Epicurus

Epicurus founded his school in an Athenian garden in 306 BC and admitted women and slaves — scandal enough before a word was taught. The teaching scandalized further: the gods do not concern themselves with us, the soul is atoms and dies with the body, and the goal of life is pleasure — by which he meant not the banquet but ataraxia, tranquility: the absence of pain in body and of turmoil in soul. Bread, water, friends, and philosophy; "a little cheese," he wrote a friend, "so I may feast when I wish."

Of some three hundred scrolls, almost everything is lost; three letters and collections of maxims survive in Diogenes Laertius, plus the magnificent secondhand monument of Lucretius' Latin poem On the Nature of Things. The physics is Democritus repaired: atoms falling through void, with an unpredictable swerve (clinamen) that breaks determinism's chain. The purpose of studying nature is therapeutic — to dissolve the two great fears that poison life: the gods and death. The gods exist, serene and indifferent, models of blessedness rather than agents of punishment; and "death is nothing to us: when we are, death is not; when death is, we are not."

The Epicurean legacy in philosophy of religion is a trilemma still argued under his name — recorded by the Christian Lactantius: if God is willing to prevent evil but not able, he is not omnipotent; if able but not willing, not benevolent; if both, whence evil? Whether or not the formulation is his verbatim, it is the problem of evil in its most portable form, and Hume's Philo quotes it as "Epicurus' old questions."

For centuries "Epicurean" was a slur meaning atheist and glutton — the Talmud's apikoros, the churchmen's bogeyman. Jefferson, calmer, wrote: "I am an Epicurean."