The major thesis of Tim Whitmarsh’s book is that atheism isn’t a product of the modern age, but rather reaches back to early Western intellectual tradition in the ancient Greek world.
The author questions the roots of free thinking, attributing it back to the scepticism movement in ancient Greece, when heretics argued that history should be perceived as a result of human action rather than divine intervention.
Whitmarsh, in Battling the Gods, covers about 1,000 years of tension between Olympism, orthodoxy and heresy, ending with the imposition of Christianity on the Roman Empire in AD313.
He journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, explaining how Greek science and secularism broadly challenged faith and caused disbelief in the gods, prior to the European Enlightenment.
By providing astute commentary, the author explores the ideas of individuals that devised theories of the cosmos based on matter.
“They developed mathematical tools that could be applied to the world around them, and tried to understand that world in material terms,” Whitmarsh says.
“Their scepticism left a rich legacy of literature, philosophy and science, and was defended by great writers like Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero and Lucian.”
Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD.
As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism.
In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label ‘atheist’ was used now to demonise anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy – and so it would remain for centuries.
As the 21st century shapes up into a time of mass information, it is also, paradoxically, a time of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions.
Greeks had the intellectual space within which to exercise reason in pursuing ontological and normative questions, setting the foundations of philosophy and later, science.
Whitmarsh proves Greek religion functioned mainly as an expression of civic engagement, both at the local level of the city-states, each of which had its own favoured divinities and rites, and at the broader level of greater Hellenicity.
Source: Amazon, New York Times
