This month, we published De Rerum Natura – Study Guide and Meleta, which is a companion to a somewhat similar collection of meleta, educational essays, and videos on Kyriai Doxai that we had previously published in order to help sincere students of Epicurean philosophy to become experts in the study and practice of KD.
Even virtuous actions often have no advantage because men show too much arrogance or fall back without reason into superstitious fears, and because in other actions in life they make many mistakes of every kind, so that no one really exhibits virtue. We, in turn, committed to follow pleasure, will witness in our favor that our affairs are carried out with more ease in the circumstances within which hitherto we had exhibited pain. – Polystratus, Third Scholarch of the Epicurean Garden of Athens, arguing that the pursuit of virtue means nothing without the study of nature
While Metrodorus referred to the belly as a “standard” of nature, details have been emerging of a Christian death cult in Kenya where a pastor had convinced the faithful to stop eating “so they could meet Jesus”, with as many as 201 people (at the latest count) dying from starvation as a result. The latest details about the death cult reveal that the pastor seems to have been harvesting the organs of his victims. These types of events–together with the Kill the Gays bill in neighboring Uganda, and the exacerbation of the AIDS pandemic by the churches’ disinformation campaigns regarding safe sex, not to mention the horrors of the days of slavery–reveal that in spite of Christian propaganda about being “pro-life”, in Africa, Christianity still brings death along with many other problems, and that there is a huge need to teach empirical thinking skills in African communities and elsewhere so that people will not be susceptible to this level of abuse.
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.
― Lucretius
This month, the Nothing New YouTube channel published Epicureanism: It’s Not Just Hedonism!, the Seize the Moment podcast had an episode with Dean Rickles titled Learning How to Embrace the Shortness of Life, and a friend brought to our attention the essay On Religious and Psychiatric Atheism: The Success of Epicurus, the Failure of Thomas Szasz, written by Michael Fontaine, PhD. The author says there some things concerning personal responsibility which are relevant to a subject I’ve been meaning to write about: how the innocent Greek word for choice (haereseos) ended up meaning blasphemy (heresy).
The words haereseos and fygis appear in Epicurus’ Epistle to Menoeceus, and are often translated as choices and rejections, or choices and avoidances. Peter St. Andre translates them as “accept” and “reject”. The terms refer to a helpful and potentially constructive moral faculty, the creative faculty of dynamic will power, of choice and rejection. But first, let us study the context.
Pleasure is the Alpha and Omega
After saying that Pleasure is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end of a blissful life, the Hegemon said:
For we recognize it as the primary and innate good, we honor it in everything we accept or reject, and we achieve it if we judge every good thing by the standard of how that thing affects us.
ταύτην γὰρ ἀγαθὸν πρῶτον καὶ συγγενικὸν ἔγνωμεν, καὶ ἀπὸ ταύτης καταρχόμεθα πάσης αἱρέσεως καὶ φυγῆς, καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτην καταντῶμεν ὡς κανόνι τῷ πάθει πᾶν ἀγαθὸν κρίνοντες.
Letter to Menoeceus, Monadnock Translation
Wherefore we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting-point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.
Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus.net translation
Agathon Proton
Concerning how pleasure is a primal and native good to our nature, one translation says we “recognize” this in everything we accept and reject, while the other translation says that the insights we get from the pleasure faculty are the “starting point” of every choice and rejection. The second statement translates as “to (Pleasure) we come back”, while the other translation says we honor Pleasure in everything we choose and reject.
The first Epicurean Guides reasoned pragmatically based on signs, which provide the evidence of nature. They were physicalists, and they saw the choices and rejections made by sentient beings as signs by which one could see that pleasure and aversion were guiding sentient beings in their behavior.
Kanoni to Pathei
One translation says “we achieve (Pleasure) if we judge every good thing by the standard of how that thing affects us”, while the other one says “inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing”. I believe the second translation is truer to the original.
Here, pathe / feeling (varieties of pleasure and aversion) is presented as a canonical faculty (kanoni to pathei, or the standard of feeling). In Epicurean epistemology, our canonical faculties are nature-given standards by which we directly perceive the nature of things. These faculties are pre-rational, immediate and clear, and have no opinion added.
Haereseos
The point of this passage is to clearly establish the role of Pleasure as the standard in our choices and rejections. Let us now return to the word translated as choices, or the things we accept. One of the immediate things I noticed about this word is that it shares semantic roots with heresy. Here are the Oxford Languages definitions of heresy:
belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (especially Christian) doctrine.
opinion profoundly at odds with what is generally accepted.
The dictionary offers orthodoxy as a word that means the opposite of heresy, and offers the following words as having a “similar” meaning: dissent, dissidence, blasphemy, nonconformity, unorthodoxy, heterodoxy, apostasy, freethinking, schism, faction, skepticism, agnosticism, atheism, nontheism, nonbelief … idolatry, paganism, separatism, sectarianism, revisionism, tergiversation.
One can quickly begin to sense the tension and the authoritarianism behind the history of the word heresy, and one can imagine the culture wars by which “choice” became “blasphemy”. This is, of course, due to the disinformation campaigns of the early Christian Church (which is mentioned directly in the Oxford dictionary) and its persecution of anyone who was pro-choice, in the broad sense of the word.
Epicurus had given us a philosophy and practice of freedom, of choice and rejection (without which freedom means nothing), of haereseos. Christianity, over many centuries, turned the practice of that freedom, the practice of haereseos (choice) into our modern meaning of heresy. We today have case studies of persistent campaigns to change the meaning of words with modern terms like “woke”, which on its face merely means awakened, but some are trying to re-interpret as a bad word. Our friend Nathan discussed some of the ways in which power changes language in The Book of Sh_zd_r, which I mentioned in Eikas many moons ago.
Heresy became a maligned word that suffered a disinformation campaign, but originally the word simply meant choice. From the evolution of the word heresy, we see that the practice of Epicurean pleasure and freedom evolved, form being a praxis of choice (haereseos), into a practice of heresy. Choice became heresy. It became a target for eradication by the war-machine of the early church. Many Christians still today are anti-choice–which is to say, they are against the practice of freedom, of autarchy and self rule, and of personal sovereignty. And so the faculty of choice, and the moral development that comes from our ownership of it, remain under-developed.
Maybe this says something about human nature, in addition to what it says of power. We often see mortals eager to give up their sense of moral agency, of causal responsibility (in armies, in religions, in mobs, etc.), because the burden of choice on their conscience is too much, or because they do not trust themselves to make choices, or because they are too lazy, or too weak, or not ethically educated, so it’s better to evade choosing and rejecting, to let others choose and reject for them, and to accept the less burdensome uncreative unfreedom of blind imitation or blind obedience. The Christians’ favorite euphemism for this is the Pauline belief in “salvation by faith alone”, while Muslims refer to “submission” to the will of Allah.
Maybe it’s true that the use of the faculty of choice can be an overwhelming task at times, and we must all negotiate the extent to which we will be actively involved in our choices and rejections. Perhaps a measure of outsourcing of our moral agency is warranted, particularly when we concede to the expertise of others, or when we develop and repeat sound habits informed by pragmatic needs and options. But I would still argue that a chronic, persistent outsourcing of our causal responsibility (which often is part of a belief scheme that facilitates this at all times) is unhealthy and dangerous.
Fygis is the word used for aversions, or the things we reject. Some may argue that this is another (equally important) form of choice, or another way to practice our personal sovereignty.
The bottom line is that I perceive a moral failure in how we lost the original meaning of heresy / haireseos as a good and positive human value. I see signs of moral decay and an unwillingness to achieve moral maturity in the persistent and systematic outsourcing of our moral agency. When Epicurus expects us to take ownership of our choices and rejections, he is instilling a sense of our causal responsibility and awakening our natural moral faculties, thereby encouraging our moral development.
Also, even if we make mistakes in our choices and rejections, since we accept the possibility of moral development, we are able to still feel content, at peace, and at ease when we own our choices and accept to learn from our mistakes from a place of personal sovereignty and maturity.
The True, Original Heresy
To conclude: we must use our moral faculty of choice and rejection. The practice of … true heresy–in its original prolepsis of haereseos–is the use of the faculty of choice, which is itself a practice of freedom, and of pleasure. This practice of choosing our thoughts, words, and deeds guided by our canonical nature-given faculties of pleasure and aversion is the true and original heresy.
Concerning the linking of heresy with various forms of unorthodoxy in the modern dictionary, and how it reflects historical power dynamics, something else must be said. If we stop imposing the eye of Christian hegemony upon Epicurean teachings, we will find that originally, Epicurean doctrine saw itself as the true orthodoxy. The words orthés philosophias (correct philosophy) are mentioned in Vatican Saying 41, and the Kyriai Doxai are themselves a statement of philosophical orthodoxy.
Epicurean Database 