Lucretius and the material sublime
The Epicurean universe is both soothing and terrifying
The Book:
On the Nature of Things
By Lucretius
Translated by Martin Ferguson Smith
Hackett
2001
The Talk:
In On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) 1st Century BCE Roman poet Lucretius attempts to convert his friend Memmius to join his Epicurean community. Lucretius pours all his talent into making his best case for Epicurean materialism, taking the richest poetic style, the epic, as his vehicle.
Lucretius believes that Epicurus is the savior of humanity; he has unlocked the eternal wisdom of the universe that allows humans to live as if they were gods, completely undisturbed by any trouble in life. Translator Martin Ferguson Smith writes in the introduction:
Epicurus is to [Lucretius] as Jesus is to a Christian. He has complete faith in him and regards his sayings as infallible.
What Lucretius presents is a tour of the cosmos, from the invisibly small to the infinitely big, from the dawn of humanity to the apex of civilization. The argument is a picture, a way of seeing the world differently.
Did Lucretius succeed in his goal of converting his friend? Smith says no. As far as we know, Memmius never became an Epicurean and his documented behavior following the publishing of De rerum natura was decidedly not “Epi-curious.” :)
In fact, Epicureanism was broadly unpopular in the pre-modern world1. Lucretius mentions what a turn-off his philosophy is throughout the book; he has to work hard to sweeten the medicine, which is a bitter one.
And yet, despite its unpopularity in antiquity, as far as I can tell, basically Epicureanism won?
The dread of the gods
Epicureans believed that the universe is made of invisible seeds (or atoms) that combine to create us and the world we experience. Everything from weather to stars to music to dreams are generated by the structures of these invisible combinations. Importantly, the possible behaviors of everything in the world are limited by these structures. Water flows because of the kinds of atoms it has and the way they are connected. Lucretius argues that thunderstorms occur mostly in spring and fall because those are the times when hot air and cold air collide, causing friction. (Not half bad, Lucretius!)
And while this seems rather elementary to us, it was kind of a big deal at the time to say aloud. It was common for Roman elites in 1st Century BCE to believe that thunderstorms were caused by the gods, and that lightning bolts were literally divine judgement. Whenever a storm rolled through, one needed to read the Etruscan Scrolls to interpret why the storm happened.
From the perspective of Lucretius, Roman religion was more Halloween than Christmas. To be a Roman was to be superstitious and anxious about curses, omens, and portents. Anything out of the ordinary could be a spiritual sign—and usually something bad. Roman superstitions around the will of the gods produced a life of anxiety and terror. We often think of religion as a kind of solace, a relief or comfort, but Romans often performed various rites as protection against bad luck or disasters.
Whose heart does not contract with dread of the gods, and who does not cower in fear, when the scorched earth shudders beneath the terrible stroke of the thunderbolt, and rumbles of thunder run across the vast heaven?
Part of the salvation that Epicureans offer, then, is the freedom from superstitious spiritual anxiety. If the thunderstorm isn’t a god expressing his inscrutable judgement, if its just a bunch of atoms bouncing around, it may still be destructive, but the supernatural terror of it is gone.
In fact, this example of the thunderstorm comes in the final book of the poem, almost as a kind of climax to the whole poem. Lucretius has to lay a lot of groundwork to get to the big pay off: Jupiter isn’t throwing lightning bolts! It’s just atoms!
As a modern reader, that feels pretty weak. (That’s it? That’s your big finale?) But it seems like, for his Roman audience, that was actually a really big deal, like saying the Wizard of Oz is just a man behind a curtain2.
The dark clouds of superstition that swarm the average Roman’s thoughts, actions, and everyday life—they vanish into nothing.
This terrifying darkness that enshrouds the mind must be dispelled not by the sun’s rays and the dazzling darts of day, but by the study of the superficial aspect and underlying principle of nature.
Not science yet
Reading Lucretius as a modern reader is a funny experience because it’s like someone accidentally overheard a science lecture through a thick wall and then feels super confident explaining it to you.
The most common argument structure that Lucretius puts forward in the book is that (a) he explains some phenomena using atoms, and then (b) he says, “That’s not such a crazy idea. We actually see something similar happen in the natural world all the time.” And then he gives an analogy as his evidence.
Sometimes his explanations of atoms are remarkably close to the truth. Partly this is because the physical properties of substances are, in fact, due to their molecular structure. Slippery things are slippery for a molecular reason. Hard things are hard for a molecular reason.
At the same time, Lucretius can be wildly off because, in the end, he’s just speculating. Wind becomes a common explanation. Why do earthquakes happen? There are caverns of air underground that blow really hard sometimes. What makes volcanoes erupt? Air. How do our arms move? The air around them pushes them like the sail of a ship. Magnets? Air.
I started the book thinking Lucretius was an incredibly perceptive observer of natural world (and he was). But by the end I just felt like The Dude in the The Big Lebowski.
Films about ghosts
If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts ~ Counting Crows, Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby
Sometimes, even though Lucretius’ theory is false, it’s rather elegant. For example, because everything is made of atoms, Lucretius has to explain how thoughts and dreams are made of atoms, too3. His idea is that there are myriad very faint, filmy images constantly floating through the air. When we are awake, these images float through us and cause our thoughts. In our dreams, we see these filmy images most vividly and the succession of images creates the illusion of motion:
It should be added that there is nothing remarkable in the fact that images walk and rhythmically move their arms and other limbs. It is indeed true that images seen in sleep seem to do this, and the reason for it is this: when one image fades away and is succeeded by another in a different position, it looks as though the former image has changed in posture. Of course we must assume that this happens extremely rapidly: so immense is the velocity of the images, so immense is the store of them, and so immense is the store of particles emitted at any single perceptible point of time, to ensure that the supply of images is continuous.
He’s describing animation! This is quite something. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the point of it all is to explain dreams to readers who think that dreams are visitations of the dead or evil spirits. He is emptying dreams of their supernatural force.
The material sublime
My final takeaway from the book was that Lucretius primarily makes a rhetorical argument that materialism is plausible. He’s talking to a skeptical audience, and he wants to move them from, “He’s nuts” to “He’s not entirely nuts.” His arguments from analogy fail as scientific claims to us, but the point is to convince his skeptical reader that atoms could explain these phenomena.
We, however, now live in the upside-down world. We check the 10-day forecast on our phone without thinking. We take our medicine before bed each night, hardly able to pronounce the name of it. We buy shampoo that is paraben-free, not knowing what a paraben is but grateful that we are free of them. We throw away old food that looks and smells fine because maybe something we cannot see will make us sick. We take this invisible world of chemistry for granted.
We exist in the tranquil human paradise Lucretius dreamed of. And yet the material universe opens up its own new kind of terrors.
The most remarkable passage of the book, in my opinion, comes when Lucretius is trying to describe why we should not fear death. The Epicurean universe is eternal in time; the world is destroyed and reborn, over and over again, but the atoms are indestructible and therefore everlasting. The universe is also infinite in space, filled with atoms and voids, all combining and breaking apart continuously. (It’s worth noting, a universe of infinite space and time is not ruled out by our current cosmological understanding.) Lucretius suggests that some composite forms stabilize and thus persist over time (in a way similar to Conway’s Game of Life it seems).
Lucretius explains that once your atoms break apart, your mind and body cease to exist, and so you don’t feel anything at all. Therefore, there’s nothing to fear in death. But given the fact that the universe is infinite in time and space, it’s inevitable that the exact organization of your atoms as they are constituted have repeated before, are repeating now, and will repeat again.
Furthermore, if in the course of time all our component atoms should be reassembled after our death and restored again to their present positions, so that the light of life was given to us a second time, even that eventuality would not affect us in the least, once there had been a break in the chain of consciousness. Similarly at the present time we are not affected at all by any earlier existence we had, and we are not tortured with any anguish concerning it. When you survey the whole sweep of measureless time past and consider the multifariousness of the movements of matter, you can easily convince yourself that the same seeds that compose us now have often before been arranged in the same order that they occupy now. And yet we have no recollection of our earlier existence; for between that life and this lies an unbridgeable gap—an interval during which all the motions of our atoms strayed and scattered in all directions, far away from sensation.
The fact that you have no memory of these other duplicates of yourself means that they are completely disconnected from you. This is proof, from Lucretius’ perspective, that there’s nothing to fear in death; nothing continues on.
This is supposed to make us feel better. And yet the picture he leaves us with is vertigo-inducing! In an attempt to ground ourselves in the material world, we are suddenly floating in a vast expanse, an infinite abyss. Where are we? Who are we? In trying to ground everything, we are suddenly floating free.
Contemplating the infinite. Part of this feeling is created by trying to imagine an infinite universe or at least an immense one. Size should have nothing to do with importance. And yet we feel something in our bones when we look out at a universe that goes on and on, in which we are just a speck. As Pascal writes in his Pensees, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”
Form before function. This universe, Lucretius says, was not made for us, not even our arms or legs or voices were purpose-built. They simply are because they are the forms that didn’t get destroyed by chance and time. We might say that, in the human-designed world form follows function, but in the natural world function follows form.
In fact, no part of our body was created to the end that we might use it, but what has been created gives rise to its own function.
The best example is that of language. Mouths, tongues, lips, and lungs were not created for language, but rather language emerged from what was there to be used. From such a simple thought it follows that we too did not come into being designed for a specific function. As the existentialists say, existence precedes essence.
Identity as arrangement. Furthermore, if I am merely the specific combination of generic and ubiquitous building blocks, then I can be deleted and copied at will. I am less than material, I am a pattern. Lucretius removes supernatural anxiety with one hand and brings in a new kind of anxiety with the other, the material sublime, the mixture of wonder and fear when we consider meeting our own clone.
No special time or place. One of the consequences of Epicurean materialism is that the universe is uniformly distributed4. Given enough time and space, there’s no reason why any particular spot should have atoms that no other region has. In other words, nothing in our universe is truly unique; things come in groups. There is no elephant without elephants. There is no planet without planets. Whatever is, is multiple. Whatever happens, happened before, happens again.
In the totality of created things there is nothing solitary, nothing that is born unique and grows unique and singular; everything belongs to some family, and each species has many members.
Materialism has its own spirituality, if you will—the endless fractal, the hall of mirrors, the void of space, the speed of light, the mindless computational crunch of natural selection, a story of How where the Why used to be. And on and on and on.
Comfy yet?
Related:
Is stoicism bad for democracy?
All the feels: Touch in Aristotle's De Anima
Air monitoring station records biggest ever jump in atmospheric CO2 (New Scientist, 1/17/25)
We should note that Epicureanism called for living a hidden life, far from the world of wealth, power, and fame. So maybe there were a lot of Epicureans! But they were so good at it they’ve been completely lost to history.
“Epicureanism” was synonymous with atheism in the pre-modern world. In Dante, for instance, Epicurean means materialist/atheist/irreligious. However, the Lucretian view is slightly more complicated. The gods (immortal beings) do exist in the spaces between worlds, but they live in perfect passive serenity and equanimity. They do not interact with us, but we can live as they do if we know the true nature of the universe as they know it.
All that said, Lucretius later says that the particular Greco-Roman stories about the gods are made up by human imagination. So those gods don’t exist, even if gods technically do.
Cf. the modern Cosmological principle
Interesting