Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who taught that the universe is atoms falling through empty space, and that this is good news. + Most people who use his name have the man backwards. "Epicurean" now means a connoisseur of fine food, and the historical Epicurus lived on bread and water, kept a jar of cheese for special occasions, and once wrote to a friend asking him to send a little pot of it so that he could feast when he felt like it. He was not chasing sensation. He was trying to cure fear. That is the key to everything he taught. Epicurus thought human beings were miserable for two reasons above all: they were frightened of the gods, and they were frightened of dying. His entire physics, the atoms and the void and the worlds forming and dissolving without any hand behind them, was built to take those two fears away. If nothing exists but matter in motion, then no god is watching you with a ledger, and when you die there is no one left to be hurt. He believed that a person who really understood this could be as happy as a god. He is worth a Christian reader’s time for one reason above the others. Nobody before him had worked out so carefully, and in such detail, what the world looks like when there is no providence in it. Providence is the word for God running the place: the belief that the harvest, the shipwreck, the illness and the child are held inside a purpose somebody intends, rather than being whatever the atoms happened to do that week. Epicurus said no one is running it. And he meant that kindly, which is what makes him worth answering rather than merely refuting. That vision never went away, either. When Paul preached in Athens some three centuries later, Epicureans were standing in the crowd (Acts 17:18). The church fathers argued with him for four hundred years. And the atomism he taught, once a Catholic priest had rebuilt it around a Creator, became part of the physics we still use.

(●) 341 BC: Born on the island of Samos, the son of a poor Athenian schoolmaster. + Epicurus was born in February 341 BC on Samos, a green island off the coast of what is now Turkey. His parents were Athenians, part of a group of settlers Athens had planted there to hold the island; legally he was an Athenian citizen who had never seen Athens. His father Neocles taught school for a living, which in that world meant genteel poverty, and his mother Chaerestrate is said to have gone from house to house performing purification rites. His enemies never let him forget it. Later hostile writers sneered that he had helped his father teach spelling for a pittance and had trailed after his mother reciting charms. The sneers tell us as much about ancient snobbery as about Epicurus, but they do fix one fact: he did not come from the sort of family that produced philosophers. Plato was descended from kings. Epicurus was the schoolmaster’s boy.

(●) c. 327 BC: A question his teachers could not answer sent him to philosophy at about fourteen. + The story comes down through Diogenes Laertius, the Greek biographer who compiled lives of the philosophers some five centuries after Epicurus died and who copied into his own book nearly everything of Epicurus that survives whole. It may well be a school legend rather than a memory. The boy was in a lesson on the poet Hesiod, who says that Chaos came first of all, and he asked the obvious follow-up: where did Chaos come from? His teacher told him that was a question for philosophers, not schoolmasters. So he went and found the philosophers. Whatever started him, his teachers were real enough. He heard Pamphilus, a follower of Plato, on Samos, and later Nausiphanes of Teos, who taught the atomism of Democritus. Democritus, a thinker of the previous century, had argued that everything is made of tiny indivisible bodies moving in empty space. That idea would become the floor of Epicurus’ whole system, though he was oddly ungrateful about it in later life and insisted he had taught himself.

(●) 323 BC: Alexander died, Athens lost Samos, and his family lost their home. + At eighteen Epicurus went to Athens for the two years of military and civic training every young citizen owed the city. It was the worst possible moment to arrive. Alexander the Great died in Babylon in June 323 BC, the empire he had built began coming apart in the hands of his generals, and Athens rose in revolt and was crushed. In the settlement that followed, the Athenian settlers were expelled from Samos. Epicurus finished his training and went not home, because there was no home, but to Colophon on the mainland, where his family had taken refuge. He was twenty, stateless, and living through the collapse of the world order he had been born into. Years later he would tell his students, flatly, that the wise man does not go into politics and that a settled mind is the highest good a person can have. He was not saying it from a quiet study. He had watched public life empty a city and take a family’s house with it.

(●) c. 311 BC: He began teaching at Mytilene and Lampsacus, and was driven out of the first. + Around 311 BC, in his early thirties, Epicurus opened a school on Lesbos, in the town of Mytilene. It did not last long. What exactly went wrong is not recorded, but he left in a hurry and in winter, and an ancient account has him nearly lost at sea on the crossing. A man who teaches that the gods take no interest in human affairs, in a Greek city that fed itself on temple festivals, could expect trouble. He moved to Lampsacus on the Hellespont and there, for the first time, things worked. He gathered the men who would be his lifelong companions: Metrodorus, who became his closest friend and whose children he provided for in his will; Hermarchus, who would succeed him; Idomeneus, Colotes, Polyaenus the mathematician. What formed at Lampsacus was less a lecture hall than a household, and that pattern, philosophy practiced by friends living together, is what he carried to Athens.

(●) 307 BC: He bought a garden outside Athens and filled it with friends, women and slaves among them. + In 307 or 306 BC Epicurus returned to Athens for good and paid eighty minas, a substantial sum, for a plot of ground between the city wall and the grove of the Academy where Plato had taught. It was a working garden with a house, and the school took its name from the place: the Garden. Over the door, Seneca reports more than three centuries later, stood the words: "Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure" (Moral Letters 21.10). What went on inside scandalized Athens, partly because nobody could see it. The Garden was a walled community that ate together, wrote together, and kept to itself. It admitted women. One of them was a courtesan named Leontion, who wrote a reply to the philosopher Theophrastus in prose that Cicero, who had no time at all for the school, grudgingly conceded was elegant Attic, the polished Greek of Athens itself (On the Nature of the Gods I.93). It admitted slaves too, one of whom, Mys, Epicurus freed in his will. Diogenes Laertius names two women who studied with Plato, so the Garden was not quite alone in that, but no other Athenian school took women and slaves in as a matter of course. The rival schools drew the conclusion you would expect. A walled house full of men, women and slaves, with a motto about pleasure over the door, must be a brothel. The slander stuck for two thousand years, and it was never anything but a guess made from the outside. The surviving evidence points the other way entirely: the Garden ate plain food, drank water, and reserved its passion for arguments about atoms. Epicurus taught there for roughly thirty-six years and became, by all accounts, adored. Members memorized his sayings. Cicero, who despised the doctrine, noticed that Epicureans kept his likeness not only in paintings but on their drinking cups and their rings (On Ends V.3), and Diogenes Laertius says the Garden held its members for life and outlasted nearly every rival school.

(●) 270 BC: He died of a kidney stone after a fortnight of pain, and wrote on the last day that he was happy. + In 270 BC, at seventy-two, Epicurus was blocked by a kidney stone. Diogenes Laertius says the agony lasted fourteen days and that at the end he got into a bronze tub of hot water, asked for unmixed wine, told his friends to remember his teachings, and died. His will survives, and it is the most human document he left. He left his property to two trustees on condition that the Garden be kept for Hermarchus and those who philosophized with him, so the school would continue; he set aside money for the yearly memorial of his dead parents and brothers, and for a monthly dinner in memory of himself and Metrodorus; he provided for Metrodorus’ son and daughter, arranging her marriage and her dowry; and he freed four slaves by name. On that last day he also dictated a letter to Idomeneus, his old friend from Lampsacus. It is the clearest test his philosophy ever faced, since a doctrine that pain is bearable and that the good life is a life of friendship is easy to hold in a garden in summer and hard to hold with a kidney stone. He held it.

What He Taught

(T1) Nothing comes from nothing, and what exists is atoms and empty space and nothing else. + A stone step in a doorway wears hollow over a century, losing its edges by degrees, and nobody ever sees a grain go. A ring on a finger wears thin over a lifetime in the same silent way. Ancient atomists took observations like these as evidence that solid things are made of pieces too small to see, and Epicurus made the point his starting place. His physics runs on two claims a reader can follow without any mathematics. First, nothing is ever produced from nothing, because if things could come from nothing then anything could come from anything, and we would see oak trees sprouting from stones rather than only from acorns. Second, nothing is ever destroyed into nothing, or everything would long since have vanished. So the total stuff of the world is constant, and always has been. Break matter down far enough and you reach bodies that cannot be cut further; the Greek for uncuttable is atomos, our word atom. These move through empty space, which Epicurus called the void, and everything we see, seas, stars, bodies, minds, is atoms hooked and clustered for a while and then coming apart. Two further pieces belong in the picture, and they did not come from the same place. The first he inherited from the older atomists: the universe has no edge and no center, and countless other worlds are forming and dying out in it right now. Greek astronomy had no use for that idea whatsoever. Modern astronomy came round to it in its own way. The second piece is his own, and it is called the swerve. Atoms, he said, occasionally deviate from their fall by the smallest possible amount, at no fixed time and for no cause at all. It appears in none of his surviving letters and reaches us through Lucretius and Cicero, who both credit it to him. His reason for it was not physics but freedom. If every motion is settled by the motion before it, then a person’s choices are as fixed in advance as the path of a falling rock, and Epicurus thought the fatalist worse off than the man who believed the old myths, since the myths at least left a person somebody to appeal to and blind necessity leaves nobody. Critics have found the swerve unsatisfying ever since, and it is fair to say that he saw the problem of free will clearly and then answered it with a device rather than a solution. The system quietly rules something out, and it is worth being plain about what. If matter is eternal and uncaused, the world needs no maker. There is nothing left for God to have done, and nothing left for him to do.

(Q) "Nothing is created out of that which does not exist: for if it were, everything would be created out of everything with no need of seeds." + Source: Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 38 (Bailey translation). The Letter to Herodotus is Epicurus’ own summary of his physics, written so that students who could not work through the thirty-seven books of On Nature would still have the system in hand. The line about seeds is the argument in miniature: causes are specific, and specific causes are exactly what a world made from nothing would not have (T1).

(T2) The gods are real and perfectly happy, and for that very reason they take no interest in us. + Picture a Greek farmer on the morning of a sea voyage, walking a goat up the temple steps because the last man who sailed without doing that did not come back. He is not adoring anybody. He is covering himself. Almost everyone Epicurus knew dealt with the gods more or less like that, and he thought it a miserable way to live. He was charged with atheism in antiquity and he denied it, with some heat. He believed the gods exist. He simply thought that almost everything people said about them was an insult. His reasoning starts from a definition anyone would grant. A god is a being that is perfectly blessed and imperishable. Now think about what perfect blessedness would rule out. Anger is a disturbance; so is gratitude, so is worry, so is the labor of running a world. A being that flew into a rage over a neglected sacrifice, or lay awake over the affairs of a small city, would be a being that could be troubled, and a being that can be troubled is not blessed. Therefore the gods do nothing. They are not cruel and they are not kind. They live in perfect ease, and Epicurus held that they dwell somewhere apart from our world, in the metakosmia, which Cicero later put into Latin as the intermundia, the spaces between the worlds. Piety, on this account, is not sacrifice offered in hope of a return; it is contemplating what a blessed being is like, and becoming a little more like it. Here is where he is genuinely worth listening to, even by people who think him wrong. He saw that religion driven by fear is a torment, and he was right. The Greek who kept a god sweet with sacrifices, the way a shopkeeper pays protection money, was living in dread, and Epicurus wanted him out of it. Christian theology answers not by defending that dread but by dissolving Epicurus’ premise. Scripture agrees that God needs nothing from human hands (Acts 17:25) and denies that God can be bought. What it denies is that caring costs God anything. Love, in the Christian account, is not a disturbance imported into a blessed nature from outside; it is what the blessed nature is (1 John 4:8), which is why the God who lacks nothing can attend to a sparrow without ceasing to be at rest (Matthew 10:29).

(Q) "The blessed and immortal nature knows no trouble itself, nor causes trouble to any other, so that it is never constrained by anger or favour. For all such things exist only in the weak." + Source: Epicurus, Principal Doctrines 1 (Bailey translation), preserved in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers X.139. The Principal Doctrines are forty short maxims Epicureans memorized, and this is the first of them, which tells you what the school considered most urgent. The last sentence is the whole argument compressed: anger and favor are marks of weakness, and a god by definition is not weak (T2).

(T3) The soul is made of atoms and scatters at death, so death is nothing to us. + A blow to the head takes away thought. Wine changes the mind. A body cut off from air loses consciousness in a minute. Epicurus took the everyday connection between what happens to a body and what happens to a mind at face value and drew the plain conclusion: the soul is a body too, made of especially fine and fast atoms spread through the frame, and it holds together only as long as the frame does. Break the vessel and the contents disperse, like scent from an unstoppered jar. Most people hear that as bleak. Epicurus thought it the single most liberating sentence in philosophy, and his argument for that is one short move. Everything good or bad happens to somebody; being harmed requires a subject there to be harmed. But death is precisely the end of the subject. So there is no moment at which death is bad for you: while you exist it has not come, and once it has come you are not there for it to happen to. What people actually fear, he argued, is not being dead, which is nothing. It is a picture they cannot stop painting of themselves lying in the dark, still somehow present to their own absence. Remove the picture and the fear goes with it, and out goes the whole apparatus of punishment after death as well, the rivers and the judges of the Greek underworld, which he regarded as the cruelest fiction ever told to a frightened person. The argument is a good deal stronger than it is usually given credit for, and it has an honest limit. It addresses being dead, not dying, and not the loss of the people you love. Christian thought parts from him at the first premise rather than at the reasoning: it agrees that if death were annihilation his conclusion would be hard to resist, and denies that it is. Scripture treats death as a real enemy precisely because the person survives it and stands before God (Hebrews 9:27), and answers the fear not by proving there is no one left to be hurt but by promising that the one who was hurt is raised (1 Corinthians 15:54-57).

(Q) "Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not." + Source: Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 125, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers X.125 (Hicks translation). The Letter to Menoeceus is a short letter of ethical instruction to a young man, and it survives whole. This sentence is the most quoted thing Epicurus ever wrote; the Roman poet Lucretius spent the third book of On the Nature of Things expanding it into several hundred lines of verse (T3).

(T4) Pleasure is the goal of life, and pleasure turns out to mean a body free of pain and a mind free of fear. + Think about the difference between two kinds of relief. There is the pleasure of drinking when you are parched, which is intense, and which lasts exactly as long as the thirst does. And there is the state of simply not being thirsty, which is quiet, which you barely notice, and which can go on all day. Epicurus called the first kind kinetic, a pleasure in motion, and the second katastematic, a pleasure of settled condition, and his entire ethics turns on the claim that the second is the real thing and the first is only its seasoning. He starts from an observation he thought no argument could shake: every animal, from birth and without being taught, goes toward pleasure and away from pain. Pleasure is therefore what good means for creatures like us. But he then defines the goal as the absence of pain in the body (aponia) and the absence of disturbance in the mind (ataraxia), and once you say that, the practical advice inverts. If the goal is a full cup rather than a bigger one, then luxury is not the road to it, because appetites you have trained upward are appetites that can be starved. So he divided desires into three kinds and told his students to sort their own: - Natural and necessary: food, shelter, friendship, understanding. - Natural but unnecessary: a rich table rather than a plain one. - Empty: fame, power, unlimited wealth. These are the ones with no natural stopping point, and therefore no satisfaction in them. Hence the barley bread, and the pot of cheese for a feast day. He also insisted the calculation cuts both ways: some pains are worth accepting for the greater ease they buy, and some pleasures are not worth what follows them. The result was a summary his followers boiled down to four lines, later called the fourfold cure: God is nothing to fear, death is nothing to worry about, what is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure. As a description of what a human being actually needs it is more austere than most sermons. Where Christian thought parts company is on the destination rather than the discipline: Scripture agrees that a person can learn to be content with little (Philippians 4:11-12) and denies that contentment is the point. The end of a human life is not an undisturbed mind, but God himself, and love of God and neighbor will get you disturbed on purpose.

(Q) "When, therefore, we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in sensuality, as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind." + Source: Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 131 (Bailey translation). Epicurus was answering the caricature within his own lifetime, which is why the sentence sounds tired. "Profligates" translates a word for men who squander an inheritance on parties. The two phrases at the end are his technical terms rendered into English: freedom from pain in the body is aponia, freedom from trouble in the mind is ataraxia (T4).

(T5) Of everything wisdom provides for a happy life, friendship is by far the greatest. + On the last day of his life, with a stone in his kidney and nothing anybody could do about it, what Epicurus reached for was the memory of talking with a friend. Friendship is not a footnote to his system. It is the thing the system was built to protect, and it is the part of him that most surprises readers who arrive expecting a calculator of pleasures. He did not merely praise it. He organized his life around it, bought a garden to house it, and at the end had nothing better to set against the pain than the remembrance of it. The awkwardness is that his own theory makes it hard to explain. If every good is finally my own freedom from disturbance, then a friend looks like a useful asset: someone who will help me when I am in trouble, and whose reliability lets me stop worrying. Epicurus says as much in places. But he also says, flatly, that the wise man will on occasion die for a friend, and no accounting of personal security gets you there. Ancient critics pressed the point, and Cicero pressed it hardest, arguing that Epicurus was better than his own doctrine allowed. That is probably right, and it is worth saying rather than smoothing over: what he did with friendship is the strongest evidence that human beings are not the pleasure-calculators his ethics describes. Christian readers have often found this the most sympathetic corner of the Garden, and the point where it falls furthest short. Epicurus grasped that a life is made by the people in it, and he drew the circle around a walled garden of like-minded friends who had chosen one another. Jesus draws it around the neighbor you did not choose and the enemy you would not (Matthew 5:44; Luke 10:29-37), which is a harder thing and a larger one.

(Q) "Of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship." + Source: Epicurus, Principal Doctrines 27 (Bailey translation), preserved in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers X.148. Placed among forty maxims about atoms, gods, death and justice, this one gets the superlative (T5). The Vatican Sayings, a second collection recovered from a manuscript in the Vatican Library in 1888, put it more warmly still: friendship, one of them says, dances around the world calling on all of us to wake up and count ourselves happy.

(Q) "On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could augment them; but over against them all I set gladness of mind at the remembrance of our past conversations." + Source: Epicurus, letter to Idomeneus, dictated on the last day of his life, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers X.22 (Hicks translation). Strangury is the slow and painful dribble of urine that a blocked passage produces, and the stone behind it killed him. This is the fourfold cure being tested at the only moment that counts, and whatever a reader concludes about the arguments, the man who wrote this line meant them (T4, T5).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Paul met his followers in Athens, and answered them point by point on the Areopagus. + Luke names the two schools that took Paul on in the Athenian marketplace: "Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him" (Acts 17:18). Some of them called him a babbler; others thought he was importing foreign gods, which is an odd charge until you notice he had been preaching Jesus and the resurrection, and that anastasis, the Greek for resurrection, could be heard as a goddess’ name. Then they took him to the Areopagus, the rocky rise where the city’s old council met, and asked him to explain. Put a member of the Garden in that audience and the speech turns into a conversation with him. God does not live in shrines made by hands and is not served by human hands "as though he needed anything" (17:24-25): an Epicurean would nod hard, since that was his own objection to sacrificial religion. God made the world and every nation in it (17:24, 26): the Epicurean stops nodding, because his world had no maker. God is "not far from each one of us" (17:27): the exact denial of gods at ease somewhere apart from our affairs. And then the ending nobody in that audience could take, that God has fixed a day of judgment and given proof by raising a man from the dead (17:31), which contradicts both halves of the Epicurean cure at once. Luke records the reaction without softening it: some of them sneered (17:32). Given what they believed about scattered atoms, they could hardly have done otherwise.

(†) The church fathers treated him as the chief enemy, and Lactantius passed down the question about evil that has outlived the whole debate. + For the first Christian centuries Epicurus was the opponent with a name on him. Clement of Alexandria, teaching in Egypt around AD 200, was generous to Greek philosophy in general and made an exception here: when Paul warned the Colossians against being taken captive by "philosophy and empty deceit" (Colossians 2:8), Clement took him to mean the Epicureans in particular, since theirs was the philosophy "which abolishes providence and deifies pleasure" (Stromata I.11). Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria in the next generation, wrote a treatise On Nature against the atomists, and the pages of it that survive argue from ordinary work: a cloak does not weave itself, the stones of a house do not walk into their courses, a ship’s keel does not lay itself, and neither, he says, did a world (preserved in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel XIV.23-27). The condemnation was not only Christian. Rabbinic writing of the same period lists the apikoros among those with no share in the world to come (Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10:1); the Mishnah is the earliest written collection of rabbinic law, and the word still means a heretic. The most consequential of these opponents was Lactantius, a Latin rhetorician who tutored the emperor Constantine’s son. In the thirteenth chapter of his treatise On the Anger of God, he set out to demolish Epicurus and gave, in order to answer it, the argument that has outlived every other line of the debate: God either wishes to take away evils and cannot, or can and will not, or neither wishes nor is able, or both wishes and is able. If he is willing and unable, he is feeble; if able and unwilling, he is envious; if neither, he is both feeble and envious, and therefore not God; if both willing and able, then where do evils come from, and why does he not remove them? Two things need saying about that passage, and both are usually skipped. It is not a quotation from Epicurus. It appears in no surviving work of his, Lactantius gives it in his own Latin some five centuries after Epicurus died, and a serious body of scholarship holds that it reached him from a skeptical source outside the Garden. The name most often proposed is Carneades, a skeptical philosopher of Plato’s Academy. What is genuinely Epicurean is the underlying move, that a blessed being would not be running a world like this one (T2). The other thing worth saying is that it is a real question, the hardest one an argument for God faces, and that the Christian answer to it is not a dismissal. It is the cross, where the God who is charged with indifference to suffering is found inside it.

(†) Pierre Gassendi, a Catholic priest, rebuilt his physics on Christian foundations, and modern science kept the atoms. + In 1417 a book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini was working along the shelves of a German monastery, looking for lost Latin, and pulled down a manuscript of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. The poem is six books of Epicurean physics in Latin verse. It went into circulation among readers who had never met the doctrine except through the men who hated it, and out of that one find Epicurus got a second life, and, improbably enough, a Christian one. The decisive figure was Pierre Gassendi, a French Catholic priest and astronomer who spent much of his life on Epicurus and published a full commentary on him in 1649, with the whole system set out again in the Syntagma Philosophicum that appeared three years after his death, in 1658. Gassendi thought the atomism was excellent physics wrapped around impossible theology, so he took it apart and rebuilt it: the atoms are real, but finite in number and created by God rather than eternal; the swerve goes, and providence replaces it; the human soul is not merely material and does not die. What came out was atomism a Christian could hold, and it spread fast. Robert Boyle, a devout Christian and a founder of modern chemistry, worked in this tradition and argued in print that a mechanical universe made the case for design stronger rather than weaker, since a machine implies a machinist. Isaac Newton described matter in terms of solid, hard, impenetrable particles, and framed his physics as an account of how God had ordered them. The point is worth stating carefully, because it cuts against the usual story. The particle physics on every desk in the modern world descends in part from Epicurus, and it reached us through a priest who thought Epicurus’ theology was false and his physics was true. Christian thought did not simply resist him. Where he was right, it took what he had and put it on a different foundation.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a world that made itself, a God who does not care, and a death that is simply the end. + The disagreement is not around the edges. On four points the Garden and the church are saying opposite things, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. - An uncreated world. Epicurus held that matter always existed and needed no maker, which is the whole reason his physics could carry his theology. Scripture opens by denying it: God made what there is, and what is seen was not made out of what was visible (Genesis 1:1; Hebrews 11:3; John 1:3). This is the deepest of the four, because every other disagreement follows from it. - A God who does not act. For Epicurus, a blessed being cannot be troubled and therefore cannot be involved. Scripture says God upholds the world moment by moment, numbers hairs and sparrows, and came into the world himself (Matthew 10:29-30; Colossians 1:17; John 1:14). Christians did not answer him by claiming God is more easily provoked than the Garden supposed; they answered that love is not a disturbance. - Death as annihilation. The cure for the fear of death was that no one is left to suffer. Scripture answers that someone is left, that "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27), and that the cure is resurrection rather than dissolution (1 Corinthians 15:20-22). Paul saw the alternatives clearly and stated them as starkly as any Epicurean would: if the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die (1 Corinthians 15:32). - Withdrawal from the world. "Live unnoticed" was Epicurean advice, and the wise man was told to stay clear of politics and public life and cultivate his garden. The church was sent out to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19), told to be salt and light in public (Matthew 5:13-16), and given a neighbor it did not select. Set beside all that, one thing remains true of him and ought to be said last. Epicurus took the fear that religion can breed in people seriously, and he built a whole system to get a frightened person free. He was wrong about the cure and right about the disease, and any Christian who has watched faith used as a threat should be able to see why the Garden filled up.