here under the warnings which it affords are themselves included in the chain of causation."

It's striking, in some ways, Cassius, to notice just how different the Stoic understanding of nature is from the Epicurean understanding of nature because nowhere in the Epicurean understanding of nature are you going to find ideas like fate or divination or a god that lords it over us as his slaves. It's not just that it's absent from Epicurean philosophy; it is foreign to it in a way that makes it almost difficult to comprehend when you situate yourself in the Epicurean position.

I have to agree with you that the language that's being used here all throughout some of these passages—Epicurus has set us free from superstitious terrors and delivered us out of captivity so that we have no fear of beings who we know create no trouble for themselves and seek to cause none to others while we worship with pious reverence the transcendent majesty of nature. The language is very powerful, and I think you're right to say that this stands out in many ways, even among the rest of the Epicurean library of texts, including Lucretius himself.

Yeah, it's so similar to the manner and to the intensity that Lucretius is using. Section 20 here is what we've been reading from, so the heart of what we've been focusing on is so powerful in section 20, and this is one that we'll need to return to in the future and consider to be probably one of the greatest summaries of the Epicurean position that I've seen anywhere. It combines the whole issue of the gods and happiness and pleasure and shows how it relates to infinity and physics and shows how closely tied these are together. It is indeed the physics of Epicurus that provide us the freedom to see the error of these other ethical systems and to construct an ethical system that makes sense.

There's also this image of Epicurus himself as soter in Greek, which means a savior or a deliverer. In fact, the name Epicurus means helper, or so we're given to believe, someone who wades into the argument, scoops us up, and then takes us to a place of safety away from all of this Stoic nonsense.

Right in my brain right now, right, and also combines it with talking about Stoic nonsense, all of these other things that we've just been talking about, it combines it with the really important issue of the question of whether there is necessity, determinism, fate, or not because divination rests on the view that there has to be some kind of fate. Because if people actually do have free will, then that means that it is, in fact, impossible to predict the future. At the risk of trivializing the intensity of what we've been discussing today, we see this issue discussed in popular culture. I recently watched the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise, which has this issue at its crux: that if you can predict the future, that means there is necessity and that people don't have the free will to decide otherwise.

So in the Minority Report movie, they end up concluding that the whole issue of pre-crime and holding people responsible for things they haven't committed yet has to be gutted because people do have free will, and you cannot predict in the end what will happen. It's an issue that's considered in Terminator too, with the concept of "no fate but what we make," questioning whether the future is written already. If the future is written already, then yes, you can have divination, you can have astrologers, and other people accurately predicting the future. But if you take the position that the future is not written and that determinism is wrong, you do have the ability to influence the future. Then you see the ridiculousness of trying to predict the future with certainty based on reading the entrails of animals or watching the movements of groundhogs in Pennsylvania—things that are ridiculous to conclude. As Epicurus says in the Letter to Pythocles, not even a being of ordinary intelligence would spend his time that way, much less a divine being who is worthy of being considered to be a god. That just makes no sense and is, in fact, absurd.

Yet that is the state of thinking under which probably the majority of people in the world today are operating. They give in to this idea of necessity and think that a god is, therefore, behind everything that happens—that a god decided where that bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania was going to be and not be—when, in fact, there is no intelligent being making these decisions for us. The approach that you take to life is going to be entirely different depending on whether you think everything happens by necessity, whether it's by a supernatural intelligent being looking after you, or whether it's by the mechanical operation that Epicurus was concerned about Democritus believing. No matter the nature of the force that's behind it, if you think that the future is set, then you have no ability to affect your future, and you'd be better off believing in a myth of a false religion because at least you have the chance under that type of scenario to be happy, as Epicurus says in the Letter to Menoeceus.

So determinism is wrapped up in this section here. You have so much of Epicurean philosophy wrapped up in just a few passages here in section 20. That brings us to the end of the main part of Velleius's presentation. He'll say a few more words after he says that Epicurus frees us from these terrors and restores us to liberty. Velleius says, "But I fear that my zeal for this doctrine has made me too tediously lengthy. However, I could not easily leave so imminent and important a subject unfinished, though I must confess I should rather endeavor to hear than speak so long." And with those words, Velleius turns the floor over to Cotta.

But we are not finished with this because we're going to continue and deal with at least some of Cotta's attacks in the coming weeks. This has been an excellent summation, so let's talk about closing thoughts at this point, Joshua.

Yeah, I think it's always important to keep in mind that the ancient Epicureans were not living in a vacuum, separate from broader ideas and problems of the people around them, of their time, and of their civilization. When we look at some of the writings of Lucian of Samosata, he's describing conversations that are taking place on the coast of Asia Minor in the Black Sea—conversations that we wouldn't even have a record of if it wasn't for him. They're talking about some of the same problems: problems related to fate, whether the gods intervene, whether divination is possible, and all of these questions bear on some of the most fundamental aspects of human life. But none more so, I think, than your understanding of the gods.

If you have this idea that God is an all-powerful creator who you should fear, that's going to change your life in rather important ways. Likewise, the Epicurean view—that the gods are blessed and incorruptible, that they live in abodes far removed from human cares, that they do not intervene either to help us or to hurt us—allows us, I think, to stand on our own two feet. Epicurus helps us to stand on our own two feet in a way that we don't get in some of these other systems. If you have to run to the Oracle at Delphi every time you have a problem, you're not really standing on your own two feet. You're looking to this deus ex machina once again to solve the problem for you so you don't have to do the hard work of solving it. That's such an unhealthy way, I think, to go about this, to go about living.

I completely agree, and I think the way that Velleius ends up here contains a final reminder for us. When Velleius says, "I fear my zeal for this doctrine has made me go on too long. However, I could not easily leave so imminent and important a subject unfinished," it seems to me that that's a characteristic of these ancient Epicureans. Whether it's Lucretius, whether it's Velleius, whether it's Torquatus, whether it's Diogenes of Oenoanda, whether it's any of these Epicurean writers that we have authoritative texts from the ancient world, they took their Epicurean philosophy very seriously. They were enthusiastic about it, and they wanted to take the time to explain it to other people.

They didn't just see it as an antidote to fear and as something to consume and then hide in their cave and never talk about to anybody. They were enthusiastic and motivated to talk about the details to other people, and I think that's a lesson that we could all profit from. That's what we try to do in our podcast, and that's what we're doing in our discussions over at Epicurean Friends. So, for those of our listeners who share our enthusiasm about discussing Epicurean philosophy, we invite you to come over to the EpicureanFriends.com forum. Let us know your thoughts and your opinions about this episode and any of our other subjects that we discuss. We'll come back next week, take up section 21, and move forward as we defend Velleius from the objections that Cotta makes. He's going to make a lot of objections that we're familiar with, and we can productively take the time to go through and explore how an Epicurean would respond to these arguments of both the Academic Skeptics and the Stoics.

With that, let's close for the day. Thanks for your time. We'll be back next week. See you then. Bye.