There is a widespread belief that materialism is a modern idea, and a Western idea. Neither is true. The roots of materialism are ancient and it is well represented in the East. There were important sceptical traditions in many ancient societies where there were dominant religious traditions. In the West, following the decline of Rome, Christian teaching dominated metaphysical thought. Over time some of the teachings of the great non-materialist thinkers of classical Greece, Plato and Aristotle, were incorporated into Christian philosophy and doctrine, while the ancient atomists were largely forgotten. In India and China too religious ideologies came to dominate philosophical thought.
It is a mistake to think that the Eastern and Western philosophical traditions are at odds with one another, or that there were few points of contact between them. There is compelling evidence that there was interplay between the Greek world and India in the final 500 years bce, largely through the geographical and social bridge afforded by the ancient Persian Empire, which linked the Mediterranean world and the sub-continent. Furthermore, the idea that Eastern thought is fundamentally mystical and Western thought is fundamentally hard-headed and the root of modern science is just plain wrong. Atomism and atheism were both discussed in ancient India and China, and science owes much to places such as Alexandria and Baghdad, which can hardly be described as ‘Western’.
There are a number of problems with knowledge of thought in the ancient world. First, the primary sources available are scant. Things were written down on materials that over time perished. There was no printing, so over the centuries we have a great debt to armies of scribes who painstakingly copied texts so that their teachings would survive. Later in this chapter an extraordinary strand in the history of materialism is mentioned in which the most important work on materialism in the ancient world was preserved thanks to the work of scribes about whom we know nothing except that they were in all likelihood hostile to materialism.
There is another reason of a quite different kind why there is a paucity of works of some authors and not others. The dawn of the Common Era saw a huge rise in the suppression of thought as detailed in this chapter. Teachings that were considered erroneous came also to be seen as dangerous, and therefore subject to criticism and actual destruction.
Contemporary knowledge of a philosopher, whose work survives only in odd fragments, is largely based on the reports of another, later philosopher or philosophers or other writers such as playwrights. There are occasions when materialist thinkers are known by accounts of their views by opponents whose intention was to discredit and disprove the materialist teaching. The reliability of their reports is obviously suspect.
There are also contemporary attitudes that have arisen from developments in human thought that are remarkably recent, and which need to be kept in mind when considering the thought of early civilisations. Written language has a history of no more than 5000 years. There is little doubt that speculative thought long predates this, but systematic theorising, and the dissemination of ideas beyond a relatively small locality, would have depended on text. Many of our ways of thinking arise from developments in the last 500 years. Most obviously, the clear distinctions made now between philosophy, religion and science were not present in the epoch that concerns us here – roughly the last 500 years before the Common Era. The ideas associated with the scientific method – observation, experiment, evidence and confirmation and falsification were not widely accepted. Indeed, in the ancient world, these ideas were understood only in a very primitive way, and on the whole the technologies and measurement techniques needed to accompany them were unavailable. A year’s study of logic now provides a student with much more knowledge of logic than was available to Aristotle, the greatest logician of the Hellenic period. Similarly, a year’s study of chemistry now provides a student with much more knowledge of chemistry than was available to anyone before 1600 ce. It is startling that the ancient ontological categories – earth, air, fire and water – had a fundamental role in the natural sciences until the seventeenth century, along with other theories, such as those of the four humours, that seem quaintly ridiculous. (The theory of the four elements can be seen more charitably as an early version of the distinction between the different states of matter – solid, liquid, gas and plasma.)
This chapter is about materialist thought. It is not an account of thinkers who would think of themselves as materialists, or that are appropriately identified as materialists in a modern sense. It is rather that in their writings there are specifically materialist perspectives on the nature of reality. In fact, elements of materialist thinking are present in many of the early philosophers, but in those discussed here the materialist elements are most pronounced and have had the most influence on later materialist thinkers.
Similarly, it can be difficult to separate out a specifically materialist element to strands of thought that are primarily self-identified as sceptical or critical or in opposition to some pre-existing or established set of beliefs. In studying a cultural climate where science, religion and philosophy coalesce, it would be an unnecessary and probably futile task to try to disentangle specifically atheistic thought from purely materialistic thought.
The first port of call is, in many ways, the ancient school closest in important respects to the fully articulated materialism that takes shape more than 2000 years later. It may be surprising to many readers that the most avowedly materialist school of the ancient world is to be found in India.
The intellectual tradition of India in which philosophy and religion are commonly intertwined can be divided broadly into two traditions. The beginnings are the teachings of the Vedas, dating from the middle of the second millennium bce and culminating in the Upanishads of the sixth century bce. The orthodox pro-Vedic (Brahminical) schools that developed preach the existence of an afterlife, the soul and the transmigration of souls. Many but not all are also monotheistic. Schools by the name unorthodox, or heterodox, or nastika, reject to some degree the Vedic teaching or at least dispute the orthodox interpretation of it. While much heterodox teaching denies the existence of God, the principal heterodox schools, Buddhism and Jainism, accept the existence of spiritual entities such as would be associated with the transmigration of souls and reincarnation.
The school of concern here can be viewed as a heterodox school or, more appropriately, as standing between and apart from the two traditions. It is known as the Lokayata, or Carvaka, and it is openly, flagrantly, materialistic.
Joshi writes
In Indian philosophy the systems which are generally regarded as atheistic are the Carvaka, the Samkhya, the Mimamsa, Buddhism, and Jainism. The term atheism, when applied to a system of thought, usually means that the system has no use for the concept of God and that it is opposed to all forms of spiritualism and religion. Judged in this light, the Carvaka is the only true form of atheism. The Samkhya, the Mimamsa, Buddhism, and Jainism are atheistic systems with a difference, for while they deny the reality of a personal God, they openly embrace spiritual and even religious ideas.
(Joshi, 1966, p. 189)
The tradition, then, embodies a teaching that Joshi calls a true form of atheism, and which is, evidently, materialist.
There seem to have been distinct strands in the epistemological perspectives of the Lokayata tradition. While there was a general acceptance of the empiricist view that the basic source of knowledge is sense perception, there are differing opinions about the status of knowledge derived from different kinds of inference. There may have been extremely sceptical positions in the tradition, but also more moderate positions that accepted that inference may sometimes yield genuine knowledge. These differences mirror controversies in the empiricist tradition in British philosophy, arising from the work of Locke and Hume.
In the Oxford Handbook of Atheism, Frazier (2013) writes
In its most unambiguous form, atheism developed as a distinct and well-formed philosophical school of thought referred to from the sixth century bce at least into the medieval periods, known as the Lokayatas or ‘worldly ones’, which propounded the material nature of the world and the non-existence of the soul. As there is no further or higher reality from which to take our ethical cue, happiness (understood in terms of pleasure – kama – the fulfilment of our desires) in this world is the only self-evident good, to which our efforts should be directed.
(p. 370)
Frazier describes a culture in which there is a broad range of metaphysical perspectives that are able to challenge and confront each other. At the same time, she suggests that the materialists did attract growing disapproval from their religious opponents, and speculates that one form of their persecution may have been the destruction of their writings, of which only fragments now remain.
The Lokayatas are a recognised school of thought in the medieval period, and in a compendium of such schools compiled by Madhava there is a suggestion that they had a considerable following.
The mass of men, in accordance with the manuals of politics and enjoyment, considering wealth and desire the only goals of humanity, and denying the existence of any object belonging to a future world, are found to follow only the doctrine of the Carvakas.
(Madhava, 1978, p. 2, quoted by Frazier, 2013, p. 371)
Frazier, summarising Madhava’s account, goes on
… the Lokayatas [believe] the elements of air, earth, fire and water are the sole constituents of reality, from which all things (including consciousness) are ultimately derived. This view is grounded in a firmly epistemological starting point: Lokayatas are Humean empiricists who believe that perception is the only … valid source of knowledge.
(pp. 370–1)
Madhava depicts the Lokayatas as hedonists (an early example of the coincidence of the two different conceptions of materialism discussed in the preliminary disambiguation). It remains unclear to what extent the pursuit of happiness was understood shallowly by the Lokayatas, as opposed to this being a slur on them by their religious opponents. It does seem clear the Lokayatas had little time for the ascetic life – Frazer quotes from a Lokayata text cited by Madhava: ‘If anyone were so timid as to give up a visible pleasure, he would indeed be as foolish as a beast’.
Frazier goes on to describe Madhava as depicting the Lokayatas
… as what we today call epiphenomenalists: nothing exists but the material elements, and thus the phenomenon of consciousness can be attributed merely to a particularly bodily combination of these elements which generates thought … the Lokayatas liberated themselves from the moral narrative of karma and rebirth …
(pp. 371–2)
With regard to religion and the religious authorities,
The Lokayatas also posed a critique of schools that claimed normative authority via scripture and divine mandate. Madhava describes them as ridiculing the sacrifices of priests, and dismissing the Vedic rituals as merely a source of income, otherwise to be considered a waste of time and energy. They also reject the scriptures as untrue, self-contradictory and tautologous, and leading to contradictions. They deny any future existence, and claim the closest thing to a supreme being is the earthly monarch … People are advised to give their religious donations to living people in need.
(p. 372)
There are further interesting remarks by Karel Werner (1997) in his chapter on non-orthodox Indian philosophies in The Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy. Commenting on the criticism of the Lokayatas as hedonists, he writes,
Although the hedonistic aspect of the Lokayata ethics was often overemphasized in the preserved accounts which come invariably from opponents, and granted that there must have been some realistic grounds for the exaggeration, it is nevertheless also clear that, as in the case of the Greek equivalent of Lokayata, the philosophy of Epicurus, there were also positive aspects to Lokayata. There is some evidence that the intellectual pleasures were also prized and that the pursuit of sensory pleasures was incompatible for many with perceiving, let alone causing, suffering to others, especially by killing. Hence a further reason for Lokayata condemnation of animal sacrifices. Some Lokayatists seem even to have condemned war for the same reason.
As the preoccupation with refuting Lokayata philosophy in orthodox and other philosophical writings in India lasted for several centuries, it has to be assumed that it must have had a significant following during that time and that it must have reached a considerable degree of theoretical elaboration, especially in the field of logical argument.
(pp. 119–20)
For a recent, book-length treatment of the Lokayata tradition, see Gokhale (2015).
It is striking how modern these ancient thinkers can sound. While the science is primitive, and the logic and philosophy can seem limited, on the basis of the scant evidence available to us, nevertheless the Lokayata seem to have embraced the essentials of the materialist perspective outlined in Chapter 1. Moreover, while they lived for centuries in a relatively free-thinking intellectual environment, they often suffered the same disparagement as their later Western fellow materialists.
The story of materialism in the Western tradition begins with the philosopher Democritus, who was a younger contemporary of Socrates (but still often called a ‘Pre-Socratic philosopher’). He is associated with Anaximander and Leucippus, who is reputed by some to have been his teacher. Democritus was born around 470 bce, so materialist thought may have emerged earlier in India than in Greece.
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle deserve their eminence but other Greek philosophers sometimes seem insignificant in the company of such giants. This is because extremely little of their work survives. The principal reason there is so much of the work of Plato and Aristotle is that the Christian Church sought to incorporate their philosophies in canonical doctrine, and so preserved their writings – through the production of copies – with diligence. It is true the monastic scribes also copied the works of other ‘pagan’ authors, but the fate of their works was often to have their manuscripts rot – or worse, be actively destroyed. This was particularly true in the first centuries of the Common Era. Aristotle is the source of much of our knowledge of the early philosophers, because he wrote on their work and criticised it, providing a historical setting in which to propound his ‘superior’ philosophy. (Perhaps the other most important ancient guide to the Greek philosophers is Diogenes Laertius (2015), who wrote in the third century ce.) In particular, Aristotle admired Democritus, who was a prolific writer, producing dozens of treatises on a wide range of subjects. Although more survives of Democritus’s work than that of any other philosopher of the era besides Plato and Aristotle, there are only fragments.
Democritus’ fundamental thesis is that matter is not infinitely divisible. Rather, he believed there would be a finite conclusion to the process of dividing up a piece of matter, at which point there would be many tiny indivisible bodies, too small to be visible to humans. Democritus gave the name ‘atom’ to these tiny entities, atomos being the Greek word for ‘indivisible’. He believed further in an infinite void – vacuum – and held that atoms are in constant motion in it.
Democritus also thought there were infinitely many atoms and that they come in infinitely many varieties, with countless different shapes and sizes. The objects of our world are complexes of atoms brought together by random collisions, and the difference in their constituent atoms accounts for the observable difference amongst the objects. The only ultimate realities are atoms and the void. Democritus also thought that everything happens necessarily due to the motions of atoms.
The philosophy is thus materialistic and atheistic, and although Democritus believed in the human soul, it too was composed of atoms – albeit special, spherical ones.
In The Presocratic Philosophers, Kirk and Raven (1964) have written
Atomism is in many ways the crown of Greek philosophical achievement before Plato … It was in essence a new conception, one which was widely and skilfully applied by Democritus, and which through Epicurus and Lucretius was to play an important part in Greek thought even after Plato and Aristotle. It also, of course, eventually gave a stimulus to the development of modern atomic theory – the real nature and motives of which, however, are utterly distinct.
(p. 426)
It is questionable exactly how much current physics owes to Democritus, given that atoms as we know them are divisible, but the overall point made in this quotation is important. Recalling that philosophy, religion and science are not separate at this stage in history, Democritus’ project is a very different one from that of the modern scientist. However, both he and the modern-day scientist seek empirical knowledge about, and naturalistic explanations of, the external world. Like Aristotle, Democritus was interested in the investigation of nature based on observation. Democritus, in his epistemology, thought the senses lowly as a source of knowledge, producing only ‘bastard’ knowledge, being subjective and being required to be processed by inductive reason. This seems to be a reasonable response to the problem of understanding the process beginning with sense perception and ending with knowledge, a problem for philosophy and science that has been addressed throughout the ages from the Lokayata on and up to the present day. Indeed, when Democritus argued that properties such as sweetness and odour are not amongst the properties of atoms but are appearances produced by quite different properties of atoms, he introduced a distinction that would be taken up by Galileo and become central to scientific thought.
In character, Democritus was cheerful. He was known affectionately as the laughing philosopher, although some called him the mocker – he may have been laughing at the foolishness of others. His ethics presage Epicurus, again wrongly seen as hedonistic, but also believing in the goal of cheerfulness or wellbeing, living a life of untroubled enjoyment.
The vituperative and groundless ad hominem attacks on the great materialist thinkers are a recurrent theme in this book. As the principal theoretical challenge to theistic doctrine and religious practice, materialists are seen not only as philosophical opponents but as ethically degenerate in various ways. If attacks by enemies are a measure of a materialist philosopher’s significance, Epicurus is very important indeed. He is said to have written 300 books, but all that is left are some maxims and three letters that summarise his teachings on the philosophy of nature and on morality. The letters and one set of maxims can be found in Diogenes Laertius, who devotes the tenth – and last – book of his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers to Epicurus. He gives more pages to him than to any other philosopher, including Plato, the sole subject of Book Three, Aristotle and Socrates. He begins the account after some biographical details with a list of authors who have bitterly attacked Epicurus and accused him of all kinds of base behaviour. And then, at paragraphs nine and ten, he says
9. But these people are stark mad. For our philosopher has abundance of witnesses to attest his unsurpassed goodwill to all men – his native land, which honoured him with statues in bronze; his friends, so many in number that they could hardly be counted by whole cities, and indeed all who knew him, held fast as they were by the siren-charms of his doctrine … ; the School itself which, while nearly all the others have died out, continues for ever without interruption through numberless reigns of one scholar after another; 10. His gratitude to his parents, his generosity to his brothers, his gentleness to his servants, as evidenced by the terms of his will and by the fact that they were members of the School … ; and in general, his benevolence to all mankind …
Such extreme admiration raises doubt in the suspicious mind, and the following words come as something of a shock: ‘His piety towards the gods and his affection for his country no words can describe’ (Diogenes Laertius 2015).
In Ancient Philosophy, Kenny (2004) explains Epicurus’ attitude to the soul and to the gods:
Like everything else, the soul consists of atoms, differing from other atoms only in being smaller and subtler; these are dispersed at death and the soul ceases to perceive … The gods too are built of atoms, but they live in a less turbulent region, immune to dissolution. They live happy lives, untroubled by concern for human beings. For that reason belief in providence is superstition, and religious rituals a waste of time. Since we are free agents, thanks to the atomic swerve, we are masters of our own fate: the gods neither impose necessity nor interfere with our choices.
(p. 95)
It is clear how Epicurus can be seen as pious in relation to the gods by Diogenes Laertius. Epicurus acknowledges the existence of the gods, and believes them to live happy lives and free from decay. However, the religious find his conception of the gods as material entities, and the idea of their being indifferent to mankind and completely uninvolved in the world of humans, utterly unacceptable. To have them so completely written out of the story makes the assertion of their existence, in the eyes of the religious, utterly hollow. For all they matter to humans, they may as well not exist. Given the doctrine of the dissolution of the soul at death, this is for all intents and purposes a materialist, atheistic doctrine. This is why his enemies were so venomous in their attacks.
Epicurus thought that religion was responsible for the fear of death that troubles so many people. In particular the threat of hell, or the wrath of god or gods displeased with man’s efforts in life, makes men tremble. As Kenny (2004) puts it:
The aim of Epicurus’ philosophy is to make happiness possible by removing the fear of death, which is the greatest obstacle to tranquillity … It is religion that causes us to fear death, by holding out the prospect of suffering after death. But this is an illusion. The terrors held out by religion are fairy tales, which we must give up in favour of a scientific account of the world.
(p. 94)
Epicurus is undoubtedly pointing to a genuine social phenomenon, the inculcation of fear in followers of religions. However, it is only fair to point out that fear of death has a purely naturalistic explanation. Animals have no conception of death, but naturally fear danger. Humans, who come to recognise the reality of mortality, link death with danger easily enough, danger being, after all, some kind of threat to life. Notwithstanding this, Epicurus’ argument rests on the assurance that on death, the atoms of which human beings are comprised – including the ‘soul’, which is, of course, composed of atoms – will disperse and will be gone for good. No thoughts or feelings, and no one to be subject to any kind of threat will persist. Of course, there are those who hear this account of non-being truly terrifying, but Epicurus would consider that fear irrational.
As with the teachings of the Lokayata, Epicurus believed the senses could be reliable as sources of information, but, as recognised by Democritus, false judgements may arise from observations. Reason must play its part in the process of gaining knowledge from perception. His ontological and epistemological theories in general are very similar to those of Democritus. In fact, Epicurus denied that he was a follower of Democritus, who lived 100 years earlier, but he must have been aware of his teachings, and their perspectives are in all essentials the same. One very important addition to the original atomic theory is the idea of the swerve, mentioned in the first quotation from Kenny above, and which contradicts Democritian determinism. (Epicurus also added weight to the properties of atoms.) Kenny explains:
Nothing comes into being from nothing: the basic units of the world are everlasting, unchanging, indivisible units or atoms. These, infinite in number, move about in the void, which is empty and infinite space: if there were no void, movement would be impossible. This motion had no beginning, and initially all atoms moved downwards at constant and equal speed. From time to time, however, they swerve and collide, and it is from the collision of atoms that everything in heaven and earth has come into being. The swerve of the atoms allows for human freedom, even though their motions are blind and purposeless … The properties of perceptible bodies are not illusions, but they are supervenient on the basic properties of atoms. There is an infinite number of worlds, some like and some unlike our own.
(pp. 94–5)
The idea of the swerve is the first attempt to give an account of free will in a materialist universe. There are echoes of this idea in some twentieth-century philosophical speculations about a link between the quantum world and free will.
Epicurus sought a philosophy that would make happiness possible, and believed that the pursuit of pleasure is the key to happiness. The Epicureans shared with the Lokayata the accusation they were sensualists, hedonists. But what is known of Epicurus’ teaching from Diogenes Laertius is very far from the hedonism of which he and his followers were accused. Kenny observes
Pleasure, for Epicurus, is the beginning and the end of the happy life. This does not mean, however, that Epicurus was an epicure. His life and that of his followers was far from luxurious: a good piece of cheese, he said, was as good as a feast. Though a theoretical hedonist, in practice he attached importance to a distinction he made between different types of pleasure. There is one type of pleasure that is given by the satisfaction of our desires for food, drink, and sex, but it is an inferior kind of pleasure, because it is bound up with pain. The desire these pleasures satisfy is itself painful, and its satisfaction leads to a renewal of desire. The pleasures to be aimed at are quiet pleasures such as those of private friendship.
(p. 95)
There is in fact much more to Epicurean ethics. He thought virtue was absolutely necessary to genuine pleasure. It is true that in his own life he shunned engagement in politics, but he believed people should live in society honourably.
From his deathbed, Epicurus wrote in a letter to Idomeneus,
I write this to you on the blissful day that is the last of my life. Strangury and dysentery have set in, with the greatest possible intensity of pain. I counterbalance them by the joy I have in the memory of our past conversations.
(Quoted in Kenny, 2004, p. 95)
Democritus and Epicurus are people who are free from the terrors of superstition. The Laughing Philosopher and the man who bears pain with extraordinary forbearance are at the heart of materialism’s family tree, as is the Roman Lucretius.
Lucretius was a poet who lived from about 99 to 55 bce. His place in this story is absolutely central, and yet he is not by renown a philosopher, but is acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the Western tradition. This reputation is due to one epic work, De Rerum Natura – ‘On the Nature of Things’ – that is an exposition of Epicurean philosophy (Lucretius, 1997). However, some philosophers have argued that the poem shows Lucretius to have been an original thinker in his own right. According to Santayana and Bergson, he does not simply relay Epicurus’ teachings in exquisite poetic form, but has a much deeper and more profound conception of the world of his own. The problem with this idea is that so little of Epicurus’ work has survived, and so it is unknown what further works of Epicurus were available for Lucretius to draw on.
Lucretius is, like Epicurus, honoured by the existence of outrageous attacks from his opponents, of whom the most famous is St. Jerome. The saint tells us that
The poet Titus Lucretius is born. He was later driven mad by a love philtre and, having composed between bouts of insanity several books (which Cicero afterwards corrected), committed suicide at the age of 44.
(Quoted in Greenblatt, 2012, p. 53)
The authors of the Introduction to Lucretius’ poem find this account dubious and doubt there is any evidence to support it. There are, though, plenty of pointers to it being an attempt by a ‘holy man’ to discredit an opponent. However, for a contrary view, see Gain (1969).
That Lucretius was indeed an enemy of the ‘holy’ is undeniable. In the poem, his hostility to religion is evident. Throughout it he mocks supernatural explanations and endeavours to find naturalistic accounts of many naturally occurring phenomena. He rejects religious accounts both of the origins of the universe and of inherent mind or purpose in nature.
De Rerum Natura is a long poem. It is divided into six sections, or ‘books’. The first two describe the atomic theory of Epicurus, in which the universe is conceived as consisting of atoms and the void. Book 3 identifies the soul as composed of atoms and describes its dissolution on the death of the body. Book 4 is more concerned with epistemological issues, but in later verses discusses both dreams and sex. Book 5 describes the origin of the world and the dawn of civilisation, and Book 6 discusses various natural phenomena, including lightning, volcanoes, earthquakes and magnets.
Presented as the principal extant work in the history of materialism, it may come as something of a surprise that it begins like this:
O mother of the Roman race, delight
Of men and gods, Venus most bountiful,
You who beneath the gliding signs of heaven
Fill with yourself the sea bedecked with ships
And earth crop-bearer, since by your power
Creatures of every kind are brought to birth
And rising up behold the light of sun;
From you, sweet goddess, you, and at your coming
The winds and clouds of heaven flee all away;
For you the earth well skilled puts forth sweet flowers;
For you the seas’ horizons smile, and sky,
All peaceful now, shines clear with light outpoured.
(p. 3)
This is the opening of a poem, not a philosophical treatise. No one can read the poem and come away believing Lucretius has expressed in these lines any kind of religious conception of Venus as a goddess with whom he is in a relation of worship. It is reasonable to think of this passage as expressing a love of natural beauty, personified in the figure of Venus.
The reader is soon made aware of the author’s attitude to religion, and of his devoted admiration of Epicurus. After line 60, Lucretius writes
When human life lay foul for all to see
Upon the earth, crushed by the burden of religion,
Religion which from heaven’s firmament
Displayed its face, its ghastly countenance,
Lowering above mankind, the first who dared
Raise mortal eyes against it, first to take
His stand against it, was a man of Greece.
He was not cowed by fables of the gods
Or thunderbolts or heaven’s threatening roar,
But they the more spurred on his ardent soul
Yearning to be the first to break apart
The bolts of nature’s gates and throw them open.
(pp. 4–5)
Lucretius can be very amusing in his critique of theorists. Here are some lines from his attack on early ontologists who thought the universe to be constituted by fire:
Of these the champion, first to open the fray,
Is Heraclitus, famed for his dark sayings
Among the more empty-headed of the Greeks
Rather than those grave minds that seek the truth.
For fools admire and love those things they see
Hidden in verses turned all upside down,
And take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears
And comes with sound of phrases fine imbued.
…
To say moreover that all things are fire,
And nothing in this world is real except fire,
As this man does, seems utter lunacy.
He uses the senses to fight against the senses,
And undermines what all belief depends on,
By which he knows himself this thing that he calls fire.
He believes that the senses truly perceive fire,
But not the rest of things that are no less clear,
Which seems both futile and insane.
(pp. 21–3)
A champion of the materialist tradition could argue with some justification that materialist writers try to write clearly and plainly. Here Lucretius is criticising not only what he sees as a bizarre theory, but also the obscure and elusive language in which it is expressed.
De Rerum Natura is not an easy poem, but it rewards effort, and there is importance in the poem’s artistic merit for the history of materialism. When the poem resurfaced after 1200 years of obscurity its quality as literature was vital in spreading its influence amongst the European intellectual elite.
Materialist thought in the Western world declined and descended into oblivion for over 1000 years. The reasons for this are varied and complex, but two distinct social trends are readily identifiable, one a general trend and the other more particularly associated with the Epicurean tradition. Both are associated with the rise of Christianity.
With regard to the general trend, it has been stated above that in the ancient world philosophy, science and religion were not distinct. The process of religion separating out from philosophy coincides with the growth of the monotheistic belief systems. The Jewish tribes of the Levant are identified as the source of the first great monotheistic culture, and it was from this tradition that Christianity emerged. A new attitude entered the intellectual scene.
Imagine two thinkers in dispute. Each tries to persuade the other of the correctness of his or her views, and to demonstrate the errors in the thinking of the other. This is the stuff of philosophical disputation. In contrast the two may hold a further attitude – that the view of the other is not only erroneous, it is bad, wrong, dangerous. It is his or her duty to convince the other of their error, because to believe as they do is, in some sense or other, unacceptable. Toleration of the opposing view is replaced by its opposite – intolerance. The tragic story of Hypatia and the library of Alexandria demonstrates its consequences.
Alexandria, the capital of Egypt when it was part of the Greek Empire, sometime in the third century bce became the home of a great library founded by the Ptolemaic Kings. This library housed the cultural heritage of the Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Egyptians and Jews. The goal was to attract outstanding scholars, philosophers and scientists, to create a great community of learning. It was a spectacular success. Amongst the thinkers who worked there were some of the greatest intellects of the ancient world, and the advances made in human knowledge were extraordinary. Greenblatt (2012) states that
Euclid developed his geometry in Alexandria; Archimedes produced a remarkably precise estimate of the value of pi and laid the foundations for calculus; Eratosthenes, positing that the earth was round, calculated its circumference to within 1 percent; Galen revolutionized medicine; Alexandrian astronomers postulated a heliocentric universe; geometers deduced that the length of the year was 365.25 days and proposed adding a “leap day” every fourth year …
(Greenblatt, 2012, p. 87)
For present purposes the crucial feature of the enterprise is its inclusiveness. The knowledge and worldviews of the whole world were within its scope. Dimitios, who was chief librarian until 284 bce, was given a large budget and charged with ensuring that the library contained as many of the books in the world as possible and it is reputed to have held over half-a-million scrolls. A project to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek was successfully undertaken there by seventy scholars commissioned by Ptolemy Philadelphus.
The seeds of the destruction of the Alexandrian culture were in the conflict between the traditional cults of pagan worship and the newer monotheistic cults. Greenblatt (2012) observes ‘Centuries of religious pluralism under paganism – three faiths living side by side in a spirit of mingled rivalry and absorptive tolerance – were coming to an end’ (p. 89).
The monotheists were the disputants alluded to above that were intolerant of the contrary views held by others. In the fourth century ce, Christianity achieved the status of official religion of the Roman Empire and in 391 ce the Roman emperor Theodosius the Great issued edicts forbidding public sacrifices and other pagan rituals. In the same year part of the library was destroyed on the orders of the Archbishop Theophilus. Within a quarter-of-a-century an event occurred that has been identified as the ‘end of ancient world’. Violence between the pagan, Christian and Jewish communities grew in Alexandria. Iconoclasm broke out on a huge scale. Theophilus and his nephew and successor Cyril were avid leaders of the assault on pagans and Jews. Cyril demanded the expulsion of the Jews from the city, a demand rejected by Alexandria’s governor Orestes, who although he had previously converted to Christianity resisted the Church having total control of the city. The city’s ‘pagan’ elite also were opposed to the expulsion of the Jews.
Hypatia was the most distinguished member of the pagan elite. She is an extraordinary figure in history. She had a prominence unheard of for a woman in classical society based on her brilliance as an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher. She became the object of the Christians’ wrath, and was accused of being a witch. In 415 or 416 ce a mob of Christians killed her with broken pottery and burned her corpse. Cyril was subsequently made a saint. Ironically, Hypatia’s student Synesius became a bishop and incorporated neo-Platonist ideas into the doctrine of the Trinity. The whole intellectual tradition crumbled. The great collection of the library was lost to decay, worms and wanton destruction by the Christians.
The particular social trend that led to the virtual disappearance of the materialist tradition concerned the particular hostility the Christians felt towards Epicureanism. Traditions as powerful, intellectually rich and influential as Greek philosophy were not going to simply vanish in the face of the rise of the Christian teaching. Rather, the Christians who emerged from a culture in which that philosophical tradition was dominant, over generations, incorporated certain aspects of Greek thought into the Christian canon. Features of the work of both Plato and Aristotle found a place in Christian doctrine. Besides anything else, they both believed in the immortality of the soul. Stoic philosophy also appealed in certain aspects. But Epicurus had nothing to offer the Christians. The denial of Creation, the indifference of deities towards humans, the injunction to not fear death, the derision of religious ritual, the pursuit of happiness – all this was anathema. Epicureans were also loathed by pagans and Jews. Julian the Apostate, who tried to counter the rising Christian influence in the mid-fourth century, wanted to exclude consideration of Epicureans, and the Jewish authorities termed anyone who departed from the rabbinic tradition apikoros – an Epicurean.
Into a culture of mutual mockery came a two-pronged assault by the Christians. First, the great figures of the tradition, Epicurus himself and Lucretius, were subject to vilification – Epicurus as an advocate of excess – recall Horace’s talk of his sty – and Lucretius a deranged suicide. Second, the misrepresentation of the pursuit of pleasure as the pursuit of vice became central to the attack on the Epicurean tradition. As sinners, it is vice for man to pursue pleasure. Rather, we should respond to our deep guilt with due self-denial.
By the end of the first century ce De Rerum Natura was hardly read and its author had already begun a descent into philosophical oblivion. Thereafter the poem was lost, but not forever. Its revival is a remarkable story in the history of materialism. De Rerum Natura was the great flame of the materialist tradition, and therefore the bane of the Christian Church, and it was saved by the Christian monasteries.
In The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt (2012) describes how in the early days of the establishment of the monasteries, monks were under an injunction to read. With the decline of the Roman Empire, the European intellectual tradition and institutions collapsed, and the survival of any learning at all was thanks to the monasteries in which monks learned Greek and Latin and were compelled to read. Armies of scribes over the centuries copied and recopied ancient texts, and the reading available for the monks went far beyond the Bible and the writings of the Christian fathers, and the pagan authors adopted by the Church – Plato and Aristotle.
After the great Italian poet Petrarch discovered in the fourteenth century a number of masterpieces by Roman authors who had lived more than 1000 years earlier, many others were inspired to go in search of lost works from the ancient world. One of these, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered, in an obscure German monastery, in 1417, a copy of De Rerum Natura. It is this event that Greenblatt identifies, in the title of his book, as an instance of an Epicurean swerve, because of the subsequent enormous influence the poem had on generations of European philosophers and scientists. More than that, and usurping the vocabulary of the opponents of materialism, it might be said that the reappearance of the poem occurred at that moment in history when the time had come for its message to be heard and its teachings absorbed. The story of materialism in the 400 years following the rediscovery of Lucretius’ poem is the subject of the next chapter.