ONE
When we look for doubt among the ancients, in the West we are going to find the most lively cases in the Hellenistic period—the few hundred years between the dominance of Classical Greece and that of Classical Rome.1 It’s not surprising that an in-between period is our main focus: human beings define which are the pinnacle moments of history and which are the in-between moments, and we tend to choose moments of certainty as pinnacles. We praise and envy the certainty, dedication, and meaningfulness of such moments, whether we look at ancient Greece or at a small town in early America. In our modern lives, many of us actively cultivate our differences from these unified communities, in defense of privacy and autonomy. Yet we tend to laud them and long for them, because the ideal members of these societies seem to have been so well nourished by them; intellectually and emotionally, they do not seem bereft. We moderns can’t cotton to the constraints and gross inequalities—ideal membership is usually limited, having to do with gender, heredity, and/or wealth—but we marvel at the general ideas of the group, at the rich and jubilant belonging, and at the ideal members’ noble and satisfying engagement in civic affairs. Our quickest shorthand for the past is a list of these highly principled moments, their breakdown, and the birth of the next. So the history of doubt looks different than other histories, because it highlights what goes on between periods of certainty: it’s like seeing a map upside down—it takes time for the new contours to take shape. The history of being awake to certain contradictions of our condition is the negative image of the history of certainty.
Hence, while usual histories of the ancient world would linger on the certainty of Classical Greece and then rush through its dissolution over the next few hundred years, I will briefly discuss Greek piety and then linger on the budding of doubt at the end of the Classical age and its blooming in the Hellenistic period that followed.
In the heyday of the ancient Greek polis, or city-state, the gods oversaw a very well integrated society. Although every society has some sense of itself as old, as having seen a lot, this was a society with a primary relationship to its religious ideas, and the strength of each of the many poleis had a lot to do with this primary certainty, this lack of doubt. Ideally, you lived for the polis, you worshiped its particular gods, you knew most fellow members by face, and you took part in its governance and defense. It was the central object of identity, politics, and religion. It was an identity that was bigger than the self and bigger than the family. It was often uncomfortable for people to subordinate themselves thusly, but they were extraordinarily well nurtured in doing so.
The polis assuaged confusion and doubt because it was something midway between the world of humanness and the universe at large, and could serve as a shelter. If humanity’s central existential difficulty comes from the fact that we have humanness—consciousness, hopes, dreams, loneliness, shame, plans, memory, a sense of fairness, love—and the universe does not, that means that we are constantly trying to wrangle our needs out of a universe that does not tend in such directions. The polis expanded humanness so it seemed longer-lived and larger. The aim of each person’s life is to do his or her part in the polis, to serve in a given capacity, to worship the gods of the polis, to fight, to procreate, to keep the thing going.
The Olympian gods were not very remote from humanity. They hadn’t created human beings. They were immortal but not eternal. They were often heroic, but they were not particularly honorable in their dealings with one another or with human beings. They were imminent in human life and in the environment: they brought meaningful dreams to sleepers and threw thunderbolts when they were angry. They even lived nearby, on Mount Olympus. They also gave an external cause for human inconsistency or illogic, such as the mystery of why certain people find each other attractive and lovable—as if struck by an arrow. Along with the gods, there were the even more immediate daemons, vaguely drawn embodiments of occult power. Sometimes they were doing a god’s bidding; at other times they were described as the enacting force of the moment, animating someone to heroism, great speed, or tragic error.
At the height of their cult, the Olympic gods of the Greeks were thought of as very real—not at all the equivalent of parables or half-believed fairy tales. The sun did rise every day, it was indeed the source of all life, it was perfectly consistent in its behavior, and its rising and setting was a vision of spectacular beauty. If we call immense, nonhuman power gods or God, then it is purely descriptive to say that the god Apollo drives his chariot across the sky every day, and perfectly appropriate to express awe at the sight of it. It may be a bit less obvious that Eros is a purely descriptive personification of erotic love, because we don’t believe that erotic love exists as a thing outside of human beings. Yet passion can seem to hit us from the outside, and that’s how the Greeks saw it.
The great authorities of the culture were Homer and Hesiod, poets who had crafted wonderful praise poems detailing the historical adventures of the gods. In these stories, people were driven in and out of wars, friendships, and adventures because of the whims or ardent desires of gods. Everyone knew these stories, and for centuries upon centuries the lives of ordinary Greeks were interpreted within this engaging and satisfying, if also disturbing, context. As such, ordinary lives generated more evidence for these gods. Life was organized around the gods’ rituals and when one participated in a given ritual one experienced the god. Predictions that emerged from dreams, omens, and oracular prophecy came true often enough to feel like evidence. More generally, a trick of light might be interpreted as a fleeting vision, and might subsequently grow more solid, just as rationalists might identify a visionlike image as a trick of light and allow it to grow less strange in memory. For a long time and for most people, it would have been absurd to question the existence of the gods. They were an obvious part of the world; invisible but made apparent by the authority of the poets, the phenomena of the natural world and the heavens, the experience of their worship, and occasional dreams and visions.
Under the gaze of philosophy, this level of belief eroded rather dramatically along three major lines: some people started discussing how the universe actually worked, some people started questioning the reasonableness of the gods’ biographies, and some posited a whole other world of meaning that did not rely on the gods in any important way.
THE MECHANISM OF THE UNIVERSE
In the second half of the sixth century BCE, the first Western philosophers were arguing in Ionia. They are the “pre-Socratics”—the philosophers that came before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—and what sets this new type of thought apart is that it is an attempt to explain the universe by thinking it through rather than relying on handed-down tradition. Thus the birth of philosophy is, in itself, one of the origins of doubt—when empirical, rational thinking becomes a goal unto itself, that means people have developed a system for checking whether an idea has a foundation outside plain faith. This sort of checking keeps valuing those ideas that have a demonstrable foundation and scuttling the rest. The very behavior gets one into the habit of devaluing beliefs that have no describable, rational foundation.
Thales was the first philosopher in the West. He predicted an eclipse of the sun in 585 BCE, which sets a date for us and indicates his skill as an astronomer. His idea was that the universe was made of one substance, and he thought water the likely candidate. Aristotle is one of our best sources of information on early philosophy (Thales left no writings), and he informs us that Thales also held that “All things are full of gods.” Aristotle also explained that Thales believed a magnet had a soul since it can move iron, and Aristotle supposed that this was what Thales had meant when he said that “soul is diffused throughout the whole universe,” meaning that the forces that were the gods were very much like the magnetic force.2 Following Aristotle, some modern scholars have held that Thales’s use of the word soul was purely naturalistic.3
Thales’s student Anaximandros was the first philosopher for whom we have any detail, and he explained the world without reference to gods. In his description, human beings were at the center of a profoundly interconnected universe that continues its cycles without the nudging of any gods. It was a tremendous leap into rationalism. But the very movement of the universe, and the precision of its cycles, suggested to Anaximandros that the world was somehow guided. Anaximandros recognized that life on earth seems to undergo constant change—from day to night, life to death, summer to winter—but he saw a constancy behind all this flux, and named that constancy divine. So philosophy overthrew the gods right away. It also spoke of a single God right away, but this philosophical God was very conceptual, as much a matter of physics as metaphysics.
Heraclitus, another of the great pre-Socratic philosophers (he lived from about 535 to 475 BCE), was thinking along similar lines when he said that you can’t step in the same river twice. The universe and the beings in it seemed to be part of a single world order that is one unified, but constantly shifting, divinity. God was a force and that force was fire. “This world order, the same for all, no one of gods or men has made, but it always was and is and shall be: an ever living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.” All life and matter are the same force manifesting itself in a variety of ways—and that’s what God is, that’s his full description. “God is day and night, winter and summer; war and peace, satiety and hunger; he takes various shapes just as fire does.” Was this force a God in the same way Zeus was a God? Could it be Zeus? Heraclitus specified that it was “both unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.” There were reasons, not least social and emotional, for maintaining continuity with the past, but Heraclitus did not offer any logical justification for doing so. Heraclitus laughed dismissively at rites that have people “purify themselves by defiling themselves with other blood”—it was like using mud to wash off mud.4 He also laughed at the idea that human beings need or get any help from daemons, either in ruining their lives or in getting what they want, writing that “character is for man his daemon.”5 In a similar spirit of jaunty irreverence, the poet Kinesias and his friends hosted an impiety club, meeting for feasts on unlucky days.6
Right at the beginning of philosophy, then, the original Greek pantheon was put into deep doubt, in favor of an essentially empirical world. This reinterpreted world was partly understood as a translation of the old gods into more believable terms. As the Greeks had once marveled at the deeds of the gods, now they would marvel at the well-ordered cosmos. Piety could thus continue in much the same way it had in the past. But there was no longer a reason to think of a god as having personality, of being an emotive creature who is in any way interested in us. Religion survived the philosophers, but not intact. As the great historian of Greek religion Walter Burkert has written:
Only anthropomorphism proved to be a fetter which had to be cast away.… In place of the beholding of festivals of gods there is the beholding of the well-ordered cosmos of things that are, still called by the same word, theoria.… And yet the reciprocity of charis [grace] was missing. Who could still say that the divine cares for man, for the individual man? Here a wound was opened in practical religion which would never close again.7
Philosophers could conjure proofs of God, but it was God redefined by rationality, without personality, without interest in humanity, and as Burkert says, without grace.
Where Heraclitus saw change everywhere, a constant spark and sputter in the fire of the world, Parmenides of Elea argued the opposite, namely, that change is all a matter of perception—constancy is the rule. Yet, coming from this other direction Parmenides also found doubt and ambivalence. He wrote in the form of a long poem, the first half of which was a description of the universe as unified and unchanging. It did not include God. In the second part of the poem, however, Parmenides offers the universe based on “the opinions of the mortals.” Here there are gods: a central female creator god and other gods with more specific portfolios. So, for Parmenides the ultimate reality of the universe is simply the stable fact of being—and this doesn’t require God or gods. Humanity, however, needed some kind of theistic religion to explain the universe within the context of its human experience.
All that has survived of Protagoras’s Concerning the Gods is the first sentence, but it packs a punch. “About the gods I cannot say either that they are or that they are not, nor how they are constituted in shape; for there is much which prevents knowledge, the unclarity of the subject and the shortness of life.” It seems Protagoras was indicted for the blasphemy of this book, that he escaped before his trial and drowned while trying to cross the sea to Sicily. We wish we knew more, but what we do know is that an attempt to offer evidence for his theories of the universe threw Protagoras up against the chief obstacles of rational belief in God or gods: we don’t know who or what we are looking for and we do not have much time to observe the universe before we die. Protagoras’s claim suggests that nothing available to humanity could serve as trustworthy or sufficient proof of the gods’ existence; not tradition, nor experience, nor contemplation.
THIS SEEMS UNLIKELY
Pantheon religions have some very attractive traits, but the simple fact that gods are many leads to their being identified by somewhat distinct personalities, and that often means they have weaknesses, vices, and bad habits mixed in with the good. The Greek gods were at times lascivious, jealous, scheming, and cruel. Zeus slept around, Hera had a nasty sense of revenge, and few of the gods would scruple against harming human beings. Contemporaneous with the first pre-Socratics, in the sixth century BCE, the poet Xenophanes of Colophon (570–475 BCE) began to criticize the actions of the Olympians—not as a scold, but because he thought that these gods couldn’t really exist. Xenophanes complained that “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among men, stealing and committing adultery and deceiving each other.”8 A dedication to rational thought is part of the “this seems unlikely” phenomenon, but it is as often a matter of rationalist history, or linguistics, as it is a matter of natural science.
In the light of knowledge of other cultures, Xenophanes began to feel that the idea of these gods was sort of silly, not just because they acted childishly, but also because they were so very Greek, so much created in the image of Hellenic society. With this critique, Xenophanes began the great tradition of trying to imagine where the idea of gods came from, famously claiming that if oxen and horses and lions could paint, they would depict the gods in their own image.9 He also noted that Ethiopians describe the gods as black and flat-nosed, while the Thracians picture them with blue eyes and red hair.10 This cosmopolitan metaphor about oxen gods and redheaded Thracian gods will be adored through the history of doubt. Xenophanes posited that the Olympian gods were nonexistent, but he replaced them with what seemed to him to be a more satisfying deistic conception: one God. This one god was like the one imagined by Anaximandros, but Xenophanes added the notion that the God functions through mind (nous); that the universe is guided by mind. This God doesn’t look human, and doesn’t have a smattering of traits and abilities, but rather “sees as a whole, perceives as a whole, hears as a whole,” and, without moving, moves whatever it wants. Xenophanes described this God as dignified, fixed in place, since “it is not fitting” for God to be running from here to there. This God is not gendered and not subject to desires and needs. Because Xenophanes was more a poet, and performer of poetry, than he was a philosopher, he’s had a much larger audience than Anaximandros. Religion persisted in its traditional forms, but Xenophanes’ ideas were wildly popular.
It has been argued that with these ideas Xenophanes produced the first theology—rational thinking about what God must be like. Also, the rise of this type of critique is often told as a story of the development from a pantheon of anthropomorphic gods to transcendent monotheism. But this is also a story of how gods get put into doubt. Questioning a pantheon leads to monotheism in some cases, but it also leads to rational secularism.
Also working in the middle of the fifth century BCE, just prior to Socrates, Prodicus of Ceos tried to figure out how human beings “learned” the names of the gods. Prodicus was a Sophist philosopher and his method of argument was essentially the linguistic investigations of secular history. He noticed that Homer sometimes substituted the name Hephaestus for the word fire. He also noticed that heavenly objects were named the same as the gods, but these, too, were not actually the same as the anthropomorphic gods of the poets. His conclusion was that early human beings worshiped those things that kept them alive, things that gave them light and food, water and warmth. These were the first gods, he guessed, and they were named for their function. The rest of the gods had been individual human beings who gave instruction in farming or production. They came to be revered as gods and goddesses associated with what they had discovered or popularized: Dionysus had provided wine, for example; Demeter brought corn. The fact that Prodicus questioned the origins of the gods does not mean that he questioned the existence of the gods. The Greek gods were always understood as having come into existence at some point, so it’s possible that he was trying to puzzle out the truth about them without really questioning them as an absolute reality. His critique, however, seemed sufficient for his contemporaries: ancient accounts of Prodicus take it for granted that he denied the existence of gods, and they later classed him among their famous atheoseis.
Democritus of Abdera made a similar hypothesis. People must have invented the gods because they were frightened and excited by what went on in the sky—shooting stars, eclipses, thunder and lightning. At the same time, he continued, people were struck by the precise regularity of the movements of the heavens, and this also gave them cause to admire whatever was controlling these movements. It seemed reasonable to Democritus that such fear and admiration led to anthropomorphized worship: “Some of the men who were able to say something stretched out their hands thither where we Greeks now speak of ‘air’ and thus they called the whole ‘Zeus’ and they said: he knows everything, he gives and takes, he is king of everything.”11 That comment that “we Greeks now speak of ‘air’” is the heart of his thesis: now that we’ve got critical thinking, we can see the obvious. He did not seem overly surprised or moved by the conclusion.
Democritus was the founder of the idea of atomism, which suggested that everything in the universe is made of atoms. That is, Democritus suggested that there was some “smallest thing” of which everything else was constructed. The theory can seem less than rationalist since the ancients could not get physical evidence of atoms. It is based on experiment, but of a conceptual rather than an empirical nature. The logic of atomism is that on the human scale of time and space we can see that things grow and decay, a phenomenon that suggests something is being added and taken away, i.e., that solid objects flow. The apple tree is bare in winter, then there is a flower, a fruit, and then the fruit shrivels, disintegrates, and entirely disappears. The fruit morphed into reality and morphed out again, and when you think about it, this is true for everything and everyone in the universe. Thus, everything must be made of some smallest thing that teams up with other smallest things to form one object and then another—as sand morphs into dunes and castles. You can get to the same conclusion by cutting any object, a herring for instance, into smaller and smaller pieces, all the way to the smallest piece you can make and then ask yourself, Is this smallest piece still inherently herring? If not, you’ve invented atomic theory. Democritus essentially guessed how the universe works, in a manner of speaking, because it made sense. It was a stunning insight.
Democritus’s atoms fell into an orderly pattern by chance, but he explained that once a pattern is established, the progress of things is not entirely accidental. The orderly pattern allows us to make predictions about the way things will behave and interact. So, not only could Democritus claim that the frightening sky no longer frightened and was no longer so mysterious that it had to be personified, but he could also assert that the beautiful regularity of the universe was neither created nor maintained by the guiding intelligence of a god. Democritus also addressed the emotional-experiential aspect of belief in the divine, best summed up by the question “Well, if there are no gods, why do so many people have religious experiences?” His answer was that when the gods, or suggestions of the gods, show up in dreams and visions, it is because the universe does in fact have some sort of population of phantoms. Democritus described these phantoms as possibly being some effect of atomic behavior, that is, purely natural. There was something that was like the gods, but it wasn’t really the gods.
The poet Diagoras of Melos was perhaps the most famous atheist of the fifth century. Although he did not write about atheism, anecdotes about his unbelief suggest it was self-confident, almost teasing, and very public. He revealed the secret rituals of the Eleusinian mystery religion to everyone and “thus made them ordinary,” that is, he purposefully demystified a cherished secret rite, apparently to provoke his contemporaries into thought. In another famous story, a friend pointed out an expensive display of votive gifts and said, “You think the gods have no care for man? Why, you can see from all these votive pictures here how many people have escaped the fury of storms at sea by praying to the gods who have brought them safe to harbor.” To which Diagoras replied, “Yes, indeed, but where are the pictures of all those who suffered shipwreck and perished in the waves?” A good question. Diagoras was indicted for profaning the mysteries, but escaped. A search was put out for him throughout the Athenian empire, which indicates that the charges were serious, but he was not found.
The reason he was indicted for profaning the mysteries was that nothing broader was on the books. The philosopher Anaxagoras is the earliest historical figure to have been indicted for atheism—in fact, it seems they wrote the law just for him. A meteorite had fallen in 467 BCE and it convinced Anaxagoras that the heavenly bodies, including Helios, the sun, were just glowing lumps of metal. Other people had this information—the meteorite didn’t fall in Anaxagoras’s backyard—but he was a philosopher and a rationalist and he came to conclusions that were not attractive to everyone. This was the origin of a conflict between religion and science. Here, new information, new empirical data, led to a direct challenge to the way in which the gods were envisioned. This new doubt encouraged a new kind of punishment for doubt. Set up about 438 BCE, the law against Anaxagoras’s atheism held that society must “denounce those who do not believe in the divine beings or who teach doctrines about things in the sky.”
While Anaxagoras had gone too far for some in talking about the sun as a hot rock, his other ideas doubting the pantheon were too common to be very shocking. At about the same time, Thucydides (460/55–400 BCE) was writing his secular history of the Peloponnesian War and gods did not intervene in the drama. By now, educated people commonly held that traditional belief in the Olympic gods had been fully discredited, and that the most compelling understanding of God was the universe-mind idea of some philosophers. The poet Empedocles wrote that the gods should not be imagined as of human form but rather as “sacred, unspeakably rich thinking,” and “swift thoughts which storm through the entire cosmos.” Even the believers did not equate God with anything like a personality or even a mystical meaning for humanity—some of Anaxagoras’s students equated the universe’s mind with Air and others then equated the Air with God. But some of his students continued in the master’s way of thinking, referring to the mind of the universe without theistic interpretation at all.
THE OTHER WORLD
Socrates challenged every last conception of life as he knew it, even the idea of having a conception of it. Piety, materialism, hunger for power, and competition were particular targets because of how they distracted people from reality. One must devote oneself to figuring out that one must live for the good, for its own sake. It was a secular morality. Contemporaries did not know what to call a thing like that—he questioned their every faith, their every way of life—so they called it atheism.
Socrates was indicted for atheism, but the wording of the indictment suggests that even his accusers did not think him particularly atheistic, just disruptive and antitraditionalist. From Plato and others we know that Socrates respected the traditional rites of piety. At his famous trial, Socrates responded to his accuser by asking if the idea was that he didn’t believe in any gods at all. He went on to say that it had been an oracle that told him to become a philosopher, and he would not have risked the unpleasant social and economic consequences of such a life if he had not believed in the divine origins of the command. There is no reason to doubt his honesty: Socrates wasn’t fighting for his life—he would not have been given the hemlock had he merely agreed to stop teaching. Still, there is a reason he was accused of atheism and it has everything to do with his chief claim: that he knew nothing and yet was wiser than most, since at least he knew that he knew nothing. Socrates counts among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth. The Socratic method is an eternal questioning. This is not relativism; there is truth to be found, but human beings may best approach it through doubt rather than conviction.
It was in 399 BCE that Socrates defended himself against the charge, and Plato’s description, in the Phaedo, of his final day has been a model of a cool philosophical death scene ever since: he comforted his friends and family; sent away anyone weeping too much; joked; and reminded one sad friend that they were all going to die, so there was no reason to be upset for him in particular.
Just at the end he told of an afterlife in which those who have “purified themselves sufficiently by philosophy” live on in ethereal grace, but added, “Of course, no reasonable man ought to insist that the facts are exactly as I have described them.” His story, he explained, was “a reasonable contention and a belief worth risking” because it inspires us to be brave. Then he bathed to save the women the trouble of washing his corpse, and drank the hemlock.12
In Aristophanes’ The Clouds, written during Socrates’ life, a philosopher called Socrates operates a “Thinkery” and dismisses the gods. His neighbor, an old farmer, asks who makes it rain if there is no Zeus. Socrates answers that the clouds make it rain. If it were Zeus, he could “drizzle in an empty sky, while the clouds were on vacation,” but that never happens.13 When full of water, the clouds rumble like an overfull belly. The farmer asks if it is Zeus that moves the clouds at least and Socrates says, “Not Zeus, idiot. The Convection-principle!” The farmer replies, “Convection. That’s a new one. Just think, So Zeus is out and convection-principle’s in. Tch, tch.” Still, he asks, lightning must be Zeus striking liars? Socrates says no, think of all the un-struck liars you know, and notice that lightning often strikes Zeus’s own temples! Then he demonstrates a large model of the universe according to the convection theory. The farmer is convinced. Later, though, he returns to the old gods—and burns Socrates and his fellow atheists alive in their home. Eerie, given how things turned out, but there were other plays at the time where atheism was proposed throughout and punished in the final scene. In a lost drama by Euripides, the protagonist comes to the conclusion that there are no gods, since evil is rewarded and the faithful suffer. He rides his winged horse up to the sky to get a better look, and ends by falling into madness.
We can take Socrates’ death, at the hands of a democratic Athenian government, as a signpost of the decline of the great Greek poleis. Athens, which had become a democracy about 510 BCE, had a period of splendor that began with military victory in 490 BCE and ended with military defeat in 404 BCE. Athens had been greedy, had made enemies of too many neighboring peoples, who finally allied themselves against her. That was the Peloponnesian War, and it took decades. Plato was born in 429 BCE and thus grew up under its misery and came of age as Athens breathed its last independent breath. He had been Socrates’ student, and the execution of his brilliant teacher, combined with what felt like the mismanagement of Athenian greatness, inclined him to criticize conventional wisdom. He blasted both the traditional Greek poetry that had made characters of the gods and the by now well-established Greek philosophy that had denied the gods.
Greek piety in the period before Plato had two main aspects: ecstasy and sacrifice. You took part in ecstatic rituals of music, dance, and emotional frenzy in order to bring yourself to a divine or near-divine state. You took part in sacrifice in order to enact your humility before the larger wills, the larger hungers, that are denizens of this universe. As historian Michael Morgan has argued, Plato advanced aspects of both these two traditions: he borrowed heavily from the ecstatic-ritual aspect of Greek religion, replacing the emotional with the cognitive—philosophy was now the route to the divine state—and he also maintained a sense of humility before the larger powers, although he did not see them in their old anthropomorphic terms.14
For Plato, the pre-Socratic division between naturalism and spiritualism was not real. As he put it, in a dialog in The Laws: “Why, my dear sir, to begin with, this party asserts that gods have no real and natural, but only an artificial being, in virtue of legal conventions, as they call them, and thus there are different gods for different places, conformably to the convention made by each group among themselves when they drew up their legislation.” Then these people say that the “really and naturally laudable is one thing and the conventionally laudable quite another,” and that there is “absolutely no such thing” as a real and natural right. “These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. Hence our epidemics of youthful irreligiousness—as though there were no gods such as the law enjoins us to believe in.…”15
The philosophers, Plato tells us, assert that the gods are not real and natural but artificial. They are made up by the law—as Critias had proposed— and are different in each different place—as Xenophanes had noted. Plato is railing because what he sees as the most disruptive thing you can do to a culture has been done: the philosophers have argued that tradition was all a big mistake, that nothing is absolutely true outside the crucible of a particular culture. These ideas had created epidemics of young atheists. That was bad, because people living as if there were no gods were likely to lose the old sacred commitment to living for the community. Plato wanted truth, not just social happiness, and would sweep away everything about the Greek pantheon that he did not feel he could logically support. But that still left him with a complex sense of divinity in the universe and a certainty that human beings need and ought to have a traditional, local religion in which they can believe wholeheartedly.
Like the philosophers before him, Plato had a sense that there was some motive force in the universe. He made a similar inquiry into the question of what moves and animates individual human beings and found himself confronted with the idea of the soul. There had been some mention of souls in the Homeric poems, but the references were vague and did not suggest that the soul much outlasts the body. In the late sixth century Pythagoras of Samos brought the idea of immortal souls into prominence, and later the Orphic mystery religion made much of it as well, so the idea of humanity as being possessed of immortal souls was in the Greek culture by the fifth century BCE. Plato found it conceptually satisfying because of the relationship between the idea of moving stars and planets in the sky and moving bodies here below. Both move and seem purposeful in a way that separates them from almost everything else: rocks don’t move, wind seems random. That suggests that the motive forces of human beings and the motive forces of stars and planets are essentially the same.
We human beings have mind and we are animated. The heavens are animated and much more magnificently than we, so Plato argued that they were possessed of even more splendid mind: “Without intelligence they would never have conformed to such precise computations.”16 As for the question of immortality, just in this period the heavens were beginning to be considered eternal: a recent finding that centuries-old ancient Babylonian astronomical records matched Greek observations of the heavens suggested that the universe was eternal and stable. So by mutual analogy, that which moves purposefully has mind and is everlasting. Plato concluded that some sort of eternal intelligence animates the heavenly objects, and he was comfortable using the old gods’ names for them. In his words, a legislator “should strain every nerve, as they say, to plead in support of the old traditional belief of the being of gods,” using reason to buttress myth and tradition.17
Plato explicitly referred to the soul as a divinity. It’s a good reminder that divinity here is that which is primary, self-sufficient, mobile, and alive. The heavenly objects were gods, he concluded, because they are a grander version of our souls, so they must also have a kind of care for the universe, as we do over our affairs, but on a supreme scale. Above these gods, Plato reasoned, there must be a mind that created the whole universe, including these visible gods, and that must be a creator god. Calling it demiourgos, he even suggested, albeit vaguely, that there is an even more remote god beyond that. Plato’s schema is based on rational attempts to figure out the universe, but what seemed reasonable to his mind was very much shaped by the dominant religious vision of his time and place. The culture’s specific claims made certain things—a pantheon, for example—seem more reasonable, more expectable, than they would be to someone outside that culture.
The idea of the immortal soul also made sense in Plato’s epistemological theory—his inquiry into how we can know things. Epistemology is still a central issue in philosophy, and we moderns are particularly vexed with the question of how we can come to know anything outside what we already know, that is, how we can climb out of our own culture’s basic assumptions, and how we can hope to see beyond our brains’ basic formation. Plato’s understanding of this issue also led him to believe in the soul: as an essence within us that is possessed of knowledge not gleaned in this life, but rather remembered, somehow, from the past. If one is supposed to be something beyond the fact of one’s body, what could that something be other than a kind of mobile remembering? Plato understood the soul as having knowledge about mathematics as well. In this context, a life spent studying and seeking truth was the ultimate religious life. Seeking truth—whether in the realm of math and physics or psychology and metaphysics—was a life of reawakening the soul to its own self-knowing. And this self-knowing was what the soul needed in order to come into harmony with the wider company of higher divinities.
Plato’s sense that this was the only religion that would hold up nowadays was thoroughgoing. The only religion that could be really believed by anyone in his time, he said, is based on belief that the stars have intelligence, and that we and they have immortal souls of some sort.18 The more we learn—and mathematics is the queen of the soul’s subjects—the more we will ascend toward self-knowledge and universal truth. This ascension is the drama of Plato’s religion.
The process was further conceptualized as the theory of ideals or forms. Plato’s tremendous contribution to Western religion was the otherworldliness of thought, and the theory of ideals was a big part of this otherworldliness. Plato took things to be real and true if they were intelligible. The world, then, which is constantly changing, was thus fundamentally unknowable, and could not possibly be real. Rather, it was a flowing variety that only seemed real in human time. The buildings around us feel real enough, but they come down. What is real, then, is the Form that every building shares to some degree. If something is real it is not material, not changeable, and it is intelligible. The great science of the Classical Greek period was geometry, wherein some primary axioms almost magically describe an extraordinary variety of manifestations. Plato thought everyone should study geometry because it was the most developed example of how Forms work.
The theory of ideals suggests that everything on Earth is a specific and flawed copy of an ideal model that actually exists in another reality. The doctrine can seem silly if applied to a chair—it offers a fine metaphor for representation and the problem of language (after all, how can we call each of the variety of chairs by the same name and yet be intelligible?), but it is a stretch to believe that the ideal chair actually exists somewhere. For concepts, like beauty, the theory works much more immediately. The story Plato tells to show this is of a man who falls in love with a boy for his beauty. Erotic and emotional love between a man and a boy was common and idealized in Greek culture, so moderns should not read anything intended to be negative in this pairing—it was intended to suggest perfection. In any case, the man courts the boy and at one point moves to take him. At that moment, the boy turns to the man, and the man is struck motionless by the vision of beauty. In that moment, Plato wrote, the man is sensible to this example of physical beauty as partaking in beauty in general. The boy is so beautiful that the beauty doesn’t seem to have much to do with the boy at all, and sexual gratification with this one particular beauty does not seem to bring one closer to beauty itself. After having shown us the man’s progression from specific beauty to general beauty, Plato takes us through the further steps that the man takes, from recognition of the true nature of physical beauty, to understanding the beauty of the soul, to beauty of knowledge, and finally—with much struggle—to knowledge of the realm of ultimate beauty, the ideal, otherworldly Form. For a lot of people throughout history, this description of the progress of wisdom has rung true.
It was the first reasoned argument for the existence of another world. Plato famously outlawed poetry, and why? Because the great poets Homer and Hesiod had sung about the unphilosophical and quite immoral gods of Olympus. Plato did not, however, mind a kind of poetry in his philosophy. Although he tried to decipher the world rationally, he also used marvelously engaging stories to illustrate his ideas.
In his “Parable of the Cave,” in the Republic, Plato described a lesson given by Socrates wherein he imagined humanity as trapped in a cave watching shadows of animal puppets projected onto a wall. Seeing only the shadows, the people made a life’s work of discussing the shadows. Socrates then imagines dragging one person up through successive realizations of reality, first taking in the facts of fire and puppets. One’s eyes can bear a lake’s reflections of animals before one can look up, directly at them. Each of these realizations feels like that first glimpse of fire would feel. Only slowly, with pain, and with the jettisoning of each successive conclusion, did the person eventually see the world and then finally the sun from which all of it comes. Indeed, the sun was so bright that even those who understood it to be there found it very hard to hold in view. Here’s the point:
My opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual…
People have insisted for two millennia that Plato meant God when he said the good, but Plato never said anything like that. One can see the temptation, but as the great historian Etienne Gilson put it, “It should be permitted, however, to suggest that if Plato has never said that the Idea of Good is a god, the reason for it might be that he never thought of it as a god.”19 Farther along in the same chapter of the Republic as the parable of the cave, Socrates says that until someone has worked hard to understand reality, “he apprehends only a shadow, if anything at all, which is given by opinion and not by science; dreaming and slumbering in this life,” he is dead before he ever awakens.
The chief difficulty of interpreting Plato’s body of work has been that we do not know the order in which he wrote it. Because there are great differences among the various works, it is very frustrating not to be able to say which was a youthful notion, which a mature claim, and which a parting sigh. Fierce academic battles have been fought over the order of things— computer analysis is now in on it. The Timaeus in particular has been hotly claimed as a particularly early work and as a particularly late work, and the heat is generated because the book plays a key role in the great monotheist religions.20 Some people want it to belong to a comparatively foolish youth and others like it as a culmination. In the Timaeus, Plato has the character Timaeus offer Socrates a story, full of rich detail, told as if he’d watched it all from above. The story is of how the universe was created by a fatherly God who happened upon the chaotic stuff of the universe and the Forms, then used the Forms to make the planetary gods, and then human beings, and then helped the rest of the animals to develop from them. It is worth noting both for its fairy-tale tone and because it is one of the earliest descriptions of an idea of natural animal evolution—a crucial notion in the history of doubt. For example, the “race of birds” was created out of “innocent light-minded men,” who eventually grew feathers instead of hair: “Land animals came from men who had no use for philosophy and never considered the nature of the heavens… their fore-limbs and heads were drawn by natural affinity to the earth.…” As for fish, shellfish, and everything that lives in the water: “Their souls were hopelessly steeped in every kind of error” so they were made to breathe water. “These are the principles on which living creatures change and have always changed into each other, the transformation depending on the loss or gain of understanding or folly.”21
There are parts of the Timaeus that sound familiarly religious, describing “the sensible God who is the image of the intellectual, the greatest, best, fairest, most perfect.” Much would be made of this in the future, but such lines within the Timaeus, and the Timaeus in general, were a minor part of all that Plato had to say on the subject. In some of his writings, long taken to be among his late work, Plato softened the notion that the Forms or ideals actually existed as such, but the sense that good had an ultimate version was always at the center of his interpretation of the world. Philosophy was the work of coming closer to it—an intensely pious undertaking capable of generating religious pleasure along with deep knowledge. To the extent that we can call his study theology, it was a naturalist theology, generally much more philosophical than religious in tone. The soul was a descriptive term for that part of us that is beyond the vicissitudes of life, of coming into being and passing away, and can thus reflect upon the realm of truth, reality, permanence, and ideal Forms.
After Plato, one could speak of life after death without recourse to mystery rites or the intervention of anthropomorphic gods; what he’d offered here was a hypothesis, a theory, not a story, not something someone had heard. In the Timaeus that is exactly what was shared, a story told to this grown man in his youth, and this book was not particularly popular in its time. Plato’s larger religious contribution to his own time was the development of the divine human soul, reaching toward the good, coming to remember itself as immortal and thus becoming so. With the loss of anthropomorphic gods, human beings were profoundly alone, but with the notion of soul, we were also godlike in our immortality, self-sufficiency, and potential wisdom.
The pre-Socratics’ rejection of the pantheon was based on the unknowable nature of the universe and the unseemly behavior of the traditional gods, but those arguments only disrupt belief in a particular kind of God. Generally Plato’s work was natural science rather than purely religion, because rather than calling in invented gods to be the movers in any given inexplicable phenomenon, he started from the phenomenon and made hypotheses—with simile, with analogy, but without invention. The stars do move. Why? Well, what moves down here on earth tends to have mind, so the stars probably have mind. Since the planets already bore the names of gods, it was a simple step to say that the proper description of the gods is that they are the mindful stars. Natural science and religion were thus brought so close together as to be almost indistinguishable. Individual human beings lost their vibrant, humanlike, intervening gods, but they gained a logical, rational worldview that included distant deities and transcendental possibilities.
The ancient Greek religious rites persisted in the flavor and terminology of even Plato’s most rationalist descriptions of the universe—and very much in his prescription for an ideal community. This was not only because these rites were so thoroughly a part of the fabric of Plato’s culture. It was also because he assumed that most people were never going to be able to take part in the more philosophical route to truth, beauty, and human comfort; the mass of people needed ritual and ceremony to help them concentrate on the good. In Plato’s idealized poleis described in the Laws, religion was of paramount social and political importance. For the sake of both individual peace and state unity, atheism was to be a capital offense. It did not, however, take any leap of faith to believe in the state-ordained religion—he does not tout the creator God or the highest God here; the gods Plato speaks of in the Laws are the visible gods, the stars and planets. According to Plato, these are manifestly real and thus undeniable. Of course, in another way, the religion Plato prescribes for the polis is less real, more surface-level, than that which he conjures for philosophers, where one searches after one’s inner divinity. The larger point is that both are true because no matter how materialist or rationalist your description of the world, if it also includes the possibility of transcendence, all kinds of religiosity become reasonable. If we believe in any possibility of transcendence, then we cannot quite scorn any kind of transcendent work—if ritual, ceremony, and worship function at all in this capacity, for anyone, then they are part of the work of truth and worth their effort.
So, it is the visible gods that the poleis would celebrate, and they would celebrate a great deal. Plato has festivities for one of these gods going on every day. Since these were gods of the same names as the pantheon, the old rites and rituals were to be maintained. Although these rites were full of myth and fantasy, they hid some meaning in them and, most important, they honor the gods and provide occasions for the members of the polis to come together, to know one another, to have a joyous, sometimes wild, experience, bonding them to one another. The cult of the sun would be celebrated as a double cult of Apollo and Helios—religion and natural philosophy. The people would exercise humility, but stretch toward the divine.
The sacrificial part of the Greek religion had to do with submitting to the wild chaotic world beyond one’s own will; getting used to the idea that your rational plans will be knocked around by larger forces. The ecstatic-ritual part of ancient Greek religion was a kind of throwing oneself into the chaos, not pitting your rationality against the tempestuous world, but rather leaving your rationality on the shore, letting the waves toss you about, and coming to identify with the waves, with the storm, with the weather. You transcend by letting go of what is human—rationality, pride, and planning—but this is not a cold, dead universe you are submitting to. It is a universe that has had some humanity read into it: an ecstasy, a pleasure, a mind, a divinity. So far these doctrines are all relatively familiar. It’s the choice we human beings have. Serious rationalism allows for self-sufficiency, but on a very small scale and with the expectation of many setbacks and the certainty of failure: we cannot win using our logic against the forces of the universe. Yet total submission to—and identification with—a larger force leaves us with no tiny will (or life) to protect and thus renders us free and eternal, although not quite ourselves anymore. What is fascinating is that Plato’s solution is both logical and transcendent. Here one does not use logic to conquer chaos. Rather, one uses logic because the logic itself is beauty, is truth. Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.
Plato’s mood was one among many. His relative, the Athenian Critias, wrote a play in which religion is an explicitly invented lie, made up in order to keep otherwise brutish human beings honest and law-abiding—the gods had thus been a deliberate deception. Critias had studied with Socrates, too.
Saying there was a God, thriving in deathless life,
Hearing and seeing with his mind, thinking much… [This God]
could hear all that mortals speak,
And have the power to see their every act.
…With words
Like these he introduced this most alluring doctrine,
Concealing with his lying speech the truth.22
The piece goes on to say that it is smart to claim that the gods live in the heavens, since that region is associated with scary things like thunder, lightning, and meteors. Critias was also political, and eventually became one of the Thirty Tyrants imposed on Athens by Sparta. He had a reputation as bloodthirsty, but was liked by Plato, who made Critias a speaker in several of his dialogues. Critias was to become the hero for those who resent it when religious claims are used to justify political power.
MORE MECHANICS AND AN UNMOVED MOVER
Plato had a great student who maintained his doctrines and became his successor as head of the Academy. His name was Speusippus, he was a nephew of Plato’s, and his contributions followed along Plato’s metaphysics (he hypothesized about the stages one travels in ascending toward the good). He also followed along the Socratic tradition of doubt, arguing that it is impossible to have satisfactory knowledge of anything without knowing all things—and that wasn’t going to happen.
Of course, Plato’s greatest student was Aristotle, who formed his own school and gave doubt a whole new path. Aristotle took Plato as his main inspiration, but he did not believe that the forms of things existed apart from the examples of things. Aristotle believed that justice and beauty were real, but not that they existed apart from examples of justice and beauty. They are not meaningless because they lack a separate existence, but they do lack it. What was real, then, was what one learned through sensation. With Aristotle’s works, as with Plato’s, we are unsure of the progression or dates of composition. What’s more, none of Aristotle’s many actual, finished books survive from the ancient world: all that remains are working drafts of ideas, his notes for his lectures, or maybe lecture notes taken by students.
Aristotle’s empirical conception of the universe is important in the history of doubt because it championed rationalism. Throughout his work he called for reason, proofs, and demonstration, and he worked out the beginnings of whole disciplines showing how to do this: from marine biology to logic, political science, ethics, and psychology. His scientific studies, however, were often great jumbles of hearsay examples and thought experiments. Moreover, his philosophy always assumed that the universe made beautiful sense, that it was all going to fit together intelligibly and gracefully. So he often imposed this beautiful sense on things and did not bother to check with nature.23
Aristotle himself didn’t make much use of the concept of God one way or another. Yet in attempting to find logical causes for all effects, he found himself stymied by the motion of the heavens. Aristotle was so convinced that things needed to be pushed on in order to move that he came up with a naturalistic theory for why a tossed ball keeps moving after it has left the hand that tossed it: the displaced air in front of the ball, he ventured, must come around back and push the ball forward (nature abhors a vacuum, so the air rushes in). A naturalist answer—not right, but rational, i.e., dependent on reasoning and evidence. The ball moved because the air moved, and the air moved because the hand pushed the ball into it, and one can keep going backward this way, tracing the force-origins of any movement, but it begins to beg the question of what started things—what is the ultimate something that is causing all this motion? We moderns don’t have a clear idea about where the energy of the universe comes from either. We say it must have come out of the Big Bang with all the matter, but that’s not saying much. Aristotle’s conclusion was that the world was not made, it has always been here.
For Aristotle, it seemed a logical necessity that behind all the other forces one would eventually find an unmoved mover, the ultimate cause. He also assumed that the whole of philosophy would have an ultimate first truth. Just as with Plato, geometry provided the template for all subjects to someday map out their axioms—certainties from which all else can be deduced. Soon after Aristotle, about 300 BCE, Euclid took this to a new level and reinforced Plato’s and Aristotle’s idea that through math, the world was magically logical, and might be uncoded and understood.
Aristotle also agreed with Plato that Eros, or sexual desire, plays a catalytic role in our striving toward the good, and the unmoved mover can be understood as causing motion in the same way longing pulls us. Aristotle agreed, too, that the planets moving on their strange paths across the sky, perfectly, eternally, must be moved by something like souls. For him the souls move planets in the same way objects of desire cause movement: by their goodness. Although imaginative, the unmoved mover and the souls in the sky were philosophical ideas. Aristotle certainly treated the old myths as easily dismissible:
Our remote ancestors have handed down remnants to posterity in the form of myths, to the effect that the heavenly bodies are gods and that the divine encompasses the whole of nature. But the rest has been added by way of myth to persuade the vulgar and for the use of the laws and of expediency.24
Aristotle thought the unmoved mover had mind; in fact, it was nothing but thought thinking itself. Nothing he had deduced about God suggested that he cared about what human beings were up to, or even really knew that we were here. When Aristotle discussed ethics, a concerned God was occasionally considered as a possibility, but always in the conditional. Yet the atomic theory of Democritus, which required only the patterned unfolding of nature, did not appeal to Aristotle, who saw it as too random, and the universe as too full of fancy shapes, orderly events, and goodness to be thus accounted for. Despite his thoughts on the Olympian gods, Aristotle was convinced that the forms and rites of religion should continue. God may not know or love us, but it is reasonable for us to love God, since the notion of him is so high above us.
Some primary reasons that both Plato and Aristotle had for believing in God were utterly erroneous—simple errors caused by our being stuck to the planet and misled by the sensation that the planet is standing still. If they had been aware that the Earth spins, they would have understood that, by and large, we are making our own light show in the night sky. As it was, the precision of the movements of all the stars seemed astonishing. If we knew how we lined up among the planets, their motion would not seem so strange and willful. Also, had the philosophers been able to leave planet Earth for a jaunt in outer space, they could have seen that, at a distance from gravity and atmosphere, moving things tend to keep moving, without any need for an impelling force. From out there, the motion of the planets would seem natural as well.
In any case, Aristotle’s conception of the universe was very mechanical and practically atheistic, and average people, yearning for some cosmic care and interaction, came to populate it with daemons. These ghostlike intermediaries between people and gods had been part of Greek religion from as early as Homer, but the term was vague before Plato mentioned them in a story within a story in the Symposium. Aristotle wrote that dreams were daemonic but was clear that he rejected supernatural descriptions of them, and he spoke of life itself as daemonic, calling attention to the awesome strangeness of consciousness—but he wasn’t implying that it was divine. In the wake of Aristotle’s rather materialistic discussion of the universe, however, people came to refer to daemons along the lines of Plato’s story in the Symposium: active, invisible creatures available for supplication. Now there were evil daemons, too—the germ of our current use of the word. Average people negotiated the world through bribing certain daemons and flattering others. The problem, of course, is that this is no longer an intellectually satisfying world, nor a morally ordered one. The traditional forms of religion were retained, but they had been given new meaning, in which human life was a magical game of fear, supplication, and avoidance in a pointless world.
THE HELLENISTIC AGE AND EUHEMERUS
We conventionally date the Hellenistic period as the three hundred years between Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BCE and Queen Cleopatra’s death in 31 BCE.25 The period was so suffused by doubt that its philosophers were the original Cynics and Skeptics. To many, the Hellenistic period is not as familiar as the Hellenic age of Classical Greece that came before it or the period of Ancient Rome that followed just after. Again, in a history of doubt the map of relative value is reversed. This Hellenistic period fits a cosmopolitan model of doubt, where disbelief gets very emotional and painful, savvy and wry. As we’ve seen, the religion of the Hellenic period was profoundly rooted in each polis, but the poleis were on their way out. During the period in which Plato and Aristotle wrote their philosophy, the individual poleis began to break down, weaken, and take each other over. The great philosophical works that characterize Greek civilization for most moderns were written at the end of the Classical age of Greece, when things were getting very shook up.
When the poleis began to lose their independent identities, it was not long before they were conquered by an outside force. Philip of Macedon conquered the Greek city-states over the course of twenty years; in less time than that, his son Alexander took Egypt, the great Persian Empire and beyond—all of western Asia as far east as modern Pakistan. These vast territories were now under one rule, and Alexander avoided revolt by encouraging his newly won territories to feel like one big, mixed culture. To energize the mixing process, he himself married a Persian princess, despite his preference for men: this new, amalgamated culture was led by a Macedonian but dominated by Greek ideas and predilections. Macedonia was a northern neighbor of Greece, nearby and much under Greek influence; Alexander, for his part, had studied with Aristotle in his youth. The Macedonian army thus helped to dismantle the Greek way of life, but it also spread Greek culture to what felt like the ends of the earth.
In this shifting new world, individuals were much less likely to have the kind of territorial, spiritual, and political home that the polis had once provided. What home they had was likely urban and urbane. Even if Alexander did not found all of the seventy cities he claimed to have founded, he was still a remarkable city builder, shifting the structure of his world from distinct city-states and monolithic empires to a sprawling cosmopolitan network of urban centers. When he died, young, in 323 BCE, no one else proved capable of controlling these vast holdings. They fell into two empires—the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid—under the command of, and named for, two of Alexander’s generals. The extraordinary new cities of Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria served as their capitals, respectively. These were lively, learned places, bustling with people of conflicting traditions and widely divergent cultures of dress, food, religion, and habit. Greek civil servants, soldiers, and business people who settled across the two empires, in Asia and the Near East, brought Greek institutions and influence with them. In rather short order, a common culture was established across these wide-ranging and diverse areas. A common language, Koine, further unified the peoples across both empires.
The Hellenistic period is said to end in 31 BCE, but Rome had been growing in the background for some time, and had started to intervene in Hellenistic affairs as early as 212 BCE. Cleopatra almost managed to reassert the lost power of the Greek-Egyptian dynasty, but things were too far gone, and with the victory of Octavian it was over. Alexander’s world was shortlived, yet it was the site of some astonishing cultural innovations, and the cultural life of the Hellenistic world persisted for centuries after it had been otherwise eclipsed by Rome. The innovative spirit that made Hellenistic culture so rich was born of necessity: having been a culture that valued purity, precision, and authenticity, the Greek world was now faced with a status quo of mergers and mixes, influence and collage. The transition was met with distress, but also with a developing taste for cosmopolitan pleasures and virtues.
Somewhat by coincidence, right at the beginning of this period of social and political upheaval, there was a monumental and long-lasting change in the way people understood cosmology. The new Ptolemaic cosmic order that would be established here would persist, with little or no competition, until the Copernican heliocentric revolution of the Renaissance. The dominant idea prior to the Ptolemaic system was very simple: there was earth, heaven, and underworld. The Greeks spoke of the gods living at the navel of the world with humanity tucked up near the mountainous home of the gods; sometimes they described the earth as a disk floating under an overarching heaven. Either way, humanity was located in a central, protected arena. The Ptolemaic cosmology was much more complicated.
Starting with the pre-Socratic philosophers, there were a wide range of possible scenarios, but by the third century BCE, a new consensus had been reached. Earth was still at the center, but now seven planetary (which means wandering) realms existed, with the Moon the closest, followed by Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and then the fixed stars. Since the stars were so impressively immutable and life on Earth so busy and changing, it seemed evident that a scale of value existed—and descended toward us. Thus arose the notion of the sublunar realm, where we are, as radically distinct from the superlunar realm, where the gods can be found.
Naturalist and ethical philosophy had made the idea of personified, involved gods appear naïve—especially ones with unseemly biographical details. Instead, there were very nonhuman gods: distant in an emotional sense, and, in the new cosmology, in the physical sense as well. As often happens with distant gods, an underbrush of more quirky and personal spirits began to appear on the ground, spirits one could bribe for favors or blame for mishap. It was beneath the Moon that these daemonic powers held sway. Gods were powerful, but distant and not interested; daemons and other local spirits were on hand, but they were relatively weak, and they themselves had local desires, which might run counter to one’s own wishes. The location of the gods in the new Ptolemaic cosmological model added to the general sense that human experience was not guided by any kind of larger meaning. Astronomical speculation had helped to dramatically change the way people felt about the world.
The sociopolitical world had been violently stirred up by the army generals and the spiritual world had been violently stirred up by the cosmologists. That is why this period is Hellenistic rather than Hellenic, Greek-ish rather than Greek. A vast array of varied cultures were bleeding into one another: Persian ceremonial pomp was lavished on once sober Greek politics, and arcane Egyptian cults spread throughout the upper classes of a vast cosmopolitan world. Emperor worship and the mystery religion of Isis were two of the most widely practiced cults.
The rational doubt that characterizes much thought in this period contrasts sharply with the emotional nature of the Mystery Religions, but both were imagined as havens, set against a chaotic background. The Mystery Religions were vast empirewide cults, each based on secret knowledge revealed only to initiates. The “mystery” was the secret knowledge of texts and rituals, but it was also a comment on the atmosphere. The initiation ceremonies were often accompanied by ecstatic celebration: music, dance, darkness, and wine. The wildness here reflected the larger world, which had come to seem like a chaotic mess. Only within the judicious care of the goddess—most of the Mysteries’ deities were female—was there any hope of correspondence between one’s actions and one’s fate. Across the vast territory of the empire, the Egyptian goddess Isis was the most important of them, especially for the intellectual, urban elite. Worldwide now instead of local, Isis left her historical throne on the Nile and took up a lunar throne from which she could see much farther.
All the goddesses of the Mysteries, and several other gods and goddesses as well, were fighting the goddess Tyche, who herself was widely worshiped. Tyche means fortune, chance, and fate. She was worshiped throughout the Hellenistic period, but often with a resignation to her inconsistency that made such worship seem more like respectful terror. For Hellenistic men and women, the world was not constructed as good versus evil; it was order versus chaos.
The sophisticated urbanites who worshiped within the Mystery Religions for generations, over the course of several centuries, were still aware of the Classical Greek gods, of course. They were well aware of the philosophy of the Classical age, too. But these older descriptions of the world as well organized and sensible did not ring true—the world was too much of a muddle. Individuals whose parents or grandparents had been deeply defined by their locality were now “set free,” like it or not, into what felt like a world community. What they found was more opportunity, but also more alienation. It was now rather easy to experiment with cultural mores, but it was also easy to lose one’s way. In another important change, people went from being citizens, or a citizen’s family member, to being subjects. Individuals in the polis had been part of something that explicitly made the whole more important than its parts, and yet that whole was still small enough that the individual could closely identify with it. Without the polis, there was a new kind of freedom and individualism, but all that meaning and sense of community was gone. In response to these shifts, two divergent attitudes arose, so that there are two primary Hellenistic images of humanity.
One was the lonely—even homeless—individual, wandering vast expanses in a vague search for meaning and belonging, and eventually ready to believe in a whole new set of anthropomorphic gods. In the great Hellenistic novel The Golden Ass, by Lucius Apuleius (ca. 124–ca. 170), the noble young Lucius gets into trouble in his wanderings and uses his girlfriend’s magic ointment in the hope of turning himself into an owl—as she has done for herself—in order to fly out of town and escape. Trying to help, but panicking, she grabs the wrong box of potion for him and Lucius turns into an ass instead of a bird. He spends the novel getting into ridiculous situations and trying to change back into human form. Lucius is an ass in the first place because he is wandering, he is out of place, and he gets in trouble. The novel was hugely popular because its readers were uprooted migrants in a vast, multicultural empire, and, in that situation, too much freedom and too few guidelines sentenced a great many people to difficult lives. Everyone knew someone who had wandered aimlessly and ended up a jackass. The climax of the book occurs when Lucius finally finds the Isis cult and Isis turns him back into a man, declaring that on his own Lucius was lost, even with the help of philosophy, but now: “Let fortune go and fume with fury in another place; let her find some other matter to execute her cruelty.…”26 Without Isis, the lonely wanderer is at the mercy of chaos.
But there was another response to the shift from the Olympian gods to the distant gods of the heavens, along with all the political and cosmological shifting. This other dominant mood in the Hellenistic period was philosophical: a clear-eyed resignation to chaos and uncertainty, and a conviction that reality, even painful reality, is preferable to living under false ideas. What looked like unbearable uncertainty to some was interesting, emancipating, and undeniably true to others. For them, the hard part was understanding how the old model of the world, with its anthropomorphic gods and moral certainty, could have ever been taken seriously by reasonable beings. It was in this climate that a Sicilian doubter named Euhemerus made a big name for himself satirizing the Olympic gods. His famous Sacred History was a sort of philosophical novel as well as a travel fantasy— perhaps the first ever. In it the gods had once been great heroes, had been celebrated after death, and eventually had passed into myth and deification. The concept took a lot from Prodicus, who had figured that the inventor of wine was worshiped, eventually, as Bacchus, but Euhemerus made more of a story out of the idea. In Sacred History he claimed to have been to the imaginary island of Panchaia and there found evidence that Zeus had been a man, a great king, yes, but he had lived and died in Crete, like any other Cretan. We’ve got only fragments and summaries, but Sacred History was hugely popular and influential in its time and long after. It was one of the first Greek books to be translated into Latin.
The biography of Alexander the Great lent credence to Euhemerus. As a youth Alexander had followed Greek ideals of the ruler: modest, unadorned, sensible. He would run alongside his chariot to keep in shape and encourage his weary foot soldiers. Conquering the Persian Empire changed him, though, and he began to adopt their “oriental” style of leadership, replete with pomp and ceremony and mysterious rites. Then he actually became a god; temples were dedicated to him and he was worshiped all over a vast empire. If rulers were now understood as gods, it was a relatively small leap to imagine that the old gods had once been rulers. That was especially true since Alexander’s story so closely paralleled that of Dionysus: the god had waged an identical conquering spree in the other direction, starting in India and heading west. The gods, then, had been heroes, transformed in the local memory as a result of human affection, idolatry, and need. Again the Greek gods were always understood to have come from somewhere, but Euhemerus did seem to be grinning at a mistake rather than lauding an apotheosis.
It is difficult to know how many people agreed with Euhemerism, as it came to be called, but folks clearly enjoyed the idea. Cosmopolitan and enlightened people contrasted themselves favorably to their counterparts of the recent past—men and women who seemed to have lived under a somewhat ridiculous, infantilizing misconception.
So how were the doubters to find meaning? The Hellenistic philosophies are generally considered silver to the Hellenic gold, and judged by the originality and sometimes the sophistication of abstract ideas, there is reason for it. Where the Hellenistic philosophies excelled was the production of what could be called secular religions. They were based on self-help–oriented doctrines often borrowed from the earlier philosophers but interpreted and presented in a way that made more direct sense to a lot of people. I’m calling them graceful-life philosophies to distinguish them from other philosophy. Their goals were practical happiness, and they were not merely theoretical about it: they provided community, mediations, and events. In this they were more like religions, but they did not identify themselves as religions and they had remarkably little use for God or gods.
The Hellenistic graceful-life philosophies had a lot in common. The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest, unendingly beckoned by a thousand possible routes. At every juncture, with every step, one is confronted with alternative paths, so that the second-guessing becomes more infuriating even than the fact of being lost. After a direction is chosen, one is constantly met with another tree in one’s path. What do you do if you come from a culture that had a powerful sense of home and local value, and now you are lost in something vast and sprawling, meaningless and strange? The stronger your belief in that half-remembered home, the more likely you are to panic, to grow claustrophobic among the trees and beneath their skyless canopy. Hellenistic men and women felt a desperate desire to get out of the seemingly endless, friendless woods. The graceful-life philosophies of this period were able to achieve an amazing rescue mission for the human being lost in the woods and bone-tired of searching for home.
They did this by noticing that we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest, to which you are headed. If there is no release, no going home, then this must be home, this shimmering instant replete with blueberries. Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done; just try to have a good time. Thus the cosmopolitan doubter looks back on earlier generations with bemused sympathy—they were mistaken—and looks upon believing contemporaries with real pity, as creatures scurrying through the forest, idiotically searching for a way out of the human condition. After all, it isn’t so bad if you just settle in and accept a few difficult ideas from the get-go.
THE CYNICS
The word Cynic comes from the Greek word kuon, which means dog. The Cynics were called dogs because they proposed to live like dogs, without shame or convention. Diogenes of Sinope, though not their founder, was their great exemplar. The Cynics felt that the way people lived in civilized society was full of falsehood, emotional discomfort, and pointless striving. Yet honesty, ease, and repose were available to anyone who merely stopped lying, role-playing, and striving. Cynics wanted to live virtuously and calmly, the way the animals do, and so rejected all possessions and social forms and slept outdoors. Diogenes boasted that he performed all his physical functions without shame, like the city’s dogs. When he needed shelter he would climb into one of the large earthen storage jugs located in public areas at the time.
Diogenes’ rejection of all custom included a rejection of religious observance: he did not take part in any social, political, or sacred rituals.27 He worshiped no gods. Still, it is possible that he believed in them. What he said on the question was that we should not worship the gods because gods do not need anything from us—in fact, they do not need anything at all. For the most part, though, Diogenes simply ignored the idea of gods and did not in any way include gods as part of his solution to the problem of how one ought to live—or how we ought to understand our predicament. The men and women who followed him gave up everything they had, but it was not in the context of sacrifice or humility. Rather, it was an act of freedom. In walking away from everything that the world both offered and demanded, they made decisions to arrange for their own inner well-being.
The style of their arrangement was to privilege the universe, which does not make value judgments; and does not try to do anything; and does not, for instance, feel shame about its excretions. Diogenes did not complement this with the other half of the religious impulse—to impose humanness upon the universe—so the whole thing can end up sounding less then triumphant, and certainly less than transcendental. After all, these people are the original cynics. But the act of pushing the absence of humanness to its extreme, taking it in, and living it every day, can somehow drive us into timelessness and continuity. We are the stuff of the universe, momentarily sentient, but aside from that little piece of weirdness, we are already home.
It is a startling solution to the human problem. The polis extended humanness into a larger sphere of the universe—it was longer-lived than the individual and had a sense of purpose that arched above his or her tiny, personal will. The Cynics dealt with the same problem by being less consumed with humanness. With the gods gone, the universe seemed like a dead place of violence and chance and we human beings the minuscule representatives of our own emotive fantasy. All that is left of this fantasy is what we maintain in our own civilized, cultured behavior—little creatures holding back the encroachment of meaninglessness with nothing but our body shame and our quest for accomplishment. Diogenes had essentially said, I give up, and he found the experience astoundingly liberating.
There is an instructive story that comes down to us: Before a large crowd, Alexander the Great approached Diogenes, who was lying in the street, sunning himself. Standing above him, the young conqueror offered the philosopher anything he wished. It was a sneaky offer, since it was both a reward for Diogenes’ wisdom and a teasing effort to tempt him away from it. Diogenes said that perhaps there was something he would like and, after a moment, asked Alexander to please stop blocking his sun. What is wonderful about this story is not only the calm that emanates from Diogenes’ lack of desires, but also the powerlessness of Alexander the Great in this situation. Here were two men who would normally be seen as decidedly unequal: both had reputation, but one had wealth beyond imagination and the other was without a single possession. But if the poor man truly has no desire for those riches, all we have is two men of reputation, one of whom exerts a tremendous amount of energy and enacts the pomp and ritual of power, while the other one relaxes in the sun. Now the rich one seems ridiculously self-important and the other looks wise and well rested. What is more, given the way of the world, the rich and powerful man seems riding for a fall, whereas the tanning philosopher seems to be in a very stable place. The ragged figure was also surrounded by friends who could only love him for his innate qualities, and who were likely to feel very comfortable with him. The richer figure was more alone, more subject to fear, chance, envy, and exhaustion.
Diogenes did not want anything, so he did not lack anything. Alexander the Great is supposed to have said, “Were I not Alexander, I would be Diogenes,” such was Diogenes’ independence. Diogenes, by the way, is said to have returned the compliment—saying that were he not Diogenes, he would be Alexander. The exchange brings to mind the two most evident ways of curing oneself of envy: stop wanting what other people have, or go out and get it. The first option may save a lot of time and effort, but, of course, it requires a transformation of one’s emotions, or at least a control over them.
Diogenes’ advice is that we stop distracting ourselves with accomplishments, accept the meaninglessness of the universe, lie down on a park bench and get some sun while we have the chance. Alexander might have answered that conquering is fun and we might as well do that while we have the chance. Still, some control of one’s own hungers is clearly necessary for happiness, and for many people what Diogenes had proposed was attractive even in its most extreme form. It asked a lot of a person but seemed to provide great power in exchange, and men and women came from across the empires to observe and imitate his Cynical way of life. The life of a Cynic required and inspired devotion. It was a rejection of meaning and convention, but it had power to sustain and uplift its followers. To be cynical about even the things dogs love is hollow and demoralizing; to be a true Cynic leaves one a few devotions: loyalty, for instance, food, and sleep.
THE STOICS
The Stoics were named for the porch where their founder, Zeno, taught. They shared the Cynics’ no-nonsense realism, engaged detachment, and their advice was to concern oneself only with what is within one’s control. They were much more enamored of civilization than were the Cynics. Like the Cynics, they did not depend on reference to the gods in their general approach to life. They thought that God was the whole universe. That can sound very religious, but as it was lived by the Stoics, everything being divine was a lot like nothing being divine. The idea served to relax the tension between that which is immortal and omnipotent and that which is worldly, mortal, and weak, and the feeling was rather secular: we are here, this is our situation, there is no hidden other situation. One’s task is to become inured to the pain of it.
The central idea of Stoicism was that with the loss of the polis as the center of life, the universe should be conceived of as one giant polis. If men and women acted their parts in the universe as diligently as they had in the polis, they would recreate the sense of belonging to a meaningful and relatively eternal community, larger than themselves in strength and significance. Feeling a part of the community of the universe required a lot more imagination than did belonging to the local and knowable polis, but that is what Stoicism was intended to help with. Adherents of Stoicism had no need to lament their difficult lives, since these lives were merely parts they happened to be playing: it is of little consequence whether one is cast as a queen or as a scullery maid in a play, so long as one does a good job of it. Depending on the play, the part of the servant may well be the better role. In this schema, human beings do not get to know what the play is, let alone the purpose of it, but they are clearly essential to it. The universe, its theater, holds us at its center. Since individual lives were generally held to be preset, Stoics gave a great deal of attention to the notion of fate and looked to the stars for indications of what was to come. Not surprisingly, they were great public servants, and for centuries, institutions of public service encouraged Stoicism within their ranks.
There was a certain amount of ambivalence on the question of the divine. Some Stoics conceived of God as entirely identical to nature. For them, fate or providence was actually materialist determinism; not a prewritten script, but a simple working out of the laws of nature. Other Stoics imagined a more personal God—still very much equated with nature or the universe, but one who cared for individual human beings and arranged their fates for them. Either way, this God was imagined as all good. The only evil in the world occurred when people refused to act their part. The Stoics could never quite account for the fact that the world contains so much suffering and cruelty, but their most common response was to say that these difficulties were all part of a larger and positive grand scheme. Of course, here the grand scheme was a bit mechanical; less the thinking omnipotent being, more the complicated cosmic machine. The whole point was for individuals to be in harmony with the universe; if that could be achieved, there would be no real trouble. Much that seems endemic to religion—prayer, ritual, sin, and miracles—had little to do with Stoic piety. With the Cynics, meaning was generated nowhere; with the Stoics, the universe and its human parts all participated in a general state of meaningfulness, but it was a remote one, without much sympathy for individual hopes or affections.
THE EPICUREANS
Epicurus was a fascinating character in the history of doubt. He said that not only can human beings manage to be virtuous in this chaotic, unsupervised world, they can actually be happy. In fact, there is no reason for them not to be happy. The three chief obstacles to being happy, he explained, are fear of death, fear of pain, and fear of the gods. He dealt with fear of death by arguing that death is an utterly unconscious sleep and nothing more. Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don’t know it. So long as you can possibly worry about it, you’ve got nothing to worry about.
Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.28
He argued that fear of pain is foolhardy since intense pain is usually short-lived and long-term pain tends to be relatively mild, which means it is endurable. Fear of pain is worse than pain itself. Accept the pain, embrace the sting, especially in its absence, and you’ve vanquished your worst foe: the one in your head. Fear of the gods was more complicated, and part of our interest in this is the simple fact that he rated fear of the gods so high in his list of human problems. It is hard for us to know how much fear people actually lived under in regard to the Greek gods. We have relatively modern examples of torturous fear of God. Nevertheless, Epicurus clearly thought that it was a large fact in his own time and the massive popularity of his doctrines gives that much weight.
Epicurus answered fear of the gods by simply insisting that the gods do exist, sort of, but that they are totally unconcerned with human affairs. Epicurus agreed with Democritus’s atomic theory and with his atomic theory of the pantheon: the gods were distinct but rather fluid arrangements of extremely fine atoms. Epicurus elaborated on the consensus argument: because every human group believes in some form of gods, he reasoned, something like them must exist; we must all be getting some sort of valid information through relatively normal sensory means. However, he explained, we have been mistaken in our interpretation of this sensory information. Democritus proposed a naturalist explanation for the gods, but he didn’t go much further with it. Epicurus exclaimed with some delight that the gods were essentially images. He believed that these images had some substance and that human beings could witness them, especially in dreams. But despite such appearances, these God-beings were not like traditional notions of God or the gods; they were not in the least like people, and they were not paying any attention to us at all.
Epicurus believed in an infinite number of universes—some very different from our own and some quite similar. What we had understood as the Greek gods, he explained, were really calm and immortal image-beings living in the spaces between cosmic systems. They had but one emotion and it was placid happiness. They did not get angry or frustrated or excited. They did not judge. They had not even made the world—if they had, it would not be so full of suffering. Here Epicurus cited crocodiles as an ugly and terrible danger whose presence did not seem to indicate a benevolent creator.
The one thing that Epicurean gods did provide was the service of example—but this one was a big deal. For an Epicurean, somewhere there are beings that are truly at peace, are happy, and are eternal. The mere idea of this gentle bliss is, itself, a kind of uplifting dream. After all, we human beings know a strange thing: happiness responds to circumstances, but, basically, it is internal. We can experience it when it happens to come upon us; we can induce it with practices or drugs; but we cannot just be happy. Whereas certain religions admire a being who has ultra-virtues, Epicureanism admires a being with an ultra-mood—a being that has solved the schism between how it feels and how it wants to feel.
That is one reason for Epicurus to prefer gods to no gods. Another is that, like Democritus, Epicurus said he believed that people really did see gods in dreams and visions. For both, the weight of tradition, going back centuries upon centuries, and the weight of contemporaries’ attestations, was too powerful to dismiss. But as far as Epicurus was concerned, what most people believed—that there were gods or a God in charge of the world—was not only wrong, it was a kind of impiety against the truth. Even those who did have rational ideas about the gods when they were thinking clearly, he scolded, often behaved in ways utterly at odds with these ideas. “Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them is truly impious.”29 To his mind, Epicurus was the one being reverent toward the real, while those called pious wasted their affections on the imaginary.
Democritus provided the insight of atomism and materialism; Epicurus proclaimed it was time to use this ability to explain the world rationally to relieve humanity of fear. He actually railed against his much admired Democritus for failing to announce the end of fear of the gods. Now, Epicurus insisted, there is nothing left to fear: we are going to die, but so what? When it is over, it will be over. Pain happens but either does not last long or is bearable, so let it come if it’s going to come. And last, there are no ghostly grownups watching our lives and waiting to punish us. Everything is okay. It is all just happening.
What is more, urged Epicurus, life is full of sweetness. We might as well enjoy it; we might as well really make an art of appreciating pleasure. Later his doctrine came to be synonymous with sensualist hedonism, which is why the adjective epicurean has that connotation today. But delicate food, drink, and the pleasures of the flesh are not quite what he had in mind. What Epicurus really encouraged was a joyous cultivation of knowledge and friendships. He did write about the delight of food and drink, but he meant learning to experience fully the pleasure of eating even rough bread and water as well as other things; the idea is that you cultivate yourself more than the food.
Epicurus set up “The Garden” as a home for his school, and men and women of various social stations—including courtesans and at least one slave—came and went, studying, talking, and relaxing. Many flourished here. Leontium, an Athenian courtesan and friend of Epicurus, became renowned for her philosophical treatises. Epicurean pleasures did not include politics or much interaction with the world at large. Unlike the Stoics, the Epicureans tended to stay away from public life, seeing it as concerned with false ideals, and likely to trick people into spending their one lifetime running a race no one can win. His doctrines covered a wide range of subjects in science and philosophy, but he geared all of it toward helping people achieve peace of mind (and pleasure) in the full recognition of our peculiar predicament.
Epicurus’s theories of astronomy strictly denied that the movement of the heavenly bodies had anything to do with the gods. In fact, he took great pains to demonstrate that human beings had too little information about the heavens to settle on any given explanation of them. He insisted that the Moon’s phases might be due to the Moon’s rotating, or the interposition of other bodies, or perhaps due to “configurations” of the air. What was important, he stressed, was that “one must not become so in love with” one explanation that one rules out others for no good reason.30 This was natural science, but it was also an argument against the old gods of Olympus, and perhaps more pointedly, it was an argument against the philosophical religions of Plato and Aristotle. Epicurus believed that those philosophers had done a good deal of damage by convincing men and women that the stars and planets were divine. He wanted to free humanity not only from fear of the wrath of idiosyncratic gods, but also from fear of cosmic necessity and predetermination. As he saw it, some things in life happened randomly and some by necessity, but within this situation human beings had free will. There is no up nor down to the universe and no hierarchy of value outside the human mind. Atoms come together in orderly and disorderly fashions as patterns and chance will have it; nothing purposefully guides them through these various incarnations and nothing is purposefully trying to help us or block our path. The world was not made by the gods and it was not made for us. We may enjoy it in peace.
These are wonderful tenets, but Epicurus understood that such notions are not of much use if one simply understands the ideas. They have to be studied until they are fully integrated and accepted in one’s whole being— as with the Cynics, the pursuit of these ideas required devotion. We do not know as much as we’d like about the practices of the Epicureans, but one gets the sense that there were practices, that this was a meditative and ritualized life. Epicurus kept enjoining people to work at fully knowing the truth: “Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience.…” This philosophical study should start early in life and end late.
So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.
And again: “Those things which without ceasing I have declared unto thee, do them, and exercise thyself in them, holding them to be the elements of right life.”31 This wasn’t just study, it was exercise; it was something you did.
Rigorous religious practices can have a transformative effect on the human mind and like religions, graceful-life philosophies create meditative, “mystical” experiences—often in the invocation of peace, friendship, study, intellectual play, and joyous calm. These pleasures Epicurus considered immortal, beyond the individual experiencing them at any given time, and thus capable of focusing the individual on the moment. That makes mortality seem much less problematic: in this beautiful moment, one is alive. One of the few documents we have that comes directly from Epicurus is a letter, written to his friend Menoeceus and explaining his philosophy. Having told of the happy finality of death and the glory of prudent, mortal pleasure, the letter ends with these remarkable words:
Exercise thyself in these and kindred precepts day and night, both by thyself and with him who is like thee; then never, either in waking or in dream, will you be disturbed, but will live as a God among people. For people lose all appearance of mortality by living in the midst of immortal blessings.32
Again, coming out of the love and protection of divine care, the great doubter finds himself godlike in happiness, transcendence, and repose.
Epicurus believed there was no real point in praying, both because the gods are not listening and because human beings are entirely capable of making themselves happy on their own. Yet, he also said that the act of prayer was a natural part of human behavior and ought to be indulged. This is a wonderful little idea to which we will return. For the moment, let us at least think of it as a metaphor for human love. Consider the hypothesis that other people do not really exist as we perceive them, that for each of us, the magnitude of our isolation is profound and the possibility of a true bond of love or friendship utterly remote. On some level, of course, it is true: we are all strangers to one another; some of us, for example, are capable of surprising acts we have not yet committed. Ought we not to trust and love anyway? Shouldn’t we act as if we could know another person?
Prayer is based on the remote possibility that someone is actually listening; but so is a lot of conversation. If the former seems far-fetched, consider the latter: even if someone is listening to your story, and really hearing, that person will disappear from existence in the blink of a cosmic eye, so why bother to tell this perhaps illusory and possibly un-listening person something he or she is unlikely to truly understand, just before the two of you blip back out of existence? We like to talk to people who answer us, intelligently if possible, but we do talk without needing response or expecting comprehension. Sometimes, the event is the word, the act of speaking. Once we pull that apart a bit, the action of talking becomes more important than the question of whether the talking is working—because we know, going in, that the talking is not working. That said, one might as well pray.
Epicurus adamantly denied the idea that gods were watching, listening to, or even caring about humanity, and yet he did not counsel the sharp rejection of all religious practice. This is strange to modern eyes. Something moderns take for granted about the passionate rejection of religion is missing here: Epicurus does not picture himself in an all-out battle against the institution itself. Without the outside context of a political war between faith and reason, Epicurus does not fear that any single point he might award to the religious will be used against him. Nor is he eager to have his followers shunning prayer or ritual in order to demonstrate publicly their disbelief. Outside the context of a political war between faith and reason, more nuanced arrangements may be safely undertaken.
Epicurus recommended that people take part in the religious conventions of their country. His central purpose in this seems to have been in line with the rest of his advice, i.e., it promoted a trouble-free life. Unlike Zeno and his Stoics, Epicurus was suspicious of society. Still, getting along with people, avoiding confrontation, and making friends in general was much more important to Epicurus than it was to, say, Diogenes and his Cynics. But it was not just for the sake of convention that he advised taking part in public ritual; Epicurus also believed that these rituals were a chance to meditate upon the strange, ethereal beings that existed between the universes. Thinking of them was beautiful and tranquil and brought a calm wisdom.
Epicurus’s notion of consciousness was rationalist in a similar way. He had explained that everything was made of atoms and void. The human mind seemed to be other stuff than the rest of the world, but deep down, it was the same. Water and stone, for instance, seem to be made of completely different things, but Democritus and others had made the leap to believe that they were somehow the same. Yet, compared to consciousness, water and stone are obviously the same thing: they are stuff, and consciousness is something else again. Still, Epicurus figured it might well fit into the same schema if, perhaps, mind or “the soul” was made of particularly small atoms. “Keeping in view our perceptions and feelings (for so shall we have the surest grounds for belief), we must recognize generally that the soul is a corporeal thing, composed of fine particles, dispersed all over the frame” and something like wind and heat.
It is impossible to conceive anything that is incorporeal as self-existent except empty space. And empty space cannot itself either act or be acted upon, but simply allows body to move through it. Hence those who call soul incorporeal speak foolishly. For if it were so, it could neither act nor be acted upon.33
The atoms that make up the soul flow more quickly than even those that make up water, clouds, or smoke and thus account for thinking. That part of us that thinks and feels, mused Epicurus, is a part of our physical makeup. Hence, when the body dies, the soul dies, too.
We should note another little fact in passing: Epicurus took care to argue against the idea that the soul lives on in the maggots that swarm out of a corpse. The maggots, he explained, have their own lives; ours is extinguished. The fact that we would not dream of debating this point is a reminder that Epicurus was not answering quite the same question that we are answering today. More specifically, he was denying a different set of hypotheses about where the “self” goes after death. Physics and biology took part in discussions about the fate of human essence—there were maggots in the metaphysics and metaphysics in the maggots. But Epicurus didn’t believe any of it, and offered instead a surprisingly modern empirical materialism. For him, human consciousness is an awesome power that requires some special explanation—but not too special. That life ends in death should not be a cause for despair: “The true understanding of the fact that death is nothing to us renders enjoyable the mortality of existence, not by adding infinite time but by taking away the yearning for immortality.” It is accepting the finality of death that makes it possible to enjoy the pleasures of the garden. This is a very different garden than the one we got kicked out of in the Eden story. This time you have to eat from the tree of knowledge in order to get in. You build this one yourself, in part in your character, in part in your real environment. It is a lot of work, but you can stay as long as you like.
For Epicurus, living prudently, in deep appreciation of modest pleasures, was not just the route to happiness, it was happiness. The key, he said, is coming to know that “the wise person’s misfortune is better than the fool’s prosperity.” Difficult truth is better than wonderful falsehood. Since behavior creates happiness, and accepting reality creates peace of mind, the vicissitudes of chance and worry cannot hold much power. Accept the bad things in the knowledge that they are not really so bad, get over the idea that the gods are watching you, and be happy.
THE SKEPTICS
Despite the deep secularism of Cynicism, and sometimes Stoicism, it was Epicureanism and Skepticism that issued the most powerful critiques of theism. Skepticism began with Pyrrho of Elis, who lived from 365 BCE to about 275 BCE. He wrote nothing, as far as we know, and offered his followers not a system but a manner of living. Pyrrho studied the ideas of the great philosophers and came to the conclusion that a really smart person could convince him that any substance was the primary matter of the universe. What is more, all the philosophers’ systems were vulnerable to argument. Pyrrho believed that nothing can be known, because the opposite of every statement could be asserted with plausibility. Also, our senses and minds provide false or merely narrow information. We should attempt to have no opinions. Since we know nothing for certain, we must behave as such, affirming and denying nothing, no matter what the subject. We thus stand aloof from life and thereby attain peace of mind.
Not much of Pyrrho’s recommended manner of living is known and, amusingly, what we know conflicts.34 There is one tradition in which he seems to have been trying to shed human emotion. In that tradition, he was marked by an imperturbability and “oriental indifference” that, at times, had him pass by friends without noticing them. Once, when he was attacked by a wild dog and scurried up a tree, he later apologized to friends for his fear and announced that it was difficult to strip oneself of humanity. In the other tradition, he was not trying to strip himself of humanity but merely to live a moderate life. There is a story of his calming passengers on a storm-tossed ship by pointing out that the pigs on board were quietly munching their food. He recommended such serenity for all. Here Pyrrho seems less the indifferent ascetic and more the caring teacher. Stories of his life support both versions: In 334 BCE he joined the court of Alexander the Great (Aristotle had left the young man, after an eight-year stay, only about a year earlier) and traveled with Alexander to India, where he studied with the philosophers and ascetics of the Indus Valley. In the same court was a philosopher who was a follower of Democritus—a materialist, an atomist, and a believer that sense experience is always flawed by such things as tricks of light and tricks of the human body. When Alexander died, Pyrrho went back to Elis and lived with his midwife sister, and although he taught philosophy to large crowds and regular students, he also helped out at home by cleaning house, washing pigs, and taking fowl to market. Elis named him a high priest. He lived to the age of ninety and, in his honor, the city instated tax exemption for all philosophers. His best student, Timon, was more of a cutup than Pyrrho, writing satires that portrayed anyone who seemed to know anything as an arrogant buffoon. Yet he also wrote beautifully on the Pyrrhonic approach to knowing the world. It was Timon who wrote, “I do not lay it down that honey is sweet, but I admit that it appears to be so.” Timon had a wife and kids, and loved food, drink, and a good time as well as philosophy and solitude. Early Pyrrhonism was ascetic, but not exclusively so.
Skepticism became more important in the second century BCE when the philosopher Arcesilaus brought it into the Platonic Academy. This created what we know as the Middle Academy and is the reason that Academic philosophy became a synonym for Skepticism. We do not know much about his opinions on theism either, but his successor, Carneades of Cyrene, left us much more to work with. Carneades was arguably the best philosopher in the five hundred years after Aristotle, and his contribution to Skepticism was immeasurable because he replaced the refusal to believe anything with a sophisticated notion of probability. What he said was that we cannot know anything for certain, but we can carefully determine whether one conclusion is more likely than another. This allowed the Skeptics to bring all their studious doubt to bear on philosophical questions, whereas the old model restricted them to judicious silence.
Carneades did not insist that the gods were a fairy tale, but he unraveled most of the common proofs that they exist. Theists often said, for instance, that there must be gods since so many people had seen them and had described them in a similar manner. As we have seen, even the rationalist Epicurus bothered to offer an empirical explanation for such claims. Carneades dismissed the reports of sightings, both ancient and contemporary, as stories with no basis in reality. Against the claim that the universal belief in gods proved that they existed, Carneades responded that this proved only that people believed in gods—another proof would be needed to show that the gods exist.
Carneades also attacked the theistic position on the basis of the description of the particular gods, especially the God of the Stoics. The Stoic God was a God who was everything good. But in Carneades’ opinion, true virtue requires some flaws, some limitations. One cannot be called brave if one has not known fear. There is no meaningful way to be self-disciplined in the absence of temptation. So the description of God as supremely virtuous is inherently problematic. Carneades also attacked the argument by design— the idea that the world was so wonderful that it must have been created by an intelligence—by pointing out problems in the design. We are reminded of Epicurus’s feelings about crocodiles. For Carneades, no intelligence seemed to be at work behind agonizing diseases, poisonous snakes, and tidal waves. Furthermore, the Stoics had argued that God’s greatest gift to humanity was the gift of reason. Carneades pointedly asked why God had shown such partiality in the distribution of it.
Carneades described this way of arguing as ataxia, which comes from a word meaning “heap.” People sometimes make arguments by heaping up a collection of ideas and observations that prove their contention. If someone else continually takes one of these ideas off the heap by disproving it, Carneades asks, at what point is the heap no longer a heap at all? It is a clever conception, especially regarding theism. Take three popular reasons to believe in God: (1) How else did we get here? (2) The beauty of the world implies intelligence. (3) People everywhere believe in God. Each can be argued with on its own, and they do not cohere into a single system, but as a heap they are quite formidable. By identifying the metaphor of the argument, Carneades discovered a clear-cut way of examining its validity.
With all the Hellenic and Hellenistic doubters, what is perhaps most striking is how fully invested in the idea of, say, Zeus, they were, even when they doubted to the point of not believing in him. It is what we should expect, but it is somehow still surprising. Greek proofs of a theistic universe hung on attributes of the gods as the Greeks conceived them. They believed in the Olympian pantheon, so one proof was that people had seen these specific characters, in visions and dreams, for hundreds and hundreds of years. They believed that Homer and Hesiod, who had written of the gods so long ago, could not possibly have been entirely lying or entirely mistaken. The Greeks believed in planetary gods because the planets move, so they must be alive, they must have soul. When we look at the way the disbelievers structured their arguments, it was all about these same gods: the dreams and visions were real but were not really images of an Olympian pantheon; Homer and Hesiod were not lying but were faithfully recording an error in human memory—the gods were really just deified heroes; the heavenly bodies are not gods but rather are rocks like the earth. Doubt in the ancient Greek world is rationalism, naturalism, and secular history applied to the Olympic pantheon. The result of that was a world suffused by doubt, within which there were pockets of belief and pockets of real disbelief.
As the philosophers put the gods or God into doubt, according to rationalist narrative and natural science, they sought a philosophical replacement. They were not fighting against the religious impulse; they just reconceived the sacred so that it seemed true. They still thought that a good life could be achieved only through deep and reverent contemplation of reality. The actual human predicament, they cautioned, is very difficult to hold in one’s mind; there is a natural forgetfulness that pulls one into the day-to-day world with all its frustration and emotional pain. The philosophers were convinced that thinking about these big ideas, just the pure process of mulling them over, does a person a world of good. A big part of the secret to life was to spend time teasing these ideas out, playing in them, working hard to get to know them. For many, and for Plato and Epicurus certainly, brave thinking about truth is the secret to happiness: concerted and regular contemplation will transform us and let us taste what there is to taste of transcendence.