Why was Epicurus so dangerous for christians? Lactantius and his hostility towards Epicurus and Epicureanism
Lactantius is a good representative of an apologist talking about Epicurus. The way in which he starts speaking of Epicurus, we hold, is not very promising: in fact, when discussing the problem of the origin of the world and of evil, and while attempting to show that there is good reason to endorse the view that the world is the result of divine providence's making, Lactantius calls Epicurus ‘the lone lunatic' ( Div.
Inst. 2.8, 49: unus... delirus). That the world has been made by divine providence is so obvious, Lactantius contends, that everyone (including Trismegistus, the Sibylline verses, the prophets, and Greek thinkers, such as the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, the Peripatetics, and even the Seven Sages, Socrates and Plato) have taken such a view to be certain (Div. Inst. 2.8, 48-49). Of course, one should say that the fact that all the above-mentioned figures support the view that the world has been made by divine providence (if this is in fact the case)26 is simply an ex auctoritate account that proves nothing. Epicurus and the Epicureans27 have some reasonable arguments to defend the view that there is no providence or teleology in the world. Lactantius' argument against Epicurus is that ‘it is more credible' [credibilius... potius] that matter was made by God because of his omnipotence [ quia deus potest omnia ] than that the world was not made by God, because nothing can be made without purpose, system and plan (sine mente ratione consilio; Div. Inst. 2.8, 52).Several scholars have agreed that Lactantius was very hostile towards Epicurus and that the Epicurean school was his chief opponent.28 At the beginning of the 1970s, Maslowski published a set of important papers focused on antiEpicureanism; the paper devoted to Lactantius is relevant and helpful for our interests because, even granting that Lactantius' preoccupation with Epicurus and Lucretius in his apologetic works bears out the view that his chief opponents were the Epicureans, Maslowski proposes a re-examination of the notion of Lactantius' anti-Epicureanism by investigating what he calls ‘secondary' opponents of Lactantius.
As a result of his investigation, Maslowski holds, it is clear that the term ‘anti-Epicurean' is too narrow and ought to be replaced by ‘anti-atomistic'.29 His project is appealing insofar as it shows that some labels are too limited for the proper consideration of an author from the past who, to a certain extent, has contributed to a particular kind of reading of a philosopher like Epicurus. But our purpose in this section is much more modest: we will examine in a general way how Lactantius assesses the Epicurean theses and arguments. In the limited framework of this chapter, such a procedure has the advantage of providing an overview of the Christian apologist as a reader of Epicurus and Epicureanism, which will make it possible for us to contrast his judgement of the Garden with that of Cicero and Plutarch.Certainly, one can reasonably start by examining what the main purpose of Lactantius was when he set out to write Divine Institutions. Of course, as a convinced Christian, he sees himself waging an all-out battle against the pagans. He feels his mission to be to free people from the absurdities and damage arising from pagan religion and philosophy; and in his view philosophy does not play a minor role in such a struggle. Philosophers discuss religion; they argue about whether there are gods; if there are, what one should examine of their nature and what their role is in the cosmos as well as in human life. As could not be otherwise for a Christian apologist, Lactantius wishes to show that Christianity is the best doctrine (both religiously and philosophically), since it is the only one that has managed to unite wisdom with religion. Philosophers, on the other hand, have been especially concerned with trying to solve the problem of how ‘to live well', that is, how to achieve happiness.30 The fact that there are so many theories to explain the same thing, Lactantius seems to suggest (Div. Inst. 1.1, 5-8), shows that the multiple existing philosophies can and must be overcome by ‘true religion', without which ‘the supreme good of true wisdom' [u erae sapientiae summum bonum] is unattainable.
To be sure, he is convinced that when the teachings of philosophy have been disapproved [ conuictis philosophiae disciplinis; and of course he thinks that they will be disapproved], people will come to true religion and wisdom (ad ueram nobis religionem sapientiamque ueniendum est; Div. Inst. 3.9, 1; 3.9, 14; 3.30, 9).31 As is obvious, he takes all religions (except the Christian one) and philosophies to be false, and thus to be real sources of confusion.Lactantius mentions Epicurus so many times in his Divine Institutions that it would be cumbersome and tedious to cite all the places where he quotes him; hence, we will limit ourselves to commenting on only a few representative and critical passages. A particularly relevant section is Div. Inst. 3.17, 1-20, where Lactantius strives to show the alleged ‘errors' of Epicurus. Lactantius remarks here that he does not intend to fight philosophers since, ‘they could not resist anyway' [qui stare non possunt]. This somewhat arrogant observation is not without surprise, since, strictly speaking, he sometimes does not argue on strictly philosophical grounds, but tries to show why his approach is better than that of the philosophers without providing truly rational arguments as to why what the philosophers say should be rejected. To be sure, we do not mean that he never argues (for instance, see his arguments for the sake of the existence of providence in Div. Inst. 3.17, 16-27). However, if you call your adversary ‘lunatic', ‘fool', and so on (2.8, 49; 3.20, 15), your arguments cannot be taken seriously; in that case you are not undermining someone else's reasoning, but rather attacking the person.32
Lactantius starts by pointing out that he will focus on Epicureanism because this is supposed to be ‘the best known of all the philosophies', even though this is not for any contribution to truth but because hedonism (a central Epicurean stance) turns out to be very appealing to many. This is so since everyone is prone to vice (Div.
Inst. 3.17, 2).33 Once again, it is clear that such a starting point is full of biases and inaccuracies; in various ways, this determines the way he reads (and makes others read) Epicurus' hedonism, a concept which, as Lactantius himself probably knew, is much more refined than saying that a general tendency towards pleasure must be identified with a general propensity to vice or evil. Nor is it true that Epicurean hedonism recommends the lazy not to study and advises cowards against politics. This last point is particularly prejudicial and unfair. Indeed, it seems especially illegitimate to accuse the Epicurean philosophy of propagating the idea that people should be kept away from politics when Epicurus himself, who recommended ‘living unnoticed', was seriously involved in developing a sophisticated theory of law and justice. Of course, Lactantius refers to ‘the cowards'; but an Epicurean philosopher might reply that there is no such cowardice in those who seek to show that conventional laws (based on a common notion of justice, which rule over current forms of the state) require a profound modification to cease being laws in the formal sense of norms. At best, people obey such ‘formal laws' to avoid being punished, not because they believe that such rules should be rationally internalized, activated and deployed effectively within the practical domain.It is also interesting to note that Lactantius believes that he can explain the origin of learning and, in general, of Epicurus' philosophy. According to him, Epicurus said that good people are always liable to misery, whereas evil persons flourish with more power and influence; additionally, crimes can be committed with impunity, and so on (Div. Inst. 3.17, 7-8). Once one has said this in a very general fashion (in order to avoid reproducing all the details provided by Lactantius), one might suggest that the apologist's point is that all which is bad usually turns out to be successful. In contrast, the opposite is subject to misery and pain.
To sum up, if the apologetic discourse was right, the view of Epicurus would have been encouraged by the unfairness of things (Div. Inst. 3.17, 16), an opinion that, according to Lactantius, depends on Epicurus' ignorance of the ‘real reason' [sic enim causam rationemque ignoranti uidebatur]. This is the way, Lactantius holds, in which it can be explained that Epicurus states that there is no providence; if there is no providence, it cannot be understood how the world is organized and ordered.Some scholars argue that when Lactantius ascribes to Epicurus the view that ‘there is no order', he is drawing on what Lucretius states in a formidable passage of On the Nature of Things (5.195-234).34 Nevertheless, Lucretius is not describing a disorder in nature in this section of his poem, but a particular order in which each thing seems to take its proper place. What Epicurus, Lucretius and other Epicureans intend to prove is that this immanent order of nature is not due to a providence or intelligence that plans the cosmos' order. What they wish to show is that a cosmology without teleology is possible; ‘but how is that possible?', a Christian and even a pagan philosopher (such as Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics) might wonder. From the Epicurean perspective, what follows from this is a challenging question that must be answered by a teleological account of the cosmos: ‘why the world-builders suddenly appeared on the scene, after sleeping for countless centuries'. (Cicero, ND 1.21, reporting the Epicurean Velleius' objection to Plato and the Stoics). One might argue that if the world did not exist, time did exist (which implies some difficulties, insofar as the world was created at a point of time, a view that Lactantius would endorse). Besides, the Epicurean god is taken to be an imperishable and blessed being, but this is incompatible with the strains of world administration.35 Further, the Epicurean gods do not have any control over celestial phenomena and they are not interested in human affairs (Lucretius, RN 5.1182-1192); of course, this view turns out to be unacceptable to Lactantius.36
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