Three Ancient Teachers—Part 1

I have written before on this blog about how several ancient philosophers (mostly from Greece) came to influence my outlook on life. In each case I was already leaning in the direction of their messages, so when I came upon them I was quite ready to absorb their lessons. I think this is a common experience for many of us. I'm not referring to what happens when we are cruising through life and suddenly become a convert to a completely new (to us) idea; one that immediately transforms our views and even turns us into a devoted disciple.

Instead, I'm describing how we might already be thinking along certain lines, but with a limited understanding of the subject we are pondering... we're just muddling along, but with some sense of direction. Then one day we encounter a teacher who clearly describes this same issue, and suddenly the fog lifts and we see the bigger picture. Our former simple and limited understanding thus becomes far more complete and convincing. We're not taking a radically new direction at all, but getting confirmation that the direction we were going in is OK, and now we get a boost that urges us farther along that path. I love those kinds of discoveries.

The three ancient teachers I'm writing about here are Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. The first two lived in the 5^th century BCE in Greece. Lucretius came along about 400 years later, and was a resident of Rome. The two earlier Greeks were familiar with each other and taught similar things, but their message later got shunted aside by competing Greek philosophers. A few centuries later Lucretius revived their teachings in a beautiful epic poem, On the Nature of Things. His message was also sidelined and his poem was repressed—this time mostly by the Catholic Church.

I will delve into their stories only briefly here—just to sketch the overview. My main objective is to offer a three-part, connective summary of the aspect of their teachings that has had a strong influence on me. As I wrote above, I was already inclined to be thinking along these lines, and when I discovered their philosophies, they gave me the courage to have more confidence in my thoughts and to rededicate myself to the philosophical and moral paths that they laid out.

The three messages are: (1) the composition of all matter is explainable by the existence of atoms, (2) death is not what we think it is, and (3) live simply, rather than pursue money and power. While these three lessons may seem to be a bit dissociated, they are in fact tightly interwoven, I think, and form a broad and coherent philosophy of life and how to live it. I'll try to explain.

The first message: Everything is made of atoms; in other words, it's atoms all the way down. The Greeks of Democritus' time (the first true scientists) were pondering the fundamental reality of the world. A central question they pondered: What are things made of? There were several competing arguments at the time, and most of them perceived matter as a continuum. Epicurus took another tack and put forth the proposition that matter was not continuous, but really was granular—being constituted of tiny building blocks that he called "atoms" (from the Greek word atomos, meaning indivisible).

What is extraordinary, is that Democritus arrived at his theory of atoms, without any chance of proving their existence; it was just a mental construct. The necessary proof of his insight had to wait for some 2500 years, until powerful microscopes could be invented. His insight essentially founded the science of physics. It was an elegant and prescient concept. He wrote that every kind of matter is made up of similar kinds of elementary building blocks... thus everything in the world is related. (More on that later.) This fundamental insight led to a completely new way of looking at the world: that the composition and nature of everything is both natural and explainable—thus, things and events are neither supernatural nor magical.

More on ancient teachers next time...