Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Page 8
Xenophanes, then, was not an atheist in any straightforward sense. He was not denying the existence of a deity but radically redefining it: shifting it away from anthropomorphic projections, so that it became instead the explanation for life and motion, what Dylan Thomas called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Even the one god’s “mind” seems entirely nonanthropomorphic: when he claims that the god moves things with his mind, he makes it clear that this is an entirely different type of mind from the human. Xenophanes shifted gods from Olympus into every living being, into science and matter. From another point of view, however, this was the most devastating assault on traditional Greek religion, a religion built around the cultic worship of temples (gods’ houses) and statues. How could one worship the one god? What rituals would one use? The “one god” is like a conventional deity in that he is undying and possessed of immense power, but given that he cannot be known and is not of our world, the word “god” is more of a conceptual placeholder in the absence of any secure definition of this entity. Would anything be lost in Xenophanes’s account of the world if we substituted “nature” for “the one god”?
In the early fifth century BC, the center of philosophical thought shifted westward, to southern Italy and to Elea, a relatively recent colony in what is now Cilento. Here Parmenides taught that the evidence of the senses is not to be trusted; the way of truth was open only to reason. Among his successors (and, according to tradition, lovers) was Zeno, who came up with paradoxes designed to deny the possibility of motion. If I wish to get from a to b, I must first travel half of the distance between the two, to a point that we might call c. But before that I must travel half of the distance between a and the midpoint between a and c, which we can call d. But before I get to d, I must travel half of the distance in between, to e…This process of division leads to an infinite regress, which Zeno took to indicate that the idea of any movement at all was logically impossible. What we experience as movement, then, must be the mere semblance of it; reality must, however, be constant and unchanging. The Eleatic school was in part a response to the Ionians’ insistence on explaining the sum of existence by observing the nature of the physical world around us and extrapolating from there. For the Eleatics, observation was misleading; only rational reflection could lead to the truth. This distinction between the material cosmos and the abstract world of reason (logos) was to have a profound influence on the development of philosophy, allowing for the re-emergence of strong forms of theism. The material world and the senses were downgraded; reason was deified. Parmenides imagines his discovery of the truth about reality as a mystical journey “onto the many-voiced path of the deity, who leads the knowing mortal straight through all things.” A hierarchy was thus created between mind and body, the rational and the sensory, divine truth and mortal experience. This hierarchy was later borrowed by Plato and would ultimately shape the development of early Christianity. The evangelist John has the best known opening of any of the gospels: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “Word” is logos, which could also be translated “reason.” The evangelist is very Parmenidean in spirit.13
Materialism, however, was not dead. In the course of the fifth century, the philosophical hub shifted once again, this time to Athens. By the middle of the century, Athens had become the largest and wealthiest city in the Mediterranean, thanks to its control of the sea. It was also a city obsessed with words. Thanks to its democratic political system, a recent innovation, the ability to persuade others and to reason was highly prized. As a result, it became a magnet for intellectuals from all over the Greek-speaking world, who were attracted both by the promise of financial rewards for teaching wealthy Athenians and their sons and by the prospect of living in a place that prided itself on being (at least in principle) receptive to new ideas.
One such figure was Hippo of Samos. Samos is an island just off the Ionian coast, and Hippo was very much an heir to the sixth-century tradition of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, who had flourished in nearby Miletus. Like Thales, he argued that moisture was the single material origin (arkhē) from which all reality was derived. Hippo, however, took the further step of arguing that the soul is entirely corporeal and that it is nothing more than the brain. This was a radical step. The belief that a living being might have a soul was relatively recent in Greece (there is no such concept in Homer or Hesiod). It seems to have arisen with cults associated with Orpheus promising existence in the afterlife. From the sixth century these spread down from Thrace. The god Dionysus in particular was increasingly associated with the idea of a part of us that survives death. From these cults the idea seems to have percolated into philosophy. The followers of Pythagoras (who originated, like Hippo, from Samos) believed not only that the soul does not die but also that it is reincarnated into other humans or animals; hence their strict vegetarianism. Pythagoras himself claimed to recall having fought in the Trojan War in a previous life as the Trojan Euphorbus. For Hippo to associate the soul with the brain, then, was a direct assault on this position. He may well have denied the existence of gods too. As so often with the pre-Socratics the evidence is sketchy, and Hippo is even less well represented than most. What we do know is that he was known as an atheist (atheos); he may even be the first person in Greek history to have gained this reputation.14
Two pieces of evidence suggest that Hippo was an atheist in the modern sense. The first is the fact that Aristotle, writing some one hundred years later, criticizes him as an excessive materialist; apparently he could not see any role in the world for anything other than matter. This certainly suggests that he did not believe in gods. The second testimony is subtler. We happen to have Hippo’s epitaph, which he himself composed:
This is the grave of Hippo, whom Fate made
equal in death to the immortal gods.
I have given the traditional translation, which implies nothing more than a grandiose claim that Hippo’s achievements have given him immortal fame after death. But there is an alternative one. Michael Hendry argues that Hippo also wanted to hint that the gods themselves are no more. In depriving Hippo of life, Fate has made him “equal to the immortal gods”—in the sense that both are now dead. The adjective “immortal” would have to be taken as heavily ironic in the context. Perhaps Hippo is even claiming to have slain the gods himself, with his materialist arguments. That would make him the theomakhos par excellence: the mortal who battled the gods and won.15
Another radically innovative Ionian was Anaxagoras, from Clazomenae (near the modern Turkish town of Izmir); he arrived in Athens in the 430s. Anaxagoras’s achievement was to reconcile Ionian materialism with Parmenides’s distinction between the physical world of the senses and the rational world of the intellect. Reality, he held, is composed of physical ingredients blended in different ways to produce different substances. All life is physical in origin and generated from primordial seeds. Like his Milesian predecessors, he paid great attention to natural wonders: he explained thunder, earthquakes, comets, floods, and hail in physical terms. But he also proposed something called “mind” (nous), which is entirely different in kind from the material world: pure, unchanging, infinite. Mind is behind the revolutions of the stars. Every animate being has some share in this cosmic mind. In this way, Anaxagoras managed to accommodate Parmenides’s idea of an abstract rationality in the universe without denying the reality of the material world.16
Was Anaxagoras an atheist? There is nothing anachronistic about this question. In the late 430s, he was put on trial for “impiety,” on the grounds that he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies (which he undoubtedly did). This may have been the first time in history that an individual was prosecuted for heretical religious beliefs. Although he escaped, he retained a reputation for impious thought. Socrates, at his own trial, had to remind his jurors not to confuse him with Anaxagoras. On the one hand, his views were clearly reconcilable with a form of theism. The cosmic “mind
” at one level resembles closely Xenophanes’s “one god”: it is remote, self-sufficient, all-powerful, different in kind to the stuff of matter. Elsewhere we learn that it is mind that is behind the orderly rotation of the stars and all of the celestial elements and mind that gives life to organic beings. It looks, to all purposes, like the designing will of a creator god. Yet Anaxagoras never, to our knowledge, identified it with divinity. This is a significant silence: surely if he had wanted to equate “mind” with “god” he would have done so explicitly. Indeed, he seems evasive—deliberately so?—on the question of what “mind” actually is. Plato criticized him on precisely that point: for all his talk of cosmic intelligence, he protested, he always offers materialist explanations for the way the universe is. Ultimately, as with Xenophanes, the central question is how literally or metaphorically we are to take these metaphysical perambulations. Are we to think that mind is a real cosmic property, which has godlike powers of design and creation? Certainly Anaxagoras sometimes speaks of it as acting in time, for example at the origins of existence when it separated out the elements by setting things in motion. Here, mind seems to act like the Yahweh of Genesis or the Allah of the Qur’an. But maybe in its original context (which is now lost) that reference to creation was just a figurative way of saying that the universe as it is now is structured and ordered. Perhaps what he meant was nothing more than that there is a coherent, unified explanation for the way that the material universe is and that this explanation can be disclosed by the inquiring human mind.17
For the pre-Socratics (apart from the Eleatics) “god” typically meant not a deity of popular religion but the nexus of invisible forces that holds the material world together, the sum of all that cannot be explained by observation and perception alone. Modern theologians refer to the principle of “the god of the gaps,” according to which belief in the divine is thought to be confirmed by the failure of science to explain everything. Although there are some superficial resemblances, the pre-Socratic deity is in fact something completely different. It does not pick up where science leaves off; rather—this is the important point—it is an intrinsically scientific concept. It joins together all of our isolated experiences of the physical world into a coherent, rational, predictable structure. This is why the pre-Socratic god seems so often, from a modern perspective, to slope into the metaphorical: it is not really a god at all. This, perhaps, explains Anaxagoras’s choice of “mind” instead of “god”: it is a better way of expressing the idea of the intellectual coherence, and, indeed, intelligibility, of the world.
One group of pre-Socratic materialists, however, chose to go down a different path altogether. Democritus was born in around 460 BC in Abdera, a town in Thrace that had, by a nice coincidence, been founded by colonists from Anaxagoras’s hometown, Clazomenae. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he spent little time in Athens (“I went to Athens and no one knew me,” he reportedly said). He and his teacher Leucippus were credited with the development of the doctrine of atomism, the theory that the smallest elements of reality are tiny, indestructible, indivisible (the Greek adjective is atomos) particles of matter. According to Democritus, the universe is composed, essentially, of nothing more than atoms and void. Everything that we sense in the world around us is formed of clusters of atoms; all substantial changes in nature (such as the decay of a corpse or the transformation of water into steam) are simply rearrangements in the atomic structure of such clusters.18
Atoms have certain properties: they vibrate, impacting on other atoms, causing motion. They come in different sizes and shapes, and these qualities determine the ways in which they move through the void. This atomic habit of moving in predictable ways is a partial explanation for the orderliness of the universe: the celestial bodies, for example, will move in the predictable way that they do because it is the property of a body with their atomic structure to do so. But how, without appealing to an intelligent design behind the cosmos, do we account for the fact that everything seems so well set up for organic life? Democritus met this challenge by positing an infinite number of worlds. Some of these will not sustain life; others will, with varying degrees of success. In other words, the fact that our world is as it is is the result not of an integrated design in the universe but of luck. Democritus is the first philosopher to have given a central role to tykhē, “chance.”
It may seem at first sight implausible to claim that our complex, symbiotic, life-supporting ecosystem is the result of mere chance. Modern theists who appeal to design-based arguments about the nature of the universe, for example, are fond of pointing out that the odds of the big bang occurring in just the right way to produce a life-sustaining universe are infinitesimal: “If the initiation explosion of the big bang had differed in strength as little as 1 part in 1060, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back in on itself, or expanded too quickly for stars to have formed.” Yet such arguments can be answered using Democritus’s theories as a basis. Firstly, Democritus’s infinite numbers of “worlds” could be taken to refer to planets, and on present evidence no other one supports life. Why would a god who created existence with the primary purpose of allowing life have designed such a vast expanse of space that could not do so? Alternatively, we might imagine multiple alternative versions of the universe as we know it. In that case, the question is whether ours is the best possible one for sustaining life. Could not an omnipotent designer god have created one that offered, for example, a larger Earth to avoid overcrowding, or a neighboring planet that could be colonized? Indeed, if there are, as Democritus proposed, an infinite number of universes, it follows that there are ones that are necessarily better adapted to sustaining life (and perhaps other forms of life that might be superior to our carbon-based version). Both of these Democritean objections expose a serious flaw in design-based theism, which invariably assumes that the cosmos designed by a perfect god must itself be perfect. We simply cannot test whether our world is the best possible one: we cannot rerun the formation of the universe using different variables to see whether alternative, and possibly better life-generating scenarios might have arisen.19
Democritus’s materialist universe has no obvious room for any supernatural forces, but he does nevertheless speak of both souls and gods. The soul, he thought, was the same as the mind and composed of atoms. Soul, in other words, is what we would call consciousness, and presumably he thought it was dispersed after death (as his followers, the Epicureans, did). His views on deities are more complicated. On the one hand, he thought that the gods of conventional religion arose in former times when people naïvely mistook natural phenomena like thunder and eclipses for manifestations of divine power. Yet he also believed that it was possible for us to see gods in our sleep, because there are demonic images (eidōla, “idols”) that exist in the air and penetrate our bodies. He clearly felt a need to explain, in physical-materialist terms, why some people claim to encounter gods in their dreams. They are, however, entirely incidental to his system: atoms and void are sufficient to explain the functioning of the world. In Democritus’s material world, gods have become parasites rather than hosts.20
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PART TWO
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Classical Athens
ATHEISM AND OPPRESSION
The period of Greek history between the fifth and the fourth centuries BC is known as the “classical” period, thanks to the mesmerizing image of democratic Athens. During this time Athens became the largest city in the Mediterranean, adorned itself with the finest architecture anywhere in the world, and achieved unrivaled cultural preeminence thanks to its drama, oratory, history, and philosophy.
Although all Greek city-states depended on the idea of inclusive citizenship, democracy itself was a relatively late innovation. In the late sixth century, the city of Athens disposed of its last tyrant, Hippias. Unsurprisingly, the vacuum created a power struggle among the Athenian elite. One of these contentious aristocrats, Cleisthenes, won out by mobilizing popular support. In
the aftermath, he radically reorganized Athenian society, dividing the citizen body (that is, the free male Athenian adults) into ten tribes and 139 “demes” or regional units, each self-governing at the local level. The democratic system, designed to prevent the domination of one group or another, represented each unit proportionally. He drew up a new council of five hundred men, fifty from each tribe, to set the agenda for policy and law for the city as a whole. By 501 BC, the signature feature of Athenian democracy was also in place: a popular assembly with sovereign power, open to all citizens, each of whom had an equal right to speak. Judicial decisions too would be made by the people, with huge juries of up to 1,500 members.1
The fifth century was the Athenian century. Under the guidance of Pericles (495–429 BC), inspirational and controversial in equal measures, the iconic temple of Athena Parthenos—the Parthenon—was completed in 438 BC. What we now call the Parthenon marbles (the relief sculptures that ran along the outside of the building) were added by 432. Pheidias, the most famous sculptor of the day, added a colossal sculpture of the goddess, wrought in gold and ivory. Intellectual life was flourishing too. Athens was coming to attract the finest talents of the day: philosophers and sophists such as Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Gorgias, as well as other kinds of writers like the historian Herodotus. Dramatic festivals had taken place in Athens since the time of the sixth-century tyrants, but it was under the democracy that they peaked, with the famous tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedians Cratinus, Eupolis, and Aristophanes.