Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

by Tim Whitmarsh

  But what does it mean to say that gods are real? They are obviously not real in the sense that you could choose to visit them or touch them. They are not empirically testable or tangible. For a philosophy predicated on the idea that reality consists entirely of matter and void, this is a serious problem. Epicurus and his successors struggled with this. The perception of gods, they held, was different in kind from other forms of perception. We see gods not with our senses but with our minds alone; that explains why we witness them predominantly in dreams and imaginative moments, when our minds are working but not our eyes. Now, Epicurus thought that we perceive the material world around us because objects emit atoms, which enter our sense organs. To explain the perception of gods, via the mind rather than the senses, he offered an extension of that model: unlike regular matter, gods consist of superfine particles, which can be detected only by our minds, not our senses. Thanks to our natural, built-in capacity to conceptualize gods, the mind processes this atomic flow as indicating divinity.5

  There are all sorts of philosophical difficulties with this idea. If Epicurus’s view is that everything in the world is made of matter and void, and that matter can be perceived by the five senses, how are we to accommodate the fact that gods are not corporeal in the normal sense and cannot be perceived through the senses? The solution that we see them in our mind’s eye while dreaming seems unsatisfactory, for not all things that we see in dreams are real: we may dream, for example, of ourselves flying, or of an animal changing shape. Are the gods any more real than all of the other oddities we dream of? At issue here is the question of whether we perceive anything real in our dreams and imaginations. Epicureans believed that all perception is true, in the sense that all sensations are caused by the impact of material atoms. But even on that account, there must surely be some room for brain malfunction through madness or drugs, or for failure of the sensory organs. What is more, on Epicurus’s own account, the nature of the gods can be misunderstood (as it is by poets and the majority of people): the idea that we can encounter gods in our world, in particular, is seen as a fundamental error. Epicurus would no doubt say that in such cases our perceptions are accurate but that our interpretation of them is wrong: we have formed a false belief about the gods on the basis of them. But this leaves open the further problem, which he does not seem to have addressed: Who is to say that these things that we witness in our dreams are gods at all? Could we not simply have misinterpreted a true perception of something quite different? A version of this issue, indeed, is still with us. One of the standard arguments for the existence of divinity is the claim that many the world over have spoken of encountering the divine. The question then becomes whether such encounters mark a real experience, however remote, of the divine (like Epicurus’s dreams) or (as Richard Dawkins and others would put it) a malfunction caused by some combination of psychosis, culturally conditioned expectations, and wishful thinking. What exactly is the status of religious experience? Is it evidence for the truth of religion or for the befuddlement of the witness? Who has the right to judge such matters? These questions will not go away.6

  Another problem for Epicurus’s account is the imperishability of the gods, for in the atomistic worldview the only things that are indestructible are the atoms themselves; the clusters into which they form are all destined to dissolve. How, then, can Epicurus instruct us not to “impute to [the god] anything that is incompatible with indestructibility”? Surely the stringent rules of a materialist conception of nature are being bent?

  Even more difficult still is the question of where they are located, for if they are material beings, they must exist in real space. Yet if they exist in real space, there remains the awkward question of where they are. Could you go there and meet them? Lucretius (ca. 100–55 BC), the great Roman poet of Epicureanism, would frame the question with admirable clarity: “Here is another thing that you should not possibly believe: that the sacred abodes of the gods exist in any part of the world. For the nature of the gods, which is super-fine and far removed from our senses, is dimly seen by the mind; and since it eludes the touch and pressure of the hands, it cannot touch anything that we can touch (for anything that cannot be touched cannot itself touch). For this reason, their abodes must be different to our abodes, and must be super-fine in the manner of their substance.” Gods, then, are different in kind from the rest of matter and do not exist in our world. But even so they are still made of real matter, and they still exist in space. How can this be? Is this not more bending of the rules? Epicurus’s followers came up with an ingenious explanation. Epicurus himself believed in an infinite plurality of universes—in what we would now call a “multiverse.” The gods, these later commentators concluded, must live in the places between them, which they called in Latin the intermundia (the “between-worlds”). An ingenious explanation, yes, but an unsatisfactory one, because it simply displaces the problem. What are these intermundia like? How do the atoms emanating from the gods manage to travel from them to us and into our dreams and imaginations?7

  The loss of key works makes it difficult to be certain what Epicurus himself thought. From among his many writings, only three summary letters and a vade mecum of “chief tenets” (kyriai doxai) survive, along with quotations and references in later authors. Still, there is enough Epicurus to allow us to piece together some kind of picture of his religious beliefs. He clearly thought that conventional religious ritual was a waste of time. Worshipping, praying to, swearing by, and making statues of the gods, he thought, is ineffectual. We should do these things because our happiness depends in part on living in peace with our fellow citizens, but we should not expend much of our precious emotional energy on these matters. Epicurus, then, seems to have thought that the popular conception of divinity is harmless but misguided. The wiser amongst us, he says, have the truth of the gods—but what that truth is, frustratingly, we are not told.

  All of this suggests that Epicurus’s own writings were evasive to the point of obscurity on the matter of the gods. Conventional religion is false but should be followed. We must believe in gods but not gods as usually understood. Gods do exist but not in reality as we otherwise understand it. It is a puzzle, then, why Epicurus insisted so firmly on the existence of gods, when his theories of reality not only had no need for them but also struggled to accommodate them. Part of the explanation may lie in the cultural context. Even a century later, the trial of Socrates still resonated: the charge of “not recognizing the gods” could still hurt a philosopher, as Theodorus of Cyrene found out to his cost when he was exiled from Athens in the later fourth century BC. Perhaps it is as simple as that: having seen the theological implications of his materialist model of the universe, Epicurus realized that he had better arm himself against the counterblast that had swept away earlier thinkers like Diagoras of Melos and Socrates. Scholars of classical philosophy tend to dislike explanations of this kind, partly because they are hypothetical and not especially highbrow and partly because they imply that sordid political reality has intruded distastefully into the life of the mind. Classicists have much invested in the idea that their texts are the product of pure reflection and that ancient cities were spaces of free intellectual expression. It goes against the grain to argue that the magisterial Epicurus might have been motivated by fear of persecution, but that is no reason to discount the possibility.8

  There is, however, another way of interpreting Epicurus’s theories of divinity. According to one school of modern criticism, the gods he believed in were not real deities, but idealized abstractions symbolizing the happiness to which we should all aim. Divinity represents a mental image of serenity and tranquility to which the philosopher aspires—and nothing more. Now, this was clearly not the view of those later followers of Epicurus who saw the gods as real beings who lived in the spaces between universes. But perhaps they misunderstood the words of their leader? Did Epicurus in fact believe that gods only exist as expressions of human potential? The best evidence in support of this
interpretation lies in the treatment of Epicurus himself, who was venerated with godlike honors by his followers. His will (which survives) made provision for enagismata, “sacrifices to the dead,” performed in honor of his parents and siblings, and the community was to celebrate him annually on his birthday on the tenth of Gamelion (late January). They were also to meet monthly to revere his memory and that of his friends. These clauses do not explicitly mention cult, but they certainly do have a close resemblance to the ritual calendar of a Greek city. Epicurus’s garden was, in effect if not explicitly, to secede from Athens and set up its own civic structures, including a polytheistic “religion” based on himself, his family, and his friends. Just as the Ptolemies were doing at the same time in Alexandria, Epicurus was establishing divine credentials for his rule over his “city.” Epicurus seems to have conceived of divinity as something that can be attained by humans.9

  But it seems, ultimately, unlikely that Epicurus thought that gods were only role models for mortals. When he writes that “the god is an indestructible and blessed being,” it suggests something superhuman, something divine in the conventional sense of the word. We have to face the fact that the role of divinity in his thought seems to have been ambiguous—perhaps indeed, as we have said, because of the travails that he anticipated for any philosopher who dared to deny the gods altogether.

  Despite his opacity on the matter of the gods, however, there was enough that was heretical about Epicurus’s thoughts to win him a reputation throughout antiquity for atheism. In particular, his aspirations to divinity set him on a collision course with conventional civic religion, thanks to the familiar association—which went back to earliest myth—between humans aspiring to divinity and humans denying the existence of divinity. Like Salmoneus and Ceyx in the epic Catalogue of Women, or Bellerophon in Euripides’s play, Epicurus was perceived to be a theomakhos, a “battler of the gods.”10

  Nowhere does he appear more theomachic than in Lucretius’s great poem On the Nature of Things. Written in Rome in the midst of the civil wars of the early first century BC, it is the earliest surviving complete epic poem composed in Latin (epic in the sense that Lucretius uses the hexameter meter). It has been hugely influential since antiquity, not only for its sublime poetic craft but also for its embodiment of Epicurean doctrine. Stephen Greenblatt has famously argued that its recovery was responsible for European secularism and the Renaissance. As late as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was heralded as the foundation stone of a European intellectual tradition based on science and observation rather than theocratic dictates.11

  Epicurus makes a stirring entry in Lucretius’s poem, in lines that will quicken the pulse of any humanist:

  When human life lay on the ground, foully oppressed

  For all to see under the weight of Religion,

  Who showed forth her head from the regions of heaven,

  Standing over mortals with terrifying aspect,

  Then first a Grecian man dared to raise

  His mortal eyes to meet hers—the first to dare to confront her.

  For neither the stories of the gods nor thunder nor heaven

  With its threatening growl deterred him; no, all the more keenly

  Did they arouse his soul’s virtue, so that he, first of all,

  Should desire to shatter the narrow confines of nature’s gates.

  And so the vivid vigor of his soul was victorious, and far

  Beyond the flaming walls of the world did he march.

  He ranged the expanse of the universe in his mind and soul,

  Whence he returns victorious, bringing us report of what can come to be

  And what cannot; in sum, by what reason each thing has its power

  Defined, and its deeply fixed boundary marker.

  And so Religion now in turn lies beneath our feet,

  Trampled, and his victory raises us to heaven.12

  Just like Euripides’s Bellerophon, Lucretius’s Epicurus is imagined as leading a military assault on religio. The imagery here is largely drawn from siege works. In the first half of the passage, Religion is imagined as towering above an oppressed mankind, like an intimidating fortress of the kind that Romans built to instill fear in their subjects; myths, rituals, and conventions are the weapons that she uses to keep her subjects in check. Then the image is reversed, and Epicurus is envisaged not as the assailant but as the besieged, now leading a breakout from the “narrow confines” and marching beyond the “flaming walls of the world.”

  What does Lucretius mean by the Latin word “religio”? Not, to be sure, “religion” in our sense, which is to say the institutional apparatus promoting a particular way of worshipping the gods; the sense is more of pious devotion, a moral quality. It is psychological bondage that he sees as the enemy of human freedom. (Bondage, indeed, is an appropriate image: elsewhere he speaks of “loosing the mind from the constricting knots of religion,” apparently deriving religio from religare, “to tie.”) Lucretius’s Epicurus is a crusader not so much against rituals and state institutions as against the false beliefs that oppress us with fear of death, punishment, and the afterlife. Liberation will be found not in smashing organized religion (no Epicurean ever suggested that) but in rejecting the received, mythical view of the gods as aggressively vengeful and accepting that in the materialist view of things they have no influence over our lives.13

  Epicurus’s war on religion was not imagined as an effort to promote secularization at the state level. But it is a more radical claim than is often admitted. The implications of denying religious truth are profound and far-reaching. Lucretius follows the description of Epicurus with an instance of the destructive effects of such beliefs: “Religion has given birth to wicked and impious deeds,” he opines (mischievously repurposing the word “impious” to describe the actions of the religious rather than their foes). His example is the mythical story of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphianassa (more commonly called Iphigenia) to Artemis at Aulis. In the myth, his fleet had been stayed by a calming of the waters, which Artemis had imposed because Agamemnon had killed a deer on land sacred to her. “Such is the terrible evil that religion was able to urge,” concludes Lucretius: “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,” one of the poet’s most famous lines (Voltaire, for example, sent it to Frederick II of Prussia in 1737 when urging the cause of secularism). Lucretius’s point is that this misunderstanding of the shifting nature of wind (which he explains elsewhere in purely material terms) is more than simply an error. When we fail to understand the truth about nature, and more particularly when we substitute religious for scientific understanding, terrible consequences can ensue. It is particularly striking that Lucretius chooses an instance of sacrifice, the central component of all ancient ritual activity: although of course the particularly horrific aspect of this sacrifice is that the victim is human, the additional implication is that any kind of blood sacrifice is both ineffective and likely to generate physical and mental pain. Without saying as much explicitly, Lucretius exposes the truth that destructive acts condoned in the name of the gods would be utterly condemned in other areas of life.14

  So there is more at stake in true and false belief than unnecessary psychological anxiety. False beliefs have consequences, sometimes bloody ones. Lucretius is well aware that in talking of the impieties of conventional beliefs in the gods he is setting his truth up as a powerful rival to that of established theology. He predicts to his addressee Memmius that

  There will come the day when you will seek to withdraw

  From our community, overcome by the terrifying utterances of the priests.

  Yes indeed, for how many dreams can they concoct for you

  Even now, dreams that can turn on their head the principles of existence

  And by terrifying you throw all your fortunes into chaos!

  And with good reason: for if people saw that there is a set limit

  To our sufferings, they would by some means find the strength />
  To stand against the threatening pieties of the priests.15

  At stake here is the question of authority in speech. Who speaks the truth, the priest or the philosopher? “Priest” (vates) is a term that in Latin covers both specialists dedicated to particular cults and traditional poets. Lucretius’s attack, then, is on both the established structures of state religion and on the storehouse of traditional myth. Stories are weapons, “threatening pieties” that the true philosopher should “stand against.” Lucretius never sounds more modern than here, when pitching scientific materialism as a truer and more socially enlightened alternative to the “dreams” concocted by traditional religion.

  The irony is that Lucretius expresses all of this using the very poetic form traditionally associated with theology: the epic poem consisting of hexameters, lines of six metrical feet. This is the form in which Homer and Hesiod had composed their ancient stories of gods and humans and the form adapted for Roman culture in the second century BC by the brilliant and highly influential poet Ennius. An example, perhaps, of using the master’s tools to dismantle his own house. But the paradox runs deeper than this. In pitting Epicurus as theomakhos, battling the gods of traditional religion, he ended up assimilating the two. Epicurus himself became a kind of god in his own right: