Declaration Of Rights Of Epicureans To Freedom of Religion - Cassius' Declaration of August 20, 2021

I caution against presenting Venus to non-Epicureans as our go-to expression of divinity. I don't think that Venus is a completely inappropriate teaching tool, but using Venus as our prototype will inevitably lead to misinterpretation.

In accordance with Epicurus' insistence on frank speech, I think we should use materialistic language to express the notion of divinity as the gods. Philodemus' innumerable, extra-terrestrial animals who have cultivated an incorruptible state of pleasure seem more coherent with Epicurus' teachings than does Lucretius' symbolic hymn. Presenting any one personality as the Epicurean expression of divinity might lead to the common misconceptions of the masses that Epicurus warns against in his Letter To Menoeceus. For example, a Christian might assume that Epicureans either worship Venus as a personal savior, or assume that we see Venus the Creatrix as pre-dating the natural world.

Invoking the gods instead of Venus serves to prevent a few common misconceptions.

(1) While pleasure is universal, the means by which pleasure is realized is unique to each animal. This god may pursue a different path to pleasure than that god. No one God offers a path that can be prescribed as a universal panacea.

(2) Students of our tradition do not need to rely on metaphors to understand divinity. Most forms of idealism tend to abuse the use of ambiguous metaphors to obscure their contradictions. Our philosophy is not limited to metaphors.

(3) Venus is a culturally-contextualized personality from ancient Rome (or Aphrodite in Ancient Greece); therein, Venus isn't nearly as accessible to a contemporary audience as is Mother Nature, to exemplify a more viable metaphor.

(4) Venus as a symbol of life and fertility invokes images of verdant field, succulent fruit, and life as it is on Earth. The gods may be silicon-based lifeforms who breathe methane, or something even more unexpected.

(5) While Lucretius is one of our primary sources of information, he wrote exclusively in poetic verse, and we have an extra layer of interpretation to even understand what Venus symbolizes. That's a burden on new students.

As a general expression of our philosophy, the use of mythic personification is an invitation to misinterpret a philosophy that has been radically misinterpreted throughout history, particularly by self-proclaimed Epicureans, like the Italian Humanists who synthesized Epicurean physics with faith in their Christ. If we are to invoke a primary divinity at all, I would suggest using the contemporary metaphor of Mother Nature. Even better, I think it best to avoid using metaphors as much as possible when referring to divinity, and, instead, privilege the phrase "the gods".

Quote

Are there any other contenders for the role of primary divinity in Epicurean religion?

If the interpretation of George Santayana and other scholars is to be trusted, Lucretius' Venus is only one half of a dyad representing the Empedoclean principles of Love and Strife, re-creation and destruction, accretion and dissolution—things coming together and things falling apart. Co-equal and co-eternal, and each a necessary condition for the existence of the other.

Venus, then; first among equals? I don't have an opinion on whether or not DRN is a finished poem, but I find I love the idea that a 7th book would have ended with a Requiem to Mars—as in a sense the 6th book does, with the account of the plague in Athens.

Interestingly (or perhaps not), Venus is the second brightest object in the night sky and Mars occasionally outshines even Jupiter himself for third place.

Your post brings back a memory of Civics class in high school. One of our homework assignments was to draft a Declaration of Independence from whatever we chose. I wish I could remember what I declared my independence from.

Off the top of my head, Buddhism is a religion that doesn't worship a god but follows its founder's teachings. So that might apply in some way to this discussion.