Whitmarsh Battling the Gods

Atheism in the Ancient World
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-27932-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

How new is atheism? In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean to recover the stories of those who first refused the divinities. Long before the Enlightenment sowed the seeds of disbelief in a deeply Christian Europe, atheism was a matter of serious public debate in the Greek world. But history is written by those who prevail, and the Age of Faith mostly suppressed the lively free-thinking voices of antiquity. Tim Whitmarsh brings to life the fascinating ideas of Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; and Epicurus and his followers. He shows how the early Christians came to define themselves against atheism, and so suppress the philosophy of disbelief. Battling the Gods is the first book on the origins of the secular values at the heart of the modern state. Authoritative and bold, provocative and humane, it reveals how atheism and doubt, far from being modern phenomena, have intrigued the human imagination for thousands of years.

Tim Whitmarsh is the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University. A well-known specialist in the civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome, he has appeared on BBC radio and TV, and written for the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and Literary Review.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Whitmarsh, Tim

Leseproben

A Dialogue

THERSANDER: The gods are dead. Their withered bodies lie immolated on the altars of science and reason. The pious are exposed for credulous fools.

DIOTIMUS: Nonsense! Belief in the gods is stronger than ever. It is true, of course, that the peacocks of the academy deceive themselves that their worldly knowledge is all. But you should get out into the streets. Leave behind your chattering dinner parties and take a walk through the city: the shrines are packed, the temples blackened with the smoke of sacrifice.

THERSANDER: Their belief is skin-deep. They act this way because they have always done so, not out of deep conviction. They do not have the time or inclination to question; they are too busy trying to survive, while their foolish leaders pitch them from one disaster to another.

DIOTIMUS: The people need their gods, in this perilous world of ours. It is their comfort and stay.

THERSANDER: Yes, of course religion offers comfort and hope. But it also makes for anxiety and fear! It plays on the emotions of the credulous. It has nothing to do with truth. Only observation, testing, and rational enquiry can lead us to proper understanding.

DIOTIMUS: You blind yourself to the truth that is not of this world. It is obvious that humans are born capable of glimpsing the divine. All people have that capacity, even if some choose not to use it. That is why there has never been, and never will be, a society without gods.

THERSANDER: Humans created gods. Primitive humans saw divinity in the sun, moon, and stars, in the cycles of the seasons. They lacked scientific understanding of matter, the cosmos, and nature. In time, politicians and rulers realized the power of religious belief and cynically twisted it to their own ends. There are no gods overseeing social order, punishing wrongdoing; that is simply what our leaders teach us, to keep us in check.

DIOTIMUS: Atheism is a fad. Future generations will look back on it as a passing folly.

THERSANDER: Quite the opposite: it is religion that is dying. It has no answers to the questions of the modern world, only adherence to outdated dogma and ritual. I know that belief in the gods is deeply rooted, and those who profit from it will fight tooth and claw to preserve it. But as true understanding of the world grows and spreads, it will be exposed for the vanity that it is.

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.1

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.2

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.3

Just as atheism exists cross-culturally, it also (as Plato rightly says) exists throughout history. A thoughtful study by John Arnold of Birk-beck 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.4

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,...