"Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion"
About this Quote
A Roman poet watching piety curdle into violence is not offering a hot take; he is filing an indictment. Lucretius writes as an Epicurean in a world where religion is civic infrastructure: rituals secure the state, priests arbitrate meaning, omens steer policy, fear of the gods polices behavior. Against that backdrop, “Such are the heights of wickedness” lands like a cold tally of damage, and the most ruthless move is the grammar. Men are “driven” by religion. Evil isn’t framed as a personal glitch or a few bad actors; it’s a system that can outsource guilt to the divine and then call the result virtue.
The line’s subtext is that religion doesn’t merely fail to prevent atrocity; it can metabolize atrocity into moral duty. That’s why Lucretius doesn’t say religion causes wickedness in the ordinary way. He emphasizes escalation: “heights.” Religion, in his view, is an engine of moral extremity because it offers something intoxicatingly efficient - cosmic authorization. Once an act is rebranded as obedience, the normal brakes (shame, empathy, social taboo) become negotiable. Fear does the rest: fear of punishment, fear of impurity, fear of being seen as disloyal to the gods.
Contextually, Lucretius is writing De Rerum Natura to replace superstition with a physics of atoms and void. The polemic isn’t anti-spiritual so much as anti-fear. The sentence works because it compresses an Epicurean promise into a warning: when people mistake terror for transcendence, they don’t just suffer; they start making others suffer and call it sacred.
The line’s subtext is that religion doesn’t merely fail to prevent atrocity; it can metabolize atrocity into moral duty. That’s why Lucretius doesn’t say religion causes wickedness in the ordinary way. He emphasizes escalation: “heights.” Religion, in his view, is an engine of moral extremity because it offers something intoxicatingly efficient - cosmic authorization. Once an act is rebranded as obedience, the normal brakes (shame, empathy, social taboo) become negotiable. Fear does the rest: fear of punishment, fear of impurity, fear of being seen as disloyal to the gods.
Contextually, Lucretius is writing De Rerum Natura to replace superstition with a physics of atoms and void. The polemic isn’t anti-spiritual so much as anti-fear. The sentence works because it compresses an Epicurean promise into a warning: when people mistake terror for transcendence, they don’t just suffer; they start making others suffer and call it sacred.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Lucretius
Add to List
