History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [146]
His poem sets forth in verse the philosophy of Epicurus. Although the two men have the same doctrine, their temperaments are very different. Lucretius was passionate, and much more in need of exhortations to prudence than Epicurus was. He committed suicide, and appears to have suffered from periodic insanity—brought on, so some averred, by the pains of love or the unintended effects of a love philtre. He feels towards Epicurus as towards a saviour, and applies language of religious intensity to the man whom he regards as the destroyer of religion:9
When prostrate upon earth lay human life
Visibly trampled down and foully crushed
Beneath Religion's cruelty, who meanwhile
Out of the regions of the heavens above
Showed forth her face, lowering on mortal men
With horrible aspect, first did a man of Greece
Dare to lift up his mortal eyes against her;
The first was he to stand up and defy her.
Him neither stories of the gods, nor lightnings,
Nor heaven with muttering menaces could quell,
But all the more did they arouse his soul's
Keen valour, till he longed to be the first
To break through the fast-bolted doors of Nature.
Therefore his fervent energy of mind
Prevailed, and he passed onward, voyaging far
Beyond the flaming ramparts of the world,
Ranging in mind and spirit far and wide
Throughout the unmeasured universe; and thence
A conqueror he returns to us, bringing back
Knowledge both of what can and what cannot
Rise into being, teaching us in fine
Upon what principle each thing has its powers
Limited, and its deep-set boundary stone.
Therefore now has Religion been cast down
Beneath men's feet, and trampled on in turn:
Ourselves heaven-high his victory exalts
The hatred of religion expressed by Epicurus and Lucretius is not altogether easy to understand, if one accepts the conventional accounts of the cheerfulness of Greek religion and ritual. Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, for instance, celebrates a religious ceremony, but not one which could fill men's minds with dark and gloomy terrors. I think popular beliefs were very largely not of this cheerful kind. The worship of the Olympians had less of superstitious cruelty than the other forms of Greek religion, but even the Olympian gods had demanded occasional human sacrifice until the seventh or sixth century B.C., and this practice was recorded in myth and drama.10 Throughout the barbarian world, human sacrifice was still recognized in the time of Epicurus; until the Roman conquest, it was practised in times of crisis, such as the Punic Wars, by even the most civilized of barbarian populations.
As was shown most convincingly by Jane Harrison, the Greeks had, in addition to the official cults of Zeus and his family, other more primitive beliefs associated with more or less barbarous rites. These were to some extent incorporated in Orphism, which became the prevalent belief among men of religious temperament. It is sometimes supposed that Hell was a Christian invention, but this is a mistake. What Christianity did in this respect was only to systematize earlier popular beliefs. From the beginning of Plato's Republic it is clear that the fear of punishment after death was common in fifth-century Athens, and it is not likely that it grew less in the interval between Socrates and Epicurus. (I am thinking not of the educated minority, but of the general population.) Certainly, also, it was common to attribute plagues, earthquakes, defeats in war, and such calamities, to divine displeasure or to failure to respect the omens. I think that Greek literature and art are probably very misleading as regards popular beliefs. What should we know of Methodism in the late eighteenth century if no record of the period survived except its aristocratic books and paintings? The influence of Methodism, like that of religiosity