[In the following excerpt from Book VIII of The City of God, St. Augustine includes Epicureanism in his castigation of philosophies that value materialism above religious faith.]

Thus not only the doctrines of both theologies, mythical and political alike, must give way to the philosophy of the Platonists, for they have said that the true God is the author of all things, the illuminator of truth, and the bestower of happiness, but so must the other philosophers too who have adopted a belief in the material elements of nature because their own minds are subservient to the body give way to these great men who recognize so great a God. Such were Thales with his moisture, Anaximenes with his air, the Stoics with their fire, Epicurus with his atoms, that is, very minute bodies which are indivisible and imperceptible, and any others that there are whom we need not stop to enumerate, whether they named bodies simple or compound, animate or inanimate, as the cause and primary substance of everything, as long as they named bodies. For some of them, like the Epicureans, have believed that living things could originate from things without life, while others have held that both living and lifeless objects come from what is living, yet still that these are bodies produced from bodily matter. For instance, the Stoics have held that fire, one of the four material elements of which the visible universe is composed, is endowed with life and wisdom and is the creator both of the universe and of everything within it, and that such fire is in the fullest sense god.

They and the others like them have not been able to imagine anything more than the fabrications of their own wit, confined as it is in the bonds of their fleshly senses. Note that they had within themselves what they did not see, and they pictured inwardly what they had seen externally, even when they did not see it but only had it in their mind. Now the representation that appears to that sort of mental scrutiny is no longer a body but only the likeness of a body, and the faculty by which this likeness of a body is seen within the soul is neither a body nor the likeness of a body. Moreover, the faculty that sees and judges whether the likeness is beautiful or ugly is assuredly superior to the actual likeness on which such a judgement is passed. Now that faculty is the human mind and the substance of a rational soul, and it is certainly not material, if even the likeness of a body, when seen and judged in the mind of one who is engaged in thinking, is not itself material. It is, then, neither earth nor water nor air nor fire, of which four materials, or elements as they are called, we see the material universe to have been composed. Furthermore, if our mind is not material, how can God, the mind's creator, be material?

So, as we have said, these philosophers must make way for the Platonists …