Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism

Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance

The Second Sophistic

Ancient Greek Literature

Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2015 by Timothy Whitmarsh

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Whitmarsh, Tim.

Battling the gods : the struggle against religion in ancient Greece / Tim Whitmarsh.—First Edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-307-95832-7 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-307-95833-4 (eBook)

1. Atheism—Greece—History. 2. Greece—Religion. 3. Christianity and atheism. I. Title.

BL2747.3.W45 2015 200.938—dc23 2015005799

eBook ISBN 9780307958334

Cover image: Marble bust of Apollo. Regent Antiques, London, UK

Cover design by Oliver Munday

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To the people of Greece in these difficult times

This book is about atheists in the ancient world, primarily in Greece: their ideas, their innovations, their battles, their persecution. It is a work of history, not of proselytism. It is not my aim to prove the truth (or indeed falsehood) of atheism as a philosophical position. I do, however, have a strong conviction—a conviction that has hardened in the course of the researching and writing of this book—that cultural and religious pluralism, and free debate, are indispensable to the good life.

This dialogue, between a religious devotee and an atheist intellectual in Athens at the end of the fifth century BC, did not take place. But it could have done. All of the ideas in it are to be found in ancient Greek sources. If the terms of the debate seem arrestingly modern, that is no coincidence. We are still, in the twenty-first century, grappling with issues that are at least two and a half millennia old.

Atheism, we are so often told, is a modern invention, a product of the European Enlightenment: it would be inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science as a rival to religious truth. This is a myth nurtured by both sides of the “new atheism” debate: adherents wish to present skepticism toward the supernatural as the result of science’s progressive eclipse of religion, and the religious wish to see it as a pathological symptom of a decadent Western world consumed by capitalism. Both are guilty of modernist vanity. Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills. Already in the fourth century BC, Plato imagines a believer chastising an atheist: “You and your friends are not the first to have held this view about the gods! There are always those who suffer from this illness, in greater or lesser numbers.” We may balk at his disease imagery, but Plato was surely right in his general point. There have been many throughout history and across all cultures who have resisted belief in the divine.
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It is of course undeniable that religion has dominated human culture as far back as we can trace it. The problem lies with the
normative
claims built on that observation. Too often religious practice is imagined to be the regular state of affairs, needing no explanation, whereas any kind of deviation is seen as weird and remarkable. This view underpins the modernist mythology: the post-Enlightenment West is seen as exceptional, completely unlike anything else that has preceded it and unlike anything elsewhere in the world. This is a dangerous misprision. To the religious, it can suggest that belief is somehow universal, essential to the human condition, and that creeping secularism is an unnatural state. Atheists, on the other hand, can be seduced into delusional self-congratulation, as if twenty-first-century middle-class westerners have been the only people throughout history capable of finding problems with religion.

Religious universalism—the idea that belief in gods is the default setting for human beings—is everywhere in the modern world. There is a growing trend toward speaking of religion as “ingrained,” or even “hardwired” into the human subject. So-called neurotheologists have even sought to identify a part of the brain, the so-called god spot, where religious impulses originate. Others have argued that the human propensity toward religion emerged as an evolutionary advantage. These are controversial claims, and fortunately it is not our job to evaluate them here. The crucial point is that they can all be taken to buttress the normative view of religion. They project the idea that supernatural belief is fundamental to humanity. They follow Karen Armstrong in redefining
Homo sapiens
as
Homo religiosus.
Such views have their modern roots in the ideas of European theorists of natural religion like Joseph François Lafitau, who aimed to demonstrate that all peoples have the innate potential for Christianity (and hence to legitimate the missionary project); they were, however, already seeded in the religious revolutions of late antiquity.
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The notion that a human is an essentially religious being, however, is no more cogent than the notion that apples are essentially red. When most of us think of an apple we imagine a rosy glow, because that is the stereotype that we have grown up with. Picture books, folk songs, Disney cartoons, and television advertising have conspired to generate this normative picture of “appleness.” And indeed it is true enough that many apples are tinctured with red. But it would be ludicrous to see a Golden Delicious as less than “appley” just because it is pure green. Yet this is in effect what we do to atheists in acquiescing to the modernist mythology: we treat them as human beings who are not somehow complete in their humanity, even though they are genetically indistinct from their peers. We connive in the etymological quirk that identifies them only by their lack (
a-
) of that sense of god (
theos
) that is assumed to be the norm.

There are atheists the world over, not just in the industrialized West. The evidence for this is unmissable, since many states (including, among others, Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan) seek them out and execute them. Anthropologists too have found plenty of evidence for skeptics in non-Western cultures. Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, researching among the Azande of the Congo in the early twentieth century, spoke to one man who thought the witch doctors to be frauds; after probing a little further, Evans-Pritchard concluded that this was the general attitude of the people. It is not strange or exceptional to adopt a skeptical approach toward the supernatural: anyone in any culture at any time can do so. Such people do not always show up in the standard accounts of the religious culture of a given society, however, because the standard ethnographies are normative ones: they tend to project religion as not just uniform within a particular cultural group but even constitutive of it. When we want to capture the essence of a given community we typically ask about their religious systems: “Zoroastrians believe that…,” “Yoruba believe that…” This cultural flattening creates a false impression of uniformity.
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Just as atheism exists cross-culturally, it also (as Plato rightly says) exists throughout history. A thoughtful study by John Arnold of Birkbeck College in the University of London, for instance, has explored the position of the “unbelievers” in medieval Christian Europe, arguing that the idea of a single, unified faith community is a mirage: there was “a spectrum of faith, belief and unbelief.” If we shift our attention away from ecclesiastical texts, which are specifically designed to perpetuate the idea of doctrinal unity, and toward religious life as it was actually practiced, we can find all sorts of cases of disbelief. Arnold cites, for instance, the case of one Thomas Tailour of Newbury, who was punished in 1491 for calling pilgrims fools, denying the power of prayer, and doubting the survival of the soul into the afterlife.
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The history of atheism matters. It matters not just for intellectual reasons—that is, because it behooves us to understand the past as fully as we can—but also on moral, indeed political grounds. History confers authority and legitimacy. This is why authoritarian states seek to deny it to those they do not favor, destroying historic sites and outlawing traditional practice. Atheist history is not embodied in buildings or rituals in quite the same way, but the principle is identical. If religious belief is treated as deep and ancient and disbelief as recent, then atheism can readily be dismissed as faddish and inconsequential. Perhaps, even, the persecution of atheists can be seen as a less serious problem than the persecution of religious minorities. The deep history of atheism is then in part a human rights issue: it is about recognizing atheists as real people deserving of respect, tolerance, and the opportunity to live their lives unmolested.

Atheism, in my opinion, is demonstrably at least as old as the monotheistic religions of Abraham, which means at least as old as the monotheism of Israel. That claim raises a separate question, since the processes whereby the temple cult in Jerusalem adopted Yahweh as their one god were complex and long-lived and are not fully understood. I am persuaded by those who see monotheism in the biblical form that we know it today as shaped by the returning Israelite exiles in the Second Temple period (in the aftermath of the conquests of the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 BC). This is around the time when we find in Greece the first philosophical articulations of skepticism toward traditional religion, in the writings of Xenophanes of Colophon (ca. 570–475 BC). But the exact dates do not greatly affect my point, which is rather a rhetorical one: that atheism has a tradition that is comparable in its antiquity to Judaism (and considerably older than Christianity or Islam).
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The difficulty in telling the story of atheism in deep antiquity, however, is that the evidence is often complex and elusive. It is very hard to locate the atheists in many ancient cultures. We do not find them in Ugaritic royal literature or in the Hebrew Bible, say; nor indeed would we expect to. In their different ways, both bodies of text are strongly normative. Their role is to present a view of the world in which the existing social order is fixed and guaranteed by divine mandate. There are, to be sure, some traces in the Bible of awareness that not everyone commits equally to belief in Yahweh. The Psalms speak of wicked men who say that “there is no God” (10:4, 14:1). Job abuses Yahweh (quite understandably, in the circumstances) for his capricious cruelty. The book of Job as a whole, perhaps, creates room for an attitude of suspicion and doubt toward the divine. But these are slender pickings. As a rule, this type of literature exists to insist on the incontrovertible truth of a divinity that favors its own acolytes.

In the Western world, it is only for ancient Greece, and later Greek-influenced Rome, that the scattered tesserae can be pieced together into a coherent mosaic. (Ancient China also had its atheists; but that would be a different story.) This is in part because vastly more material survives in Greek than in all other ancient languages (including Latin) put together. Indeed, I would wager that more words survive written by the Greek medical writer Galen alone than of the literature of ancient Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, and Israel combined. Add in the huge amount of material culture, art, stone inscription, and papyrus that Greece generated over a thousand-year period, and we can begin to get a sense of why the documentation for the inhabitants of this small peninsula and its diaspora is so much richer. But it is not simply a question of density of evidence. Greece has bequeathed a diversity of material that is so unfortunately lacking for other ancient peoples: as well as the official record, as it were, Greek historians have the outtakes and the alternative versions. Greek history tells us about eccentrics, deviants, miscreants, and skeptics.

History is, so we are often told, written by the winners. Much of the labor of social history, from the mid-twentieth century onward, has been directed toward recovering the voices of those who do not loom large in the dominant script: women, slaves, children, the infirm, minorities. The book in your hands, by contrast, deals with a relatively small segment of ancient society. Most of those named in these pages were educated males from the upper tiers of Greek and Roman life (not because atheism is an exclusively elite, male prerogative, but because that narrow demographic sliver is disproportionately represented in our sources). Yet they too have often been airbrushed out of ancient history, or their significance minimized. Accounts of Greek religion and culture have almost always been written from the point of view of the believers. The result is a misleading impression of ancient religion as a smoothly functional system, with no glitches. It is time to restore the other partners in the dialogue to life.
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Why has history been written in this way, so as to favor religion? The answer is not straightforward. It is true enough, certainly, that some modern scholars have allowed their own religious values to percolate into their writing about antiquity. Even today, scholarly discussions of ancient atheism can prompt undignified tirades against “populist, fundamentalist atheism” and its “zealous preachers.” Classical scholars, however, are not usually known for their piety; quite the opposite, they have usually liked to see themselves as fiercely secular. The discipline of classics as we know it today, indeed, emerged in the nineteenth century as a result of a messy divorce from theological studies. Since then, historians of Greek religion have sought to define it by contrast with the monotheistic religions of the modern West, and particularly Christianity. But this itself has been part of the problem. So keen have classicists been to avoid “Christianizing” the Greeks (a cardinal offense in the academy!) that the standard textbooks have tended to describe Greek polytheism as in effect a straightforward inversion of modern Christianity (particularly in its Protestant guise): focused on collective ritual rather than individual contemplation, the public sphere rather than the private self, outward performance rather than inner belief, conformity to past practice rather than scripture. There is much in this portrait that is true, but rigid, schematic oppositions can be deeply misleading. It is demonstrably wrong to suggest that Greek religion was unproblematically “embedded” (to use the scholarly parlance) in society, fully naturalized in all of the day-to-day rhythms of the ancient city, to the extent that no ancient could imagine a world without religion.
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