Acts 17:18

18. Philosophers Socrates was the first who turned the study of men from mere physics to mind and morals. His more legitimate followers were Plato and Aristotle, the former of whom endeavoured to place man’s immortality and the law of immutable right and truth upon a firm basis of positive reason. Of this class of philosophers none seem to have encountered the apostle.

Epicureans The essential principle of Epicurus was that man should aim at the greatest possible amount of happiness. This maxim is capable of the highest and best meaning. And it is said that Epicurus used it to show that the highest pleasure required the most perfect virtue. But as Epicurus admitted no future state, the maxim in most men’s minds took an individual application. Each one said, “ I have but one life to live, and I must, by whatever means, or at whosever expense, get the most enjoyment out of it for myself.” Hence, sensuality and selfishness, tending to utter beastliness, were the natural result. This philosophy is, in its essence, being revived at the present day by such men as Comte, of France, and John Stuart Mill, of England. Such philosophers may, like Epicurus, give a high version of this philosophy, and may sustain it by their own exemplary conduct; but its prevalence ever marks a sensual age. Sensual men will ever feel a tendency to adopt the doctrine; the doctrine will ever exert an influence to make men sensual.

Stoics The Stoics, reversing the Epicurean maxim, forbid all regard for pleasure, and require us to act solely for the absolute right. He who so acted, discarding all passion or selfishness, was a wise man, a king, a god. This was a noble philosophy, and some of the noblest men of antiquity belonged to this sect. But, knowing nothing but the energy of human nature to rely upon, it placed a greater strain on fallen humanity than it was able to bear. In endeavouring to make men morally perfect it made them perfectly miserable. While Stoicism would make men perfect by crucifying all man’s passions, Christianity would make them so, through a divine aid, by harmonizing the passions with the right, the true, and the good. Thus it attains for man a higher happiness than Epicurus knew, and a perfect righteousness, a holiness, and a blessedness unknown to Stoicism.

But it was in their doctrine of God and a future state that these philosophers came into collision with the preaching of Paul. The Stoics were pantheists, the Epicureans were atheists, and neither knew any future state. Pantheism teaches that the universe, the great whole, the cosmos, is God. Atheism admits, of course, the existence of the cosmos, but denies the existence of any God. In asserting the existence of a true, living, personal God, who exists in entire independence of the cosmos, and able to live without the cosmos, yet author and creator of the cosmos, Paul’s Christianity was at exterminating war with both. Yet pantheism and atheism are at bottom one. Both alike teach that the cosmos, passing through changes and evolutions by laws inherent within itself, is all the God there is. Pantheism avers that there is no God but cosmos, and atheism only denies that besides the cosmos there is any God. With regard to a future state both Epicureans and Stoics maintained that, whether pleasure or duty is our law, all our calculations are limited to this life. Hence, both these sects were at issue with every step of the apostle’s argument. And when Paul uttered the word resurrection, they were as prompt in their rejection of further discourse as were the Jerusalemite Jews when he uttered the word Gentiles, Acts 22:22.

Some said We suppose that this first contemptuous question comes from the haughty Stoics.

Babbler In the Greek the term σπερμολογος signifies, literally, a seed-picker, an epithet applied to birds. It may here mean figuratively a talker who picks up a smatter of petty subtleties to retail. The term was often applied also to loungers and vagrants, who lived about the agora, like birds, on what they could pick up, and so it may have been applied to Paul.

Strange gods The very same term, foreign gods, was used in the legal indictment against Socrates. Some have supposed that the plural gods was here used because in the phrase Jesus and the ( anastasis) resurrection they mistook anastasis for a goddess. Hackett, Lechler, and others, deny that the Athenians could have made such a mistake. And certainly they could not have made it after having heard the speech of Paul. They might, however, have caught such a notion previously, when, by their own account, they but half understood him.