New In Troubled Times, Why Young People Should Turn To Epicurus Rather Than To The Pope

A friendly but direct word to young people searching for solid ground and thinking they might find it in the old but newly trendy Church

This article is also available on Substack.

Something is stirring among young people in the West, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. Bookstores, podcasts, and university campuses are buzzing with a renewed interest in traditional religion — and in particular, in Catholicism. Authors like Scott Hahn, Robert Barron, Trent Horn, and Matthew Kelly are reaching a generation that feels, with good reason, that other religious and secular institutions of the past several decades have failed them. They are not wrong to feel that way. They are not wrong to want something more durable, more serious, and more demanding than the shallow therapeutic culture that was handed to them. They are not wrong to reject a world that offered them streaming platforms and antidepressants in place of genuine community and genuine meaning.

But there is a profound irony in the direction many of them are turning. The Catholic Church, which presents itself as the answer to modernity’s failures, was not a passive bystander to those failures. It was, in important respects, their architect. And the philosophical tradition it has historically worked hardest to suppress and discredit — Epicurean philosophy — turns out to be precisely the tradition best equipped to give young people what they are actually looking for: a grounded, honest, courageous, and genuinely fulfilling way of living in this world.

This article makes that case. It does so without contempt for those who find themselves drawn toward the Catholic Church, and without any desire to mock sincere religious belief. But it does so firmly, because the stakes are real, and because Epicurus himself would have recognized the moment we are living through as one he understood very well.

The Moment We Are In

Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, published a book in 2023 called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. Whatever one thinks of Hawley’s politics, the book is a revealing cultural document. It explicitly attacks Epicurus by name — which is itself remarkable, since it is unusual for a sitting senator’s self-help book to bother refuting a Greek philosopher who died in 270 BC. Hawley accuses Epicurus of promoting withdrawal, passivity, and the pursuit of mere personal pleasure at the expense of civic virtue and masculine engagement with the world. He presents the Catholic-Stoic tradition of virtue — suffering, sacrifice, duty, engagement in the great struggle — as the antidote to Epicurean softness.

Hawley’s attack on Epicurus is not original. It is a version of an argument that has been made, in various forms, for the better part of two thousand years — ever since the Church identified Epicurean philosophy as one of its most dangerous competitors and set about discrediting it. The charge is always roughly the same: Epicurus taught people to care only about their own pleasure, to withdraw from civic life, to avoid discomfort, and to deny the existence of the gods and the immortal soul. All of these charges are, at best, distortions. At worst, they are deliberate fabrications. And the fact that they are still being repeated in 2023 by a prominent politician tells us something important about how thoroughly the Church’s long campaign against Epicurus has succeeded — and how badly the truth about Epicurus needs to be recovered.

The books being recommended to young people interested in Catholicism today — Hahn’s Rome Sweet Home and The Lamb’s Supper, Barron’s Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith, Horn’s The Case for Catholicism, Kelly’s Rediscover Catholicism, Curtis Martin’s Made for More, Thomas Joseph White’s The Light of Christ — are all, whatever their individual merits, built on the same foundational assumptions: that there is a supernatural God who created the universe with a purpose, that human beings have an immortal soul that will be judged after death, that there are absolute moral rules derived from divine authority, and that the Catholic Church is the institution uniquely authorized to transmit and interpret these truths. These are precisely the assumptions that Epicurus spent his life carefully, methodically, and compassionately dismantling.^Note1

The Ancient Parallel

It is worth pausing on Hawley’s implicit comparison — between our moment and the troubled times that preceded the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire. The parallel is more apt than Hawley intends, but the lesson to be drawn from it is the opposite of the one he draws.

The ancient world in the centuries around the birth of Christianity was indeed a time of extraordinary turmoil. The Roman Republic had collapsed into civil war. The Empire that replaced it brought external stability but internal anxiety — a vast, anonymous, multicultural machine in which traditional sources of meaning (the small community, the ancestral religion, the coherent civic life) had been disrupted or destroyed. Into this vacuum poured a bewildering array of competing mystery cults, philosophical schools, and religious movements — Mithraism, the cult of Isis, Neoplatonism, various Jewish sects, and eventually Christianity. All of them were offering something similar: a deeper meaning, a connection to something transcendent, a community of fellow-believers, a promise of something better than what the world immediately offered.

Epicurean philosophy was one of the serious alternatives in this competition, and for several centuries it held its own. The Epicurean communities scattered across the Mediterranean world — communities of friends, including men and women, slaves and free citizens, gathered to study and practice philosophy together — were in many ways remarkable anticipations of what people today are looking for when they look to intentional religious community. But Epicureanism had one decisive disadvantage in the competition for hearts and minds in a frightened age: it refused to lie. It would not promise an afterlife. It would not promise divine protection. It would not promise that suffering had a cosmic purpose. And it would not — this was perhaps its most important refusal — promise that there was an authority, a Pope, a Church, a priest, a sacred text, to whom you could surrender the burden of thinking for yourself.

The Church won that competition, in part, by suppressing the competition. Epicurus’s thirty-seven volumes of On Nature were not lost by accident. The systematic destruction of Epicurean literature, the slander of Epicurus’s character (the Church fathers accused him of gluttony, drunkenness, and depravity), and the centuries-long campaign to associate his name with crude hedonism — all of this was deliberate and largely successful. When Thomas Aquinas incorporated Aristotle into Catholic theology in the thirteenth century, he was careful to exclude Epicurus. When the Church encountered the rediscovery of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in the fifteenth century, it responded with deep alarm. The poem’s argument that the universe was made of atoms and void, that the soul was mortal, that the gods were indifferent to human affairs, and that the pursuit of pleasure was the natural and rational goal of life — all of this was recognized, correctly, as a profound challenge to the entire Catholic worldview.

We are in a similar moment now. The institutions that were supposed to give meaning — secular liberalism, conservatism, consumerism, social media, the therapeutic culture, the university as traditionally conceived — have failed. Young people are right to look for something better. The question is whether they should look to the institution that spent two thousand years destroying the alternative, or whether they should look to the alternative itself.

What Epicurus Actually Taught

Before making the positive case, it is worth clearing away the slanders, because they are still everywhere — including, implicitly, in Hawley’s book and explicitly in most Catholic apologetics.

First, let’s address the elephant in the room: how can anyone suggest that something as apparently superficial as “pleasure” is a preferred alternative to the sublime offerings of a church? The answer is that when Epicurus spoke of Pleasure he meant something very different from what his detractors claim. Just as Epicurus divided the entire physical universe between matter and void, he divided all human feelings into those which are felt to be desirable — pleasure — and those which are undesirable — pain. This includes not only the body but also the mind, especially since mental feelings are often more significant to us than bodily feelings. Detractors and misguided commentators fail to see what the ancients clearly understood — that when Epicurus spoke of Pleasure he was speaking of Nature’s “go” signal in every aspect of life, not always or even primarily the momentary pleasures of the body.

Epicurus did not teach that we should pursue every pleasure and avoid every discomfort. He taught that pleasure is the natural guide given to us by nature — that every living creature reaches toward pleasure and recoils from pain at birth, before any instruction or conditioning, and that this is nature’s own declaration about what matters. But he was careful to distinguish between pleasures that lead to greater pain and pleasures that do not, pointing instead to a contextual scale where natural and necessary (for food, companionship, understanding) come first, then followed by desires that natural but unnecessary (such as fine food, physical comfort), and those desires which are impossible of attainment by definition (such as for unlimited fame, power, and wealth). Epicurus’ own life displayed the proper proportionment of these goals, combining ownership of significant property, pursuit of an active life of writing and philosophical lecturing, and leadership of a numerous school of students, all guided by common sense sustainability that inspired Philodemus, a later Epicurean, to write a wide-ranging series of books on engagement with society, including one on Household Management.

Epicurus did not teach withdrawal from life in the sense of passivity or cowardice. The injunction to “live quietly” (lathe biosas) was not an instruction to be a doormat. It was a recognition — entirely borne out by the history of the Roman Republic’s collapse — that entanglement in political ambition and public competition for status was among the most reliable ways to make yourself and everyone around you miserable. The Epicurean communities were not monasteries of disengagement. They were active, intellectually serious, socially diverse communities engaged in the demanding project of understanding the universe and living well within it.

And Epicurus did not deny that the gods exist. He affirmed the existence of divine beings — blessed, immortal, perfectly happy — but insisted that these beings were entirely natural, took no interest in human affairs, and neither rewarded virtue nor punished vice. This was not atheism in the modern sense, but it was something more disturbing to religious authorities than outright denial: the argument that we need not fear the gods, and that the entire apparatus of priestly mediation, sacrifice, prayer, and supernatural bargaining was based on a false premise.

The three great fears that Epicurus identified as the sources of most human misery were: the fear of the gods, the fear of death, and the fear that following nature alone is insufficient for happiness. His philosophy was designed, with great care and compassion, to cure all three. This is what Diogenes of Oinoanda, a wealthy Epicurean of the second century AD, meant when he carved his vast philosophical inscription on a wall in what is now Turkey — he wanted passersby to receive the medicine of Epicurean philosophy whether they sought it or not, because he saw the world suffering from a plague of false beliefs from which he had been cured.

The Physical Foundation: Nature Without Supernatural Design

The deepest reason why Epicurean philosophy is more sound than Catholicism is not an ethical argument but a physical one. Epicurus, building on the atomism of Democritus and anticipating in remarkable ways the picture that modern science has confirmed, argued that the universe is entirely natural: composed of atoms and void, operating without supernatural direction, without cosmic purpose, without a designing intelligence. Worlds form and dissolve through the motion of atoms across infinite space and infinite time. Humanity occupies no privileged position in this picture. The universe was not made for us.

This is not the type of consoling picture that Catholicism claims to provide. It offers no promise that suffering has a purpose, no assurance that the good will be rewarded and the wicked punished, no guarantee that the universe cares about you personally. But it has two enormous advantages over the Catholic picture. First, it is true — or at least, it is consistent with everything that science has discovered in the centuries since Epicurus, including the atomic theory, the vast indifferent scale of the cosmos, the naturalistic origins of life, and the physical basis of mind and consciousness. Second, and perhaps more importantly for the present argument, it is liberating. Once you understand that the universe is not a theater in which your suffering serves a divine script, you stop waiting for cosmic justice and start focusing on the actual sources of happiness and unhappiness in your actual life.

Thomas Jefferson understood this. He wrote of himself “I too am an Epicurean,” and described Epicurean philosophy as “the most rational system remaining from Greece and Rome.” Jefferson saw, as many of the American Founders did, that a free republic could not be built on the foundation of supernatural authority, and that the Epicurean picture of nature — rational, orderly, comprehensible by reason, without arbitrary divine intervention — was the natural philosophy of a free people.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who could hardly be accused of being a sentimentalist, was equally clear about the significance of Epicurus. He described Epicurus as one of the most admirable figures in all of human history — a man who had understood, centuries before Nietzsche himself arrived at the same conclusion, that “the true world” — the Platonic-Christian realm of ideal forms, divine purposes, and supernatural realities — did not exist, and that the recovery of this world, the natural world, as the only and sufficient world, was among the most important philosophical tasks any person could undertake. Nietzsche’s “death of God” was in some ways simply a restatement of what Epicurus had argued: that the gods are not governors of human life, that the fear of divine punishment is among the most destructive of all human emotions, and that the affirmation of natural life — joyful, mortal, embedded in the actual world — is a higher achievement than the ascetic renunciation that Christianity demands.

On the Soul, Death, and What Comes After

The promise of eternal life is perhaps the most powerful thing the Catholic Church offers, and it is important to engage with it honestly rather than dismissively. The fear of death is real. The grief of losing people we love is real. The desire for some form of continuity beyond the brutal fact of biological extinction is not irrational — it is deeply human.

But Epicurus’s argument about death is not a cold denial of its significance. It is one of the most carefully reasoned and, once understood, genuinely liberating arguments in the entire history of philosophy. His argument is simple: “Death is nothing to us. Where death is, we are not. Where we are, death is not.” The fear of death treats the absence of experience as a form of experience — as if death were something that would happen to us, when in fact it is the end of the very self that anything could happen to. We do not fear the time before we were born. There is no reason, Epicurus argues, to fear the time after we die. Both are simply the absence of the self.

This is not a comfortable argument in the sense of being warm or reassuring. But it is a true one, and its practical effect — when it is genuinely internalized rather than merely intellectually accepted — is precisely the freedom from existential terror that the Church claims to offer but can only deliver on conditions: belief in doctrines for which there is no evidence, submission to an institution whose claim to authority rests on nothing more than its own assertions, and the acceptance of an afterlife whose terms are defined by that same institution and which includes, historically and doctrinally, the possibility of eternal punishment.

Epicurus’s alternative is not resignation. It is the recognition that a life of finite duration, fully lived, is complete — that happiness does not require infinite time to be real, and that a life rich in friendship, understanding, and the genuine pleasures of existence can be described without irony as a blessed life. He demonstrated this himself on his deathbed, writing to a friend that the physical pain of his final illness was outweighed by the joy he felt in recalling their philosophical conversations.

On Virtue, Happiness, and the Catholic-Stoic Error

One of the sharpest disagreements between Epicurean philosophy and the Catholic tradition concerns the relationship between virtue and happiness. The Catholic tradition, heavily influenced by Stoicism through figures like Cicero and reinforced by the Church fathers and later by Aquinas, holds that virtue is an end in itself — that right action has intrinsic value independent of its effects on anyone’s wellbeing, and that the highest human life is one of virtuous struggle and sacrifice rather than one of pleasure.

This is the view that Josh Hawley is promoting when he attacks Epicurus. It is the view implicit in books like Curtis Martin’s Made for More and Scott Hahn’s work on the sacrificial dimensions of the Mass. The Catholic vision of the good life is a life of suffering accepted, duty fulfilled, sacrifice made, virtue maintained in the face of temptation and difficulty — because this life is merely a testing ground for the eternal life to come.

Epicurus’s response to this is not that virtue doesn’t matter, but that it has the relationship to happiness exactly backwards. Virtue — honesty, justice, prudence, courage — is not an end in itself. It is a means to happiness, and a reliable one. The honest person sleeps well. The just person can maintain real friendships rather than merely transactional relationships. The prudent person avoids the pleasures that bring greater pain in their wake. The courageous person can face the necessary difficulties of life without the additional suffering that comes from cowardice. But if a virtue reliably produced unhappiness — if justice, say, consistently made people’s lives worse — then on the Epicurean account that would be a reason to question whether we had correctly understood what justice requires.

This is not moral relativism. It is the recognition that morality is grounded in the real world — in the actual consequences of actions for actual people — rather than in supernatural commands, abstract ideals, or the requirements of an institution’s authority. And it is, once you think it through, a considerably more demanding moral standard than the Catholic one, because it requires you to actually think about what will actually produce wellbeing, rather than simply consulting an authority and obeying.

On Community, Friendship, and the Garden

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Epicurean philosophy, to those who know it only from its caricature, is how central community and friendship are to it. Epicurus did not teach individuals to pursue pleasure in isolation. He founded a philosophical community — the Garden — and his letters and doctrines return again and again to the theme of friendship as among the greatest goods available to a human being.

The Garden was remarkable by the standards of ancient philosophy and indeed by any standards. Unlike the school of Plato it did not require study of Geometry or abstractions unrelated to real life. Those who agreed with Epicurean philosophy were admitted as valued members regardless of gender or social status. Epicurus wrote that “of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship,” and he instructed his friends to study nature together with like-minded friends as the surest way to live among god-like blessings.

This is precisely what many young people are looking for when they turn toward Catholic community. The hunger for genuine friendship, for a community that takes life seriously, for shared meals and shared convictions and shared practices — all of this is real and admirable. The question is whether the institutional shell of the Church, with its supernatural claims and its hierarchical authority, is the right container for that hunger. The Epicurean answer is that you can have everything good about intentional philosophical community without paying the price that the Church demands: the surrender of your reason, the acceptance of claims that cannot be verified, and the submission of your conscience to an authority that has demonstrated, repeatedly and catastrophically, that it cannot be trusted.

A Warning About Secondary Sources

Here it is important to say something that may surprise: not everything written about Epicurus is a reliable guide to Epicurus. The modern revival of interest in Epicurean philosophy is genuinely exciting, but much of the popular writing about it — including some academic writing — has been produced by scholars who explicitly or implicitly accept elements of the Catholic or broadly Platonic worldview that Epicurus spent his life opposing.

When you read that Epicurus was “really” about tranquility rather than pleasure, that his philosophy is compatible with a religious sensibility, that the “absence of pain” he identified as the highest pleasure is equivalent to some kind of mystical emptiness, or that his ethics can be easily reconciled with a broadly theistic framework — be suspicious. These reinterpretations are almost always in the direction of making Epicurus less threatening to the Stoic-Catholic-Platonic consensus. They sand off the edges of a philosophy that was, in its original form, sharp and deliberate in its challenge to supernatural religion.

Go to the sources. Read the Letter to Menoeceus, the Letter to Herodotus, the Principal Doctrines, and the Vatican Sayings. Read Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, which is among the great poems in any language and which transmits Epicurean physics and ethics with extraordinary power. Read Diogenes Laertius’s life of Epicurus. These texts are short, accessible, and available online for free. You do need to pay attention to how Epicurus uses terms in ways that are unfamiliar to us, but once you understand where Epicurus is coming from you do not need a mediator to understand him, just as you do not need a priest to understand the universe.

The core commitments of Epicurean philosophy are clear and non-negotiable. There are no supernatural gods who govern human affairs or punish and reward after death. The soul, like the body, is composed of atoms and disperses at death — there is no judgment, no heaven, no hell, no purgatory. This world — the natural world, the world of atoms and void and the lives we actually live — is the only world there is. There is no “true world” behind it waiting to be revealed by faith or accessed by the properly initiated. Nature, through the direct testimony of pleasure and pain, gives us our guide to living. Our task is to understand what this guide actually requires of us — with honesty, with intelligence, and with the help of friends.

A Direct Word to the Searching

If you are young and you feel that something has gone badly wrong — that the institutions you were handed are hollow, that the culture offers you nothing worth living for, that the relentless emphasis on individual consumption and digital stimulation has failed to make anyone happy, that you want something more serious and more real — you are right. Something has gone badly wrong. The culture is hollow. You deserve something better.

But consider carefully what is being offered when the Catholic Church presents itself as the answer. It is being offered by an institution that spent two millennia suppressing the philosophical alternative we have been discussing, that burned books and banned ideas and executed people who disagreed with its supernatural claims, that accumulated enormous institutional power by persuading people that a supernatural authority had delegated that power to it, and that is now — in the midst of ongoing scandals about the abuse of that power — presenting its ancient authority as the solution to the problems that its ancient authority helped create.

The troubled times of the late Roman Empire were eventually “solved” by the triumph of Christianity — and the result was the Dark Ages, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the suppression of classical learning for a thousand years, the Inquisition, and the Wars of Religion that killed a quarter of the population of Central Europe. The Epicurean alternative — had it survived persecution rather than being systematically destroyed — would have offered something quite different: a world in which people pursued their genuine happiness with clear eyes, in honest community with their fellow human beings, without the terror of divine punishment, without the corrupting influence of priestly power, and without the demand that they surrender their reason to an institution claiming supernatural authority. Such a world would have seen properly how the goal of life is exactly as Thomas Jefferson stated it: the pursuit of happiness.

That alternative is still available. The texts survived. The tradition survived. Thomas Jefferson read them. Friedrich Nietzsche read them. Lucretius’s poem survived fifteen centuries of Christian civilization to be rediscovered and printed and read and to contribute, as Stephen Greenblatt has argued in The Swerve, directly to the intellectual movement that became the Renaissance and eventually the Enlightenment.

The Epicurean invitation is not to return to the past. It is to take what the past got right — the atomistic understanding of nature, the grounding of ethics in actual human wellbeing, the centrality of friendship, the freedom from supernatural terror, the recognition that this world is our only world and therefore deserves our full and joyful attention — and carry it forward into the present.

Conclusion: Choose This World

Epicurus died at seventy-two, after a period of decline in which he suffered considerable physical pain from kidney stones and other ailments, surrounded by his friends in the community he had built. His last letter, written on his deathbed, describes a day of physical suffering outweighed by the joy of friendship and the memory of a life well-lived which physical pain could not destroy. Even had Epicurus not lived as long as he did, such a life stands as a shining example of what can be accomplished through his philosophy.

This is what young people looking for something more solid and more serious should hear: not the voice of an institution claiming divine authority and promising supernatural rewards, but the voice of a human being who looked at the universe honestly, accepted what he found, worked out with care and compassion what that honest account required of him, and lived and died in the knowledge that a life of genuine friendship, genuine understanding, and genuine pleasure — pleasure in the full sense, pleasure of the body and mind together, pleasure in its Epicurean sense as all experience that is not painful — is enough. It is more than enough. It is, in fact, everything.

The world does not need more young people surrendering their reason to an ancient institution’s supernatural claims. It needs more young people willing to do what Epicurus did: look at the world as it actually is, take nature as their guide, build genuine communities of friendship and honest inquiry, and pursue happiness — real happiness, grounded in this real world — with open eyes and without fear.

That is the Epicurean invitation. It has always been there. It is there now. The only question is whether you are willing to accept it on its own terms, rather than on the terms that two thousand years of opposition have tried to impose on it.

Take it. Read the sources. Find your friends. Live well.

• This article has been prepared by Cassius Amicus with the generous assistance of others, including the overlords of Artificial Intelligence. Cassius Amicus is solely responsible for its content.

[Note 1] As Nietzsche wrote in his Anti-Christ, Lucretius and through him Epicurus were campaigning against these ideas even before the emergence of the Catholic Church.

It has been 2000 years since there have been any organized Epicurean communities, and there are not likely to be any real-world communities in the near future. That should be seen as a challenge, not as a reason for sadness, and the place to start is finding out for yourself what Epicurus really taught.

While remembering the warnings that it pays to start with a reliable commentary on Epicurus’ true perspectives, such as the provided in Norman DeWitt’s “Epicurus and His Philosophy,” the primary texts of Epicurean philosophy are available freely online. No living person can legitimately claim that they are the last word on Epicurean views, but there are many active websites pursuing the study of Epicurus. These include EpicureanFriends.com and sites such as EpicurusToday.com, where you will find the classical Epicurean worldview vigorously presented.

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