Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

by Tim Whitmarsh

  Whatever the explanation for the third-century explosion, Constantine’s own promotion of Christianity was not the result of weight of numbers alone. Ten percent of the population was still a small minority. His calculation was surely a political one instead: claiming for himself the authority of the all-powerful, universal Christian god (without dispensing with the others) was a shrewd exercise in branding for an emperor concerned to hold together a worryingly fissile realm. Nor had he been the first Roman ruler to try to co-opt divine power in the service of empire. Even before Augustus had become the first princeps, Rome’s imperial mission had been associated with divine providence. Stoic philosophy, which imagined a universe governed for the good by a single divine force, had proven congenial to a Roman imperial mentality from earliest times. Emperors had presented themselves as conduits for divine power, assuming the office of pontifex maximus, chief priest of all the cults at Rome; propagandistic art repeatedly depicted them as sacrificers in chief on behalf of the state. (Even after the adoption of Christianity as the imperial religion, emperors continued to hold this title until the end of the fourth century; in the fifth century it began to be used, as it still is today, for the head of the Catholic Church.) Emperors were worshipped as gods, during their lifetimes in the Greek-speaking parts of the empire and after their deaths (if they gained favor) in the west. Crucially, other experiments with religious unification had been essayed before Constantine adopted Christianity: Septimius Severus and Julia Domna had sought to promote the Syrian god Elagabal (“El of the Mountain”); Aurelian (AD 270–275) had tried again with Sol Invictus (“the Unconquered Sun,” a god favored also by Constantine himself). The Roman Empire had always had theocratic elements to it, even if they had not always been consistently activated. It was, in fact, a general assumption throughout Greco-Roman antiquity that ruling vast, centralized empires was best done by co-opting the will of gods.5

  The primary political challenge that presented itself throughout Greco-Roman antiquity was always a variant on the same theme: how to create unity out of diversity in a world without the armature of modern nationalism. Religion had always been part of the answer to that challenge. In archaic Greece, polytheism had been an appropriate expression of the sameness-but-difference of hundreds of autonomous or semi-autonomous city-states. In the later Roman period, monotheistic, centralized religion conveyed the desire for political unity in an empire that had come dangerously close to collapse.

  Constantine’s adoption of Christianity may not have seemed revolutionary to most observers at the time: the Roman pantheon was roomy, and there was nothing at all remarkable about an emperor adding another god to it. The effects over the course of the fourth century, however, were seismic. The brief reign of Julian (AD 361–363) aside, all subsequent emperors were Christians. In AD 380 Theodosius I (ruled AD 379–395) issued a decree from Thessalonica that pronounced Christianity the official religion of the empire and ordered all subjects to follow it. This was the making of Catholicism, Christianity in its orthodox form approved by the emperor. According to the edict, those who submitted to this particular theological orthodoxy, treating the Trinity as a single deity according to the findings of the Council of Nicaea, were entitled to call themselves “Catholics.” All the rest—no distinction is drawn between polytheists, atheists, Jews, and theologically unsound Christians—were judged dementes vesanosque (“demented lunatics”), branded heretics, and threatened with punishment both divine and imperial. The subtle alignment of imperial and divine authority is telling. The omnipotent Christian god and the emperor stand in a relationship of exact analogy. A year later, Theodosius came up with another edict insisting that those who did not profess the Nicene version of the faith should be branded and driven from all cities. As one scholar has noted, Theodosius redefined the very nature of religion, which was “no longer merely normative practice: it has become a defined set of beliefs authorised by descent from the apostles and from Nicaea, and now issuing out of the mouth of the Roman ruler.” For the first time in the history of the Greco-Roman world, political authority was systematically boring down into the hearts and minds of individual subjects, assessing their beliefs against decreed standards of orthodoxy and rewarding or punishing them appropriately.6

  This was the real ideological revolution engendered by the Christianization of the empire: the alliance between absolute power and religious absolutism. Christianity had always produced theological dissent and schism. That tendency had now been turned into a tool of imperial power. Theodosian law enforced the idea that the health and prosperity of everyone in the empire depended fundamentally upon the adoption of not just the right religion but the right theological position on the right religion. Like all successful techniques of social control, this new focus on religious identity also involved identifying and stigmatizing outsiders. The Codex Theodosianus, a massive compilation of imperial law from the time of Theodosius II—the grandson of Theodosius I who ruled between AD 408 and 450—devotes the last of its sixteen books first to defining the model of Catholic Christianity that the empire sought to promote and then to various forms of legislation against all of those who do not fit the model. There are laws of course against heretics (the word derives from the Greek hairesis, “sect” or “cult”), mostly other types of Christians (Montanists, Eunomians, Priscillianists, Donatists, Apollinarians, Arians and so forth), who are prohibited from congregating or using any kind of ecclesiastical language to describe what they do; in many cases they are to be banished from the cities of the empire. Heresy should be treated as a crime against the state, since “any crime committed against divine religion is treated as an aggression against everyone.” There is even legislation against remembering heretics: “No one shall recall to memory a Manichaean or a Donatist…There shall be one Catholic worship, one salvation.” Apostates—those who renounce Christianity—are to be isolated from the rest of the community and forbidden to pass on property to their heirs. There are laws protecting Jews, but Jews are also forbidden from trying to convert Christians or owning Christian slaves. “Superstition”—traditional Greco-Roman polytheism—is to cease, temples to be closed, sacrifices to be abolished. Those who sacrifice or worship cult images shall be fined or put to death. Even public debate about religion is banned. The extent to which these policies were put into practice has been debated, but at the very least they provide a powerful rhetorical case for the exclusion of everything but Nicene Christianity.7

  The Theodosian Code defines Catholic Christianity in opposition to a series of religious “others,” execrated as manifestations of madness and deviancy and threatened with state violence. This was a massive change, for Greco-Roman polytheism had seen itself not as a unified system that excluded others but as an infinitely extensible network of local cults. The elasticity of polytheism meant that it had no external borders: if new deities were uncovered, they could simply be added to the list. Monotheism, by contrast, carried with it the idea of right and wrong belief. In earlier periods, that different people worshipped different gods had been viewed as an empirical fact about the world; now it was a problem that required correction, using the full power of the state and the law. Earlier Greeks and Romans had not even had a word for the acceptance that there were many gods, since this was seen as a self-evident ethnographic reality rather than a theological worldview. The word “polytheist,” like “pagan,” is a Christian coinage and implicitly suggests its inferiority to its polar opposite, “monotheist.” (Personally I prefer to describe those who cleaved to the old ways as “polytheists” rather than the more obviously pejorative “pagans” [pagani, “rustics”], but it is important at all times to recognize that when considering late antiquity we are forced to adopt a set of religious distinctions and categories that would have been alien to an earlier era, and that stack the deck in favor of a Christian worldview.)

  One religious crime, however, is missing from the Theodosian catalogue. Nowhere does this statute book mention atheism. It is, appare
ntly, unimaginable in this world that anyone could be without religion. There are only two possibilities: true religio or false superstitio. The assumption underlying this position seems to be the belief that all humans are born with a natural sense of the divine but that some people have been led into misunderstanding by false teaching, a common belief among Christians of the time. This doctrine created a cultural blind spot: with no role to play in this binary construction of the world, with no place to occupy on the scale between true religion and false superstition, atheism now became effectively invisible.

  The Christianization of the Roman Empire put an end to serious philosophical atheism for over a millennium. The word itself, indeed, acquired an additional meaning, which was wholly negative: rather than the rational critique of theism as a whole, it came to mean simply the absence of belief in the Christian god. For Christians in late antiquity, there was no contradiction at all in referring, for example, to “atheist polytheists”: polytheism was a misunderstanding of the true nature of the one god, which led its benighted practitioners into the “atheistic” position of rejecting the Christian message. Christian heretics too could be called atheoi: in such cases the issue was not even that they did not believe in the Christian god, but rather that they did not believe in him in the right way. The earliest instance of this usage comes in the writings of Philo of Alexandria, a Greco-Jewish intellectual who died around AD 50. “Those who are dead in their soul are truly atheists,” he writes, “while those arrayed alongside the true god live an eternal life.” Or: “Atheism is the source of all crimes.” Or most strikingly: “The atheists are waging a war against the lovers of God, a war that admits of no treaty or diplomacy.” (This is, incidentally, the earliest instance I know of the “militant atheism” trope so beloved of present-day theists.) Perhaps Philo can be excused this paranoia, given the prevalence of anti-Semitism and pogroms in first-century Alexandria. But it was also a paranoia rooted in the Hebrew Bible’s vision of the Israelites as a people set apart from others, fundamentally and irreconcilably alien. That distinctively monotheistic sense that there can only be one true religion has a tendency to foster sharp divisions between communities, and indeed a sense of the inevitability of violence between them. In Christian writings from the fourth century onward too we find time and again the idea of atheoi as mortal enemies that need to be joined in battle: the atheists are “universal enemies”! Catholic Christians have “drawn up the battle lines against the innumerable atheist heretics”! This figurative war could be quickly literalized, too: religious-sectarian hostility, which had been rare in the polytheist world, became a regular feature of life. A recent study of sacred violence between Catholics and Donatists in North Africa alone runs to over eight hundred pages. The baneful idea of holy war against unbelievers had put in its first appearance. Religious difference, for just about the first time in Mediterranean antiquity, had become the driver of conflict.8

  But were Christians not themselves called “atheists” by Greeks and Romans? This is often asserted, but in fact the evidence for it comes almost entirely from Christian sources themselves. The fourth-century Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, for example, depicts Constantine’s rival Licinius as himself conducting his own “holy war” on behalf of traditional polytheism. While offering sacrifice in a grove, he is said to have inveighed against Constantine for “betraying his ancestral inheritance and taking up an atheistic belief…let us set out to war against the atheists!” Eusebius of course had no way of knowing what Licinius actually said at the time. The idea of a holy war waged against Christian “atheists” is his own construction, projected onto Licinius; it serves merely to legitimize Constantine’s response, which is to reverse the terms and attack the polytheist “atheists” himself. The reversibility of the accusation of atheism is in fact a recurrent feature of Christian discourse. The story of the martyrdom of Polycarp of Smyrna, set at some point between AD 155 and 167, offers a wonderful example. The hero of the story, a virtuous old Christian, is arraigned before the governor and a bloodthirsty crowd in the arena. “Swear to Caesar’s good fortune!” commands the governor. “Repent! Say the words: ‘Away with the atheists!’ ” Polycarp turns to address the crowd, waving his fist at them, crying, “Away with the atheists!” thus redirecting the charge of atheism at the polytheists. This act of defiance earns him a fiery martyrdom at the stake. But although Polycarp’s impressive response to persecution makes for a neat, punchy climax to the story, that story is itself surely historically inaccurate. No non-Christian would have uttered the words attributed to the governor. The idea of “repentance” (metanoia) is a Judeo-Christian one, and the phrase “away with” (aire) directly echoes language used in the Gospels to condemn Jesus. It seems unlikely that a Roman governor, apparently hostile to Christianity, should have borrowed Christian phraseology so explicitly. The story of Polycarp’s martyrdom may have been invented entirely or (perhaps more likely) embellished with motifs designed to appeal to a Christian audience, and indeed to draw out the parallels with the execution of Jesus.9

  The conclusion seems inevitable that the violent “othering” as atheists of those who hold different religious views was overwhelmingly a Judeo-Christian creation, which was then projected back onto the polytheists. There were, to be sure, some subtler uses of this device. In about AD 150, a Syrian called Justin wrote a work in defense of Christianity that invoked the figure of Socrates, who (he claimed) tried to lead humanity away from these demons by using “true reason and critical examination”—but was condemned to death as an impious (asebē) atheist (atheon) and for introducing a new type of divinity. Socrates has been reimagined as a Christian martyr! “That is why we [i.e., the Christians] are called atheists,” Justin continues. “And we confess that we are atheists…at least as far as these kinds of imagined gods are concerned. But not with respect to the truest god, the father of justice and self-control and the other virtues, who is free from all impurity.” Christians, then, are indeed atheists! Or, rather, atheists of a kind. Instead of simply reversing the supposed accusation of atheism, like other Christian writers of the era, Justin accepts and embraces it: like Socrates, he turns his back on the gods of polytheism.10

  Indeed, while there were those early Christians who decried the earlier classical atheoi as the worst kind of disbelievers, there were others who took them as allies in their war on polytheism. In the second century, Clement of Alexandria wrote of the paradox that “the label ‘atheist’ has been applied to Euhemerus of Acragas [sic], Nicanor of Cyprus [otherwise unknown], the Melians Diagoras and Hippo, and in addition Theodorus of Cyrene, and many others beside, who lived chaste lives and perceived religious error somewhat more sharply than others did.” In Clement’s view, it was not the virtuous Diagoras and his peers who deserved to be called atheists but the polytheists they criticized. Euhemerus’s Sacred History, indeed, was a particular favorite of the early Christians: that even some of the ancients themselves had seen that their gods were just deified mortals was taken as firm proof that belief in the Olympian gods was fundamentally misplaced.11

  It is at first sight a curiosity that the classical atheoi were welcomed so enthusiastically in this new era. Their Christian readers, however, were interested only in the rhetorical leverage that they could exert on recalcitrant polytheists, and indeed on wavering Christians. There was no serious engagement with their ideas at the philosophical level—and certainly no sense that Christianity itself could be interrogated by atheistic reasoning. For Christian apologists, philosophical atheism was necessarily consigned to the pre-Christian past, its critique directed not at theism in general but at polytheism in particular. Atheism, now viewed as the debunking of false superstition rather than the interrogation of supernatural belief, could serve no purpose now that the true Christian message had been revealed.

  The arrival of Catholic Christianity—Christianity conjoined with imperial power—meant the end of ancient atheism in the West. Once it had been established that the pa
radigm of true versus false religion was the only one that mattered, there was nowhere to place atheism on the mental map. Cosmological and philosophical debate remained intense, of course, but it was unthinkable outside of the framework of Christian monotheism. Individuals surely experienced doubt and disbelief, just as they always have in all cultures, but they were invisible to dominant society and so have left no trace in the historical record. It is this blind spot that has sustained the illusion that disbelief outside of the post-Enlightenment West is unthinkable. The apparent rise of atheism in the last two centuries, however, is not a historical anomaly; viewed from the longer perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is the global dominance of monotheistic religions and the resultant inability to acknowledge the existence of disbelievers.

  Acknowledgments

  I am hugely grateful to the British Academy, which awarded me a grant that absolved me of my university duties during 2012–2013. I am grateful, too, to my former students and colleagues at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who tolerated my absence during that period with good humor. Teaching extraordinary students is a wonderful privilege, and not one that I take for granted. A number of specialist academic colleagues have read drafts and steered me through dangerous waters: David Sedley, James Warren, John Ma, Edith Hall, Robert Parker, Robin Osborne, Neil McLynn, Christopher Kelly. My children, India and Soli; my partner, Emily; and my parents, Judy and Guy, have been rocks. Judy and Emily also read large parts of the manuscript for me. Many thanks, too, to my agents Catherine Clarke and George Lucas, to my editors, George Andreou at Knopf and Neil Belton, Walter Donohue, and Julian Loose at Faber and Faber, and to my excellent copy editor, Amy Ryan.