Epicurus · Philosophy
Epicurus’ liberation of humanity from the fear of the gods - the gods exist but are blissful and indifferent, taking no part in the world - and his ‘fourfold cure’ (tetrapharmakos): don’t fear god, don’t fear death, good is easy to get, evil is easy to endure.
Alongside the fear of death, Epicurus identified a second great source of human anxiety: the fear of the gods. In the ancient world, the gods were objects of dread - capricious powers who sent plagues and storms, demanded sacrifices, punished the impious, and meddled constantly in human affairs. People lived in superstitious terror of divine anger, scanning omens, fearing that every misfortune was a punishment and every disaster a sign of heavenly wrath. Epicurus saw this fear as a poison, a chief enemy of the tranquillity (ataraxia) that is the goal of life - and, strikingly, he set out to dissolve it without denying that the gods exist. He was not an atheist. The gods, he held, are real; but they are utterly unlike the meddling, wrathful deities of popular religion.
Epicurus’ gods are perfectly happy, immortal, and blessed - and precisely because they are perfectly happy, they take no part in the troubles of the world. To govern a universe, to judge and punish humanity, to be moved by our prayers and angered by our sins - all this would be labour and disturbance, incompatible with the serene, untroubled bliss that is the very mark of divinity. A being that fretted over human affairs, that grew angry and had to be appeased, would not be perfectly happy; it would be anxious and burdened, like us. So the gods, in their perfect blessedness, dwell apart, in the spaces between the worlds, enjoying their own eternal tranquillity, taking no notice of us at all. They neither made the world (it formed itself from atoms) nor govern it nor judge us. ‘What is blessed and imperishable,’ Epicurus declares in the very first of his Principal Doctrines, ‘neither has trouble itself nor causes trouble to another, so that it is never affected by anger or favour; for all such things are signs of weakness.’ The gods are real, but they are nothing to fear.
A natural question arises: if the gods take no notice of us, neither rewarding nor punishing, neither hearing prayers nor sending blessings, why should we honour them at all? Why did Epicurus, far from being an atheist, encourage participation in the traditional religious festivals and the contemplation of the gods? His answer reframes the whole purpose of piety. We honour the gods not out of fear, and not in hope of gain - not to appease their anger or buy their favour, for they have neither - but out of admiration and love for their perfect blessedness, and because contemplating such serene, untroubled happiness is itself good for us, holding up a model of the tranquil life we ourselves are striving toward. The gods, on Epicurus’ view, are the supreme exemplars of ataraxia: beings who have achieved the perfect, self-sufficient, undisturbed happiness that is the goal of all our striving. To contemplate them is to contemplate the ideal of our own philosophy made perfect and eternal.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Epicurus held the gods to be real but blissful and indifferent - they do not create, govern, or judge the world, so there is nothing to fear from them - and that he summed up his therapy in the ‘fourfold cure’ (tetrapharmakos): don’t fear god, don’t fear death, the good is easy to get, the terrible is…
Leads to The Stoics.
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