In one sense of the term, as the opening of book 3 shows, Lucretius was not an atheist: he did write of the gods. In the early modern period, however, ‘atheism’ was normally applied not simply to a denial of God’s existence but to the denial of a creating and continuing divine intervention in the world, and in that sense Lucretius was definitely an atheist: his gods are supplied by nature (3.23) and neither created the world nor take an interest in its affairs. His cosmos could thus be criticised on combined theological and aesthetic grounds. A powerful tradition of Renaissance poetics took poetic form as a parallel for the divine design of the universe. The Earl of Shaftesbury, retorting to Lucretius, pointed out that the wordor world was associated with the adjective for beautiful, and claimed that ‘in spite of his philosophy, [Lucretius] everywhere gives way to admiration and rapturous views of nature ... He is transported with the several beauties of the world, even while he arraigns the order of it’. But Lucretius’ cosmos does have an underlying order, and the way it evades traditionally recognised formal patterns could evoke a sublimity transcending a tamer kind of beauty – because of his philosophy rather than in spite of it. In the end, his gods are of value less in themselves than as indices of what the human mind can do. They image theor freedom from perturbation advocated by Epicurean philosophy, and this state can in principle be attained by humans: it is in this sense that Epicurus has a divine mind ( divina , 3.15). Early modern editors inserted, ‘not’, before this phrase and took the passage to be asserting that the universe did not arise from a divine mind, that is, that it was not created by God. But Lucretius later repeats the claim that Epicurus was a god (5.8); he proceeds to gloss this as meaning that he was worthy to be counted in the number of the gods, since he discoursed divinely of them (5.50-54). There is a circularity here - to be divine is to discourse divinely of the divine – which suggests that for Lucretius these deities are useful fictions. He draws attention to the contradictory nature of these beings which do have bodies and yet evade the rules posited for bodies elsewhere. In this sense, the provocative claim that Epicurus made man equal to the gods,(1.79) amounts to the claim that he has raised their imaginations to a more sublime level. This is an instance of the ‘sublime of the gap’ between high and low; with the extra twist that in this universe, high and low are fundamentally the same.