the Week of Proper 28 / Ordinary 33
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Bible Dictionaries
Epicureans
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
or EPICUREANS . St. Paul’s visit to Athens ( Acts 17:15-34 ) led to an encounter with ‘certain of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers,’ representatives of the two leading schools of philosophy of that time.
Epicureanism took its name from its founder Epicurus, who was born in the island of Samos in the year b.c. 341. In b.c. 307 he settled in Athens, where he died in b.c. 270. A man of blameless life and of a most amiable character, Epicurus gathered around him, in the garden which he had purchased at Athens, a brotherhood of attached followers, who came to be known as Epicureans, or ‘the philosophers of the Garden.’ His aim was a practical one. He regarded pleasure as the absolute good. Epicurus, however, did not restrict pleasure, as the earlier Cyrenaic school had done, to immediate bodily pleasures. Whatever may have been the practical outcome of the system, Epicurus and his more worthy followers must be acquitted of the charge of sensuality. What Epicurus advocated and aimed at was the happiness of a tranquil life as free from pain as possible, undisturbed by social conventions or political excitement or superstitious fears.
To deliver men from ‘the fear of the gods’ was the chief endeavour and, according to his famous follower the Roman poet Lucretius, the crowning service of Epicurus. Thus it may be said that, at one point at least, the paths of the Christian Apostle and the Epicurean philosopher touched each other. Epicurus sought to achieve his end by showing that in the physical organization of the world there is no room for the interference of such beings as the gods of the popular theology. There is nothing which is not material, and the primal condition of matter is that of atoms which, falling in empty space with an inherent tendency to swerve slightly from the perpendicular, come into contact with each other, and form the world as it appears to the senses. All is material and mechanical. The gods and Epicurus does not deny the existence of gods have no part or lot in the affairs of men. They are relegated to a realm of their own in the spaces between the worlds. Further, since the test of life is feeling, death, in which there is no feeling, cannot mean anything at all, and is not a thing to be feared either in prospect or in fact.
The total effect of Epicureanism is negative. Its wide-spread and powerful influence must be accounted for by the personal charm of its founder, and by the conditions of the age in which it appeared and flourished. It takes its place as one of the negative but widening influences, leading up to ‘the fulness of time’ which saw the birth of Christianity.
W. M. Macdonald.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Epicureans'. Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdb/e/epicureans.html. 1909.
