Atheism, it’s safe to say—or religious skepticism more generally—was more common in the ancient and medieval world than a straightforward reading of history otherwise suggests. The reason is obvious: until relatively recent times, charges of atheism carried with them the threat of excommunication, imprisonment, and death. People hide their true feelings to avoid fates far less severe than this.
While we’re all more or less familiar with the horrific practices of torture and execution carried out by the Church during the Middle Ages (and beyond)—purportedly in service to the religion of the “Prince of Peace”—what is perhaps less known is that religious persecutions of “atheists” occurred frequently in the otherwise “freethinking” culture of ancient Greece. Fighting the gods—and challenging orthodoxy and tradition—has always come at substantial risk.
Some examples: The presocratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who proposed naturalistic explanations of the world, such as the Sun being merely “a fiery mass, larger than the Peloponnese,” was charged with impiety and had to flee Athens to avoid death; Socrates famously was executed by hemlock for “impiety and corrupting the youth” by “not believing in the city’s gods and introducing new deities”; and Protogoras was put on trial for simply writing “about the gods I cannot know whether they exist or not.” Even if these condemnations were politically motivated, it’s still telling that accusations of atheism carried such strong weight as a capital offense.
Tolerance, it seems, is not a strength of the human species, even in the great city-state of Athens. Faced with these prospects, we must concede that countless historical atheists must have either (1) concealed their true beliefs, or (2) expressed their sincere beliefs only to be killed or exiled or to have their books burned. And so we should be grateful for even the few scraps of text that we do have demonstrating courageous nonbelief.
But it remains the case that we don’t have much. No texts of the presocratics, for example, survive in their original or complete form; what we have are a small number of quotations and fragments preserved by later authors along with summaries and commentaries. Even for Epicurus, writing later in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, who wrote an estimated 300+ works, including a book titled “On the Gods,” only a few letters, fragments, sayings, and quotations survive.
Protagoras, Democritus, and Epicurus all wrote books specifically on the gods, of which none survive, yet we have the full text of Plato’s Timaeus, which argues for the existence of a creator god and, subsequently, was easily assimilated into the Christian worldview. This imbalance is a travesty of intellectual history.
Plato thought there were eternal, perfect, unchanging Forms of chairs and beds (in which all actually existing chairs and beds partake, whatever that means)—and we get to read all about it in perfectly preserved texts—but as to what Democritus, the father of the atomic theory of matter, had to say about the gods, we have next to nothing. This sure seems backwards.
This is all to say that any brief history of atheism in ancient Greece is going to be very sporadic and incomplete. But even what we do have shows an impressive range. Let’s take a look.
The march towards atheism in ancient Greece
In the previous post, Breaking the Spell, we saw the Xenophanes (c. 570 – c. 478 BCE), the first recorded religious skeptic in the West, broke the spell of religion and initiated the first “Copernican revolution” of human thought, in that, just as the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, humans create gods in their own image and not the other way around. And once that dangerous idea gets out—the possibility that gods are simply imagined—it’s a few small steps to naturalism, agnosticism, and then outright atheism.
Taking the next step was Anaxagoras (c. 500—428 BCE), who, realizing that, if, as Xenophanes supposed, the gods are simply mental projections, then natural phenomena, things like the sun and moon, are simply material bodies, and not actually gods (Helios and Selene). Anaxagoras would claim that “the sun is a red-hot mass, larger than the Peloponnese” and that “the sun provides the moon with its brightness.” For these beliefs, he was tried and condemned to death, to which he had to flee Athens for Lampascus.
Prodicus of Ceos (c. 465 BC – c. 395 BC) would carry on this tradition by noting that people like to ascribe the name of gods to beneficial things, saying that “it was the things which were serviceable to human life that had been regarded as gods,” thinking that the sun, moon, rivers, and springs were deemed gods because they benefited human life. But, like Anaxagoras, he believed they were simply material bodies.
Once you realize, even if only potentially, that the gods may simply be figments of the imagination, this could be enough to compel you to suspend judgment altogether—thus was born agnosticism. Protogoras of Abdera (c. 490–420 BCE), perhaps the first recorded agnostic in the West, wrote, “Concerning the gods, I am unable to know whether they exist or not, nor what they are like, for many things prevent knowledge: the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.”
In this he was simply echoing Xenophanes:
And concerning the gods,
No man has seen clearly nor will anyone ever
Know the truth
About the things I speak of;
For even if he happened to speak what is
Perfectly true,
He himself does not know it.
All things are mingled with opinion.
The next logical step—in the march to outright atheism—was to admit that the gods or god exists, but that they or he remains uninterested in human affairs and does not take human form (again following Xenophanes, the spiritual ancestor of all religious doubters). Epicurus, the follower of the great atomist Democritus, who thought that “atoms and void alone exist in reality,” said that:
The gods do indeed exist, since our knowledge of them is a matter of clear and distinct perception; but they are not like what the masses suppose them to be, because most people do not maintain the pure conception of the gods.
Epicurus would further say that “a happy and eternal being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; hence he is exempt from movements of anger and partiality, for every such movement implies weakness.”
This, again, echoes Xenophanes: “There is one god, greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in body or in thought.”
We can detect here, despite the skepticism, a stubborn resistance to shed the idea of god entirely, but we should not be too surprised as to why this is the case. Without any notion of evolution to explain the complexity of life, ancient thinkers were holding onto the idea of a divine creator out of what seemed like a necessity. But unlike the orthodox theists, they were increasingly disconnecting this creative intelligence or force from any human-like form (Spinoza, Einstein, and the pantheists would carry on this tradition in later eras, as would Thomas Paine and the Deists).
This led to the final step: If some of the gods could be rejected, then perhaps all of the gods should be rejected—thus we have the formal birth of atheism. As Richard Dawkins would later write, “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
This final step—from doubting the gods, to suspending judgment, to finally rejecting them explicitly—was left to Diagoras of Melos (c. 470 – c. 400 BCE), Strato of Lampascus (c. 335 – c. 269 BCE) and Theodorus of Cyrene (c. 340–c. 250 BCE), possibly the first well-known Western atheists. While we don’t have any direct works, we do have commentary from other authors, particularly Cicero.
For example, according to Cicero, “Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene held that there are no gods at all.” Cicero further relates this story about Diagoras:
Diagoras, named the Atheist, once came to Samothrace, and a certain friend said to him, ‘You who think that the gods disregard men’s affairs, do you not remark all the votive pictures that prove how many persons have escaped the violence of the storm, and come safe to port, by dint of vows to the gods?’ ‘That is so,’ replied Diagoras; ‘it is because there are nowhere any pictures of those who have been shipwrecked and drowned at sea.
Regarding Strato, Cicero says, ‘he denies the need to appreciate the work of the Gods in order to construct the world. All the things that exist he teaches have been produced by nature,’ and ‘thus he liberates God from a big job and me from fear.’
What is still needed—if in fact the gods do not exist, as the atheists maintain—is an account of the human propensity to nevertheless create them. Why does virtually every culture seemingly feel the need to delude itself?
In the following extended excerpt, preserved by Sextus Empiricus, Critias (or Euripides, in one tradition), makes the following hypothesis, which is worth reading in its entirety:
A time there was when anarchy did rule
The lives of men, which then were like the beasts,
Enslaved by force; nor was there then reward
For good men, nor for wicked punishment.
Next, as I deem, did men establish laws
For punishment, that Justice might be lord
Of all mankind, and Insolence enchain’d;
And whosoe’r did sin was penalized.
Next, as the laws did hold men back from deeds
Of open violence, but still such deeds
Were done in secret,—then, as I maintain,
Some shrewd man first, a man in counsel wise,
Discovered unto men the fear of Gods,
Thereby to frighten sinners should they sin
E’en secretly in deed, or word, or thought.
Hence was it that he brought in Deity
Telling how God enjoys an endless life,
Hears with his mind and sees, and taketh thought
And heeds things, and his nature is divine,
So that he hearkens to men’s every word
And has the power to see men’s every act.
E’en if you plan in silence some ill deed,
The Gods will surely mark it; for in them
Wisdom resides. So, speaking words like these
Most cunning doctrine did he introduce,
The truth concealing under speech untrue.
The place he spoke of as the God’s abode
Was that whereby he could affright men most,—
The place from which, he knew, both terrors came
And easements unto men of toilsome life—
To wit the vault above, wherein do dwell
The lightnings, he beheld, and awesome claps
Of thunder, and the starry face of heaven,
Fair-spangled by that cunning craftsman Time,—
Whence, too, the meteor’s glowing mass doth speed
And liquid rain descends upon the earth.
Such were the fears wherewith he hedged men round,
And so to God he gave a fitting home,
By this his speech, and in a fitting place,
And thus extinguished lawlessness by laws.
Thus first did some man, as I deem, persuade
Men to suppose the race of Gods exists.
The theory of religion as a form of social and political control, through the fear of god, was thus born. We also have Euhemerus (late fourth century BCE), who held that gods, and mythological tales more generally, are loosely based on historical events and figures but which inevitably become altered and exaggerated over time—likely for the purposes of social manipulation and control.
And so we’ve run the full gamut of nonbelief hundreds of years before the emergence of Christianity—albeit much of it stamped out by dogmatic thinkers and religious zealots throughout the ages.
But think about what the Greeks accomplished: In Ancient Greece, we find the origin of skepticism, agnosticism, atheism, the idea that gods are psychological projections, naturalism, early ideas of evolution (Anaximander thought humans evolved from fish), and speculations on why and how religion was invented. Not only is this an awesome achievement, it should, at the very least, dispel the notion that religious doubt is a recent phenomena.
In attacking or mocking these ideas, later authors, ironically, actually preserved them, lending historical credence to their assertions. Whether or not we listen to these suppressed voices of reason is another story altogether.
References
- Cicero. De Natura Deorum
- Sextus Empiricus. Against the Physicists
- Epicurus. The Art of Happiness (Penguin Classics)
- The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists (Oxford World’s Classics)
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries for Xenophanes, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Socrates, and Epicurus
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