A Christian Rehabilitation of Lucretius

Lucretius, the Roman poet-philosopher, died in the late 50s B.C., though his life dates are somewhat uncertain. Nevertheless, he lived and died in the great upheaval and overthrow of the Roman Republic; he thought and wrote in the same period as the great Cicero, Cato the Younger, and was an older man when Caesar was killed, or died just before the final death-throes of Caesar and ironically, the Republic which was ultimately done to death both by Caesar and his assassins, who only succeeded in providing space for Octavian and Antony. Lucretius probably knew that both Cato and Cicero were, in effect, killed by the strife and the radical loss of their highest ideals; he knew that Mars, the god of war, seemed to continually hold sway over Venus, the goddess of love.

Yet Lucretius, in an age when politics was the philosopher's most noble calling, spent his life-blood on philosophical poetry, and though he lamented over the strife he lived with in Rome, he focused not on these politics but on what he saw as the cure for war and strife: the freedom from the ultimate fear of death, the freedom from religio, or that which 'binds' the spirit (from which we get 'religion'), and the freedom for understanding reasonably the causes of all things. In other words, Lucretius thought that his master, the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who lived in the 4th-3rd centuries B.C., had journeyed farthest into the greatness of nature to find the answers; however, it was not a physical journey, though Epicurus was a radical materialist. It was a journey, like the other Greek philosophical pioneers, of the mind, the reason. How could a single human reason know the ultimate causes?

The Ancient Greeks, from the Ionian Presocratics on, believed in a cosmos that was ordered and knowable. The mystery and unsearchable nature of the gods and fate that marked earlier centuries gave way, slowly, to a belief in human reason as a means for finding truth, and ultimately, causes: the reasons for and the sources of, everything. This would allow human beings to create order in themselves and their community based on predictable reasons, not on a variety of conflicting, arbitrary, impetuous wills found in nature and personified as gods. Socrates died for this new belief, and like a martyr, his life and death sparked a kind of revolution, of which Epicurus was a part, though his ideas are not Socratic or Platonic, or even Aristotelian. The similarity between Epicurus, and therefore Lucretius, and the other Greek philosophers is two-fold: the belief in a knowable, ordered cosmos, and the fact that this order also includes human reason, like a great machine. Human reason held a special place for all of them, because they believed in an unprecedented way, that human reason could ascertain the whole machine and not just the parts that mattered for human survival. It was a faculty that is best expressed for Christians as God-like, as like a Being who can understand the purpose, the workings of a universe as a whole and the meaning behind it all.

Epicurus specifically thought the whole was an order of atoms, seeds which produced through movement, everything else. Everything is reduced to this cause: the movement and interaction of atoms. Thus, for him the material world is all there is, and thus everything dissolves back into these basic elements. There is no frightening half-life of Achilles, as we see in Homer, no judgment, no eternal punishment or reward. There is only this life. Epicurus and Lucretius after him thought that this would annihilate the basic source of fear for the human being: the fear of death. Without this fear, man could learn to live tranquilly in a balanced way, and by knowing the causes of everything in the movement of atoms, he could learn to live with order, not against it. This would produce peace; this was love; this was happiness: and most importantly, it was reasonable to assert that peace and order was attainable through human effort.

What about free will? Free will was produced by the random swerve of certain atoms; this would change what would otherwise be determined patterns; this swerve produced a kind of creativity in the basic elements of life and yet also made way for disorder in people and nature.

Epicurus and Lucretius believed that 'nothing comes from nothing' and that atoms have always existed, and that the universe is infinite and eternal. The senses are the only source of knowledge,and all thought, the soul, everything, is made of material in the form of atoms.

In the end, many people decide Lucretius and his master, Epicurus, are among the first atheistic materialists, and that especially Lucretius is anti-religious. Hundreds of years later, St. Jerome spent time attacking the doctrines contained in Lucretius and many religious people have done the same through the ensuing centuries.

Is Lucretius, especially, and his Epicureanism, a threat to Christianity, an anti-religious philosopher? Is he worth reading?

Let Lucretius speak in his 'heroic hexameter':

And there shall come the time when even thou,
Forced by the soothsayer's terror-tales, shalt seek
To break from us. Ah, many a dream even now
Can they concoct to rout thy plans of life,
And trouble all thy fortunes with base fears.
I own with reason: for, if men but knew
Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong
By some device unconquered to withstand
Religions and the menacings of seers. 

It is important to note when Lucretius is writing: Pre-Christianity, and without much knowledge of the Jews and their profound revelations from 'the law-giving and reasonable One who created the Whole.' It is also important to note the history and character of the religions he, and Epicurus actually knew: Lucretius, as his primary example of 'religion' uses Agamemnon's infamous sacrifice of his own daughter to gain the prevailing winds he needed to embark on a revenge war against Troy. Iphigenia's death on an altar to Diana seems to illustrate for Lucretius the hold that fear and superstition wielded on the human spirit, the deadening irrationality that the arbitrary, conflicting wills of mysterious forces engendered for whole societies. Agamemnon's crime, as the primary example, shows that Lucretius thought it an underlying temptation, outcome, principle of all pagan religion. And indeed the scapegoating is inherent. How could Lucretius know and expect that all sacrifice, in its true form, points to God who gives of Himself and saves? How could he know that God could undo all scapegoating, all Iphigenias, by becoming the scapegoat Himself?

In pointing out the pernicious, untrue, evil nature of purely pagan scapegoating and sacrifice, Epicurus, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato, was right. Lucretius was right. Again, Lucretius uses the Latin word religio for 'religion' and this word meant, basically, 'to bind.' Lucretius rightly thought of pagan faiths as a 'binding' of the human spirit, human reason. Superstition not only feeds on fear, but it can be used by soothsayers and politicos for their own ends: either way, it is a terrible form of injustice and binds the ability to use reason well. One cannot understand the causes of things if one is held in the dark by untrue mythology and fears of displeasing arbitrary gods who are also seeking their own ends, sometimes against each other. How can one find truth when drowning in untruth?

Epicurus and Lucretius saw rightly that there was a knowable order, and that there were basic elements that transcended the entire universe and behaved in a logical and beautiful (orderly) way. Lucretius again:

Moreover, why should Nature not prepare 

Men of a bulk to ford the seas afoot,
Or rend the mighty mountains with their hands,
Or conquer Time with length of days, if not
Because for all begotten things abides
The changeless stuff, and what from that may spring
Is fixed forevermore? 

What did Lucretius get wrong? First, that unaided human reason is prone to hubris, and needs grace to see the whole correctly. Lucretius points out this fallibility as a 'problem with perception' but does not, ironically, reason it out to the logical ends: therefore, how could he, or Epicurus, expect to know that there is nothing beyond the atoms? Could this not be a problem with perception? This is where the pagans, in reserving a place for mystery, were right.

But there is an excuse for Lucretius: He could not, without revelation, understand that there could be both an apparently infinite (immense beyond all human conception) natural order and a divine Creator who was outside His creation. The idea of true transcendence was not well-understood, or even understood at all, among the Greeks, Romans, and even, it is said, by many of the Jewish teachers. This revelation flowered and became more clearly understood after the Incarnation. For most of the ancient world, up until Christianity, the idea of a God completely outside and beyond and Other than the cosmos was simply un-thought-of, except perhaps in a very few, and shadowy, exceptions, like almost hints, or logical but unsaid implications of Plato's more mystical thought, or in the slowly unfolding revelations of God about Himself in Jewish history.

So, Lucretius must be read in the context of his time and ability (unaided human reason). If read this way, he becomes a philosophical poet who critiqued the ravages of pagan religion and attempted to introduce Epicurus' rational solution for mankind. His aim was to get rid of fear, and thus to get rid of war, and strife, and to promote love and concord. He becomes best read when one understands that he loved the human spirit and the reason that engendered greatness and balance and tranquility, and accepted reality as a benevolent and ordered and beautiful, unified life. 

But again, what's wrong with his thought? At a basic level, though he looked to an infinite universe and the dance of the stars made with the same dust as the human body, he was not able to see far enough. Without the revelation that was Christ, he could not see how the dust of the Creation might be joined with the immortal and transcendent. In his quest to allay fear, he shrunk the soul to a conglomeration of 'light atoms' and relegated it to dissolution, though death was not annihilation, but a transfer of life to another beautiful configuration, like a planet, a star, a tree, a rock. For him, everything was life---and yet because there is no immortality, no eternal telos for human souls and human actions, there is nothing but revolving entropy: death, in a sense. Nothing, for him, was created from nothing, so everything is re-cycled. It brings the profound disappointment in the spirit one feels at the end of Contact or Interstellar. These films are good experiences of  the ramifications of re-cycled Epicureanism. 

This way of thinking, of course has tremendous consequences for everything: moral action, thought, love, rationality. 

Christians believe the opposite: Everything is created from, in the first cause, nothing. This directly implies a First Mover, but a First Mover not like Aristotle's, which was unknowable and within creation. The Christian First Mover is outside, beyond, Other. He is also a Person, a Society of Persons, and thus knowable in a sense of being capable of direct relationship with us and Himself. These facts are, I think, impossible to gain from human sense and reason alone, though what comes to us through Nature makes sense with this knowledge, is given by it its proper place and shows an order of Love primarily. This is because creating something from nothing means that what is created did not have to exist, or did not exist, simply, infinitely and eternally. The creation thus was wanted, and planned, and desired. Because it is, from its conception, in relationship with a Creator who wanted it, it is also about love. Because it was wanted, and planned by a loving Creator, it has purpose. It is less like a machine and more like a living, eternal love-story, a family. Judgment is real, because we matter, and we have free-will not from the cause of atoms swerving, but because it means we can love. We choose to love Reality, which is sourced in God, which is God, or to love our own perceptions more. This is heaven and hell. 

Thus, Lucretius was alive to the beauty and order that he could see; he wanted to allay fear, which he rightly saw as an evil, and the opposite of love and life; he rightly saw that the pagan religions bound people in darkness, and that reason and the reason's ability to see the whole order of the cosmos was essential and part of human nature. Thus, as a pre-Christian, I find Lucretius and also Epicurus to be admirable, and possibly heroic truth-seekers: mistaken, and possibly unnaturally closed off through fears of their own, and resentment of the abuses of religion, but with a little more excuse for not seeing the fingerprint of God, which was placed in them by virtue of being in the image of God. I can excuse them because of original sin and a history without knowledge of Sinai or Bethlehem and Golgotha.

However, I do not find modern materialists as admirable truth-seekers. Why? For the very reason that they are post-Christ. Materialism now seems a flight from God, though how much do Christians have to answer for this flight? If we had all been better, if the Wars of Religion, if Henry VIII's self-absorption and Luther's scrupulosity, if the Borgia popes had all rather been Catherine of Sienas and St. Louis-Kings and St. John of the Crosses, and if in our own time the millions of potential saints had not been killed before birth, would the materialists be here yet again?

There is nothing new under the sun. But as limited and mistaken as the materialist Lucretius is, he is a valuable resource not only for beautiful poetry, but an effective teacher of the abilities and the limitations of unaided human reason.