A. B. Drachmann

“ We shall hardly be too bold in asserting that the free-thinking of philosophically educated men in reality had very slight influence on the great mass of the population. Philosophy did not penetrate so far, and whatever degree of perception we estimate the masses to have had of the fact that the upper layer of society regarded the popular faith with critical eyes—and in the long run it could not be concealed—we cannot fail to recognise that religious development among the ancients did not tend towards atheism. ”

“ In order to be at all intelligible and ethically applicable, it presupposes the conception of beings of whom the essence is knowledge. For Socrates and his contemporaries the popular belief supplied such beings in the gods. The institution of the Oracle itself is an expression of the recognition of the superiority of the gods to man in knowledge. But the dogma had long been stated even in its absolute form when Homer said: “The gods know everything.” To Socrates, who always took his starting-point quite popularly from notions that were universally accepted, this basis was simply indispensable. ”

“ Whoever God is, if any other god (than the universe) exists at all, and in whatever part of the world he is, he is all perception, all sight, all hearing, all soul, all reason, all self.” The popular notions of the gods are then reviewed, in the most supercilious tone, and their absurdities pointed out. A polite bow is made to the worship of the Emperors and its motives, the rest is little but persiflage. ”

“ We cannot indeed deny that the ancients had a certain feeling that nature was regulated by laws, but they only made imperfect attempts at a mechanical theory of nature in which this regulation of the world by law was carried through in principle, and with one brilliant exception they adhered implicitly to the geocentric conception of the universe. We may, I think, venture to assert with good reason that on such assumptions the philosophers of antiquity could not advance further than they did. ”

“ To her is imputed every loss, every gain; in all the accounts of life she alone fills up both the debit and the credit side, and we are so subject to chance that Chance itself becomes our god, and again proves the incertitude of the deity.” Even if a great deal of this may be put down to rhetoric, by which Pliny was easily carried away, the solid fact itself remains that he felt justified in speaking as if Dame Fortune had dethroned all the old gods. ”

“ The discrimination, however, made in the treatment of the theoretical and practical denial of the gods is certainly not due merely to consideration of the more or less isolated occurrence of the phenomenon; it is rooted at the same time in the very nature of ancient religion. The essence of ancient polytheism is the worship of the gods, that is, cultus; of a doctrine of divinity properly speaking, of theology, there were only slight rudiments, and there was no idea of any elaborate dogmatic system. ”

“ Now it is a matter of experience that, while monotheism is the hereditary foe of polytheism, polytheism and pantheism go [pg 024] very well together. The universe being divine, there is no reason to doubt that beings of a higher order than man exist, nor any reason to refuse to bestow on them the predicate “divine”; and with this we find ourselves in principle on the standpoint of polytheistic popular belief. There is nothing surprising, then, in the tradition that Thales identified God with the mind of the universe and believed the universe to be animated, and filled with “demons.” ”

“ A point of view like that of Aristotle would, I suppose, hardly have been called atheism among the ancients, if only because the heavenly bodies were acknowledged as divine. But according to our definition it is atheism. The “sky”-gods of Aristotle have nothing in common with the gods of popular belief, not even their names, for Aristotle never names them. And the rest, the whole crowd of Greek anthropomorphic gods, exist only in the human imagination. ”

“ Strictly speaking, men had always been Stoics, though in an imperfect way. This point of view was elaborated in detail by the first Stoics, who took their stand partly on the earlier naturalism which had already broken the ground in this direction, and partly on sophistic, so that they even brought into vogue again the theory of Prodicus, that the gods were a hypostasis of the benefits of civilisation. Such a standpoint could not of course be maintained without arbitrariness and absurdities which exposed it to embarrassing criticism. ”

“ When a thinker arrives at pantheism, starting from a criticism of polytheism which is expressly based on the antithesis between the unity and plurality of the deity—then very valid proofs, indeed, are needed in order to justify the assumption that he after all believed in a plurality of gods; and such proofs are wanting in the case of Xenophanes.
Judging from the material in hand one can hardly arrive at any other conclusion than that the standpoint of Xenophanes comes under our definition of atheism. ”

“ Hence it followed in principle that religion came under the domain of “the law,” being consequently the work of man; and hence again the obvious conclusion, according to sophistic reasoning, was that it was nothing but human imagination, and that there was no physis, no reality, behind it at all. In the case of the naturalists, it was the positive foundation of their system, their conception of nature as a whole, that led them to criticise the popular belief. ”

“ The Roman superstition and uncertainty in regard to the gods led on the one hand to a continual setting up of new cults and new sanctuaries, and on the other hand to a fear of letting any of the old cults die out. In consequence thereof a great deal of dead and worthless ritual material must have accumulated in Rome in the course of centuries, and was of course in the way during the rapid development of the city in the last century of the Republic. Things must gradually have come to such a pass that a thorough reform, above all a reduction, of the whole cult had become a necessity. ”

“ Now the peculiar result of this investigation of the state of religion among the upper classes seems to me to be this: the curve of intensity of religious feeling which conjecture leads us to draw through the spiritual life of the ancients as a whole, that same curve, but more distinct and sharply accentuated, is found again in the relations of the upper classes to the popular faith. Towards the close of the fifth century it looks as if the cultured classes that formed the centre of Greek intellectual life were outgrowing the ancient religion. ”

“ In this way Epicureanism became the most orthodox of all Greek philosophical schools. If nevertheless Epicurus did not escape the charge of atheism the sole reason is that his whole theology was denounced off-hand as hypocrisy. It was assumed to be set up by him only to shield himself against a charge of impiety, not to be his actual belief. This accusation is now universally acknowledged to be unjustified, and the Epicureans had no difficulty in rebutting it with interest. ”

“ It must be remembered that Tyche is a real layman's notion, and that Hellenistic philosophy regarded it as its task precisely to render man independent of the whims of fate. Sometimes, however, we find a positive statement of the view that Tyche ruled over the gods also. It is characteristic of the state of affairs; men did not want to relinquish the old gods, but could not any longer allow them the leading place.
If we return for a moment to Polybius, we shall find that his conception of Tyche strikingly illustrates the distance between him and Thucydides. ”

“ The Socratic ignorance has an ethical bearing. Its complement is his assertion that virtue is knowledge. Here again the gods are the necessary presupposition and determination. That the gods were good, or, as it was preferred to express it, “just” (the Greek word comprises more than the English word) , was no less a popular dogma than the notion that they possessed knowledge. Now all Socrates's efforts were directed towards goodness as an end in view, towards the ethical development of mankind. Here again popular belief was his best ally. ”

“ To imperfect human nature it is a special consolation that God also is not omnipotent (he can neither put himself to death, even if he would, though he has given man that power and it is his choicest gift in this punishment which is life; nor can he give immortality to mortals or call the dead to life; nor can he bring it to pass that those who have lived have not lived, or that he who has held honourable offices did not hold them) ”

“ They took special delight in pointing out that the theology of the other schools was much more remote from popular belief than theirs, nay, in spite of recognition of the existing religion, was in truth fundamentally at variance with it. But in reality their own was in no better case: gods who did not trouble in the least about human affairs were beings for whom popular belief had no use. It made no difference that Epicurus's definition of the nature of the gods was the direct outcome of a fundamental doctrine of popular belief. Popular religion will not tolerate pedantry. ”

“ A few chosen spirits may at any time by intuition, without any strictly scientific foundation, emancipate themselves entirely from religious errors; this also happened among the ancients, and on the first occasion was not unconnected with an enormous advance in the conception of nature. But it is certain that the views of an entire age are always decisively conditioned by its knowledge and interpretation of the universe surrounding it, and cannot in principle be emancipated therefrom. ”

“ Euhemerus's theory is no doubt the last serious attempt in the old pagan world to give an explanation of the popular faith which may be called genuine atheism. We will not, however, leave the Hellenistic period without casting a glance at some personalities about whom we have information enough to form an idea at first hand of their religious standpoint, and whose attitude towards popular belief at any rate comes very near to atheism pure and simple. ”

“ But, in addition, even sophists who personally took an attitude radically contradictory to popular belief had the most important reasons for being careful in advancing such a view. They had to live by being the teachers of youth; they had no fixed appointment, they travelled about as lecturers and enlisted disciples by means of their lectures. For such men it would have been a very serious thing to attack the established order in its tenderest place, religion, and above all they had to beware of coming into conflict with the penal laws. ”

“ From the point of view of religious history the dividing line cannot possibly be drawn at the Emperor Augustus, in spite of his restoration of worship and the orthodox reaction in the official Augustan poetry, but rather at about the beginning of the second century. The enthusiasm of the Augustan Age for the good old times was never much more than affectation. It quickly evaporated when the promised millennium was not forthcoming, and was replaced by a reserve which developed into cynicism—but, be it understood, in the upper circles of the capital only. ”

“ Not till later do we find it employed to denote a certain philosophical creed; we even meet with philosophers bearing atheos as a regular surname. We know very little of the men in question; but it can hardly be doubted that atheos, as applied to them, implied not only a denial of the gods of popular belief, but a denial of gods in the widest sense of the word, or Atheism as it is nowadays understood. ”

“ But he did not stop at that: “Men believe that the gods are born, are clothed and shaped and speak like themselves”; “if oxen and horses and lions could draw and paint, they would delineate their gods in their own image”; “the Negroes believe that their gods are flat-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.” Thus he attacked directly the popular belief that the gods are anthropomorphic, and his arguments testify that he clearly realised that men create their gods in their own image. ”

“ This view is deeply rooted in the Greek popular belief and harmonises with its fundamental view of existence. To these ancient thinkers the primary substance is at once a living and a superhuman power; and any living power which transcended that of man was divine to the Greeks. Hylozoism (the theory that matter is alive) consequently, when it allies itself with popular belief, leads straight to pantheism, whereas it excludes monotheism, which presupposes a distinction between god and matter. ”

“ On one hand, we meet with crude conceptions, according to which the pagan gods are just like so many demons; they are specially prominent when pagan miracles and prophecies are to be explained. On the other hand, there is a train of thought which carried to its logical conclusion would lead to conceiving paganism as a whole as a huge delusion of humanity, but a delusion caused indeed by supernatural agencies. ”

“ The idea that the Greek gods were nature-gods really dominated research through almost the whole of the nineteenth century. If it has now been dethroned or reduced to the measure of truth it contains—for undoubtedly a natural object enters as a component into the essence of some Greek deities—this is in the first place due to the intensive study of the religions of primitive peoples, living or obsolete; and the results of this study were only applied to Greek religion during the last decade of the century. ”

“ But its central idea was felicity, not virtue; its starting-point was the popular dogma of the felicity [pg 070] of the gods, not their justice. In this way it had come to lay stress on a virtue which might be termed modesty, but in a religious sense, i.e. man must recognise his difference from the gods as a limited being, subject to the vicissitudes of an existence above which the gods are raised. Socrates says just the same, only that he puts knowledge or virtue, which to him was the same thing, in the place of felicity. ”

“ An eminent modern scholar has therefore advanced the conjecture that Protagoras distinguished between belief and knowledge, and that his work on the gods only aimed at showing that the existence of the gods could not be scientifically demonstrated. ”

“ On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine a man choosing a mode of life like that of Socrates without a definite inducement, without some fact or other that would lead him to conceive himself as an exception from the rule. If we look for such a fact in the life of Socrates, we shall look in vain as regards externals. Apart from his activities as a religious and ethical personality, his life was that of any other Attic citizen. But in his spiritual life there was certainly one point, but only one, on which he deviated from the normal, namely, his daimonion. ”