Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

by Tim Whitmarsh

  The rise of philosophy signaled nothing so simple as the rejection of divinity. Yes, Homeric and Hesiodic ideas about the gods were attacked and often rejected. The epic poets were increasingly seen as representatives of an archaism against which the philosophers defined themselves. Crucially, what is more, the pre-Socratics developed ideas about the material nature of the world around us: rejecting explanations for natural phenomena that invoked the gods of myth, they substituted ones based on the properties of physical stuff. Most pre-Socratics, however, retained some kind of role for the divine in their models of the world, but in a radically transfigured sense: gone were the anthropoid gods of myth and cult, replaced by abstract embodiments of nature and celestial order. Early Greek philosophy, one scholar has argued, was largely based on a kind of theory of intelligent design: the ordered circuits of the heavenly bodies, the procession of the seasons and the symbiotic relationships between different organisms were taken as evidence for the coherence of existence, which must point to the existence of a god. A god of this kind, however, was unlike anything known to the Greeks. When the pre-Socratics speak of divinity, we can often substitute “nature.” “God” often seems to be a metaphorical way of referring to the interconnectedness of all life. There is certainly no sense that these cosmic beings are divinities one can worship, or even interact with: the sources never speak of prayer, sacrifice, temples, or ritual.

  The idea that the universe was made out of matter was a powerful and contagious one and did ultimately pave the way for a conception of a god-free reality. Only a few of these early philosophers went this far, but their example has been hugely significant for the development of atheism. The pre-Socratics mark the beginning of a journey leading ultimately to what modern atheists call “naturalism”: the belief that the physical world is the sum total of reality, that nature rather than divinity structures our existence.2

  The pre-Socratics have another role to play in the making of modern atheism and secularism in that philosophy celebrates the critical spirit, the willingness to question received values. The idea that progress is made by breaking with the past, by rejecting and questioning, is not a self-evident one, and it calls for some explanation. The historian of science Geoffrey Lloyd has argued that this sense of a critical displacement of existing models was intrinsic to the very functioning of philosophy as a social institution. The emergence of Greek speculation on the world was driven, he argues, by the competitive structure of Greek society in the archaic era: from the earliest times we hear of public contests between wise men, competing for the acclamation of audiences. You had to appeal to a broad audience, but you also had to offer something new. In Lloyd’s view—and it is a plausible one—early Greek intellectual culture was fundamentally a response to the public-competitive nature of its surrounding society, which generated a continually self-renewing need for ideas that were at once innovative and accessible.3

  For Lloyd, the explanation for this flourishing of ideas is political. Even the most repressive of Greek city-states, he claims, stimulated free expression and the diversity of opinion in a way that the societies of Egypt, Iraq, Persia, and India (for example) did not. Such political explanations have begun to look more problematic in recent years, as we have come more and more to recognize the Western-centered ideology that is often smuggled in with the idea of “freedom.” The idea of an essential difference between Greek culture and those of the Ancient Near East is not as widely accepted as it once was, and the idea that any such difference should be defined in terms of “freedom” looks uncomfortably close to Western propagandizing. Greek cities in the archaic era had many different types of constitution, few if any of them resembling a liberal democracy. Assassinations, coups, and other forms of political instability were far from unusual. Environments of this kind were unlikely in themselves to produce intellectual competition.4

  What facilitated the emergence in Greece of philosophical speculation about the natural world was not a political system that resembled a modern Western state but a combination of factors. One was certainly the absence of state regulation of ideas and (relatedly) the absence of any sense of sacred revelation or sacred text. Neither the politicians nor the priests controlled ideas or writing. The massive economic boom that began in the eighth century was powered instead by a sudden trade surge; as a result, it was the innovators and creators who held all the cards, not the priests. There was certainly a kind of freedom (with a small “f”) in the absence of clerical control over the cultural sphere, but this had little to do with political apparatuses.

  Another major driver, however, was contact with the cultures of the Near East, with their own ancient traditions of cosmological speculation. The initial pre-Socratic phase began in the sixth century not in mainland Greece but on the western coast of Turkey, a territory that the Greeks called Ionia, where Greeks had first settled as much as five hundred years earlier. These cities were multicultural environments, where different influences met and blended. In the late Bronze Age, much of the Ionian coast had been settled by Carians, a people originally from south-central Anatolia (roughly western Turkey). Ionia was under the control of the Hittite Empire until its collapse in the twelfth century BC; it was only afterward that Greek settlement began in earnest. Despite the passing of centuries, such ancient identities retained their vigor. The fifth-century historian Herodotus (from Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum), for example, was half Carian. The diversity of Ionia would have been amplified after King Cyrus the Great annexed the region for the Persian empire in the 540s BC. Empire always encourages migration from place to place and the traffic in ideas.5

  According to popular tradition, the first Greek philosopher was Thales, a wealthy trader who was active in the port city of Miletus at the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries. Anecdotal traditions testify to a deep interest in the material cosmos. The original absentminded professor, he is said to have fallen down a well while looking up at the stars. A more flattering story has him predict a solar eclipse. He was also believed to have introduced geometry to the Greek-speaking world. These insights almost certainly came as a result of contact with Babylonian science, mathematics, and astronomy. The Babylonians had been recording the movements of celestial bodies for at least half a millennium beforehand, and this practice had been systematized in the eighth century under Nabonassar, whose reign saw the introduction of intercalated dating (such as we still use today on February 29) and the identification of eighteen-year cycles of lunar eclipse. Miletus in Thales’s time was not yet under Persian control (that came in the aftermath of Cyrus the Great’s defeat of Croesus, in 546 BC), but its position on the edge of Asia made it an ideal mediator between Greek and Near Eastern thought. As a trader, Thales would have had a wide network of cultural contacts, particularly since his family had Phoenician roots. Everything suggests that pre-Socratic speculation on the cosmos, in its Ionian phase, originated in the Greeks’ discovery of Near Eastern science.6

  The Ionian philosophers were a disparate bunch, but they shared the desire to explain natural phenomena in terms of a single material “origin” (arkhē) of the world. For this reason they are called “monists,” from the Greek monos (single). Thales focused on water as the primal matter (it may not be coincidence that his name seems to derive from the Phoenician thal, “moisture”: perhaps “Wetty” was his nickname?). He was followed in the mid-sixth century by two more Milesians. Anaximander had a more complex theory that everything derived from “infinity” (on which more soon), but he also gave a special role to wind. His student and near-namesake Anaximenes spoke of “air.” It is striking that each of them focuses on nonsupernatural explanations: the origins of existence, they taught, lie not in divine creation but in physical matter. Because the views of these earliest philosophers survive only in the summaries of later writers, who are never systematic and often distort them for their own purposes, it is hard to gauge what “matter” actually meant to them. Did they see matter as supreme and self-sufficient? Or did the
y distinguish it from “god”? Or did they imagine that the material world was itself animated by a kind of pantheistic presence, to the extent that matter was itself divine? It is impossible to be certain given the state of the evidence, but it is possible at least to reconstruct a kind of radical materialism that is compatible with modern atheistic naturalism.7

  The argument would go like this: Thales probably did imagine a rational god who created and designed the universe. For Anaximander and Anaximenes, by contrast, the later reports suggest a thoroughgoing concern with material explanation. Particularly striking is the desire to explain thunder by natural means, given that this was traditionally thought to be the symbol of Zeus’s power. Anaximander thought this was the result of wind colliding with clouds, and Anaximenes had a similar explanation. Such matter-based accounts of natural marvels are a recurrent feature of the sources: Anaximenes in particular explains changes in the seasons by reference to the position of the sun in the sky, rainbows in terms of the effects of sunlight on cloud, and earthquakes as the result of the drying of the land after rainfall. Each of these explanations is also an implicit denial of divine activity: no need for the Horae (“the Seasons”), Iris (the goddess of the rainbow), or Poseidon, “the Earth-Shaker.” Cosmology could be explained naturally too. The heavenly bodies are, for both thinkers, nonsupernatural. Anaximander thought that the Earth is surrounded by a ring of fire that is largely veiled from our sight; what we see as stars are the gaps in the veil. Anaximenes thought that the stars were pieces of Earth that had been borne aloft on evaporated moisture and had subsequently caught fire. Even the creation of human life had a nonsupernatural cause. In an eerie presentiment of modern evolutionary biology, Anaximander claimed that primeval life originated from water; the original aquatic animals emerged onto land from the sea, containing other kinds of creatures (rather mysteriously) within them. Humans are thus latecomers to the animal kingdom. These theories are of course fanciful when judged by modern standards: if they occasionally approximate to what we know from science this is a matter of luck rather than intuition. But modern standards are the wrong standards to apply: in sixth-century terms, what Anaximander and Anaximenes were doing was trying to account for the world in new terms, using explanations drawn from the world around them rather than mythological deities. Everyone knows what fire, rock, air, clouds, and water are like, and we know that strange things happen when various combinations of them occur. These two thinkers tried to explain the sum of existence by extrapolating from tangible, observable reality. Geoffrey Lloyd’s idea that early Greek science was fundamentally competitive seems to be borne out: to win acclaim, these thinkers needed both to reject existing accounts in powerfully assertive ways and to appeal to a kind of truth that was plausible and accessible to their audiences.8

  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 (arkhē) 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.9

  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.10

  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 th
e 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.11

  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).12