Theopedia

Epicureanism

Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?”

— Acts 17:18

Definition

Epicureanism is the school of ancient Greek philosophy founded by Epicurus, who lived more than two hundred years before Christ.1 Reformed writers identify materialism as its foundation: it reduces all reality, including the human soul, to atoms in motion, so that nothing survives death to face judgment.2 Epicurus did not deny that gods exist, but denied that they govern the world, representing God as “neither doing nor designing any thing.”3 He made pleasure, meaning freedom from the fear of death and the gods, the highest good. Paul debated Epicurean philosophers at Athens (Acts 17:18).

Historical Origin

Gill dates Epicurus to “more than two hundred years before Christ.”1 His Roman poetic successor, Lucretius, later restated the system in verse; Gill observes that Lucretius, “though he disbelieved” any future judgment, “bears a full testimony to the truth of it, even while he derides it,” since he wrote centuries before the New Testament yet still felt the need to argue against a fear of eternal punishment he describes as universal among his contemporaries.1 According to Gill’s account of Lucretius, that fear was “the cause of all the troubles and miseries of human life,” a bondage from which Epicurus set out to free his followers by explaining the world without recourse to divine involvement.1

Hodge locates the school’s historical influence chiefly outside its own era: Epicurean materialism “did not exert much influence on the ancient mind,” being overshadowed by “the dominant influence of the higher philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,” and was instead revived by philosophical Materialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4 Yet the school persisted continuously enough that Paul encountered living Epicurean philosophers at Athens in the first century AD, debating him in the marketplace before inviting him to explain himself further at the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-21).5

Core Tenets

Atomistic materialism

Reformed writers treat materialism, not hedonism, as the school’s defining commitment. Calvin describes the Epicureans as men who, “like so many Cyclops,” used their skill in tracing the body’s organs and functions “as a vantage-ground from which to wage more audacious war with God,” explaining away the soul’s God-given faculties as nothing but matter in motion: “Let Epicurus tell what concourse of atoms, cooking meat and drink, can form one portion into refuse and another into blood, and make all the members separately perform their office.”2 Hodge summarizes the same position: because Epicurus “held that nothing is incorporeal except a vacuum,” his system “includes all the forms of existence under the head of matter,” so that “there is no mind or spirit,” “no God, and no moral law”; “virtue is only a prudent regard to happiness.”4

The gods and providence

Despite this materialism, Epicurus did not straightforwardly deny that gods exist. Charnock records that some historic interpreters “vindicate Epicurus from the atheism wherewith he was commonly charged,” on the ground “that he did not deny the being of God, but those adulterous and contentious deities the people worshipped.”6 Van Mastricht cites the same restraint as evidence of a natural knowledge of God that even the irreligious cannot fully suppress: “Epicurus himself, who was not ashamed of anything shameful, was nevertheless ashamed to deny God,” a hesitation Mastricht traces to Epicurus’s own Letter to Menoeceus.7 What Epicurus denied was not the gods’ existence but their governance. Gill, citing Cicero’s Epicurean spokesman Velleius, reports that Epicurus called God supremely blessed yet “wrongly represents him as neither doing nor designing any thing,” a deity too self-sufficient to trouble itself with providence, judgment, or the affairs of the world.3

Pleasure and the denial of judgment

Because Epicurus removed a governing, judging God from the world, he removed with it the traditional grounds for fearing death and the afterlife. Gill writes that “Epicurus thought the punishment of hell to be a poetical figment,” and cites the Epicurean poet Horace’s summary of the school’s creed: “mors ultima linea rerum est,” death is the last line of all things.1 The corresponding ethic made pleasure the highest good, secured chiefly by extinguishing the fear of death and the gods rather than by pursuing bodily indulgence as such. Gill records that even Epicurus’s own composure did not survive contact with his own death: though “he taught men to despise death, and outbrave it,” when he perceived that he himself was about to die, he “was most terribly frightened.” Gill cites this as evidence that the fear of divine judgment is natural to all men, not merely the product of superstition or upbringing.8

Biblical Encounter

Scripture records a direct confrontation between the apostle Paul and Epicurean philosophy. In Athens, “a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers begin debating with Paul” in the marketplace, dismissing him as an amateurish “babbler” (σπερμολόγος) before taking him to the Areopagus to hear more (Acts 17:16-21).5 Paul’s speech there addresses the Athenians’ altar to “an unknown god,” presenting the God of Israel as the self-sufficient Creator who “made the world and everything in it” and who “is not far from” any of them (Acts 17:23-27), a direct challenge to the Epicurean claim that the divine neither acts nor draws near.5 Paul closes by proclaiming that God “has fixed a day on which he will judge the world” and “raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:30-31); at the mention of the resurrection, Paul’s Epicurean and Stoic hearers interrupt and mock him, though the speech still yields converts.5

Theological Response

Reformed writers across several centuries answer Epicurean materialism on its own chosen ground: the order and design visible in nature and in the human body. Calvin’s response to the claim that mere “concourse of atoms” could account for the body’s ordered functions was to insist that such order itself testifies to God’s design, not to blind chance.2 Hodge, writing three centuries later, traces modern philosophical Materialism directly back to Epicurus’s ancient system, arguing that “the Materialists of our day have not advanced a step upon” it and that both share the same reduction of mind, virtue, and God to matter and prudence.4

Against the claim that death ends all accountability, Gill argues from the near-universal testimony of conscience: even heathen philosophers who denied a future judgment in their writings showed by their own fear of death, as Epicurus himself did, that the sense of coming judgment cannot be argued away, only suppressed.8 Mastricht draws the same conclusion from Epicurus’s own reluctance to deny God outright: if even a philosopher committed to explaining the world without divine governance could not bring himself to assert atheism plainly, that reluctance is itself evidence for the universal, natural knowledge of God Paul describes in Romans 1:19-20.7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book VII, chap. 10. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 1, chap. 5, 51-63: “The swift motions of the soul, its noble faculties and rare endowments, bespeak the agency of God in a manner which would make the suppression of it impossible, did not the Epicureans, like so many Cyclops, use it as a vantage-ground, from which to wage more audacious war with God… Let Epicurus tell what concourse of atoms, cooking meat and drink, can form one portion into refuse and another portion into blood, and make all the members separately perform their office as carefully as if they were so many souls acting with common consent in the superintendence of one body.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book I, chap. 25. ↩ ↩2

  4. Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Anti-Theistic Theories,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 241-335. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 2, “Preparation for the School of Grace,” 58-130. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XI: On the Holiness of God,” 108-208. ↩

  7. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 2, “The Existence and Knowledge of God,” 80-110. ↩ ↩2

  8. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book I, chap. 1. ↩ ↩2