Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (26 page)

The Theodosian Code defines Catholic Christianity in opposition to a series of religious “others,” execrated as manifestations of madness and deviancy and threatened with state violence. This was a massive change, for Greco-Roman polytheism had seen itself not as a unified system that excluded others but as an infinitely extensible network of local cults. The elasticity of polytheism meant that it had no external borders: if new deities were uncovered, they could simply be added to the list. Monotheism, by contrast, carried with it the idea of right and wrong belief. In earlier periods, that different people worshipped different gods had been viewed as an empirical fact about the world; now it was a problem that required correction, using the full power of the state and the law. Earlier Greeks and Romans had not even had a word for the acceptance that there were many gods, since this was seen as a self-evident ethnographic reality rather than a theological worldview. The word “polytheist,” like “pagan,” is a Christian coinage and implicitly suggests its inferiority to its polar opposite, “monotheist.” (Personally I prefer to describe those who cleaved to the old ways as “polytheists” rather than the more obviously pejorative “pagans” [
pagani,
“rustics”], but it is important at all times to recognize that when considering late antiquity we are forced to adopt a set of religious distinctions and categories that would have been alien to an earlier era, and that stack the deck in favor of a Christian worldview.)

One religious crime, however, is missing from the Theodosian catalogue. Nowhere does this statute book mention atheism. It is, apparently, unimaginable in this world that anyone could be without religion. There are only two possibilities: true
religio
or false
superstitio.
The assumption underlying this position seems to be the belief that all humans are born with a natural sense of the divine but that some people have been led into misunderstanding by false teaching, a common belief among Christians of the time. This doctrine created a cultural blind spot: with no role to play in this binary construction of the world, with no place to occupy on the scale between true religion and false superstition, atheism now became effectively invisible.

The Christianization of the Roman Empire put an end to serious philosophical atheism for over a millennium. The word itself, indeed, acquired an additional meaning, which was wholly negative: rather than the rational critique of theism as a whole, it came to mean simply the absence of belief in the
Christian
god. For Christians in late antiquity, there was no contradiction at all in referring, for example, to “atheist polytheists”: polytheism was a misunderstanding of the true nature of the one god, which led its benighted practitioners into the “atheistic” position of rejecting the Christian message. Christian heretics too could be called
atheoi:
in such cases the issue was not even that they did not believe in the Christian god, but rather that they did not believe in him in the right way. The earliest instance of this usage comes in the writings of Philo of Alexandria, a Greco-Jewish intellectual who died around AD 50. “Those who are dead in their soul are truly atheists,” he writes, “while those arrayed alongside the true god live an eternal life.” Or: “Atheism is the source of all crimes.” Or most strikingly: “The atheists are waging a war against the lovers of God, a war that admits of no treaty or diplomacy.” (This is, incidentally, the earliest instance I know of the “militant atheism” trope so beloved of present-day theists.) Perhaps Philo can be excused this paranoia, given the prevalence of anti-Semitism and pogroms in first-century Alexandria. But it was also a paranoia rooted in the Hebrew Bible’s vision of the Israelites as a people set apart from others, fundamentally and irreconcilably alien. That distinctively monotheistic sense that there can only be one true religion has a tendency to foster sharp divisions between communities, and indeed a sense of the inevitability of violence between them. In Christian writings from the fourth century onward too we find time and again the idea of
atheoi
as mortal enemies that need to be joined in battle: the atheists are “universal enemies”! Catholic Christians have “drawn up the battle lines against the innumerable atheist heretics”! This figurative war could be quickly literalized, too: religious-sectarian hostility, which had been rare in the polytheist world, became a regular feature of life. A recent study of sacred violence between Catholics and Donatists in North Africa alone runs to over eight hundred pages. The baneful idea of holy war against unbelievers had put in its first appearance. Religious difference, for just about the first time in Mediterranean antiquity, had become the driver of conflict.
8

But were Christians not themselves called “atheists” by Greeks and Romans? This is often asserted, but in fact the evidence for it comes almost entirely from Christian sources themselves. The fourth-century Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, for example, depicts Constantine’s rival Licinius as himself conducting his own “holy war” on behalf of traditional polytheism. While offering sacrifice in a grove, he is said to have inveighed against Constantine for “betraying his ancestral inheritance and taking up an atheistic belief…let us set out to war against the atheists!” Eusebius of course had no way of knowing what Licinius actually said at the time. The idea of a holy war waged against Christian “atheists” is his own construction, projected onto Licinius; it serves merely to legitimize Constantine’s response, which is to reverse the terms and attack the polytheist “atheists” himself. The reversibility of the accusation of atheism is in fact a recurrent feature of Christian discourse. The story of the martyrdom of Polycarp of Smyrna, set at some point between AD 155 and 167, offers a wonderful example. The hero of the story, a virtuous old Christian, is arraigned before the governor and a bloodthirsty crowd in the arena. “Swear to Caesar’s good fortune!” commands the governor. “Repent! Say the words: ‘Away with the atheists!’ ” Polycarp turns to address the crowd, waving his fist at them, crying, “Away with the atheists!” thus redirecting the charge of atheism at the polytheists. This act of defiance earns him a fiery martyrdom at the stake. But although Polycarp’s impressive response to persecution makes for a neat, punchy climax to the story, that story is itself surely historically inaccurate. No non-Christian would have uttered the words attributed to the governor. The idea of “repentance” (
metanoia
) is a Judeo-Christian one, and the phrase “away with” (
aire
) directly echoes language used in the Gospels to condemn Jesus. It seems unlikely that a Roman governor, apparently hostile to Christianity, should have borrowed Christian phraseology so explicitly. The story of Polycarp’s martyrdom may have been invented entirely or (perhaps more likely) embellished with motifs designed to appeal to a Christian audience, and indeed to draw out the parallels with the execution of Jesus.
9

The conclusion seems inevitable that the violent “othering” as atheists of those who hold different religious views was overwhelmingly a Judeo-Christian creation, which was then projected back onto the polytheists. There were, to be sure, some subtler uses of this device. In about AD 150, a Syrian called Justin wrote a work in defense of Christianity that invoked the figure of Socrates, who (he claimed) tried to lead humanity away from these demons by using “true reason and critical examination”—but was condemned to death as an impious (
aseb
ē
) atheist (
atheon
) and for introducing a new type of divinity. Socrates has been reimagined as a Christian martyr! “That is why we [i.e., the Christians] are called atheists,” Justin continues. “And we confess that we are atheists…at least as far as these kinds of imagined gods are concerned. But not with respect to the truest god, the father of justice and self-control and the other virtues, who is free from all impurity.” Christians, then, are indeed atheists! Or, rather, atheists of a kind. Instead of simply reversing the supposed accusation of atheism, like other Christian writers of the era, Justin accepts and embraces it: like Socrates, he turns his back on the gods of polytheism.
10

Indeed, while there were those early Christians who decried the earlier classical
atheoi
as the worst kind of disbelievers, there were others who took them as allies in their war on polytheism. In the second century, Clement of Alexandria wrote of the paradox that “the label ‘atheist’ has been applied to Euhemerus of Acragas [
sic
], Nicanor of Cyprus [otherwise unknown], the Melians Diagoras and Hippo, and in addition Theodorus of Cyrene, and many others beside, who lived chaste lives and perceived religious error somewhat more sharply than others did.” In Clement’s view, it was not the virtuous Diagoras and his peers who deserved to be called atheists but the polytheists they criticized. Euhemerus’s
Sacred History,
indeed, was a particular favorite of the early Christians: that even some of the ancients themselves had seen that their gods were just deified mortals was taken as firm proof that belief in the Olympian gods was fundamentally misplaced.
11

It is at first sight a curiosity that the classical
atheoi
were welcomed so enthusiastically in this new era. Their Christian readers, however, were interested only in the rhetorical leverage that they could exert on recalcitrant polytheists, and indeed on wavering Christians. There was no serious engagement with their ideas at the philosophical level—and certainly no sense that Christianity itself could be interrogated by atheistic reasoning. For Christian apologists, philosophical atheism was necessarily consigned to the pre-Christian past, its critique directed not at theism in general but at polytheism in particular. Atheism, now viewed as the debunking of false superstition rather than the interrogation of supernatural belief, could serve no purpose now that the true Christian message had been revealed.

The arrival of Catholic Christianity—Christianity conjoined with imperial power—meant the end of ancient atheism in the West. Once it had been established that the paradigm of true versus false religion was the only one that mattered, there was nowhere to place atheism on the mental map. Cosmological and philosophical debate remained intense, of course, but it was unthinkable outside of the framework of Christian monotheism. Individuals surely experienced doubt and disbelief, just as they always have in all cultures, but they were invisible to dominant society and so have left no trace in the historical record. It is this blind spot that has sustained the illusion that disbelief outside of the post-Enlightenment West is unthinkable. The apparent rise of atheism in the last two centuries, however, is not a historical anomaly; viewed from the longer perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is the global dominance of monotheistic religions and the resultant inability to acknowledge the existence of disbelievers.

I am hugely grateful to the British Academy, which awarded me a grant that absolved me of my university duties during 2012–2013. I am grateful, too, to my former students and colleagues at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who tolerated my absence during that period with good humor. Teaching extraordinary students is a wonderful privilege, and not one that I take for granted. A number of specialist academic colleagues have read drafts and steered me through dangerous waters: David Sedley, James Warren, John Ma, Edith Hall, Robert Parker, Robin Osborne, Neil McLynn, Christopher Kelly. My children, India and Soli; my partner, Emily; and my parents, Judy and Guy, have been rocks. Judy and Emily also read large parts of the manuscript for me. Many thanks, too, to my agents Catherine Clarke and George Lucas, to my editors, George Andreou at Knopf and Neil Belton, Walter Donohue, and Julian Loose at Faber and Faber, and to my excellent copy editor, Amy Ryan.