FOUR
We have seen the philosophical doubt of the ancient Greeks, the ancient Jews, and the ancient East. All of that took place between the sixth century and the first days of the Common Era: in 600 BCE the Carvaka had their materialist text, the Brihaspati Sûtra; in 536 BCE the Jews were headed back to Jerusalem from the Babylonian exile; and about 500 BCE the Greek philosopher Heraclitus was explaining the world in rationalist terms. The Buddha died in 480, Confucius died in 479, Socrates was born in 470, and by 458 Ezra was working out the postexilic interpretation of the laws of Moses. Plato’s Symposium came in 387 BCE; Alexander the Great invaded India in 327 BCE; Epicurus died in 271 BCE; and the Greek Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, was composed about 255 BCE. In 168 BCE an altar to Zeus was built at the Temple in Jerusalem. At the turn of the millennium there was a turn toward theism in the Far East; in the Middle East, Jesus was born and in his name the whole tremendous Western culture of doubt would change profoundly. But not right away.
In the centuries around the turn of the millennium, the Romans created some of the most exquisite doubt of all time. It is worth noting that in this vibrant Roman world, early Christianity was taking hold in the poorer sectors of the Middle East, but at this point educated Romans took little notice. It was not until very late in the Roman period that the intellectual Roman world addressed the Christian idea. The second-century pagan physician and philosopher Galen spoke of Jews and Christians as philosophers and compared the cosmology offered by Moses with those offered by Plato and Epicurus (of the three, he favored Plato’s). In writing about the Christians’ philosophy, Galen criticized their dependence on “faith” and dismissed them as lacking the epistemological evidence for what they claimed.1 Educated Romans lived in a rationalist, doubting world. But we must begin at the beginning.
The early Romans were pantheists and their major gods, Jupiter, Mars, Juno, Minerva, and Venus, were of Italian or Etruscan origin. Before Greek influence transformed Roman religion, it was a utilitarian affair, used to help ensure the family’s need for food and procreation and the state’s need for military power and domestic tranquillity. In the family, religion was overseen by the paterfamilias; in the state, it was overseen by the magistrate. Although the absence of a separate priestly class did not persist throughout the Roman Republic and Empire, it helped establish the importance of religious ritual for individuals, such that support of the state was linked with participation in ritual but not with private beliefs.
We used to say that ancient Rome was a society of almost no religiosity. Historians explained that the relationship between religion and the state in ancient Rome was so explicit, and so clearly in the service of the state, that the whole thing was more bureaucratic than pious.2 One visited temples and made sacrifices in order to please the gods so that they would keep safe the Roman Republic and, later, keep the Roman Empire powerful and unified. Most people seem to have believed that the complicated communities of human institutions were extended into a less visible realm of big gods and local, average gods who were attentive—in varying degrees—to human beings. In this official Roman religion, there was no religious education for the young or old, no cosmology or doctrine, no message about one’s own soul, and no ethical code: it was a system of sacrificing to the gods for the sake of the state. Religion was about reading the world for messages from the gods: omens, auguries, and prophesies read from entrails and other natural things. Divination was much less personal in ancient Rome than it had been in Greece. So it was not a very metaphysical or emotional religion, but it would seem that many people found it satisfying: they took part in the glory and persistence of a great state, and auguries helped them manage their communal anxieties and ambitions.
Later historians looked more closely and found evidence of religious passion and interiority in rites that had once seemed to us more cold and public.3 There are some subtle indications that the man at the emperor’s altar was weeping—engaged in managing his inner life, not only the fortunes of the state. Still, this merely adjusts our persistent overall impression that ancient Roman religion was not centered on the internal experience of the individual. Some have further modified this vision of Roman areligiosity by pointing out that alongside the more secular gestures of the official religion, Romans took part in a number of imported cults that offered more passionate or personal religious experience. By the period of the empire, the Hellenistic mystery religions, from Isis to Mithraism, had grown very popular throughout the Roman world—enough so that Isis was felt to be a threat and was banned from the city of Rome. The other source of an inward religion was Judaism and, as we’ll see, it was very tempting, too. It eventually took over.
The Roman religion was stable and varied. Rome did not care much what else her subjects believed or to whom else they sacrificed, so long as they also believed in Rome and sacrificed to her gods and, later, to her emperors. The whole structure of the Roman gods was a result of the Romans conquering the Greeks militarily and the Greeks conquering the Romans intellectually. The Greeks claimed their culture represented the height of human accomplishment and the Romans believed it, coming to identify their local gods with gods of the Greeks and thereby taking on the glories of the Greek past. Later, as the Roman Empire grew, the Romans followed their own experience and encouraged the identification of the gods of the empire with the local gods of newly conquered or incorporated areas. There were many full identifications, and lots of double temples.
The apotheosis of Alexander the Great, and other Hellenistic kings after him, was the model for the deification of the emperors, first at death and then, later, while they still ruled.4 There’s something in this that feels very religious, very full of belief. But that seems to be the opposite of what was happening. As the master classical scholar Arnaldo Momigliano has argued, it was not that the state was so religiously valued, but rather that the words god and godlike had lost meaning to such a degree that they could be applied to anyone in affection or admiration.5 Cicero called Plato a god and, more wonderfully, Lucretius used the term for his idol, the essentially atheistic Epicurus. In Momigliano’s words, “people were finding it easy to call exceptionally powerful men gods because they were losing faith in the existence, or at least in the effectiveness, of their traditional gods.”6 The deification of emperors was meant to justify the extraordinary power of the Roman leaders and help consolidate the far-flung provinces. Emperors during their lifetimes were more godlike in proportion to their absence: communities who had the emperor in their midst tended to treat him as emperor, while in the provinces, the imperial cult’s sacrifices, temples, games, speeches, banquets, and statues all helped give the sense of a present ruler.
In other important ways, the empire’s subjects were well served by the imperial cult—the celebrations were lively communal events at which poets and musicians excited the crowd, athletes competed for prizes, local rulers made speeches in honor of the great ruler, and children and teenagers took part in performances. But it is reasonable to distinguish such social and political ceremony from religiosity. The people were celebrating themselves, their community, the empire, the universe, and the fact that none of it had come crashing down. We do not all know how it feels to have our city besieged, but when it happens, we learn that we ache to take part somehow in the alchemy of mourning and reviving and to conjure again the illusion of mundane safety. Some reveled for the glory of peace, others for the militarism that they saw as keeping war at a distance from their homes. They were also having a good time. More traditional religion was not even doing that for them anymore. As Momigliano puts it, “The imperial cult was primarily a sign of indifference or doubt or anxiety about the gods.”7
As for the intellectuals, many scoffed at the idea that a job title could hoist one into the sphere of the immortals. Lots of authors showed a bit of a sneer or a smirk in their discussion of imperial deification, and it is likely that many cultivated people felt this way. In this secular world, where the masses showed religious reverence for the emperor and went to statist celebrations, and intellectuals did not even do that, spiritual people flocked to the Mystery Religions and to Judaism. The Mystery Religions that had emerged in the Hellenistic world had spread to the reaches of the empire. They addressed the darkness of the universe and of our own hearts, and the fate of the individual after death. Judaism was yet a step further away from the statist Roman religion because it had those spiritual features but, unlike the mysteries, could not tolerate any other gods, including emperors. The Romans put up with this, for a long time, for three reasons: first, they respected the antiquity of the Jews; second, the Jews had proved, militarily and otherwise, loyal and reliable; and third, the Jews were shockingly willing to die rather than to tolerate even minor infringements on their law. In the next chapter, we will see the result of mixing Judaism and the Mystery Religions (and then adding Greek philosophy and Eastern asceticism), but for now these two spiritual ideas, and the Christianity that derived from them, must be seen as they were by most Romans: as exotic or bizarre minorities. Their secrecy, separatism, and passion remind us of the public, vaguely bureaucratic nature of mainstream Roman religion.
In the several decades before and after the turn of the millennium, Julius and Augustus Caesar championed a religious revival to go along with their new, more authoritarian regimes. How much this revival affected the average person’s beliefs is difficult to tell. Augustus also gave the people other things to think about. The Plebeian and freed population of Rome vastly outnumbered the Equestrian and Patrician classes, and often enough a large number of them could not find work and could not afford adequate food. In response, to keep the average Roman from revolting against the rich, Augustus legislated food prices so that the poor could manage their basic needs, and also began a system of free food—in the form of grain distribution. At the same time, he offered free entertainment in the form of chariot races, bloody gladiatorial combat, lavish spectacles in amphitheaters, and the Circus Maximus. The poet Juvenal (55–127 CE) coined the pertinent phrase in his fourth satire, writing that “the people,” who once demanded and received “commands, consulships, legions, and all else,” had grown passive and “now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things—bread and circuses!” These circuses, and even the sharing of bread, may have served basic religious needs, providing an emotional outlet and a sense of community. It is a question suited as well for our own age and our own public spectacles.
A few dates will be helpful before we go on: Octavian (who would become Augustus) defeated Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BCE and, as Augustus, established the Principate in 27 BCE. Jesus’ ministry seems best dated as lasting from 27 CE to 30 CE, but the movement he started did not show up on the radar of any intellectuals for the following two centuries. The Pax Romana, or Roman Peace, a period of great stability and cosmopolitanism, stretched from Augustus’s reign to 180 CE. We speak of Imperial Rome as beginning in 27 BCE and extending to 284 CE. In 330 Constantine moved the capital of the empire from Rome to Byzantium (renamed Constantinople), and began turning the empire toward Christianity. The years between 300 and 600 used to be called the Dark Ages, though they are nowadays called Late Antiquity, both of which give some valuable clues as to the period’s nature. For now, we begin in the Late Republic, just as it falls.
The Roman world invented some stylish new doubt and brought many older traditions of doubt to a culmination. The six greatest disputants of that doubt were Cicero, Lucretius, Pliny the Elder, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Sextus Empiricus, and Lucian of Samosata. These men of the Roman Empire robustly schooled themselves in the history of Greek thought and then turned to explain it all to their peers: in brief and in Latin. In so doing, they offered the most shapely theories of doubt yet arranged. This is both old and new doubt, for these authors were often more straightforward in their versions of Greek doubt and they reimagined these ideas according to Roman concerns. The first was Marcus Tullius Cicero. Few texts in the history of doubt rival the importance of The Nature of the Gods.
CICERO
Cicero began writing De Natura Deorum about 45 BCE. By then he was weary of politics: he had been an important figure on the political stage, serving as praetor in 66 BCE and consul in 63 BCE. He had also been exiled, only to be recalled by Pompey and hailed as a hero. In 56 BCE he was made an augur, an official diviner, which was a lauded religious and political position. Cicero would write a book arguing that divination was hokum, but he set a great value on attaining this prestigious post. He had been against Caesar in defense of the Republic, but when Caesar won, Cicero made peace with the situation and lived with honor in Rome. When he retired from public life, he began writing a series of philosophical works with the express purpose of giving Latin-speaking Rome the opportunity to know the Greek philosophers, and to give them a philosopher of their own. Where he found Latin unsuited for philosophy, he coined new words and phrases and thereby left the language capable of greater subtlety than before.
The conceit of The Nature of the Gods was that many years earlier Cicero’s friend Cotta, a great orator and priest, had invited the young Cicero to his home. When Cicero arrived he found himself in the company of three famous men—one an Epicurean, one a Stoic, and one, Cotta himself, a Skeptic from the Academy—engaged in a heated conversation about the gods. The Epicurean and the Stoic have some very definite ideas about the matter; Cotta, the Skeptic, claims to know nothing for sure, but also claims to be expert at seeing falsehood. Cicero—much younger than the great men—merely listens and offers a few words about his own opinion on the last page of the text. Readers have always understood that the Cotta character represents the critical eye of the adult, authorial Cicero.
The Epicurean, a man named Velleius, had already been talking when Cicero showed up, so he is asked to give a précis of his opinion. Book one of the text is made up of that speech and Cotta’s answer to it. Book two is the Stoic Balbus’s turn, and the third and final book is Cotta’s answer to him. It would be well to note that when he was a boy, Cicero’s family had moved to a town outside Rome so that his education could be of the highest affordable order. There he studied with several brilliant Greek teachers in succession: the first was an Epicurean, to whom he was devoted, but in 88 CE he found a new master, Philo, the leading exponent of the Academy’s Skepticism, and Cicero experienced a sharp conversion. Although he remained fond of his old teacher, he was never again very tolerant of Epicureanism. Later in Cicero’s youth, a famed Stoic and friend of his father came to live with the family. Cicero learned a great deal from him but did not reject Skepticism. Thus, in a sense, the story recapitulates Cicero’s personal philosophical journey.
Cicero frames The Nature of the Gods by saying that most philosophers have affirmed the existence of the gods and that this assertion is “plausible and one to which we are all naturally inclined.” But he immediately offers the reminder of a history of doubt: “Protagoras however professed himself in doubt on the matter and Diaogoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene did not believe them to exist at all.”8 Then he explains that even among those who assert that gods exist, disagreements abound as to their form and character. For him, the key to the debate is whether the gods do nothing, care for nothing, and made nothing, or whether they made everything and continue to rule over everything, on into eternity. Before giving the floor to the proponents of these two opinions—the Epicurean and the Stoic— Cicero tells his readers that society might be in serious trouble without religion, or even without an understanding of the gods as caring and interested. Cicero takes this seriously, worrying that without the belief in concerned gods, piety would become mere convention and eventually disappear along with religion and sanctity. “And when these are gone, there is anarchy and complete confusion in our way of life. Indeed I do not know whether, if our reverence for the gods were lost, we should not also see the end of good faith, of human brotherhood, and even of justice itself.” Many who would doubt religion would also worry about the social consequences of losing it.
There are a few instances in the book in which Cicero has one character or another—usually Cotta—nudge one of the other speakers to be more honest, since this is, after all, “a private conversation,” in a private home. Cicero thus communicates that for the health of the state, these things should not, perhaps, be broadcast, but that in a quest for the truth, the wise must speak their true minds, if only to one another. He asks everyone to “come into court, weigh up the evidence, and return their verdict” on the matter of the gods, because there is too much at stake to be cavalier. “Surely even those who believe that they have attained certainty in these matters must feel some doubts when they see how widely wise men have differed about so crucial a question.”9 This plea for serious investigation would be paraphrased or repeated by many future doubters.
Velleius’s Epicurean speech starts off the conversation, and it is deeply irreverent, especially because Cicero manages to tease the Epicurean for his own certainties at the same time that he uses him as a mouthpiece for teasing yet other people’s certainties.
Then up spoke Velleius, with all the confidence of men of his school (whose only anxiety is lest they may seem to be in doubt on any point), as if he had himself just returned to earth from some council of the gods held in one of those abodes of theirs “between the worlds” which Epicurus talks about. “Listen,” said he. “From me you will get no mere figments of the imagination, such as the god whom Plato describes in his Timaeus as the creator and artificer of the world, or the fortune-telling old witch whom the Stoics call Providence, or some theory of the universe being itself endowed with mind and senses, a sort of spherical, incandescent and revolving god. All such marvels and monstrosities as these are not philosophy but merely dreams.”
It is a remarkably forthright beginning by all accounts; it is fun to see Cicero refer to the God shown in the Timaeus as a very particular instance in Plato’s work, and a silly one at that. Velleius then proceeds to give a little synopsis of the Greek philosophers’ opinions on the gods. It is almost a comical performance, because Cicero is exaggerating what he saw as an Epicurean tendency to casually dismiss great minds (of other opinions). From its origins in the Garden, the Epicurean school had spread across the Hellenistic world and through the Roman Empire, and along that journey it had nurtured some dogmatic incarnations. The philosophy had become a way of living for countless people across several centuries, and followers could be loyal to the conclusions of the master without always being able to reconstruct the argument. So Velleius’s tour of the Greek philosophers offered Latin readers a quick lineup of philosophy so far, and allowed Velleius to swashbuckle his way through history. He laughs at Anaxagoras’s idea of the mind of the universe, saying that it makes no sense to imagine a mind without a brain; he scoffs at Pythagoras, who said the whole world was God—that, Velleius argues, would mean God was part of us and since we are so often unhappy, that would mean God was unhappy, and that seems to him unlikely. Even if there could be conscious intelligence separate from a body, all the spinning the universe does would make a person sick, “so why would it not be unpleasant to a god?”
But he saves the most space for Plato, Aristotle, and the founder of Stoicism, Zeno. He dismissed Plato for inconsistency and his cosmological imagination. “How could your friend Plato in his mind’s eye comprehend so vast a piece of architecture as the building of a universe, and how God labored to create it? How did he think God went about it? What tools did he use? What levers? What machines? … It would be tedious to say more, for it is all the stuff of dreams rather than the search for truth.”10 Velleius then says that he has the same problem with the Stoic Providence that he has with Plato’s God:
I ask you both, why did these creators of the world suddenly wake up, after apparently having been asleep from time immemorial.… I ask you, Balbus, why that “Providence” of yours remained quiescent through that mighty lapse of time? Was she work-shy?… Why should God in any case wish to decorate the universe with lights and signs, like some Minister of Public Works? … I suppose he had previously always lived in darkness, like a pauper in a hovel? 11
Valleius thought Aristotle had been “very confused” because he considered God to be bodiless: “And how can this universal god have motion if he is bodiless?” Velleius accuses the Stoics of reconciling the tales of Hesiod and Homer with their own views and, “In this way the most ancient of our poets, who never dreamt of such a thing, are converted into Stoics unawares!” Mythic dogma had been reframed as allegory for a more secular age, but now this allegory was itself becoming dogma.
Velleius concluded by saying, “So far I have been dealing in a general way not so much with the opinions of philosophers as with the fantasies of lunatics”—as absurd, he complains, as the gods described by Homer. Velleius then turns to explain the happy, totally unconcerned, immortal gods described by Epicurus: ethereal creatures that are just a bit more than images; shaped like human beings, but inactive; floating in the space between the worlds. Velleius agrees with Epicurus that gods exist because “an idea that by its nature commands universal agreement must be true,” and since we all feel the gods are happy and immortal, it is reasonable to assume that this is true, too. Also, the gods show up in dreams occasionally. The end of Velleius’s speech starts with naturalism and wraps up in an attack on the idea of a caring God:
Our master has taught us that the world was made by a natural process, without any need of a creator: and that this process, which you say can only be effected by divine wisdom, in fact comes about so easily that nature has created, is creating, and will create, worlds without end. But as you cannot see how nature can do this without the intervention of mind, you follow the example of our tragic playwrights, and take refuge in a divine intervention to unravel the intricacies of your plot. You would have no need of such divine handiwork, if you would only consider the infinite immensity of boundless space in all directions.… In this immensity of breadth and length and height there swarms the infinite power of atoms beyond number, and although they move in a vacuum, they cohere amongst themselves, and then are held together by a mutual attraction. Thus are created all the shapes and forms of nature, which you imagine can only be created by some divine blacksmith with his anvil and his bellows! So you have smuggled into our minds the idea of some eternal overlord, whom we must fear by day and night. Who would not fear a god who foresees everything, ponders everything, notices everything? A god who makes everything his own concern, a curious god, a universal busy body?… Epicurus has saved us from all such fears and set us free… 12
A deus ex deus ex machina! Velleius also criticizes the Stoic notion of Providence as foolish and dangerous, in that it makes people dependent on soothsayers, seers, and “every charlatan who will read for us the riddles or our dreams.” Again, Epicurus is most praised for having delivered people from such dependency and its attendant fear.
Cotta’s refutation is harsh, but it never contests the Epicurean’s dismissal of the various ideas of God. Instead, it attacks the one vision of God that Epicurus did defend. Indeed, after bestowing a few compliments, Cotta goes right to the heart of the matter, asking why “universal agreement” of belief in God had been either posited or taken seriously. Diagoras and Theodorus had openly denied the existence of the gods, reminds Cotta. Protagoras had doubted and for it he was banished and his works burned in public. “I suspect,” Cotta explains, “that his example made others more reluctant to express such sentiments, when they saw that even agnosticism could not escape such penalties.” It is a remarkable comment, suggesting that there has been much doubt that never dared speak its name. Cotta moves on and demands to know how Epicurus or Velleius came to know all the opinions of humankind on the gods:
It is difficult, you will say, to deny that they exist. I would agree, if we were arguing the matter in a public assembly, but in a private discussion of this kind it is perfectly easy to do so. Now I myself hold a religious office, and believe that public religious worship and ritual ought to be reverently observed: so that I could wish to be certainly persuaded on this first question, that the gods exist, as a matter of fact and not of faith, I confess that many doubts arise to perplex me about this, so that at times I wonder whether they exist at all.13
Cicero has Cotta say that despite all this, he does believe that gods exist, and that he was only challenging anyone’s ability to prove it. But other than offering these few quick disclaimers, Cotta makes a powerful argument for deep doubt.
Cotta has no patience at all for the specifics of the Epicurean gods. He has lots of detailed arguments, such as: why, if we are to believe our dreams of gods had some substantive origin, should we move on to assign the visiting image-beings any kind of divinity? “Suppose our minds are visited by such images, and that at most some apparition of this sort does come our way. Why should it be blessed? Why should it be immortal?” And why are these image-gods in human shape? Cotta jokes, “What a fortunate clash of atoms, from which suddenly men are born in the images of the gods!” What’s more, he argues, it would be egocentric to so favor our own shape as to imagine the gods thusly. “No doubt an ant feels the same way,” quips Cotta. “And which human shape are we speaking of? How many human beings are handsome?” Cotta digs in at the point where the gods are supposed to look like us. “Are we to imagine that… some are pug-nosed, some flap-eared, and some beetle-browed or big-headed, like many of ourselves? Or with them is everything made perfect?” And if they are all perfect, they are all the same; “then among the gods there can be no telling who’s who or what’s what!”
Cotta also finds a lot of fun with the idea of an unmoving god who is featured like a human being, and baits Velleius along these lines: “So your God will have a tongue, but he will not speak.… And the organs of procreation, which nature has added to our bodies, will be useless to a God.” Epicurus thought the gods looked like us because we are so beautiful, but Cotta argues that the beauty of our bodies has everything to do with their function—our bodily organs are beautiful because of their complex and precise workings. For a god to have them would be foolish.
Cotta gives other reasons to doubt the Epicurean gods—he finds their idleness childish, for example—but his most powerful argument is that the whole idea of these gods is unfounded. Yes, many people believe in gods, says Cotta, but they all believe differently and according to the conventions of their local culture. “Are you not ashamed as a scientist, as an observer and investigator of nature, to seek your criterion of truth from minds steeped in conventional beliefs?” Since universal agreement and dreams were the reasons offered by Epicurus for belief in gods, Cotta had pretty well finished off Velleius at this point, but there is still a tone of frustration here. It is the misuse of logic that really burns Cotta. “The whole theory, Velleius, is ridiculous.… Is there no end to the old wives’ tales which you permit yourself? … I do not believe these gods of yours exist at all.”
Cotta’s disbelief in these gods is not offered in favor of anyone else’s conception of the gods. Cotta mocks Velleius for treating the great minds of ancient Greece with so little grace, but he does not do so in defense of any of their gods. Quite the contrary. He scolds that Velleius “called some of the most famous men fools, dreamers and lunatics. But if none of these could discover the truth about the nature of the gods, we may well wonder whether they exist at all.”14
At the very end of his rebuttal, Cotta’s argument takes a little turn. After a lengthy argument against Epicurean gods, Cotta wraps up his response with the accusation that by offering people the idea of uninvolved, totally uninterested gods, Epicurus became one of the important destroyers of religion. Along with him, Diagoras, Theodorus, and Protagoras are accused of demolishing religion, reverence, and worship by their denial of or doubt in the gods. Cotta’s diatribe at this juncture is a little history of doubt. It is a delightful miniature of my central task and well displays the tone of Cicero’s book. The idea of religion was defended, and the denial of the gods was seen as a destruction of religion, and to be avoided. Yet, the text manages to rehearse every argument againstGod and to dismantle every argument for God. This text picks up after Cicero has mentioned the work of Diagoras, Theodorus, and Protagoras.
Then there are those who have argued that all our beliefs about the gods have been fabricated by wise men for reasons of state, so that men whom reason could not persuade to be good citizens might be persuaded by religion. Have not these also totally destroyed the foundations of belief? Or Prodicus of Chios, who ascribed divinity to everything which benefits mankind: what room did he leave for religion?15
Cicero then remarks that some say “brave and famous and powerful men” were deified “and that these are the gods whom we have now become accustomed to worship.” People who say such things, he muses, must have no religious feeling. “This line of thought has been especially developed by Euhemerus,” explains Cicero, “and our own Ennius has been his foremost disciple and interpreter.” Ennius (239–169 BCE) was considered the founder of Latin poetry (he introduced Greek forms and changed Latin to do it), most famed for his epic history of Rome, the Annales, but he also brought Euhemerus to the attention of the Roman Republic, and, eventually, the Empire. Cicero asks if when Euhemerus describes these deified heroes “and where they lie buried,” did he seem to have strengthened religion “or to have utterly undermined and destroyed it?” The same goes for the “holy and solemn shrine of Eleusis,” or of Samothrace, “for when these are examined by the light of reason, they seem to be a recognition of the powers of Nature rather than the power of God.”
Cicero added that Democritus, “one of the truly great men, from whose springs of thought Epicurus watered his own little garden,” had erred on the issue of the gods. “Who can understand what he means by these images?” Why worship them? “Then comes Epicurus and uproots religion entirely from the minds of men by taking away all grace and favor from the gods.” As Cicero had it, and it may have been a message from Cicero to sympathetic readers: “It is obviously true, as our mutual friend Posidonius argued in the fifth book of his work on the nature of the gods, that Epicurus did not believe the gods existed at all and that what he said about them was said merely to avoid the odium of atheism.” He continues with a final attack on the Epicurean gods on grounds that would apply to the specifics of many other visions of God:
A god endowed with human limbs but with no use for them! A god transparent and insubstantial, giving no sign of grace or favor to anyone, inactive and indifferent! In the first place such a being could not even exist, and Epicurus knew this, so that he merely paid lip-service to gods whom he had in fact destroyed. And finally, if this is all that a god is, a being untouched by care or love of human kind, then I wave him good-bye.16
This good-bye ends the first book, and it is surely Cicero’s. We recall that his first important teacher was an Epicurean, that his second was a Skeptic from the Academy, and that after his conversion, when he passed from one teacher to the next, he never went back. This philosophic conversion was perhaps the issue at the center of this text: If you want truth, you have to avoid making up anything. If you want to attend to people’s needs, and take seriously the knowledge they glean from their emotions and dreams, don’t give them something that looks like the comforts of old but is in fact an almost entirely useless, unsubstantial nothing.
Now it is the Stoic Balbus’s turn to speak, and Cicero treats him very differently than he had treated Velleius, praising him and giving his position a much longer and more subtle hearing. The gist of Balbus’s argument comes down to two major notions, which he circles again and again. First, the rotation of the heavens seems too beautifully coordinated to be without divine control. Second, if there is no God, then human beings are the most reasonable, wisest, most powerful creatures in the world, and that seems arrogant and childish. I’ve remarked on this before, but it is worth remembering that most moderns live in densely populated areas where the stars are obscured by light and pollution. Even when we are in the country and confronted by the awesome spectacle of the firmament, we know that we are the ones that are moving—the whole question of how the light show works no longer packs a wallop. It’s because we thought we were at the center of things, with everything moving around us, that we were so amazed at the concert of motion above us—once we see the Earth as out there somewhere, spinning around, the precise pageantry of the firmament is less staggering. For most of human history, however, the moving night sky was an excellent argument for theism. Listen to Balbus’s confidence: “What could be more clear and obvious, when we look up to the sky and contemplate the heavens, than that there is some divinity of superior intelligence, by which they are controlled?”17
He has four reasons to believe in God: (1) foreknowledge of future events—he believes divination works and that it could work only if a God had preordained events; (2) the blessings of nature—climate, abundance of food, and so on—and how perfectly they fit our needs; (3) awesome natural spectacles such as thunderbolts, cloudbursts, blizzards, hailstorms, and floods; and (4) the regularity and motion of the heavenly bodies. This last he says is “perhaps most important,” for if you go into a house or gymnasium or anyplace else and everything is beautifully arranged and in perfect order, you assume that someone is in charge—these things just don’t happen by themselves.18 “Their constant and eternal motion, wonderful and mysterious in its regularity, declares the indwelling power of a divine intelligence. If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all.”19
Balbus thinks it is the extreme of hubris to imagine that we are the smartest thing going. Moderns might agree, insofar as, if other life exists in this vast universe, it may well be smarter than we are. But the only extraterrestrial Balbus is thinking about is God, so if there is no God, we are the smartest things in the world, and that seems like puerile narcissism. Balbus says, “Only an arrogant fool would imagine that there was nothing in the whole world greater than himself. Therefore there must be something greater than Man. And that something must be God.”20 This argument is mingled with the idea of design in the universe, because Balbus is impressed enough with humanity to insist that someone better than we must have made us. “If you see some great and beautiful building, would you infer, because the architect is not immediately visible, that it must have been built by mice and weasels?”21
Balbus cannot exclaim enough about the absurdity of a small part of the universe, humanity, being in some way superior to the entirety of the universe. Therefore, since the universe gave birth to intelligence, it must itself be a living intelligence. The Stoics spoke of God in quite naturalist terms: “That which we call Nature is therefore the power which permeates and preserves the whole universe, and this power is not devoid of sense and reason.” For Balbus, not only is the universe God, but the heavenly bodies are also divine. There are two kinds of warmth, he says: the kind from fire and the kind from living bodies. The sun never goes out and it sustains rather than destroys life, so it must be alive and so must all the stars be.
For Balbus, the stories that had been told about the gods—arising from the poets, from philosophy, and from the coincidence of certain earthly events with certain celestial periods—are all “wild errors.” Of Homer’s stories: “These tales are frivolous absurdities and both those who tell them and those who listen to them are a pack of fools.”22 Yet, since a divine power permeates everything, Balbus concludes that we might as well say that it permeates the earth under the name Ceres and the sea under the name Neptune, and so on, and worship these gods each in the way custom has established. Stoic allegory aside, he says that in truth the universe itself is God, and he laughs at the Epicurean belief that our world came into being by chance. “Is it not a wonder that anyone can bring himself to believe that a number of solid and separate particles by their chance collisions and moved only by the force of their own weight could bring into being so marvelous and beautiful a world?”23
He suggests that we’d have as much luck if we poured a sack of golden letters on the ground and hoped they’d spell out the Annales of Ennius. Balbus continues: “If these chance collisions of atoms can make a world, why can they not build a porch, or a temple, or a house, or a city?”24 As we’ll see, Cicero will have Cotta help Balbus with this apparent problem by pointing out that we are talking about nature, not a poem and not a city. The secular explanation is that life, and other matter in other ways, is an accident that has fallen into a replicating pattern. By contrast, when we make predictions of a highly complex end point whose arrangement has nothing to do with the intrinsic properties of its parts, the odds of getting there by random action drop to the infinitesimal.
Balbus’s argument that there must be intelligence to the universe is based on his awe of the heavens, and, to share his awe, he also catalogs the wonders of the earth: “Think also of the beauty of the sea… and the shellfish clinging to the rocks!” He argues that the world must have been made for us since only we appreciate it. Just as Athens and Sparta were made for the Athenians and Spartans, so the universe is for us. We are the ones who have measured out the course of the stars, so the stars must be for us. He observes, “What use is the pig, except to be eaten? Indeed Chrysippus says that the life in a pig is merely the salt which prevents it going bad.”25 The line highlights the comic hubris of Balbus’s idea that the world is made for us.
Balbus concludes even more about the existence of God from the existence of humanity, and cites Zeno as having said that “Nothing… which is devoid of life and intelligence can give birth to any living creature which has intelligence. But the universe does give birth to living creatures which partake of intelligence in their degree. The universe is therefore itself a living intelligence.”26 Balbus finishes up by mentioning that injustice in the world is no proof against the gods, because the world is unjust only in its minutiae and “the gods… have no interest in trifles. For great men all things always turn out well…” Then he reminds Cotta that, as a priest, he ought not to argue against the gods.
Cotta turns to Balbus with a bit of a smile at this little reminder, and Velleius, catching it, expresses his hope that Balbus will be as well skewered as he himself had been. Cotta’s response assures the company that he has much to say against the Stoic notion of God, but first he takes a last shot at Epicurus, accusing him again of having been afraid to deny the gods’ existence: “it seemed to me that he had his tongue in his cheek.”27 The Stoics at least seemed devoted to truth. Cotta then turns back to Balbus and says that he needs no encouragement regarding his public duties: “Nobody, be he learned or unlearned, shall ever argue me out of the views which I have received from my forebears about the worship of the gods.”28 He says he has never been contemptuous of Roman religion and “I have even persuaded myself that Romulus by his reading of omens and Numa by the institution of religious ceremonies together laid the foundations of the Roman state.”29 There is certainly enough evidence here to see that Cicero may have been informing his readers that his belief in God was social and political rather than spiritual or intellectual. Regarding the actual existence of the gods, Cotta turns to Balbus and says, “I am persuaded of this belief by its traditional authority: but you have given me no reason why I should believe it.”
Cotta mocks Balbus’s contention that the stars and planets are divine, reminding him that “Velleius and many others would not even consider [them] to have any life at all!”30 And he laughs even louder that Balbus could give any weight to the idea of universal agreement, saying, “You are content that such matters would be decided by the judgments of fools, you, a Stoic, a member of a sect which regards all folly as a kind of mental disorder!”31 Cotta teases Balbus about the idea that the gods had appeared to men, and Balbus breaks in, dramatically citing some famous and revered examples. “You palm me off with hearsay, Balbus,” answered Cotta, “when what I want from you is reasoned argument.”
Cotta dispatches Balbus’s four proofs just as briskly. He doesn’t believe in divination, and he acknowledges that there are both pleasures and terrors that impress people so mightily that they believe them to be of divine origin, but that does not make it so. Cotta then takes on the claim that since the universe is superior to a person and a person can think, the universe must be able to think. He proposes a parallel: nothing on earth is superior to the city of Rome; therefore, either the city of Rome can think or an ant is superior to the city of Rome. Cotta plays with this, proposing that “A being which can read is superior to a being which cannot. But nothing is superior to the universe as a whole. Therefore the universe as a whole can read.”32 And since for Balbus the universe has intelligence because it gave birth to creatures with intelligence, Cotta insists that the universe is also a lute player. He concludes that there is no reason to imagine that the universe is God, and if the universe is not God, neither are the stars. “You are right to wonder at them,” he assures Balbus, but that they are amazing does not mean that they can’t be natural phenomena.33Listing some other marvels, he says, “We must seek an intelligible cause for all these phenomena. The moment you fail to find one, you run off to a god like a suppliant to an altar.”
As for the craftsmanship that went into the universe, “I would agree,” says Cotta, “if only the universe were a house and not, as I shall show, a work of nature.” Cotta is impressed with Balbus’s description of the harmony and interrelation of nature, but insists that this does not mean a divine spirit is needed. “Nature persists and coheres by its own power without any help from gods. There is indeed inherent in it a kind of harmony or ‘sympathy’ as the Greeks call it. But the greater it is in its own right, the less need it be regarded as the work of some divine power.” Cotta then asserts that there are no immortal beings, citing the great Skeptic Carneades for his argument that every living thing is subject to change, suffering, and destruction. He even says that “there is in fact no immortal body, no individual atom which cannot be split and pulled apart. Every living thing is therefore in its nature vulnerable.… There are countless other cogent arguments to prove that every conscious being must perish in the end.”34
In a beautiful argument, Cotta then revives Carneades’ idea about the moral qualities of God, writing that “a being who is not and cannot be touched by anything of evil has no need to choose between good and bad. What then of reason and intelligence? We use these faculties so as to proceed from the known to the unknown. But nothing can be unknown to God.”35 This problem is also true for all the other virtues, he argues, noting that justice is a product of human communities, that temperance entails temptation, and that courage occurs in situations of pain, toil, and danger. What could God know of any of these? At this point Cotta says that he cannot feel contempt for the ignorant masses when such rubbish is being said by the Stoic philosophers. Returning to the notion that the universe is God, Cotta asks, “Why then add a number of other gods? And what a crowd of them!” After listing the names of star gods, he turns to the idea of Ceres, the corn god, and Bacchus, the vine god, and abruptly asks, “Do you think that there is really anybody so mad as to believe that the food which he eats is a god? As for the human beings who are said to have become gods, can you give me some rational explanation of how this could happen in the past but not in the present?”36
The last important argument that Cotta puts forth addresses the issue of whether the gods care for human beings. Balbus had argued that they did, since they gave us reason, the greatest possible gift. Cotta isn’t so sure, because reason is so double-edged: “It is only a few, and those rarely, who use it for good, while many use it constantly for evil.” He insists that the gods could have endowed us with reason in a form that excluded vice and crime and asks how the gods could have made such an awful mistake. As for punishing the bad and rewarding the good, Cotta doesn’t see any evidence of it. “Diogenes the Cynic used to say that Harpalus, who was regarded as one of the most successful robbers of his time, was a living witness against the gods, because he enjoyed so long a run of good luck.” Cotta then tells a number of enchanting stories of sacrilegious temple robbers, including one who apparently said, “It would be silly to pray to the gods for their gifts and then to ignore them when they are on offer.” Such behavior, we are informed, led to the thief’s prosperity, not his downfall. “We may consecrate shrines to Reason, Faith and Virtue, but we know that it is only in ourselves that they are to be found. From the gods we ask the fulfillment of our hopes of safety, wealth and success. Therefore the prosperity and good fortune of the wicked, as Diogenes so often said, absolutely disprove the power of the gods.”37 Reason, faith, and virtue come from within ourselves—so the only thing remaining that argues for the gods’ existence is divine justice, which is why it is so important to notice that there is none. Cotta also reminds us of “Diagoras the Atheist,” who dismissed the votive pictures testifying to divinely saved sailors by asking where the pictures were of those who had prayed and yet perished.
Most poignantly, Cotta wants to know why Balbus’s all-powerful Providence allows beauty to be destroyed. He speaks of ravished towns and wonders:
Could not a god have come to the rescue and saved those great and splendid cities?… [Y]ou say the divine power of a god can create, set in motion, or transform anything at will. You do not offer this belief as a superstition and an old wives’ tale, but as a reasoned proposition of physical science. You argue that matter, which comprises and composes all things, is malleable and changeable throughout the universe.38
Divine Providence was supposed to be able to “accomplish anything it pleases” and yet it lets people die. “It does not even care about nations. Nations? It does not even care about whole peoples and races, and so we need not be surprised if it shows contempt for mankind altogether.” That would be bad enough, laments Cotta, but the Stoics also argue, “in the same breath,” that the gods send dreams to people and that it is proper for people to make vows to the gods.
But vows are made by individuals, so the divine mind does give heed to the concerns of the individual? So, you see, this divine mind cannot be quite so busy as you thought. But even suppose it is at full stretch, turning the sky, protecting the earth, calming the sea, why does it permit all the other gods to idle about doing nothing? Why not appoint some of those who are unemployed to be Commissioners of Human Affairs? There seem to be any number of them available.39
That’s the last real statement of the book. After this—and Cotta’s final assertion that he hasn’t been denying the existence of the gods but merely reminding his listeners how difficult a question it is—Cicero suddenly comes back into the picture to sum up. In a brief, rushed conclusion he compliments Cotta on his masterful analysis but says that, overall, he agrees with Balbus and the Stoics. And that is that.
Cicero’s book provided a ready source for anyone interested in the arguments for doubt, and it made the ideas available for those who read only Latin. What did Cicero believe? He seems to have been religious in his earlier philosophical works, The Republic and The Laws. In the introduction to The Nature of the Gods, Cicero tells us that he was writing philosophy for three reasons. First, he had time on his hands because political changes had shoved him out of government. Second, he thought it would be good for the nation to learn philosophy and many could not read Greek. Last, he confessed, he “was moved to these studies by my own sickness of mind and heart, crushed and shaken as I was by the great misfortune which I had to bear.” This great misfortune was the loss of his daughter Tullia in 45 BCE. He was inconsolable, and his second marriage broke up in the strain. For a while he planned to have Tullia deified, so he could build a little temple to her memory on his estate, but he did not do it. Instead, Cicero wrote this masterpiece of doubt, though he never said the one was a replacement for the other.
Some scholars have wondered at this—should not he have turned toward religion? Yet, clearly, he didn’t. This is another possible response to loss. This response places the quest for demonstrable truth above the vicissitudes of the mad and thieving universe. The search for provable truth can be an unalienable comfort. What Cicero seems to have concluded is that we cannot know if the gods exist—but it seems unlikely.40
It has been suggested that Cicero grew more skeptical because his contemporaries were growing more credulous.41 His friend Terentius Varro had just written Divine Antiquities, a treatise on religion that cataloged the vast array of Roman gods and called for a revival of their worship. Varro noted that ways of understanding the gods changed across time, but the specific reality of their details interested him less than the mandate that the gods be worshiped for the sake of the state. Varro’s book helped inspire the conservative revival of Roman religion by Julius Caesar and then Augustus. Cicero celebrated Varro’s work in 46 BCE, and in his own work of this period he also took care to emphasize that Rome must actively preserve its religious traditions. Now it was 44BCE and Varro’s work was inviting a restoration of obsolete cults. A public sacrifice was decreed to celebrate Caesar’s birthday, and Caesar’s statue was increasingly exhibited among the gods. The tone of the times, among both Cicero’s friends and his enemies, was increasingly sanctimonious. That may have helped drive Cicero in the other direction. Yet his skepticism was not only a distaste for Caesar’s swagger. Cicero’s beloved Tullia was dead, and we may presume her father asked himself some pointed questions about the nature of mortality. Seen thusly, Cotta’s words on immortality sound sadder and sterner. Consider his final remarks to Balbus on his God: “It follows from this theory of yours that this divine Providence is either unaware of its own powers or is indifferent to human life. Or else it is unable to judge what is best. ‘Providence is not concerned with individuals,’ you say. I can well believe it.”42 These words are among the book’s final statements.
Cicero’s next book was On Divination, and it, too, was supposed to be a record of a private conversation, this time between Cicero and his brother. The brother spoke first, in favor of the divinatory arts. Cicero demolishes that argument, hammering on the disproportionately small number of correct or useful prophecies and the inherent improbability that bird entrails or the position of far-off stars could actually contain information about the details of a given person’s life on a given day. It was one of the last things Cicero wrote. He got on the wrong side of Augustus and was put to death in 43 BCE. He is remembered, among other things, as the unsurpassed master of Latin prose. He will remain a key voice into the future of doubt.
LUCRETIUS AND THE EPICUREAN POEM
Titus Lucretius was a contemporary of Cicero and the great poet of Epicureanism. His On the Nature of Things is a book-length poem detailing a complex and subtle philosophical system—perhaps the only successful venture of this nature in Europe’s history. The ideas were faithfully reproduced from Epicurus, yet the poem is a highly original work representing the concerns of its own historical moment. Lucretius felt the decline of the Roman Republic: the military was taking over, there was a rash of scandals, and one heard of corruption everywhere. In the circumstances, Lucretius believed it would be best to follow Epicurus out of public life and into the garden of friendship.
In the poetry of Lucretius, Epicurus is the savior of humanity. This is heroic poetry of doubt and disbelief. It celebrates Epicurus as the great champion of rational thought and as the conqueror of religion. The text also hints at the pride people felt in coming to these conclusions. A little of the verse quickly demonstrates the gratitude of centuries of followers:
When before our eyes man’s life lay groveling, prostrate, Crushed to the dust under the burden of Religion (Which thrust its head from heaven, its horrible face Glowering over mankind born to die), One man, a Greek, was the first mortal who dared Oppose his eyes, the first to stand firm in defiance.
Not the fables of gods, nor lightning, nor the menacing Rumble of heaven could daunt him, but all the more They whetted his keen mind with longing to be First to smash open the tight-barred gates of Nature.
His vigor of mind prevailed, and he strode far Beyond the fiery battlements of the world, Raiding the fields of the unmeasured All.
Our victor returns with knowledge of what can arise, What cannot, what law grants each thing its own Deep-driven boundary stone and finite scope. Religion now lies trampled beneath our feet, And we are made gods by the victory.43
Traditions regarding the lives of Greek gods were reduced to fables as Epicurus went “raiding the fields of the unmeasured All.” The last two lines of the quoted passage are particularly strong.
For Lucretius, as for Epicurus, the finality of death and the absence of the gods did not seem depressing; indeed, they seemed to add to the sweetness of life. Consider his calm musings on life after death:
Besides, if the soul by nature stands immortal And slips into the body right at birth, Why can’t we recall as well the times gone by, Preserving traces of our former lives? But if the spirit’s power is so altered That all its hold upon past action fails, Well, that, I think, strays not too far from Death.
That is to say, if you cannot remember your past lives, it is pretty much the same as not having had them, and if you live after death but with no memory, it is pretty much the same as having died. As for reincarnation, Lucretius notes that “if souls never died and could swap bodies, all creatures would become a welter of cross-traits:… the hawk would flee the swooping of the dove; men would be foolish and fierce creatures wise.”44 No, he concludes, the soul dies with the body.
On the matter of the origin of consciousness, Lucretius explains that this, too, arises from the laws of nature: “Now of necessity you must admit that sensate things must even so consist of insensate atoms.… From the insensate, animal life is born.” The fact that we are made up of insensate parts teaches us that the insensate can produce (or add up to) the sensate. “So nature turns all food to living flesh / And from that food gives birth to animal senses / In much the same way as she make dry tinder / Explode in flames and turn all into fire.”45
This naturalism, he insisted, was good news, and he was as eager as Epicurus had been to free humanity from worry over death.
Death, then, is nothing to us, no concern, Once we grant that the soul will also die. Just as we felt no pain in ages past When the Carthaginians swarmed to the attack
So too, when we no longer are, when our Union of body and soul is put asunder, Hardly shall anything then, when we are not, Happen to us at all and stir the senses, Not if earth were embroiled with the sea and the sea with heaven!
Now if you happen to see someone resent That after death he’ll be put down to stink Or be picked apart by beasts or burnt on the pyre, You’ll know that he doesn’t ring true, that something hidden Rankles his heart—no matter how often he says He trusts that there’s no feeling after death.46
The problem is, “He posits, unknowing, a bit of himself left over.” He imagines his corpse, feels sorry for it, and “Can’t see that when he dies there’ll be no other / Him living to moan that he’s bereft of him.”
Our feelings indicate that our selves are real and lasting, and that if we are not included in a game of pinochle a hundred years after our own death, we’ll feel a little left out. Lucretius suggests that if we can understand that we will not, in any sense, persist after death, we will realize that after death we will be free from all possibility of pain, anxiety, humiliation, and other nastiness. For instance, we will be entirely spared the feeling of being posthumously picked apart by beasts. You will not have an opportunity to miss your own pretty face, Lucretius reminds us, saying that when a man dies, “there’ll be no other him living to moan that he’s bereft of him.” Also, whatever section of time you have is the only time there is, as far as you are concerned, so the urge for more time does not make any sense.
Survive this generation and the next—Nevertheless eternal death awaits, Nor will the man who died with the sun today Be nonexistent for less time than he Who fell last month—or centuries ago.47
A bit grim, certainly, but the point was to stop trying to grasp on to life, to enjoy it, and to stop worrying about death.
I mentioned earlier that Epicurus was “a god” to Lucretius. What Lucretius says is that Epicurus is “a god, the founder of a way of life called ‘wisdom’ now.” If Prodicus of Ceos and Euhemerus were right about the gods originating from normal people who brought great things to humanity, then, Lucretius giddily suggested, Epicurus had earned the title, too:
Bring the old inventions of those other gods! For Ceres, they say, first brought us grain, and Bacchus Gave mortal men to drink of the juice of the vine—And yet life can go on without these things,
Without a clear heart, though, no one lives well. All the more does he merit from us the name of god Whose way of life, by now spread worldwide, brings Sweet soothing solace for the minds of men.48
Solace is the gift that seems most godlike to Lucretius—far above a glass of red and a dinner roll. There are other things to eat and drink, and life is sustained by more than food. Lucretius’s idea of the origins of gods was that people saw wondrous things in the sky, and the changing seasons, and could not understand them. “Their refuge, then: assign to the gods all things.” But it did not stop there. “Unhappy human race—to grant such feats to gods, and then to add vindictiveness! What wailing did they bring forth for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for our descendants!”49
Lucretius believed in the Epicurean gods, but given that they were absent from the world of humanity, his world was godless. He teased people who paid lip service to the conventional gods from a rationalist standpoint. His words on the matter have a nice dismissive shrug to them and delightfully bring his subject before our eyes: “If a man insists on calling the sea ‘Neptune’ or the grain ‘Ceres,’ and would sooner abuse the name of ‘Bacchus’ than to call wine what wine’s called, we’ll give way, let him tell us and tell us the world is the ‘Goddess Mother’ so long as in truth he still keeps his mind clean of the taint of vile religion.”50 Lucretius perfected the irreligious sneer.
He set out to describe how religion worked because he thought mystery and fear kept driving otherwise intelligent people back to their old beliefs. He warns: “Don’t you scurry like a brainless fool” to check where the thunder and lightning of a storm come from in order to understand the minds of the gods.51 Thunder and lightning, he assures his reader, are natural effects of the clouds and the sky in a storm. His details are fun. (Some thunder comes from clouds crashing into each other, some from overfull clouds popping: “No cause for wonder. Blow up an animal bladder until it bursts: it gives its great big pop.”) But the point is always to assure his reader that there is a naturalist explanation for everything.52
He explains the physical and emotional world with such passion—for both the exquisite and the grotesque—that his poem stands as a sublime answer to God’s litany in the Book of Job. His curiosity and wit celebrate everything: why fruits are “faithful to their trees,” instead of all things bearing all things; why “Nature cannot fashion giants to ford the sea in a few strides”; why stone walls “weep plenty of big drops”; why equal-sized balls of wool and lead have different weights; why children get dizzy when they spin around. His descriptions of the movements and behavior of atoms are so detailed that the text feels at times overly technical, but any search for a mechanical explanation might carry him off into his own surprising, imaginative musings:
Don’t suppose atoms link in every way. You would meet freaks and monsters wherever you turned: Races of half-beast men would spring up, tall Branches might sometimes sprout from a living torso, And land-dwelling members link with the life of the sea And Nature, mothering anything anywhere, Would feed Chimeras snorting stench and flame. None of this happens, we know, for everything Is made of certain seeds, by certain parents, And in their growing they preserve their kinds. Of course they must; a fixed law makes it so.53
He goes on to explain the “fixed law” in terms of atoms. He begs his reader to “Hear the truth of reason! A new fact fights to clear its way, to accost you and show you a new aspect of the world.” And then he proceeds to versify Epicurus’s wondrous cosmology:
In no way now can it seem plausible That while space yawns in every direction, endless, And numberless seeds in seas unfathomable Fly this way and that, driven on in ceaseless motion, Our world and sky should be unique creations, And all those seeds out there accomplish nothing!
When after all our world is made by nature Of her own, by chance, by the rush and collision of atoms, Jumbled any which way, in the dark, to no result, But at last tossed into combinations which Became the origin of mighty things, Of the earth and the sea and the sky and all that live.54
Since our world of atoms happened to create amazing things, Lucretius assures us that natural law and accident must have created endless pockets of wonder. These other worlds are populated by “different kinds of men and animals.” Neither the “sky and earth” nor the “sun, moon and sea” are unique; all are in abundance throughout the universe. This leads Lucretius to claim that gods simply couldn’t be running all of this—it is too much work. Instead, “nature is free,” and unconstrained; “rid of all gods, she works her will herself.” It is a big moment in the history of doubt:
Who can wheel all the starry spheres, and blow Over all land the fruitful warmth from above Be ready in all places at all times, Gather black clouds and shake the quiet sky With terrible thunder, to hurl down bolts which often Rattle his own shrines, to rage in the desert, retreating For target drill, so that his shafts can pass The guilty by and slay the innocent?55
The stanza develops the idea that a world constantly managed by an intelligent force is much less efficient than a universe that generates itself according to regular principles. The stanza also takes a jab at the silliness of an intelligent God raining lightning bolts on his own shrines, and laughs at the sheer work involved in the idea of divine justice. Many have said that this world is so complex that it must have been conceived by an intelligent, powerful force. Lucretius says the opposite—it is so vast and majestic that it must be self-propelled, because it is ridiculous to imagine a force trying to enact all of this when one has an alternative mechanistic theory.
For its delightful inquiries—into such questions as whether women and other female animals enjoy sex (he thinks yes)—its poetic style, its imaginative descriptions, and its intellectual rigor, Lucretius was read and studied by the general populace as well as the leading figures of Roman literature for centuries. He had a tremendous impact on Virgil, for example, and Ovid loved his materialism and mockery of the traditional gods. Ovid’s own best statement on the subject was, “It is convenient that there be gods, and as it is convenient, let us believe there are.” That does seem to have been the mood. Lucretius, by the way, died without putting his poem into a published form; Cicero did that for him. Cicero outlived Lucretius only by a little, both men dying in the middle of the first century BCE. We now turn our attention to three later figures of the early empire.
PLINY THE ELDER
Pliny the Elder lived from 23 to 79 CE. Nero’s reign created much anxiety and real persecution, mostly among the privileged classes. Stoicism provided the philosophical platform for the opposition, who were attempting to revive and empower the senate. Pliny the Elder, however, was a Stoic who was reasonably comfortable under the emperors, serving the state by day and writing his largely inoffensive, and often Imperially flattering, treatises by night. Natural History is the only work of his to have survived down to us, and it is a treat. The book is a compendium of information about the world, some of it merely interesting to the modern reader, such as the section on “The papyrus plant and the invention of paper,” and some of it historically enlightening and entertaining, such as the section called “Man occupies a small fraction of the earth, itself a mere dot in the universe” and the one on “Alexander the Great’s famous dog” (the dog fought lions and elephants!). But in his section on “The revival of people pronounced dead,” he showed more caution, writing that “life is full of such predictions but they should not be collected, since more often than not they are false.”
In his section on “The search for God,” Pliny opines that it is a sign of human weakness to try to find out the shape and form of God.56 He doesn’t think that the world “is properly held to be a deity,” but his list of its characteristics (everlasting, boundless, an entity without a beginning and one that will never end) does not include consciousness or intelligence. Indeed, when he speaks of the more personified notion of God, he displays more skepticism.
Whoever God is—provided he does exist—and in whatever region he is, God is the complete embodiment of sense, sight, hearing, soul, mind and of himself. To believe in … an infinite number of deities corresponding to men’s vices, as well as their virtues… plumbs an even greater depth of foolishness.57
Pliny introduces a few new reasons not to believe in the specific gods of the pantheon. For one thing, he thinks if everyone were correct about his or her gods, there would be more gods than people. He dismisses the details of these gods because they seem unlikely: “Some nations have animals—even repulsive creatures—as gods,” but worse, “to believe that some gods are always old and grey-haired, while others are young men and boys,” or to believe in gods who are “lame, born from eggs, or who live and die on alternate days—such beliefs are little short of the fantasies of children.” He also dismisses the pantheon for the old reason of the gods’ adulterous and treacherous behavior. It is at this juncture that he asserts: “God is man helping man: this is the way to everlasting glory.”58 This assessment allows him to flatter the emperors, for when Roman leaders aid their people, “The apotheosis of such men is the oldest method of rewarding them for their good deeds.” He was not saying that those who do civic good actually become gods, but he was supporting the practice of treating them that way.
As for the Stoic idea of God, “It is ridiculous,” Pliny wrote, “to think that a supreme being—whatever it is—cares about human affairs. Don’t we believe that it would be defiled by so gloomy and complex a responsibility?” Anyway, why should God care about or even judge us when “some men have no respect for the gods, while the regard shown by others is shameful.” Pliny also gave witness that the Hellenistic worship of chance, Tyche, was still vibrant in the first century CE. “Throughout the whole world, in all places and at all times, Fortune alone is invoked, alone commended, alone accused and subjected to reproaches … to her is credited all that is received… and we are so subject to chance that Chance herself takes the place of God.”
What Pliny says regarding “the power of the gods” demonstrates his wit and sarcasm as well as any other passage in the book and offers us a new kind of irreverence. “The chief consolation for Nature’s shortcomings in regard to man is that not even God can do all things. For he cannot, even if he should so wish, commit suicide, which is the greatest advantage he has given man among all the great drawbacks of life.”59 Pliny goes on to say that “God cannot give mortals the gift of everlasting life, or recall the dead, or cause a man who has lived to have not lived, or someone who has held office not to have held it.” Furthermore, “He has no power with respect to the past, except to forget it.” Also, God “cannot make twice ten other than twenty.” Here’s the kicker: “These facts show without a shadow of doubt the power of Nature and prove that this is what we mean by ‘God.’”60
Pliny is certain that there is no life after death. The period after your last day is precisely the same as the period before your first day: “neither body nor mind has any more sensation after death than it had before birth.”61 It is just “wishful thinking” that imagines an afterlife, an idea that we never extend to the animal kingdom, even to those animals that live longer than we do, “as if man’s method of breathing differs in some way from that of other animals.” Pliny poses numerous questions about the soul, asking what it is made of, what is its power of thought, how does it hear or touch, and what use it gets of these senses. He asks where the soul resides and how great is the crowd of souls from so many ages past. Then he dismisses all these questions as “characteristic of childish gibberish and of mortal men greedy for an everlasting life.” At last he dismisses the whole argument, exclaiming, “A plague on this mad idea that life is renewed by death!” Throughout the text, Pliny peppers his jaunty, upbeat discussion of the world with little remarks about how death is one of the greatest favors bestowed upon humanity. Rather than imagine an afterlife: “How much easier and much surer a foundation it is for each person to trust in himself, and for us to gain our pattern of future freedom from care from our experience of it before birth!”62
Pliny the Elder was a naturalist, and in this work he was a compiler of observations and interpretations of the known world. In this kaleidoscope of truths and notions, he manages to communicate an ebullient and curious personality and to let us in on a calm, self-assured, and exacting mood of doubt. Pliny believed that sometimes it rained blood and a hundred other things that would seem magical by our standards; he did not have enough evidence about the natural world to be certain that blood showers were anything other than a rare but natural phenomenon. On the other hand, he understood life after death as supernatural, born of wishful thinking, and he did not believe in the supernatural.
MARCUS AURELIUS
A hundred years after Pliny, the rationalist mood that he embodied would still reign over Classical Rome. The emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE) is often described as a philosophical agnostic and a practical atheist. He is seen as the quintessential figure of his age in this respect, for though he was more scholarly than most, he represented the period’s relative indifference to religion. Marcus Aurelius admired Stoicism, of the variety that did not give much credence to the notion of Providence, but he could never choose between the Stoic idea of a somehow-ordered universe and the Epicureans’ idea about atoms and chance.
Aurelius stands out as a man struggling to internalize the truths of philosophy; his Meditations read like a sage counseling himself through some dark night or ethical confusion. That he was emperor, and perhaps as close to a philosopher-king as the West would ever know, has long fueled interest in his Meditations, but it needn’t have. The book is a marvel of insight and advice. It is not particularly original in its ideas—it is mostly a mixture of Stoicism and Epicureanism—but the voice here is new and warm, and the advice, on all sorts of subjects, is good. It feels good to read it. The book does impart information on the nature of the physical world, but it is mostly what it says it is, a call for meditation, a guide for thought. The Emperor knew what so many passionate doubters have known: it takes as much repetitive reading, ritual, and practice to live well as a doubter as it does to live well as a believer. The book reiterates some ideas over and over in different forms, to help the reader and, we suspect, the author, actually learn the precepts that he or she has come to recognize as true. Here is the heart of it: “Whether the universe is a concourse of atoms, or nature is a system, let this first be established, that I am a part of the whole which is governed by nature; next, I am in a manner intimately related to the parts which are of the same kind with myself.” We are all one. The result of this realization would be not only our own inner calm, but also an attitude of patience and generosity toward other people, even fools. “Men exist for the sake of one another,” counseled the emperor, “Teach them then or bear with them.”
Marcus Aurelius lived at a moment and in a position in which he did not feel pressed to come to a decision on the existence of God or gods, so it appears that he did not. His thoughts include casual references to such gods or God—which do not feel at all forced—but when he really gets down to the subject, he is in a good deal of doubt. His basic position is as follows:
The periodic movements of the universe are the same, up and down from age to age. And either the universal intelligence puts itself in motion for every separate effect, and if this is so, be thou content with that which is the result of its activity; or it puts itself in motion once, and everything else comes by way of sequence …; or indivisible elements are the origin of all things. In a word, if there is a God, all is well; and if chance rules, do not thou also be governed by it.63
Either all is planned or we must learn the rules for living in a world of chance.
These rules are familiar to us by now: remember death so that you are vividly aware that you are alive and so that you will take the right things seriously; remember that you have nothing to fear from death since you won’t be around for it; don’t lust for money or praise because they do not bring happiness, but try to control desires; and don’t lust for posthumous fame since you won’t be around for it anyway, even if it were worth having. What then should we do? Where other philosophers of the good life counseled devotion to knowledge, as with Plato, for example; or to family and work, as in Ecclesiastes; or to friends, as with Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius joined those who counseled devotion to the community, to the great multitude of one’s fellow human beings.
Many times throughout the Meditations, Aurelius mentions that perhaps the universe has God and meaning, and perhaps it does not. After soothing himself with thoughts of the interconnectedness of the universe under the sure hand of Nature, he at once pushes himself a little further: “But if a man should even drop the term Nature (as an efficient power), and should speak of these things as natural,” even then it would be “ridiculous to affirm” that everything changes and at the same time “to be surprised or vexed as if something were happening contrary to nature” when things fell apart.64 Mood is his chief subject here, but through that conversation we hear a lot of doubt about the existence of God.
As in almost all graceful-life philosophies, the central piece of advice is not to forget the big picture, but rather to remember it constantly, especially when you feel lost or unloved, abused by chance or by your associates. The emperor puts this in rationalist yet exuberant terms: “Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return.”65 How shall we bear loss if we cannot be sure that everything has a meaning? The emperor reminds us, things change and we must attune ourselves to expect that. “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them.” And elsewhere: “Loss is nothing else than change. But the universal nature delights in change… and will … to time without end.”66 He even leaps to the notion that death will not end some stable “you” that began at your birth, but will only further change a “you” that has never stopped changing: “Do not imagine that the solid and the airy part belong to thee from the time of generation. For all this received its accretion only yesterday and the day before, as one may say, from the food and the air which is inspired. This, then, which has received the accretion, changes, not that which thy mother brought forth.”67 We must stop trying to defend the stability and coherence of a self and a world that are always changing.
Aurelius approaches the question of souls and life after death carefully: he is not concerned to prove any given system, or to disprove them all, nor does he even seem to be interested in the religious consequence of his conclusions. Yet the idea does not sound likely to him and he pokes at it rather amusedly. “If souls continue to exist, how does the air contain them from eternity?” He tells us that some people say souls shrink like bodies after death and are received “into the seminal intelligence of the universe,” and thus make room for new souls. “And this is the answer which a man might give on the hypothesis of souls continuing to exist. But we must not only think of the number of bodies which are thus buried, but also of the number of animals which are daily eaten by us and the other animals. For what a number is consumed, and thus in a manner buried in the bodies of those who feed on them!”68 If souls took up space, we would need an awful lot of room by now, given the number of creatures that die on any day, even just for the tables of Rome. The emperor didn’t believe in life after death and by the time he wrote these meditations he had spent a long time teaching himself to be at peace with annihilating death. He leaned on Epicurus here, but his own phrasings are very satisfying and show what this emperor made of the consequences of doubt. His themes—again—are time, reminders of death, and the solace of contemplation:
Soon will the earth cover us all: then the earth, too, will change, and the things also which result from change will continue to change for ever, and these again for ever. For if a man reflects on the changes and transformations which follow one another like wave after wave and their rapidity, he will despise everything which is perishable.69
Aurelius was not saying we should actually hate the changeable world, but when our arrangements are cradling us in some self-satisfied bliss, we must not be anxious to keep it, nor too terribly saddened when it all changes.
Acquire the contemplative way of seeing how all things change into one another, and constantly attend to it, and exercise thyself about this part of philosophy. For nothing is so much adapted to produce magnanimity. Such a man has put off the body, and as he sees that he must, no one knows how soon, go away from among men and leave everything here, he gives himself up entirely to just doing in all his actions, and in everything else that happens he resigns himself to the universal nature.70
Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time, the turning of a gimlet.71
And my personal favorite:
Severally on the occasion of everything that thou doest, pause and ask thyself if death is a dreadful thing because it deprives thee of this.72
These excerpts remind us again that we need to be reminded again and again. He speaks of the nature of reality, but also about the necessity of regular meditation on the situation. One must sit still and reflect on the fact of change; one must “acquire the contemplative way of seeing”; one must “exercise” oneself on this matter; one must “constantly contemplate the whole of time”; one must think “severally on the occasion of everything” you do. As a result you will be happy, calm, and generous. In fact, nothing will make you a good person faster, says Aurelius. “Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.”73
His take on prayer is that even if there are gods, we ought to ask them only for the maturity and the fortitude not to need anything. This way, whether there are gods or not, we have not wasted our time:
Either the gods have no power or they have power. If, then, they have no power, why dost thou pray to them? But if they have power, why dost thou not pray for them to give thee the faculty of not fearing any of the things which thou fearest, or of not desiring any of the things which thou desirest, or not being pained at anything, rather than pray that any of these things should not happen or happen?… Begin, then, to pray for such things, and thou wilt see. One man prays thus: How shall I be able to lie with that woman? Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her? Another prays thus: How shall I be released from this? Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released? Another thus: How shall I not lose my little son? Thou thus: How shall I not be afraid to lose him? In fine, turn thy prayers this way, and see what comes.74
By the end of those examples Aurelius has offered us a rather heartbreaking prayer, but it helps. Elsewhere he returns to the idea of worrying over a sick boy and says that all we know is that the child is sick, not what will happen, and we must not project onto the situation any positive or negative fantasies. The boy is sick. That’s all you know. Don’t worry.
More than once he bids his reader to “Look down from above on the countless herds of men and their countless solemnities, and the infinitely varied voyagings in storms and calms, and the differences among those who are born, who live together, and die.” From this vantage, “raised up above the earth,” he tells us to observe humanity, and to consider how many people have lived before you, how many will live after you are gone, “how many know not even thy name, and how many will soon forget it.” What is more, those who are now praising you may very soon curse you and “neither a posthumous name is of any value, nor reputation, nor anything else.” From high above, “thou wouldst see the same things, sameness of form and shortness of duration.”
All these philosophers who have told us to forget fame are remembered these millennia later, and were famous in their times. The problem of fame is theirs in a special way. Emperor Aurelius counseled against striving for renown but was wrestling with the meaning of his own:
He who has a vehement desire for posthumous fame does not consider that every one of those who remember him will himself also die very soon; then again also they who have succeeded them, until the whole remembrance shall have been extinguished as it is transmitted through men who foolishly admire and perish. But suppose that those who will remember are even immortal, and that the remembrance will be immortal, what then is this to thee? And I say not what is it to the dead, but what is it to the living?75
As I have said, the Meditations are contemplative songs, prayers to the self, things one comes to know slowly. Although they sometimes refer to gods or God, Marcus Aurelius’s work is about how to live as a human being in a universe that is not human and that does not bend toward human desire. To live well in the world as it presents itself, we need, not to assign possible traits to the universe, but to internalize the traits we do see. That means accustoming ourselves to believing that we are each a little nothing in a great expanse of space and time, and are therefore free of worry. Aurelius, however, had the doubled task of remembering that even if you are emperor, you are still a little nothing and therefore free of worry. To drive this point home to himself and to his readers, he lists famous people from the near past who he feels are forgotten by the present generation. It is poignant for us to read these lists, for indeed most are lost to history, although a few have come down to us with full biographies.
Augustus’ court, wife, daughter, descendants, ancestors, sister, Agrippa, kinsmen, intimates, friends, Areius, Maecenas, physicians and sacrificing priests—the whole court is dead. Then turn to the rest, not considering the death of a single man, but of a whole race, as of the Pompeii; and that which is inscribed on the tombs—The last of his race. Then consider what trouble those before them have had that they might leave a successor; and then, that of necessity some one must be the last. Again here consider the death of a whole race.76
Letting this shock of forgetfulness do its work, Marcus Aurelius then tells us to what we should devote ourselves, given such circumstances: “Thoughts just, and acts social, and words which never lie, and a disposition which gladly accepts all that happens as necessary, as usual, as flowing from a principle and source of the same kind.”77 The text is full of such gems of calm, but it also contains passages in which he seems to encounter anew the problem of life in a possibly godless universe, and he thrashes around trying to galvanize his inner forces, to go and do whatever it is that can actually and honestly be done on any given day in such a world:
The universal cause is like a winter torrent: it carries everything along with it. But how worthless are all these poor people who are engaged in matters political, and, as they suppose, are playing the philosopher! All drivellers. Well then, man: do what nature now requires. Set thyself in motion, if it is in thy power, and do not look about thee to see if any one will observe it; nor yet expect Plato’s Republic: but be content if the smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter.
He adds that if Alexander and others have “acted like tragedy heroes, no one has condemned me to imitate them. Simple and modest is the work of philosophy. Draw me not aside to indolence and pride.”78 In their own ways, Plato and Alexander had conquered much of the known world about five hundred years earlier; Marcus Aurelius suggested asking for considerably less.
The emperor did not suppose that his own path was without fault. He says that there is no man so fortunate that when he is dying there are not some who are glad of it. “Suppose that he was a good and wise man, will there not be at last some one to say to himself, Let us at last breathe freely being relieved from this schoolmaster? It is true that he was harsh to none of us, but I perceived that he tacitly condemns us. This is what is said of a good man.” There is no perfect way to be, we can only do our best; and some people will dislike us no matter what. He suggests we remember such depressing truths when we are scared of death, since it will remind us that this world is not worth clinging to.
Aurelius constructed a worldview that attended to religious needs without religion. He made peace with death, found an ambivalence he could live with on the question of meaning, and learned to pray for the one thing for which prayer is a self-fulfilling activity, the prayer to remember one’s own strength. He did not argue that the world was mechanistic and therefore free of wonder. He was awestruck at the world. With delighted reverence he marvels at human generation, “that a man deposits seed in a womb and goes away, and then another cause takes it, and labors on it and makes a child. What a thing from such a material!”79 He similarly marvels at the unseen forces of the universe: “I observe then the things which are produced in such a hidden way, and see the power just as we see the power which carries things downwards and upwards, not with the eyes, but still no less plainly.” Gravity and reproduction are always the showstoppers, and such wonders were effective reminders of the interconnected grand scheme of things, that giant truth, which, could we only remember it, would set us free to live in joy and die in peace. It’s just a matter of keeping things in mind:
Thou canst remove out of the way many useless things among those which disturb thee, for they lie entirely in thy opinion; and thou wilt then gain for thyself ample space by comprehending the whole universe in thy mind, and by contemplating the eternity of time, and observing the rapid change of every several thing, how short is the time from birth to dissolution, and the illimitable time before birth as well as the equally boundless time after dissolution.80
The emperor says that we may gain for ourselves “ample space” by coming to know the big picture of the universe. There’s something in that advice that resonates with all graceful-life philosophies and living religions. A wise heart must be made: we need to master a certain amount of pain, anxiety, and fear before we have the space to be generous, and that space must be defended by study and meditation on reality.
SEXTUS EMPIRICUS
After drinking deeply of the emperor’s good counsel, it is a decided contrast to turn to our next great Roman doubter, for he did not have anyone’s heart on his mind. Sextus Empiricus is the best exemplar of the Skeptics of Roman times. He lived from the mid second century through about the first quarter of the third. Skeptics of this period went about their arguments by dividing any notion into two possible, oppositional ideas, and then positing a dependent notion for each side until they found something contradictory or absurd, at which point they would dismiss the original proposition. In so doing, they sought not to isolate the truth, but rather to prove that certainty, on any issue, made bad sense. The Skeptics of this period were robustly against the Epicureans, Stoics, and Neoplatonists, all of whom they referred to as “the dogmatists” for believing that they knew truth. It was the philosophy of “no,” and it reigned for centuries at the Academy. On the question of the gods, it is quite something to read Sextus’s endless juxtaposition of conditionals. The relativism is a lofty aim, but taking a subject and arguing against all opinions on it is a very strange way to proceed and makes for weird reading.
There are three surviving works by Sextus, each in several volumes. They are all classic works of doubt—doubt of everything—but for the question of the gods, two essays are important. The first is in book three of The Outline of Pyrrhonism—Pyrrho being the founder of Skepticism. Chapter three of this text is “On God,” and Sextus begins with a tellingly pat avowal of official belief: “[W]e conform to the ordinary view, in that we affirm undogmatically the existence of gods, reverence gods, and affirm that they are possessed of foreknowledge. But in reply to the rashness of the dogmatists, we have this to say.” And then he launches into a dismissal of being able even to conceive of the idea of deity without making a logical mess of it. “But granted that God can be conceived, it is necessary … to suspend judgment on the question of his existence or non-existence,” primarily because “if the impression of him proceeded from himself,” everyone who believed in God would have basically the same idea of him. But they do not. In any case, he argues, it is impossible to prove the existence of something that does not make itself apparent. He picks up Epicurus’s idea that a powerful god who knows all doesn’t make sense in a world so full of evil as our own.
If [God] has the power of forethought for all things, but not the will, he will be considered malicious. And if he has neither the will nor the power, he is both malicious and weak. But to say this about God is impiety. Therefore God has no forethought for the things in the world.
But if he takes no thought for anything, and no work or product of his exists, a person will not be able to say where we get the idea that God exists, seeing that he neither appears of himself nor is apprehended by means of any of his products. For these reasons, then, it cannot be apprehended whether God exists.
Sextus concludes that all those who assert the existence of God are “guilty of impiety.” If they say God is involved with us, then God is responsible for evil, and if they say he ignores us, “they will necessarily be saying that God is either malicious or weak,” and that is “manifest impiety.”
Sextus’s other meditation on the existence of God is found in his Against the Dogmatists, which takes the form of five books: Against the Physicists, Against the Ethicists, Against the Logicians, etc. In these, Sextus does just what the titles suggest; he argues against all the ethicists, for example, setting up their views and knocking them down, without ever posing an alternative. There is a beautiful tedium to it. The argument has an almost liturgical singsong quality, such that in the deficit of knowledge Sextus posed, this song and its debunking scythe could perhaps soothe its own wound, its own harsh claim that we can know nothing.
But Sextus did not remain completely agnostic on the question of the gods. He began his Against the Physicists with a section called “Concerning the Gods,” offering a rare assessment about the general state of doubt. On the question of the existence of God, he says, some assert his existence, some assert his nonexistence, and some “say that he is ‘no more’ existent than non-existent.” He also reports: “That he exists is the contention of most of the dogmatists and is the general preconception of ordinary men. That he does not exist is the contention of those who are nicknamed ‘atheists’ such as Euhemerus…, and Diagoras of Melos, and Prodicus of Ceos, and Theodorus, and multitudinous others.”81 Ordinary people, he says, believed in God, but the group who did not was still worthy of the word multitudinous.
He then summarizes the arguments of each philosopher: how Euhemerus said gods were men of power, deified in memory after their deaths; how Critias believed “the lawgivers of ancient times invented God as a kind of overseer of the right and wrong actions of men” especially to prevent secret wrongdoing; and how Prodicus of Ceos contributed the idea that the ancients equated the sun and rivers and other beneficial things with gods. As for Epicurus, Sextus comments that, according to some, Epicurus allowed the existence of God in his popular works, “but not where the real nature of things is at issue.”82 We are told of Democritus and Epicurus and their images of giant personages that show up in dreams. Sextus asks why Epicurus’s dream images of giant people didn’t give rise to the belief in giant people, rather than gods. Also, saying that great heroes became gods after death doesn’t explain where the idea of gods came from. And if people were going to believe that all beneficial things were gods, like the rivers and the sun, then why didn’t they think people were gods, “especially philosophers” because they benefit our lives (just as Lucretius said), “and most of the irrational animals[,] for they help to perform work for us,” and our domestic furniture and whatever else “of an even humbler character.”83 He was having a good time. Since this view, he concludes, is “extremely ludicrous,” the whole idea of these origins for the gods must not be sound. That’s all he offers as argument against the atheists. Note that he argues with their positive notions of where the gods came from, but he never gets near arguing with their claim about the absence of God.
Sextus then coolly offers some propositions in favor of the claim that gods are real. It’s worth considering one before we turn to his argument on the nonexistence of the gods. In the singsong of his Skepticism he argues that if the universe is powered by something, either that something must be eternal or it must have leapt into being. Since nothing would have been there to cause a leap into being, the universe must be eternal; and since human beings are intelligent and they were made by the universe, the universe must be intelligent; what is eternal and intelligent is divine; therefore the universe is divine. Therefore the gods exist.
Then Sextus turns to refute the argument for God. Again, there’s something both amusing and annoying about the way he argues: If the gods exist, they are living beings. But if they are living beings, they have sensation. If human beings had more senses than gods, they would be superior to gods, and anyway, “to prune away from God this or any other of his senses is an altogether unconvincing procedure,” so the gods have taste, which means they can taste bitter, which means some things displease them, which means things can harm them. “But if this is so, he is perishable. Consequently if gods exist they are perishable. Therefore gods do not exist.”84 God would also be able to smell and touch and hear. “But if this is so there must be certain things which are vexations to God; and if there are certain things which are vexatious to God, God is subject to change for the worse, hence also to destruction. Therefore God is perishable. But this is in violation of what was the common conception of him. Therefore the Divinity does not exist.” Sextus says that sensation itself is a kind of alteration and change, and if God is receptive to change “he will at all events be receptive of change for the worse. And if this is so, he is also perishable. Therefore it is also absurd to claim that he exists.”85
Following the example of Carneades, Sextus also argues that most of humanity’s best qualities have to do with enduring pain or avoiding temptations, so without pain or temptation, God cannot really be said to be virtuous. It is the person “who holds out under the knife and the cautery” who shows endurance, not the one who is drinking honeyed wine.86 Moreover, “if the Deity is all-virtuous, he also possesses courage… and if this is so there must exist something which to God is fearful.… Hence if divinity exists it is perishable. But it is not perishable, therefore it does not exist.”87 The divinity, he insists, would also have to possess greatness of soul, “to rise above events,” but if he does, he must be subject to consternation and therefore perishable. God must deliberate, because it is a virtue, and therefore he cannot be omniscient; God must know pain in order to know its opposite, pleasure, and therefore he must not be eternal and perfect; God must possess wisdom and temperance, but both imply struggle and temptation; so for Sextus, in answer to all these, the gods must not exist. In a particularly interesting variation, “If nothing is non-evident to God … he does not possess art… since art appertains to things which are non-evident and not immediately apprehended.” And if he does not even possess the art of living, he won’t possess virtue. “But if God does not possess virtue, he is non-existent.”
Through all of this, Sextus has a few convictions, and first among them is that we cannot imagine any truly noncorporeal being able to do, think, or feel anything. This suffuses his discussion of the voice of God, for he says that God either speaks or cannot, and the latter “is in conflict with the common notions of him,” which means God speaks, which means he has lungs and a windpipe and tongue and mouth. “But this is absurd,” he insists, “and comes close to the story-telling of Epicurus. Therefore we must say that God does not exist.” So Sextus, too, scolds Epicurus for keeping the bare image of gods. Since you need a body to do anything, God must be corporeal, but if so, it must be either a compound or a simple body. If it is a compound it comes apart and is therefore perishable; if it is simple it is just a thing, like fire or water. If it is one of these, “it is inanimate and irrational, which is absurd. If therefore, God is neither a compound nor a simple body, and there is no further alternative, one must declare that God is nothing.”88
Many arguments for God suggest that our frail virtues must exist in perfect form somewhere. Sextus turns this on its head, stretching Carneades’ argument to its full power and entering a new idea into the annals of doubt. God’s reputed virtues, he explains, were fully realized versions of human virtues, and that did not make sense unless God had our weaknesses. Wisdom and courage are aspects of human struggle. They do not exist in pure form. Skepticism thrived in the ancient world from the fourth century BCE to the third century CE, and Sextus is our best and almost our only surviving source for it.
LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA
Lucian of Samosata (ca. 120 CE–ca. 190 CE) was a Greek satirist born at Samosata on the Euphrates in northern Syria. He was familiar with all the schools of philosophy, and made fun of them all, especially the Cynics. In Hermotimus, one of his longer dialogues, his big question is how a person is supposed to choose between the philosophies, when it would take more than a lifetime to properly learn them all. In Timon a poor man who has been rich scolds Zeus for his indifference to the injustice of man. Zeus admits that the strident disputes in Athens had kept him away from the place lately, and when the man becomes rich again, he praises Zeus and forgets his criticisms. In several works, Lucian shows himself aware of Christianity, satirizing the Christians in his Passing of Peregrinus, a story of a sage who poses as a leader to the Christians:
These deluded creatures, you see, have persuaded themselves that they are immortal and will live forever, which explains the contempt of death and willing self-sacrifice so common among them. It was impressed on them too by their lawgiver that from the moment they are converted, deny the gods of Greece, worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws, they are all brothers. They take his instructions completely on faith, with the result that they despise all worldly goods and hold them in common ownership.
So, he explains, anyone “who knows the world” can get rich tricking “these simple souls.” It was no worse than anyone else got: Lucian tells stories of a Stoic philosopher losing his cool and throwing a tantrum about wages—among other indignities. Lucian was trying to make his audience laugh, rather than start a revolution, and his jokes had a way of lasting. He treated the Olympian gods as obvious fictions. It is worth noting that Lucian’s True History made him the founder of science fiction: his characters went to the moon, comets, and other sites of outer space and met inventive extraterrestrials.89 Lucian told of lamp-people—most “were obviously pretty dim”—and described a world where men married men and carried the babies in their thighs, and a world where Tree-men reproduced by cutting off and planting a testicle. We also learn of vines that grow grapes of water rather than wine (strong winds blowing their harvest make for our hailstorms); and that “bald men are considered very handsome on the moon.”90 Lucian was long thought to be the author of another important work in the history of doubt: Lucius, or The Ass. These days the author is often called Pseudo-Lucian, because many think it wrongly attributed to him. It was another take on the story Apuleius told (perhaps from a common source) about a man changed into an ass. Apuleius’s version had offered detailed wandering in a soulless world. The Lucian version was shorter and simpler, and even more doubting. Nobody answered prayers. Life here simply unfolded in a series of ribald accidents. Future doubters would often praise Lucian with this text in mind.
Cicero, Lucretius, Pliny the Elder, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Sextus Empiricus, and Lucian of Samosata each offered a different model of the mature doubter: Cicero with his lost daughter and his lost Republic and calmly “calling everyone to court” on the matter of the gods; Lucretius with his secular savior and his beautiful psalm to a world in which nature tumbles along with no God; Pliny with his cool compendium of mundane and fabulous information and his hearty doubt in the immortal; the emperor with his book of warm advice and resignation; Sextus with his verbal assault on every certainty; and Lucian just laughing. Ancient secular philosophy is one of the greatest trees in the orchard of the history of doubt, and it produces some of its most mature fruit here. This doubt was fresh and lively for centuries, well suited for peace and for guiding countless generations of men and women through the strange turns of life on earth. The cellars that held the preserved fruit of ancient doubt were not well defended against time and violence, but whatever pots of jam survived the dark millennium would be even sweeter when opened in that strange new world. For the change in climate that shut down doubt’s living branches here, we turn next to a group always up for a little religious fervor: the monotheistic, pious Jews of Palestine.