Epicurean philosophers

(Acts 17:18) — one of the Greek philosophical sects, with whose representatives St. Paul the Apostle had to hold discourse at Athens. This sect took its name from Epicurus, who was born in 342 B.C. on the island of Samos and died in 270 B.C. The basic principles of Epicurus’s philosophy were greatly distorted by his followers; they departed from the proper sense of his teaching and set up sensual pleasure as the highest good in life. “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32): such, in time, was the form the teaching of Epicurus’s sensualist philosophy came to take.

The Epicureans also did not believe in the creation of the world by the almighty power of God, and maintained that it arose from the chance combination of atoms; they denied the immortality of the soul, holding that it dies together with the body; they taught that all events in the world happen by chance, or depend on purely mechanical causes; they denied divine Providence, future retribution after death, and the like. From this it becomes evident how starkly their absurd atheistic teaching diverged from the true teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ and His Gospel, especially in the doctrine of the future resurrection of the dead.

Despite the absurdity of its teaching, the Epicurean school had many followers, and it was with these persons that the Apostle Paul had to converse at Athens. It goes without saying that the apostle’s teaching could not please the Epicureans, so sharply opposed was it to their own; and so, when he, in the very Areopagus, briefly set forth the greatness of the true God, touched on the revealed doctrine of the future judgment and resurrection of the dead, some of them mocked, while others said, “We will hear thee again of this matter,” and would hear him no more (Acts 17:16–32).