Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (7 page)

Both Anaximander and Anaximenes, certainly, spoke of gods. Anaximander associated the divine with infinity, which he saw as the ultimate principle of existence; Anaximenes equated air with god. These claims are, as ever, hard to judge without the authors’ own words. They are usually taken at face value, to mean that there is a real divinity in the world. There is however a rather more subversive interpretation: what is conventionally called “god,” they may have been saying, is in fact no more than a property of the material world itself. You say “god,” I say air, wind, or some other material principle. If this is right, then the point is precisely the opposite of what we would now see as a theistic one: that things that seem to call for a supernatural explanation do not need one. In the case of Anaximenes this seems a distinct possibility, for “air” is undeniably a physical feature. But Anaximander’s concept of infinity at first sight looks to be something more mystical and less physical. But even here there is perhaps a nonsupernatural explanation. Anaximander may have meant merely to distinguish between individual things that exist, which are perishable, and existence itself, which is not. “The infinite is the source (
arkh
ē
) of things that exist,” one ancient commentator on him explains, “for it is from this that all things come to be and into this all things perish.” In other words, the claim may be not that “the infinite” is a creator being on the conventional model of a deity, but that to understand reality we need to take a “god’s-eye” view of it. We should not contemplate it from the perspective of an individual, since individual beings, species, and worlds come and go; what we need to grasp is the interconnected whole of the cosmos, which continues to exist irrespective of the fate of individual elements. Since this existence is defined precisely by its immortality, it can be called “divine,” but this is a metaphorical extension of the traditional language of divinity rather than an affirmation of the existence of gods as conventionally understood.
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These issues are rather subtle and unprovable either way given the current state of the evidence. But thinking through these possibilities is a useful exercise, because it shows just what a vague and flexible concept a god is. Are we speaking of an intelligent, sentient being? That is, what we might call a “deity-max,” with the capacity to design, to choose, to create? Or, at the other extreme, are we to think of god in the looser, more metaphorical way I suggested in the previous paragraph, as a way of describing nature itself? This is a vital distinction for modern readers, since it runs along one of the major fault lines of religious identity: the “deity-max” option essentially points to a theist position, the second an atheist/naturalist one. (Atheists might not be happy using the label “god” to describe nature, but the underlying model is compatible with naturalist beliefs.) These questions were probably less obviously contentious among the early Greeks, since they had no theologically canonical sense of what a god had to be like: there was no scripture to prove that one person’s definition of divinity was better than another’s. Even if the Milesians did present divinity in the radical way I have suggested, ancient readers are likely to have seen them as adjusting what was already a flexible concept, rather than as engaging in acts of blasphemous detonation. Certainly no ancient source accuses them of atheism. Greek religion was, perhaps, capacious enough to accommodate ideas that we would now associate with atheism. Even so, the Milesians’ ideas were revolutionary in terms of the development of accounts of the world based on physical laws (or at least what were thought to be such at the time).

The first of the Ionians whom we can read in his own words is Xenophanes of Colophon, resident of another old city on the Anatolian coast, some way to the north of Miletus. Xenophanes was an approximate contemporary of Anaximenes, active in the middle of the sixth century. We have already met him tipping scorn onto Homer’s and Hesiod’s anthropomorphic representations of the gods. “Homer and Hesiod,” he opines, “have attributed to the gods all things that are shameful and reproachable among humans: stealing, adultery and deceit.” This misconception of divinity comes from a kind of projection: we assume that gods should be just like us. “Mortals think gods are born,” he writes, “and have clothing, voice and body just like them.” In another fragment, this naïveté comes in for some scorching satire: “Now if cows, horses or lions had hands, and were able to draw with those hands and create things as humans do, horses would draw gods in the form of horses, and cows in the form of cows, and create bodies just like they had.” Then again: “Africans say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired.” These claims form a cumulative case against the anthropomorphic ideas of the gods enshrined in Homer and Hesiod. Xenophanes thus preempts by two and half millennia the claims of modern cognitive theorists who explain the origins of religion in terms of a human desire to explain the inexplicable in terms of the intentions of a human-like figure.
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Xenophanes speaks with the confidence of a new cultural era. References to Thracians and Africans present him as a well-traveled cosmopolitan with a sophisticated understanding of the world around him. Epic myths to him, meanwhile, were outdated nonsense, “the fictions of our predecessors.” He also expressed disbelief in prophecy, the traditional means of communication between the gods and human beings. Like the Milesians, he based his understanding of the world instead on the observation of physical reality. The fragments of his works that survive tell repeatedly of his captivation with natural phenomena: he speaks of the heating of the Earth, of caves, rain, of multiple solar systems, of the saltiness of the sea, of the fossilization of marine life, and much more. He explains meteorological phenomena through physical causes and had a particular fascination with clouds: the sun and the moon are burning clouds; lightning comes from the flash of clouds as they move; rainbows too are made of clouds; even comets, shooting stars, and the nautical phenomenon known as Saint Elmo’s fire can be elucidated in this way. As with the Milesians, the important point is not how scientifically accurate he was (the only tools at his disposal being the naked eye, an enquiring mind, and a cloud fixation), but how he positioned himself against the prevailing wisdom of the day. Once again, the desire to account for lightning and rainbows seems calculated to undermine mythological stories about Zeus and Iris.
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Xenophanes was in part a naturalist who rejected traditional ways of explaining the way things are in terms of the gods of mythology. He believed that the world is composed of physical matter and that its many wonders are physical rather than supernatural in original. Like Anaximander and Anaximenes, however, he also speaks of gods, or rather of “one god, greatest among gods and mortals, not at all like mortals in body or thought.” This one god was the most important element in his system. He remains unmoving and unchanging in one place, quite remote from the world as we know it; he is uncreated and undying; and he causes motion in other bodies through the force of his mind. In other words, the one god is the principle that animates the cosmos, causing growth and decay and the cycles of the stars. The one god is, in our terms, nature itself. But this god is more than a metaphor: he can
think.
He has intention and will. Deity-max has made a comeback (if, indeed, he ever went away).
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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.
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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 (
arkh
ē
) 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.
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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.
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