What Paul Feared and Nietzsche Celebrated: Epicurus as the Philosophical Antichrist
The encounter is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 17. Paul has come to Athens, the philosophical capital of the ancient world, and is disputing in the marketplace. A group of philosophers approaches him. Among them, Luke identifies specifically, are Epicureans. They listen to what Paul is saying and ask one another: “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others say: “He seems to be a setter forth of strange gods.”
This is the only passage in the entire Bible in which Epicureans are named. And it places them in direct confrontation with the man who, more than anyone else, shaped what Christianity would become. The confrontation was not accidental, and its stakes could not have been higher. As Norman DeWitt put it in St. Paul and Epicurus, what was being decided in that encounter — and in the decades of struggle that followed — was nothing less than a contest between two fully developed and mutually incompatible accounts of the universe and the human life within it. DeWitt named it with precision: “It was the logic of the cross against the logic of the atom, an early phase of the long strife between science and religion. Epicurus himself became a sort of Antichrist.”
The logic of the atom lost. And the consequences of that loss shaped the next two thousand years of Western civilization in ways whose full weight has not yet been honestly reckoned.
The Philosopher Christianity Could Not Ignore
Section titled “The Philosopher Christianity Could Not Ignore”It is impossible to understand why Epicurean philosophy was so threatening to early Christianity without first understanding how thoroughly it had permeated the ancient Mediterranean world by the time Paul began his ministry.
DeWitt documents in detail that Epicurean philosophy had achieved something no other ancient philosophical school had matched: it had become a genuinely popular philosophy — practiced not just by educated elites but by ordinary people throughout the Greek-speaking world and increasingly in Rome. The three centuries before the birth of Christ, DeWitt writes, had allowed “the whole coherent structure of Epicurean materialism” to be “built up and solidified and disseminated over the Mediterranean world.” When Paul traveled through that world preaching the new faith, he was not encountering a philosophically naive population. He was encountering a population many of whose members had already found in Epicurus answers to the same questions Christianity claimed only it could answer.
The structural parallel between the two movements was remarkable enough to be embarrassing. Epicurus had instituted the custom of composing epistles for colonies of disciples spread across the Mediterranean — one of his writings bore the title To the Friends in Asia, and it was in circulation for three centuries before Paul composed his epistle inscribed To the Saints Which Are in Ephesus. The Epicurean communities had long been accustomed to meet in private houses to perpetuate the memory of their founder, whom they revered as the discoverer of truth and a savior. DeWitt shows that Paul’s innovations — the epistle form, the community assembly, the celebration of the founder’s memory — were adaptations of existing Epicurean practice.
Most strikingly, DeWitt argues that the very name “Christian” was coined in Antioch specifically to distinguish the new movement from the disciples of Epicurus. The two sects were singular in the ancient world in being named for their founders. The disciples of Epicurus did not call themselves Epicureans — outsiders gave them that name. The disciples of Jesus did not call themselves Christians — outsiders gave them that name. DeWitt’s inference: “this name was coined for them to distinguish them from the disciples of Epicurus.” The rivalry between the two movements was recognized by the populace of Antioch from the beginning.
Paul could not ignore what he was up against. As DeWitt states plainly, the Epicurean ethic was “so superior and so widely acknowledged that Paul had no alternative but to adopt it and bless it with the new sanction of religion, though to admit his indebtedness to the alleged atheist and sensualist was inconceivable. Epicurus was consequently consigned to anonymity.” The most beloved devotional passages in Paul’s letters — including the great hymn to love in First Corinthians 13 — carry the unmistakable mark of Epicurean influence. Paul borrowed the content and changed the source.
What he could not borrow, and therefore had to destroy, was the foundation: the atomic physics, the Canon grounded in natural sensation and feeling, the rejection of divine providence and immortality, and the insistence that this world — the world of atoms and void, of sensation and feeling — is the only world there is.
What Paul Said — and What He Meant
Section titled “What Paul Said — and What He Meant”DeWitt’s central thesis in St. Paul and Epicurus is that passages throughout Paul’s letters that have seemed obscure to later commentators become clear when read as direct engagements with Epicurean philosophy. The most revealing is the passage in the letter to the Galatians (4:9) in which Paul warns his converts not to turn back to what he calls the “weak and beggarly elements.”
DeWitt’s reading of this phrase is specific and documented. He shows that Paul’s word for “elements” (stoicheia) was the recognized Greek synonym for atoms — used because, just as all words are composed of letters, all things were thought by Epicurus to be composed of atoms, and the word for “letter” came to stand for the smallest unit of matter. The passage is not about vague cosmic forces or elementary religious principles. Paul is sneering directly at the Epicurean atomic theory.
The specific insult — “weak and beggarly” — carries its own charge. DeWitt notes that the atoms had become notorious to Epicurus’s enemies precisely because they were such insignificant things: the smallest particles imaginable, invisible, without quality or color in themselves. For enemies of Epicurus, what could be more absurd than to build an entire philosophy of the good life on such a foundation? Paul is deploying that traditional ridicule. The Galatians, in his account, had been liberated from their old beliefs and were being tempted to return to those “weak and beggarly” building blocks — the atoms — as the foundation of their understanding of the universe.
Paul’s engagement with the Epicurean atomic theory continues elsewhere in the New Testament. DeWitt documents that the atoms are mentioned six times in the New Testament under the name “elements” — three times simply as “elements” and three times as “elements of the universe,” an unmistakable recognition of the Epicurean doctrine that the universe consists of atoms and space. The author of Second Peter, responding to the Epicurean claim that “the universe was the same as it always had been and always would be the same,” retorts that God created the world and will destroy it with fire: “the elements will be dissolved with fire” (3:10) and again “the elements will melt with fire” (3:12). This is a direct theological counter-attack on the Epicurean claim that atoms are indestructible and the universe eternal.
The point of all this, in DeWitt’s analysis, is that Paul knew exactly what he was fighting. He had organized his entire missionary program around demonstrating that the Epicurean system — Canon, Physics, and Ethics, all three — was false and that Christianity provided the true alternative in each domain. In First Corinthians 2, Paul sets up his substitute for the Epicurean Canon: not natural sensation and feeling as the criteria of truth, but spiritual insight as the gift of God. Against the Epicurean Physics, he insists that “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in God” — a statement that presupposes, as its negative, the Epicurean teaching that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Nature. And against the Epicurean Ethics, he adopts much of its content while changing the motivation from natural pleasure to divine grace.
DeWitt is careful to note that the question of exactly which Pauline converts had previously been Epicureans is debated, and scholars are right to apply scrutiny to specific textual identifications. But the broader picture is not seriously in doubt: Paul was writing for audiences who knew Epicurean philosophy, in language that carried Epicurean resonances that the original readers would have recognized, and his theological program was systematically constructed as the counter-proposal to Epicurean naturalism on every major point.
Nietzsche Sees the Same Thing From the Other Side
Section titled “Nietzsche Sees the Same Thing From the Other Side”In The Antichrist, published in 1895, Nietzsche wrote a passage that crystallizes the historical situation with a sharpness that DeWitt’s scholarly apparatus illuminates from the inside:
“One has but to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made war upon — not paganism, but ‘Christianity’, which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment, and immortality… Epicurus would have won; each respectable mind was Epicurean in the Roman Empire: and then Paul arrived.”
The first sentence deserves particular attention. Nietzsche is saying that Epicurus, writing in the third century BC — before Christianity existed as a movement — was already fighting the same spiritual disease that Christianity would later institutionalize. What Lucretius attacked in De Rerum Natura with such force and passion was not naive polytheism. It was the systematic use of supernatural fear — fear of divine punishment, fear of death as a transition to suffering, guilt imposed through supernatural moral frameworks, the devaluation of this world and this life in favor of something beyond — to keep human beings in a condition of unnecessary pain. That is precisely what Christianity, in Paul’s hands, would erect into an institutional structure with global reach.
The second sentence — “Epicurus would have won” — is Nietzsche’s recognition of what DeWitt documented: by the first century AD, the philosophically serious population of the Roman world had largely found its way to Epicurus. The momentum was running toward the natural philosophy, toward this world. And then Paul arrived.
Nietzsche does not treat this as merely unfortunate. He treats it as a catastrophe of world-historical proportions, the consequences of which he spent his philosophical career trying to reverse. And elsewhere he is explicit about the vindication that his own century had provided for Epicurus: “The awakening sciences have allied themselves point by point with the philosophy of Epicurus, but point by point rejected Christianity.” The logic of the atom, defeated in the ancient world by the logic of the cross, had returned in the form of modern natural science — and had, point by point, demonstrated what Epicurus had claimed.
DeWitt captures the same confrontation from the other direction when he writes that in Paul’s letter to the Galatians the clash of science and religion had “never been more neatly presented”: “Epicurus, representing science, finds the eternal in the atom, by the incessant motion of which all things are created aimlessly, though within the limitations of natural laws. As for history, it is the evolution of the unintended. Paul, representing religion, finds the eternal in God and by his power and intelligence all things were created and continued to be providentially governed.”
The two positions are stated with perfect economy. Twenty centuries of intellectual history have been the story of their conflict.
Pleasure Is Not What They Said It Was
Section titled “Pleasure Is Not What They Said It Was”To understand what Paul was fighting and what Nietzsche was celebrating, it is essential to clear away what is perhaps the most persistent misrepresentation of Epicurean philosophy: the claim that Epicurus’s appeal to pleasure was an appeal to ordinary bodily stimulation.
DeWitt addresses this directly in his preface to St. Paul and Epicurus: “His pleasures were not the pleasures of the flesh.” The ancient enemies of Epicurus constructed the charge of sensualism precisely because his ethic was “so superior and so widely acknowledged” — it took genuine effort to make it look merely self-indulgent. The charge was a weapon, not a description.
What Epicurus meant by the Feelings — the two criteria of pleasure and pain — was something far more fundamental. In DeWitt’s formulation, the Feelings are “Nature’s educators, her Go and Stop signals, by which she trains man and beast to recognize what is good for him and what is evil in his environment.” This covers all levels of life simultaneously. The physical signals are obvious — hunger, pain, warmth, cold. But the Feelings operate, as DeWitt notes, “on both physical and social levels of life. For example, justice gives pleasure and injustice hurts no less than a blow or a burn.”
This is the key that the hostile tradition — ancient and modern alike — has systematically suppressed. Epicurean pleasure is not primarily about gratifying the body. It is about accurately reading what nature is telling you about your situation, at every level of experience. The pleasure of genuine friendship is a reading of the Feelings just as the pleasure of eating when hungry is. The pain of witnessing injustice is a reading of the Feelings just as the pain of a wound is. Nature has provided this faculty as the instrument by which every living creature navigates toward genuine goods and away from genuine harms.
Paul knew this. That is why his response to the Epicurean Feelings was not to dismiss them but to replace them with a different criterion entirely: not natural sensation and feeling as the guides to truth, but spiritual insight as the gift of God. In First Corinthians 2, Paul systematically erects what DeWitt calls “his new canon of truth, spiritual insight, in direct opposition to the famous canon of Epicurus.” The move is deliberate and precisely aimed. Paul does not argue that the Feelings are wrong. He argues that they must be superseded — that the criterion of truth is no longer what nature provides to every living creature but what God reveals to those who receive spiritual insight.
This is the deepest philosophical move in the entire confrontation between Epicureanism and Christianity. Everything else follows from it. If nature’s feelings are the criterion — if pleasure and pain, operating honestly and clearly at all levels of experience, are the instruments by which you navigate toward genuine goods — then this world is where the genuine goods are, the natural life is the good life, and no supernatural authority can override what nature itself is telling you. If spiritual insight supersedes natural feeling — if what God reveals takes precedence over what your own nature reports — then this world is merely preparation, natural feeling is unreliable or even corrupting, and the authority structure of organized religion becomes both necessary and unchallengeable.
What Nietzsche Was Pointing At: Feeling Versus Rationalism
Section titled “What Nietzsche Was Pointing At: Feeling Versus Rationalism”Nietzsche named his central concept the will to power — a phrase that has been almost universally misunderstood as a call to domination. What Nietzsche meant was something much closer to what Epicurus meant by pleasure: the fundamental orientation of a living creature toward its own full engagement with life. The will to power, in Nietzsche’s usage, is the drive toward growth, toward the expression of genuine capacity, toward full engagement with this world rather than flight from it into abstraction, transcendence, or the false promise of a better world to come.
Nietzsche’s definition of happiness in The Antichrist makes the connection explicit: “What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing — that a resistance is overcome.” Not contentment. Not equanimity. Not the philosophical distance from life that both the Stoics and certain distorted readings of Epicurus recommend. The feeling — nature’s instrument — of genuine engagement, genuine growth, genuine forward movement against what life actually presents.
This is close enough to the Epicurean account that the parallel is not accidental. Nietzsche knew Epicurus well and admired him deeply, even when he disagreed about specific points. What both are identifying, from different angles and in different vocabularies, is the same fundamental orientation: this world, this life, these feelings, this natural existence is what matters. The flight from it — into Platonic Forms, into Stoic virtue as something above and beyond natural pleasure, into Christian transcendence of the “merely” physical — is the error that both were fighting.
The opponent is not primarily religion in the narrow sense. The opponent is the entire tradition that sets something above and against what nature has provided — the tradition that says feeling is unreliable, that sensation deceives, that the natural impulses must be transcended in favor of something that reason, or divine command, or some faculty superior to mere feeling, has determined to be the true good. Against that entire tradition — Platonic, Stoic, Christian, and eventually Kantian — Epicurus and Nietzsche are, in their different ways, making the same fundamental claim: nature is sufficient. Feeling is the guide. This world is where the genuine goods are found.
Nature Over Reason: What DeWitt Saw in Chapter 7
Section titled “Nature Over Reason: What DeWitt Saw in Chapter 7”Norman DeWitt, in the seventh chapter of Epicurus and His Philosophy, arrives at a passage that illuminates the deepest level of the opposition between Epicurus and the entire tradition that opposed him:
“The same priority of Nature over reason that predetermined the right kind of writing and rendered rhetoric superfluous eliminated dialectic… The effect of the doctrine that nothing exists except atoms and void was to deny the reality of Plato’s eternal ideas. Thus dialectic, which was the avenue to comprehension of those ideas, became a superfluity… As a parting comment it may be stated that, when once Nature has been established as the norm, it follows logically that man should live according to Nature, but the Epicureans seem never to have followed this inference through. It remained for the Stoics to identify Nature with Reason and to make a fetish of living according to Nature. They believed her supreme teaching was to be found in the divine order of the celestial realm, where Nature and Reason were at one.”
The last observation cuts to the heart of a deep irony in Western philosophical history. The Stoics appropriated the phrase “live according to Nature” and made it their central ethical maxim — and it is the Stoics who have been identified, throughout the history of philosophy, as the champions of living naturally. But what the Stoics meant by Nature was Reason — the divine rational order of the cosmos, the logos that permeates all things, accessible to human beings precisely through their own rational faculty. “Living according to Nature” for the Stoics meant aligning your rational will with the rational order of the universe. It meant transcending the natural feelings, not following them.
Epicurus established the actual priority of Nature over reason — Nature as the physical, sensory, feeling world that exists prior to and independent of any rational construction we lay over it. And it is this Epicurus — the one who refused to convert Nature into Reason, who refused to follow the inference through to a system of living according to divine rational order — whom Paul identified as “the generation of this world.” That phrase from Ephesians 2 carries the full weight of the confrontation: the Epicureans are “the generation of this world,” DeWitt explains, “because they deny the existence of any other than the physical world, and thereby deny the existence of a spiritual world such as Paul located in the heavenly regions.”
To belong to “the generation of this world” is, in Paul’s framework, the fundamental error. It is to have committed oneself to the wrong world — the natural, physical, sensory world of atoms and void — and to have denied the “true world” that lies beyond it. For Epicurus, this is not an error. It is the conclusion of honest investigation. There is no other world. The natural world, the world of atoms and void and sensation and feeling, is the only world. And a philosophy that grounds human life in that actual world, using the instruments that nature has provided — the feelings of pleasure and pain, the sensations, the anticipations built from experience — is the only honest philosophy available.
Paul could not allow this conclusion to stand. His entire program required a different world — a world in which this life is preparation, this world is fallen, and the genuine goods are available only through divine grace in a future existence. Against the Epicurean insistence that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Nature, Paul insists that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in God. The directness of the opposition could not be more exact.
The Bridge and What Was Lost
Section titled “The Bridge and What Was Lost”One of DeWitt’s most striking observations in St. Paul and Epicurus is that Epicureanism did not simply oppose Christianity. It functioned, in his analysis, as a bridge of transition — preparing the ground for the new religion even as it represented the alternative that the new religion had to defeat.
The parallels are extensive and, once seen, impossible to unsee. Epicurus was revered by his followers not merely as a teacher but as a “discoverer of truth and a savior.” His communities met in private houses to commemorate his memory, just as the early Christians would. He instituted the practice of composing epistles for distant colonies of followers — epistles of instruction, encouragement, and community building — that Paul would adopt as his own form. The Epicurean communities were organized around friendship and brotherly love, what DeWitt calls “an agreeableness of speech and manners” that made Epicurean communities attractive to the middle class and to ordinary people in ways that Stoic severity could not.
Paul borrowed all of this structure. And then he had to destroy the foundation on which it had been built.
The most remarkable example of this borrowing-and-displacing is the great hymn to love in First Corinthians 13. DeWitt shows that this passage — one of the most beloved in the entire New Testament — was composed in direct response to Epicurean philosophy and exhibits, in its very structure, the Epicurean method of “opposing the vice to the corresponding virtue.” Moreover, DeWitt demonstrates that the verse “Love beareth all things,” rightly interpreted, enshrines four qualities of true love or friendship according to Epicurus. Paul took the Epicurean philosophy of friendship — the greatest instrument of happiness according to Epicurus — and transmuted it into the Christian theology of divine love, preserving the emotional structure while replacing the naturalist foundation with a supernatural one.
This is DeWitt’s thesis in its most pointed form: “It is an astonishing fact — and the earnest student of the New Testament will profit by learning to live with it — that the passages of Paul’s Epistles which we most prefer as devotional readings exhibit the most influence of Epicurus.”
What was lost in this transmutation was the foundation — the insistence that these goods (love, friendship, community, genuine care for one another) are natural goods, available in this world, not gifts of divine grace that require supernatural sanction. Paul kept the goods and changed their source. Where Epicurus had said: nature provides these goods and the natural human being who follows nature honestly will find them — Paul said: God provides these goods through grace and faith in the resurrected Christ. The emotional content survived. The naturalist grounding was destroyed.
The Mob Against the Space Gun
Section titled “The Mob Against the Space Gun”H.G. Wells, who wrote the screenplay for the 1936 film Things to Come with full creative control, gave the role of the principal antagonist to a sculptor named Theotocopulos — played by Cedric Hardwicke. Theotocopulos leads the mob that attempts to destroy the Space Gun and stop the first crewed mission to the moon. The exchange between him and Cabal, shouted across a vast space through amplifiers as the launch clock runs down, is one of the most compressed and philosophically precise statements of the ancient conflict in twentieth-century popular culture.
When Cabal confronts the mob and asks what they want, Theotocopulos answers directly: they want to save the young people from “inhuman foolery,” to “make the world safe for men,” to destroy the gun. Cabal responds that he and those with him have a right to do what they like with their own lives — “with our sort of lives.” And then Theotocopulos delivers the passage that deserves to be heard in full:
“How can we do that when your science and inventions are perpetually changing life for us — when you are everlastingly rebuilding and contriving strange things about us? When you make what we think great, seem small. When you make what we think strong, seem feeble. We don’t want you in the same world with us. We don’t want this expedition. We don’t want mankind to go out to the moon and the planets. We shall hate you more if you succeed than if you fail. Is there never to be rest in this world?”
Every sentence of this is the voice of the anti-Epicurean tradition distilled to its essence.
“When you make what we think great, seem small.” This is the deepest charge. The Epicurean analysis of the universe — that it consists of atoms and void, that the gods do not intervene in human affairs, that death is the end of sensation and not a passage to judgment, that the life aimed at pleasure in this world is the best life available — makes small what the anti-Epicurean tradition has declared great: the divine, the transcendent, the eternal soul, the supernatural order of things. This is exactly what Paul was fighting when he called the atoms “weak and beggarly.” They were beggarly because they were too small — too insignificant, too material, too natural — to serve as the foundation of a world that needed something more.
“When you make what we think strong, seem feeble.” The strength of the supernatural tradition — its capacity to command through the promise of divine reward and the threat of divine punishment — is exactly what the Epicurean analysis dissolves. Honest investigation of what the universe actually is leaves no room for gods who reward and punish. The power that rested on that foundation becomes, in the Epicurean light, exactly what Theotocopulos describes: strong-seeming, but feeble underneath.
“We don’t want you in the same world with us.” This is the sentence that makes explicit what Paul’s program required. The Epicurean and the Christian could not share a world — not because they failed to get along personally, but because their accounts of what the world actually is were mutually exclusive. An honest naturalist who takes the Epicurean analysis seriously makes the supernatural framework look exactly as Theotocopulos describes: its greatness diminished, its strength revealed as something less than it claimed. The two worldviews cannot coexist on equal terms. One must defeat the other. Paul understood this. His entire program was built on the recognition that the Epicurean account — if allowed to stand — left no room for the world he was trying to build.
“We shall hate you more if you succeed than if you fail.” This is the most honest sentence in the speech. Theotocopulos is not arguing that the Epicurean project will fail. He fears it will succeed. The hatred is not of failure but of success — because success would mean the definitive demonstration that the natural world, explored and understood honestly on its own terms, is sufficient. It would mean the world the anti-Epicurean tradition declared insufficient turning out to be enough after all. This is exactly what Nietzsche was celebrating when he wrote that the awakening sciences had allied themselves point by point with Epicurus while rejecting Christianity point by point.
Cabal’s answer is Epicurean to its core: “Rest enough for the individual man — too much, and too soon — and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending.” He is not arguing for collective human destiny in the abstract. He is arguing against the sufficiency of rest — against the claim that what we already have is enough, that the world as it is can be declared complete, that no further reaching is warranted. The Epicurean who takes seriously that there is one life and it is finite does not respond to that recognition with rest. They respond with the urgency of someone who knows the time is not unlimited.
The mob that follows Theotocopulos toward the Space Gun is the same mob that followed Paul’s appeal against the Epicureans in Antioch and Athens and Thessalonica. Different centuries, different vocabulary, same impulse: stop the people who are trying to live fully in the only world there is, and drag everyone back toward the claim that something warmer, greater, and stronger lies elsewhere — a claim whose apparent strength dissolves the moment the natural world is honestly examined.
Humanism: Christianity’s Shadow
Section titled “Humanism: Christianity’s Shadow”The relationship between Epicurean philosophy and the tradition it opposed does not exhaust itself with ancient Christianity. It has a modern continuation that is, if anything, more difficult to recognize because it wears a secular face.
Humanism, in most of its modern forms, presents itself as the rationalist, secular alternative to religious tradition. It rejects the supernatural. It does not invoke divine command. It grounds ethics in human reason and human dignity rather than in revelation. It seems, from the outside, like the natural ally of Epicurean philosophy against the religious tradition both have opposed.
This alliance is an illusion. Humanism, examined carefully, is Christianity with the God removed — and with everything else left in place. The ethics of universal duty, of unconditional obligations to all of humanity regardless of personal relationship, of the equal dignity of all persons as the non-negotiable foundation of moral reasoning — these are not conclusions that the Epicurean framework reaches. They are conclusions that the Christian moral tradition reached, and that Humanism has inherited and secularized. The frame is Kantian (and Kant, as Nietzsche insisted and as the Twilight of the Idols demonstrates, was a Platonist who happened to be writing in a secular age). The content is the Christian ethics of universal love and equal dignity, drained of its supernatural grounding and maintained on a purely rational basis.
Epicurus does not offer universal obligations. He offers a framework for identifying and pursuing genuine goods — goods that are genuinely yours, genuinely satisfying to the person you actually are, genuinely worth the costs they impose. His ethics is particular, personal, and grounded in what nature has actually provided rather than in what reason has determined all rational beings must acknowledge. This is not a deficiency of the Epicurean framework. It is its virtue. It is what makes it the genuine alternative to the tradition that has dominated Western ethics for two thousand years — not a variation on that tradition, as Humanism is, but a genuinely different starting point and a genuinely different destination.
The Humanist who rejects the supernatural while maintaining the universalist moral framework has done half the work of liberation and stopped. The Epicurean has done it all the way through: rejected the supernatural, the universalist ethics, the rational-divine order, the devaluation of the natural world and natural feeling, and returned to the actual foundation — nature, feeling, this world, this life, the genuine goods available to a living creature who takes its own experience honestly as the standard.
The True World and This World
Section titled “The True World and This World”Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols, traced the history of what he called “the true world” — the claim that reality as sensation and experience present it is merely appearance, and that the genuine reality lies elsewhere: in Plato’s Forms, in the Christian heaven, in the Kantian thing-in-itself. The entire history of Western philosophy, on Nietzsche’s account, is the history of the elaboration and defense of this claim — the claim that this world, the world we actually inhabit and experience, is not the real one.
Epicurus is the great exception. He is the philosopher who said, from the beginning: this world is the real world. What sensation reports is what is real. What feeling delivers is the genuine standard. There is no other world — no Forms, no heaven, no thing-in-itself inaccessible to experience. The universe is atoms and void. Life is sensation. The goal is pleasure — the genuine pleasure that honest attention to nature’s instruments delivers — and it is available here, now, to anyone willing to look honestly at what actually satisfies.
This is why Epicurus is, in the deepest philosophical sense, the Antichrist. Not in the sense of being evil or demonic — a charge that reflects the fears of those who needed the “true world” to be real and who recognized that Epicurus’s arguments, if accepted, would dissolve it. But in the sense of representing the direct and complete philosophical alternative to everything that the “true world” tradition — Platonic, Stoic, Christian, Kantian — has stood for.
Paul understood this. He fought it. Nietzsche understood it. He celebrated it. The question that remains is whether we — in an age when the scientific picture of the world has confirmed, point by point, the Epicurean naturalist conclusions that Paul fought and Nietzsche celebrated — are willing to follow that recognition through to its practical consequences.
The atoms are not “weak and beggarly.” They are the foundation of the only world there is. The feelings nature has provided are not to be transcended. They are the instruments by which the only life we have is to be lived. And the genuine pleasures available in this world, pursued with honest judgment and the wisdom that Epicurus spent his life developing, are not a poor substitute for something better. They are the thing itself.
Epicurus would have won. He still should.
Primary sources discussed include Norman DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy (1954) and St. Paul and Epicurus (1954); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1895), Twilight of the Idols (1889), and Human, All Too Human (1878); Acts of the Apostles 17:18; Galatians 4:3-9; and Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. Discussion of these topics is ongoing at EpicureanFriends.com.