Epicurus Vs Augustine

Epicurus, a scientific philosopher, based his beliefs on life around his scientific theories and observations. Augustine, a theological philosopher, believed in everything through the Catholic God and was deeply rooted in his faith. To fully incorporate both of these doctrines into everyday life would be impossible. The two belief systems conflict each other greatly, but in some respects, they can be used together to find philosophical truth.
Both philosophers had radical ideas about the gods and rejected the common religious beliefs of their time. In early Roman times, people typically worshipped numerous gods, many of which were based on the Greek gods and others from other foreign or even unknown origins. They offered sacrifice to the gods …show more content…
As mentioned previously, Epicurus did not believe in this concept, thinking instead that the gods tended to their own matters rather than the lives of humans. Augustine was of a very different mindset, as inferred from his belief that God seeks to create an intimate relationship with each of his people. Augustine believed that God had worked through his mother, Monica, in order to slowly bring Augustine to Christianity. When Augustine reached his teenage years, Monica became worried about his potential involvement in fornication. He reflected on this, thinking, “Were you really silent to me at that time? Were they not your words?” (Augustine, 53). God used Monica as a vehicle to convey his message to Augustine and gradually draw him in to the Catholic faith. This personal relationship was not unique to Augustine; he also believed his student Alypius gained this close relationship with God. In this case God’s intervention used Augustine as a pawn, just as God hoped to create a relationship with each of his people. Epicurus would have balked at this idea. He would have been especially appalled by Augustine’s belief that God was present everywhere at once, not existing in material form like the atoms that Epicurus described, but instead in a spiritual form distributed throughout the world, involving Himself in everyone’s lives at once. The two philosophers conflicted …show more content…
In Epicurus’ letter to Herodotus, he describes how the soul no longer could feel anything following the death of the body. When a person dies and “the whole body is destroyed, the soul is scattered and no longer enjoys the same powers and motions; and, as a result, it no longer possesses sensation,” (Epicurus, 278). While he was not specific of whether or not the soul is destroyed when it no longer experiences sensation, Epicurus did not imply an idea of an afterlife for the soul once the body has moved on. For if there is to be an afterlife such as heaven or hell, the soul must be able to experience these things through sensation, experiencing the comfort of heaven or the torture of hell. As a Christian, Augustine believed in an afterlife that involves the reunion of the soul with God (provided that the soul was not corrupted by sin). He believed that people’s rightful place was in heaven with their creator, and that during the Last Judgement, the body and soul would reunite. Augustine’s mother died in Ostia, a great distance away from her native land. When she was approaching the end of her life, she said she wanted to be buried in Ostia. This surprised many of her friends because it was customary for people to be buried in their homeland so their body would be more easily able to reunite with their soul. Monica, however, trusted in God’s power and told