In the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve—God’s first human creations—are abruptly expelled from paradise after succumbing to temptation. Against God’s explicit orders, both eat from the one tree forbidden to them: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Suddenly aware of their own nakedness and imperfection, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to live a life of labor and toil. Talk about a blown opportunity.
The lesson seems clear enough: Man’s thirst for knowledge is his downfall. Had we listened to God, we might have lived forever in a state of ignorance and bliss. Instead, we followed the path to our own demise: the pursuit of education in disobedience to God. Paradise must now await another life; the best we can do in this one is an unwavering commitment to faith.
Against this dreary outlook stands Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher and founder of Epicureanism. His philosophy turns the lesson of Eden on its head. Eating from the tree of knowledge does not incur divine punishment—it frees us from the idea that God is a vindictive and intellectually stifling force to begin with. Eden, we will find, is no lost paradise, but a garden we can build for ourselves—and inhabit for as long as we choose.
Let’s see how to build it.
Epicurus was born in 341 BCE, seven years after Plato’s death. He studied philosophy among the followers of Democritus, the great atomist who taught that “atoms and void alone exist in reality.” In time, Epicurus would found his own school in Athens, known as the Garden. Unlike the elite and exclusionary academies of Plato and Aristotle, the Garden was open to all—welcoming not only free men but also women and slaves—a rare and radical departure from convention.
It was in the Garden that a quiet yet momentous shift in the trajectory of Western thought began to take shape—the turning point where religious skepticism matured into a fully developed philosophy of life. Epicurus did more than dismiss the “gods of the masses.” He articulated an entirely new framework for living—one that no longer depended on the gods at all.
He also taught something more unsettling: that belief in the gods of orthodox religion actually stands in the way of human happiness. Tranquility, Epicurus proposed, is impossible to achieve in the shadow of powerful, capricious deities—and under the looming fear of death. These anxieties—like invasive weeds that choke out a garden—drain life of its vitality, and must be uprooted.
Epicurus showed us how to pull them out at the source.
The origin of religion, and belief in God specifically, is complicated and multifactorial, but the fear of death undoubtedly factors prominently in the mix. It may even be the primary factor. In the 1973 book The Denial of Death, American anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed the idea that humans, uniquely aware of their own mortality, engage in “immortality projects” that convince us we’re not actually going to die. This takes different forms; whereas humans sometimes seek immortality through works and deeds that are meant to live on in the memories of others, the ultimate immortality project, according to Becker, is religion, as it offers us literal immortality—complete with souls and an afterlife.
But this comes at a cost. When our immortality projects harden into religions, they compel us, in some cases, to kill and be killed in defense of them. The very systems, then, that are meant to relieve one’s anxiety of death can actually quicken death’s arrival. This is religion’s tragic side: not merely that it promises another life, but that it can devalue this one—trading the only life we have for the hope of one that never arrives.
Epicurus wasn’t impressed. He preferred a direct confrontation with death, not a denial. He realized that by conquering the fear of death, you eliminate the need for religion—and with it humanity’s greatest source of anxiety, guilt, and repression. Fear of death, he realized, is a deeply irrational fear—and once we see this, we can stop erecting elaborate defense mechanisms against an imaginary opponent.
“Death means nothing to us,” Epicurus writes, “because that which has been broken down into atoms has no sensation and that which has no sensation is no concern of ours.” Epicurus’s atomism at last comes into ethical play; if our bodies consist only of atoms temporarily and randomly arranged, then the dissolution of that configuration spells the end of our existence. Death cannot be experienced, “because so long as we are existent death is not present and whenever it is present we are non-existent.”
There are other reasons not to fear death. Epicurus reminded us that death is like the continuation of a deep, restful sleep, and that just as we have no recollection or concern for the period of time before we were born, we should feel no trepidation about the period of time after we die. Nonexistence is nonexistence, after all. And so it should never be feared.
There are benefits to this way of thinking. The Epicurean, freed from the shadow of death—and from the longing for immortality—is better able to inhabit the present, spending each day with gratitude and purpose. This otherwise morbid idea—knowing that we will one day die—is actually what gives life urgency and value. “You could leave life right now,” said Marcus Aurelius, “let that determine what you do and say and think.”
Religion, then, to Epicurus, is nothing more than a false hope meant to overcome an irrational fear—one that gets in the way of living life to the fullest. But what about God? Does he have a place within the Epicurean universe after all?
It’s always interesting to ask whether certain historical figures concealed their atheism to avoid capital charges or the condemnation of their peers. The case of Epicurus is especially curious. Consider his unorthodox views of the gods expressed in the Letter to Menoeceus:
The gods do indeed exist, since our knowledge of them is a matter of clear and distinct perception; but they are not like what the masses suppose them to be, because most people do not maintain the pure conception of the gods. The irreligious man is not the person who destroys the gods of the masses but the person who imposes the ideas of the masses on the gods.
The “irreligious man,” according to Epicurus, is the person who anthropomorphizes the gods, which runs counter to our “pure conception” of them, explained by Epicurus in the first Principle Doctrine:
The blessed and indestructible being of the divine has no concerns of its own, nor does it make trouble for others. It is not affected by feelings of anger or benevolence, because these are found where there is lack of strength.
The perfect and blessed gods of Epicurus—stripped of all human emotion, motivation, and movement—are effectively made inert. In other words, in their perfect state of undisturbed bliss, they’ve been given no reason to exist—and maybe that was the point. The difference between believing in no gods at all (atheism) and believing in gods that are so perfect that they have nothing to do is practically indistinguishable. If you wanted to be an atheist in all but name, this is just the position you might take.
But Epicurus pointed out something even more crucial. To call a God perfect—yet at the same time believe that it gets angry or disappointed or jealous—is to be profoundly hypocritical. It is out of line with our “clear and distinct” perception of a perfect being—one who necessarily lives in absolute harmony and has no concern for human wishes or conduct. In other words, from our perspective, it is a God that might as well not exist (or does not exist).
Epicurus would add that this is just how we should want it to be. If an all-powerful, all-knowing, yet ultimately unknowable God could so easily or unpredictably be risen to anger, then we should, as a result, expect to live in near-constant fear of divine retribution. Does this not create unnecessary anxiety? On the other hand, a perfectly serene and contented god creates no psychological torment for humanity at all. Our happiness is in our own hands, and it’s not difficult to achieve (more on this in a bit).
Epicurus has accomplished something impressive here. He has, as classicist George K. Strodach wrote, swept “mankind’s two greatest foes and phobias”—death and hell—“from the board together by atomic theory—truly the most humane act ever performed by any philosophy, materialist or otherwise!”
With God removed from the equation—and with death no longer looming—you might think that it’s now time to revel in an endless amount of sex, drugs, and debauchery. The Garden is now a playground of sensual pleasure, where its inhabitants forever chase their next hit of dopamine.
If this is your idea of Epicureanism, then you’re in for a big disappointment, especially once you learn that Epicurus recommended a steady diet of nothing more than “barley bread and water” and thought that “sex never benefited any man, and it’s a marvel it hasn’t injured him.” Upon entering the Garden, you may think you took a wrong turn into a monastery. But that’s only because you misunderstood what Epicurus meant when he wrote about pleasure being life’s highest aim. As Epicurus wrote:
Thus when I say that pleasure is the goal of living I do not mean the pleasure of libertines or the pleasures inherent in positive enjoyment, as is supposed by certain persons who are ignorant of our doctrine or who are not in agreement with it or who interpret it perversely. I mean, on the contrary, the pleasure that consists in freedom from bodily pain and mental agitation. The pleasant life is not the product of one drinking party after another or of sexual intercourse with women or boys or of the sea food and other delicacies afforded by a luxurious table. On the contrary, it is the result of sober thinking—namely, investigation of the reasons for every act of choice and aversion and elimination of those false ideas about the gods and death which are the chief source of mental disturbances.
Pleasure in the Epicurean sense is defined as an absence of pain—in both body and mind—over the course of a lifetime. Not all positive pleasures, then, are desirable, because “the things that make for pleasure in certain cases entail disturbances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.” A night spent drinking, for example, can result in a hangover that brings disproportionate levels of suffering. We would be better off, according to Epicurus, by avoiding the hangover altogether—and being satisfied with simpler pleasures that bring no future distress.
What are these simpler pleasures? They come with no strings attached and are easy to acquire—simple food and drink, philosophical contemplation, and deep conversations with like-minded friends. In the Garden, these “natural and necessary” goods are found in abundance, whereas luxuries, while sometimes nice to have, are never needed. As Epicurus wrote, “We are firmly convinced that those who need expensive fare least are the ones who relish it most keenly and that a natural way of life is easily procured, while trivialities are hard to come by.”
The Epicurean trains the mind to desire little so that they always have enough. Once desire is brought into this narrow range, a new kind of wealth emerges that is independent of fortune: a sufficiency that cannot be outbid, even by the endlessly accumulating riches of the materially wealthy, who are forever trapped in the logic of “more.”
As Epicurus puts it with characteristic bluntness: “Nothing is sufficient for the person who finds sufficiency too little.”
Epicureanism, for all its strengths, can still feel a bit self-centered. In the end, it is still our own pleasure—or absence of pain—that we elevate as life’s most worthy aim. But if we dig a bit deeper, we can begin to discern a more altruistic dimension to the philosophy.
Consider Epicurus in Vatican Saying 44:
The wise man, after adjusting himself to the bare necessities of life, understands better how to share than to take—so large is the fund of self-sufficiency that he has discovered.
The implications of this point to something far more prosocial than Epicurus is typically given credit for. Think, for a moment, of some of the most persistent social evils in the world today: senseless murders, theft, corruption, war, intolerance, bigotry, greed. The Epicurean—trained to desire little, to recognize sufficiency in what is simple, and to locate fulfillment in friendship and reflection—has little room for these destructive compulsions to take hold.
This Epicurean drive for self-sufficiency—combined with the removal of supernatural fear—undercuts many of the psychological motives that lead people to harm, deceive, or steal from one another. When life is no longer organized around anxiety about divine punishment or salvation, or endless accumulation, those pressures lose much of their force. Having attained true and lasting happiness, the practicing Epicurean wishes the same for others.
This is the Epicurean spin on the Golden Rule. If a life free from pain is the best life for you—and you realize that you are made of the same stuff (atoms) as everyone else and therefore undeserving of any special consideration—then a life free from pain is a life you should want for others as well. This is pure egalitarianism arrived at by reason alone—and without the need for divine commandments etched in stone.
We are ready, at last, to inhabit the garden. But this time there are no forbidden trees, no lurking deities, and no threat of exile. What has been cast out is not humanity, but the belief that life must answer to some higher tribunal—and that it needs redemption elsewhere.
Freed from the fear of gods, death, and hell, we find no religion here—only human beings, equal in their shared condition. In learning to want little, we discover a genuine abundance; in stepping off the treadmill of wealth and status, we recover the one thing they never truly offered us: time. Time to think clearly, to live simply, to deepen our friendships, and to love without anxiety.
If there is any Eden within our reach, it is not a paradise before knowledge, but a life beyond illusion—one we build, sustain, and inhabit for ourselves.
References
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997.
Epicurus. The Art of Happiness. Translated by George K. Strodach. New York: Penguin Books, 2012.
———. The Essential Epicurus. Translated by Eugene O’Connor. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.