Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (20 page)

Nowhere does he appear more theomachic than in Lucretius’s great poem
On the Nature of Things.
Written in Rome in the midst of the civil wars of the early first century BC, it is the earliest surviving complete epic poem composed in Latin (epic in the sense that Lucretius uses the hexameter meter). It has been hugely influential since antiquity, not only for its sublime poetic craft but also for its embodiment of Epicurean doctrine. Stephen Greenblatt has famously argued that its recovery was responsible for European secularism and the Renaissance. As late as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was heralded as the foundation stone of a European intellectual tradition based on science and observation rather than theocratic dictates.
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Epicurus makes a stirring entry in Lucretius’s poem, in lines that will quicken the pulse of any humanist:

When human life lay on the ground, foully oppressed

For all to see under the weight of Religion,

Who showed forth her head from the regions of heaven,

Standing over mortals with terrifying aspect,

Then first a Grecian man dared to raise

His mortal eyes to meet hers—the first to dare to confront her.

For neither the stories of the gods nor thunder nor heaven

With its threatening growl deterred him; no, all the more keenly

Did they arouse his soul’s virtue, so that he, first of all,

Should desire to shatter the narrow confines of nature’s gates.

And so the vivid vigor of his soul was victorious, and far

Beyond the flaming walls of the world did he march.

He ranged the expanse of the universe in his mind and soul,

Whence he returns victorious, bringing us report of what can come to be

And what cannot; in sum, by what reason each thing has its power

Defined, and its deeply fixed boundary marker.

And so Religion now in turn lies beneath our feet,

Trampled, and his victory raises us to heaven.
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Just like Euripides’s Bellerophon, Lucretius’s Epicurus is imagined as leading a military assault on
religio.
The imagery here is largely drawn from siege works. In the first half of the passage, Religion is imagined as towering above an oppressed mankind, like an intimidating fortress of the kind that Romans built to instill fear in their subjects; myths, rituals, and conventions are the weapons that she uses to keep her subjects in check. Then the image is reversed, and Epicurus is envisaged not as the assailant but as the besieged, now leading a breakout from the “narrow confines” and marching beyond the “flaming walls of the world.”

What does Lucretius mean by the Latin word “
religio
”? Not, to be sure, “religion” in our sense, which is to say the institutional apparatus promoting a particular way of worshipping the gods; the sense is more of pious devotion, a moral quality. It is psychological bondage that he sees as the enemy of human freedom. (Bondage, indeed, is an appropriate image: elsewhere he speaks of “loosing the mind from the constricting knots of religion,” apparently deriving
religio
from
religare,
“to tie.”) Lucretius’s Epicurus is a crusader not so much against rituals and state institutions as against the false beliefs that oppress us with fear of death, punishment, and the afterlife. Liberation will be found not in smashing organized religion (no Epicurean ever suggested that) but in rejecting the received, mythical view of the gods as aggressively vengeful and accepting that in the materialist view of things they have no influence over our lives.
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Epicurus’s war on religion was not imagined as an effort to promote secularization at the state level. But it is a more radical claim than is often admitted. The implications of denying religious truth are profound and far-reaching. Lucretius follows the description of Epicurus with an instance of the destructive effects of such beliefs: “Religion has given birth to wicked and impious deeds,” he opines (mischievously repurposing the word “impious” to describe the actions of the religious rather than their foes). His example is the mythical story of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphianassa (more commonly called Iphigenia) to Artemis at Aulis. In the myth, his fleet had been stayed by a calming of the waters, which Artemis had imposed because Agamemnon had killed a deer on land sacred to her. “Such is the terrible evil that religion was able to urge,” concludes Lucretius:
“Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,”
one of the poet’s most famous lines (Voltaire, for example, sent it to Frederick II of Prussia in 1737 when urging the cause of secularism). Lucretius’s point is that this misunderstanding of the shifting nature of wind (which he explains elsewhere in purely material terms) is more than simply an error. When we fail to understand the truth about nature, and more particularly when we substitute religious for scientific understanding, terrible consequences can ensue. It is particularly striking that Lucretius chooses an instance of sacrifice, the central component of all ancient ritual activity: although of course the particularly horrific aspect of this sacrifice is that the victim is human, the additional implication is that any kind of blood sacrifice is both ineffective and likely to generate physical and mental pain. Without saying as much explicitly, Lucretius exposes the truth that destructive acts condoned in the name of the gods would be utterly condemned in other areas of life.
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So there is more at stake in true and false belief than unnecessary psychological anxiety. False beliefs have consequences, sometimes bloody ones. Lucretius is well aware that in talking of the impieties of conventional beliefs in the gods he is setting his truth up as a powerful rival to that of established theology. He predicts to his addressee Memmius that

There will come the day when you will seek to withdraw

From our community, overcome by the terrifying utterances of the priests.

Yes indeed, for how many dreams can they concoct for you

Even now, dreams that can turn on their head the principles of existence

And by terrifying you throw all your fortunes into chaos!

And with good reason: for if people saw that there is a set limit

To our sufferings, they would by some means find the strength

To stand against the threatening pieties of the priests.
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At stake here is the question of authority in speech. Who speaks the truth, the priest or the philosopher? “Priest” (
vates
) is a term that in Latin covers both specialists dedicated to particular cults and traditional poets. Lucretius’s attack, then, is on both the established structures of state religion and on the storehouse of traditional myth. Stories are weapons, “threatening pieties” that the true philosopher should “stand against.” Lucretius never sounds more modern than here, when pitching scientific materialism as a truer and more socially enlightened alternative to the “dreams” concocted by traditional religion.

The irony is that Lucretius expresses all of this using the very poetic form traditionally associated with theology: the epic poem consisting of hexameters, lines of six metrical feet. This is the form in which Homer and Hesiod had composed their ancient stories of gods and humans and the form adapted for Roman culture in the second century BC by the brilliant and highly influential poet Ennius. An example, perhaps, of using the master’s tools to dismantle his own house. But the paradox runs deeper than this. In pitting Epicurus as
theomakhos,
battling the gods of traditional religion, he ended up assimilating the two. Epicurus himself became a kind of god in his own right:

For if we must speak as that majesty of nature that we have come to understand

Demands, he was a god—a god, famous Memmius,

Who first uncovered those rational principles underlying life

That we now call “wisdom,” and who through his art

Brought life out of the deep currents and dark shadows

And into such tranquillity and such clear light.
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It is common enough in the modern world for atheists to have their anti-religious rhetoric turned back against them: science is “just another belief system,” a religious skeptic is mocked as the “high priest of atheism,” and so forth. But Lucretius’s words go well beyond a loose sense of equivalence, and emphatically claim divinity for Epicurus. “He was a god—a god, famous Memmius.” What did Lucretius mean by this? At one level, he was merely developing Epicurus’s own instructions in his will that his community of followers should treat him with honors that bordered on worship. Lucretius himself was surely aware of the cult-like reverence that the charismatic figurehead enjoyed. But in fact his words nowhere mention actively worshipping Epicurus: the point is, rather, that thanks to his achievements he deserves to be ranked among the gods. This is in fact a deeply, albeit subtly, subversive claim, since it converts the idea of “god” from a metaphysical to a metaphorical one. A god is simply a high-achieving mortal who has attained a perfectly happy existence—which, incidentally, must involve acceptance of mortality (which contradicts the very premise of deity in the literal sense). Epicurus’s victory over
religio
is so complete that he has eviscerated the very idea of divinity as a special category of existence.

The poet proceeds to expand on the theme of Epicurus’s divinity by adopting a line of argument that goes back to the fifth-century sophist Prodicus, via Euhemerus. Ceres (the Roman equivalent of the Greek goddess Demeter), Lucretius argues, introduced the cultivation of corn to mortals; Liber (the Roman Dionysus) invented wine. Prodicus too had interpreted Demeter and Dionysus as mortals who had been granted divine status as thanks for their beneficence toward their fellow humans; that Lucretius uses the same two examples suggests that he intends a direct allusion. Epicurus’s divinity, then, is of this kind: he is to be understood not as a supernatural being (for nothing exists outside of nature) but as a human who has achieved superhuman things. In fact, by removing the necessity of fear and anxiety, he performed an even greater benefit than inventors of nonessential foodstuffs: “For that reason, he is all the more entitled to his reputation among us as a god.”
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Where, then, did religion come from? Why did such a monstrous deception arise? Lucretius gives an answer in the midst of a long section that recalls the “culture narratives” of the fifth-century Athenian sophists, telling of humans’ emergence from a state of nature into their civilized state. Even in those days, he writes, people saw both in sleep and occasionally while awake images of larger-than-life individuals of stunning appearance. (Are these dim glimpses of real gods, or just phantoms? He makes no comment at this point.) These primitive beings assumed that these individuals must also have superhuman powers and intellects, eternal life and a blessed existence. Next they perceived the orderliness of the heavens and the seasons and assumed that these beings must have been responsible for the universe’s intelligent design—and that natural disasters were therefore signs of displeasure. This theory provokes another lament on human folly:

O unhappy human race, who attributed

Such deeds to the gods, and gave them bitter wrath too!

What weepings and wailings did they produce for themselves, what

Injuries to us, what tears for future generations!

It is no “piety” to parade yourself often in public wearing a veil,

Nor to turn towards a bit of stone and go up to every altar,

Nor to stretch yourself out on the ground and raise your hands

Before the shrines of the gods, nor to spatter altars

With the blood of beasts, nor to make vow after vow.

Piety, rather, is the ability to survey the universe with untroubled mind.
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True piety, then, should consist not in petty conformity to human religious convention but in the power to comprehend and marvel at nature’s immense power. Divinity is a quality not of transcendent beings but of the world we inhabit: it is there in the sublime stuff of things, from the star-studded ether to the thrill of thunder to the charging stream. Lucretius was famous in antiquity for his magnificent, Turneresque depictions of nature’s grand power, but there is more to such purple passages than vivid displays of poetic skill: he wanted his verse to capture the magic of the world around us and to teach us that we should seek “divinity” in matter, not in some imaginary god.

For all this, though, Lucretius, like his master Epicurus, can still insist on the reality of gods. The most famous instance is the prayer to Venus—“First of the line of Aeneas, the pleasure of humans and gods alike”—that opens the poem. It seems mightily disquieting to have a deity presiding over an Epicurean poem, until we realize that Venus—the Roman equivalent of the Greek Aphrodite—is not literally the goddess of myth but a symbol of the generative power of nature. As in the description of Epicurus as a “god,” he is using divinity as a metaphor, eviscerating it of its conventional meaning. But elsewhere he certainly speaks of gods as if they are real, or real in a sense. Epicurus, he says, opened up to him a vision of the gods in their “tranquil abode,” untroubled by the seasons and provided for by an unfailingly bounteous nature. We might take these gods too as figurative, merely as embodiments of the serenity toward which Epicurean philosophy steers us. Yet he seems also to locate them in real space, in the “void.” At another point, he speaks of the gods existing outside of our world; they cannot come into contact with us, their nature being “thin” and fundamentally different from ours. He promises to explain what he means by this at a later point, but (frustratingly) does not.
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But perhaps we should take this broken promise not as a sign of Lucretius’s forgetfulness or of the unfinished state of the poem, but as a token of Epicureanism’s general slipperiness on the question of the divine. When it came to the gods, the Epicureans’ contract with their readers was never quite fulfilled. From earliest times, this philosophy had always promised a little more than it had delivered in theological matters. There had always been a fundamental incompatibility between Epicurus’s claim that “the god is an indestructible and blessed being” and a view of reality as composed of impermanent combinations of matter. The Epicureans’ gods are indeed, as Lucretius put it, “thin” in nature: thin to the point nearly of disappearance, but not quite. Like distant traces of memory, they stubbornly refuse to be erased entirely. Were the Epicureans atheists, as their opponents often held them to be? Certainly atheism was the logical extension of their worldview, and certainly they felt themselves to be at loggerheads with conventional religion. But for some reason they felt unable to sever the ties completely.