Morality and Atheism
In the fifth century BCE, Athens was going through a period of intellectual “enlightenment.” Overall, there was a shift from the old systems of morality to a social system guided by naturalism and rhetoric. As is the case in most such periods of transition, people began to question everything about the old ways. Specifically, there were those who questioned the existence of the traditional Greek pantheon. Many sophists claimed that the gods were merely inventions by the week used to control the strong. Furthermore, they claimed that if gods were not around to punish wrongdoers, there was no divine sanction against (what was traditionally considered as) wrongdoing. Therefore, one was justified in doing whatever was in one’s personal best interest and would not be punished by other men.
This atheism may seem like a huge departure from the very significant role the gods had previously played in Athenian society. However, three trends in the literature written before the Peloponnesian Wars illustrate the fact that it was only a matter of time before something like the sophist movement took place. First, there is a gradual transition away from the personal, anthropomorphic gods of Homer towards the more abstract, naturalistic gods of Herodotus. When gods become abstract and impersonal, it is natural for people to start questioning whether they can be called gods at all. Second, there is the continued tendency for only the rich and powerful to be severely punished by the gods, while the weak are left alone or even aided. Finally, there is the continued tendency for characters to do whatever they believe they can get away with doing. These three trends culminate with the sophist atheism of fifth century Athens.
In Homer, the gods are very anthropomorphic and personal, in that they have basic human emotions and interact closely with human beings. The Iliad is full of examples of gods fighting alongside men. The gods help or harm men based on their emotional attachment or aversion to the men and their respective “teams.” Aphrodite pities Paris, so when he is about to be killed by Menelaos, she “caught up Paris easily, since she was divine, and wrapped him in a thick mist and set him down again in his own perfumed bedchamber.”[1] Aphrodite helps Paris because he is too weak to successfully defend himself from Menelaos. When men are too strong, on the other hand, the gods very often hurt them. Patroklos is a very adept fighter, and is able to kill Sarpedon, who had earlier torn through the wall of the Achaeans. When Patroklos kills Sarpedon, Zeus weeps “blood that [falls] to the ground, for the sake of his beloved son.”[2] The fact that Patroklos is strong enough to kill the son of Zeus leads to Zeus’ sadness and anger, which eventually leads to the dishonorable death of Patroklos himself.
Odysseus is also strong enough to harm the son of a god. While in the land of the Cyclopes, he violently attacks and blinds Polyphemos, who is Poseidon’s son. In retaliation, Poseidon helps make Odysseus’ homecoming roughly a decade longer than it would have been otherwise. “All the gods pitied [Odysseus] except Poseidon; he remained relentlessly angry with godlike Odysseus, until his return to his own country.”[3] At the end of the Odyssey, Odysseus becomes the weaker party, when compared to the angry mob that wants to punish him for killing the suitors. Athena, along with some help from Zeus’ thunderbolt, brings order to this mob, saving the life of Odysseus. She then tells him to “hold hard [and] stop this quarrel in closing combat, for fear Zeus of the wide brows, son of Kronos, may be angry with you.”[4] The reason she gives for why Odysseus must refrain from further violence is not that such violence is wrong in and of itself, but rather simple expedience. If he does not stop the quarrel, Zeus may become angry, which would certainly not be in the best interest of Odysseus.
A major theme in the Odyssey is the relationship between guest and host. Hospitable relationships between strangers were believed to be sanctioned by Zeus himself, the protector of strangers. In addition to possibly incurring the wrath of Zeus for mistreating a stranger, one risked the anger of the stranger himself, who, it was believed, could very easily be a god in disguised. The only time a person could possibly hurt a stranger was when he was stronger than the stranger. Thus, the threat of Zeus’ punishment for the mistreatment of strangers in the Odyssey is an example a threat to the strong in order to protect the weak. Furthermore, it is an example of justice coming not from an absolute moral code but from self-interest. One must not refrain from harming strangers because of some inherent “evil” in harming them, but rather simply because it is not in one’s best interest to do so.
It is Athena, the goddess of wisdom, who creates order at the end of the Odyssey and the Oresteia. This is significant both because it implies that the gods prefer an ordered universe and because it shows that wisdom, which is embodied by Athena but which is also a human characteristic, can bring about such a universe. In the “Eumenides,” the Furies accuse Apollo of destroying “the old orders of an elder time,”[5] which were not very ordered at all, as far as our current understanding of the word is concerned. The American Heritage Dictionary’s first definition of “order” is, “A condition of logical or comprehensible arrangement among the separate elements of a group.” When dealing with the order of the universe, the “separate elements” can be seen as the consequences of certain actions. If these consequences were not predictable, no sense could be made of them, and they would not be comprehensible. Therefore, when order is brought to a situation, it means that there is now something predictable about the situation.
In the Histories, the idea of a divine sanction for predictable systems evolves further and the gods themselves become far less anthropomorphic and personal. Herodotus still refers to the god (this translation uses the singular almost exclusively), but he is far more abstract than in earlier literature and never actually appears to mortals. Instead, the god runs the system of cause and effect that gives the universe coherency. Most importantly for Herodotus’ themes, the god frequently and predictably “gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him.”[6] The divine system of cause and effect repeatedly involves excess leading to ruin:
You know, my lord, that amongst living creatures it is the great ones that God smites with his thunder, out of envy of their pride. The little ones do not vex him. It is always the great buildings and the tall trees which are struck by lightning. It is God’s way to bring the lofty low. . . . For God tolerates pride in none but Himself.[7]
For Herodotus,
the pattern of excess leading to ruin is an absolute law of the divine
order. Every time a mortal oversteps
the bounds prescribed to him by god and nature, he brings about his own demise. Once again, we see a predictable, ordered system
of the divine punishment of those humans strong enough to become “lofty,” while
the weak are left alone.
The primary role of gods in the Histories is simply to enforce this and other absolute laws with perfect consistency. Unlike in earlier works, no god acts based on any personal relationship with a human being. That is, the actions of the gods are not determined by the unpredictable actions of mortals. As far as what we can observe is concerned, the gods and their laws are perfectly unchanging, and therefore perfectly predictable. However, this predictability does not imply that everything in the universe is predetermined and that there is no free will. On the contrary, the choices men make are not at all predetermined. What is predetermined is the aggregate of the consequences of each available choice. For instance, it was not fated that Croesus would choose to attack Persia, only that, if he did choose to attack, he would “destroy a great empire.”[8] The future is not absolute and unchanging, but the laws of cause and effect that determine the future, along with the choices of men, are absolute and unchanging.
We see these same patterns in Sophocles’ tragedies. Perhaps most importantly, the gods never appear to any mortals. Rather, humans consult oracles and prophets for some connection to the divine. The Oracle at Delphi does not tell Oedipus that he would necessarily kill his father and marry his mother. All the Oracle tells him is that he must not return to his homeland, because if he does, he will commit patricide and marry his mother. He is then free to choose his own course of action. Because Oedipus was mislead about the circumstances of his birth, he believes Corinth to be his homeland, and therefore flees from there. It just so happens that he eventually returns to his real homeland of Thebes. At that point, he does end up killing his father and subsequently marrying his mother. The fact that he is strong enough to kill his own father and take control of Thebes leads eventually to the revelation of his past and the suicide of Jocasta, his wife and mother. Thus, Oedipus suffers not only for being ignorant, but for being strong as well.
The example of Oedipus, though, is not representative of an absolute divine law, because the prophecy is specific to Oedipus and his family, instead of being a general rule. For an example of a more general divine rule, we turn to “Antigone.” One of the bounds imposed on (Greek) mortals by the gods is that the dead always be buried. When Antigone says, “I did not believe your proclamations had such power to enable one who will someday die to override God’s ordinances,”[9] she implies that Creon is overstepping that bound with his command that the traitor Polyneices remain unburied. As the king of Thebes, though, Creon is sufficiently powerful to be able to enforce his decree, so he believes that he can get away with doing so. He also believes that it is in his best interest to do so, because if he reverses his earlier decision, he risks losing the credibility of the citizens of Thebes. However, as Haemon illustrates in his tree metaphor, it is best to yield. “You notice how by streams in wintertime the trees that yield preserve their branches safely, but those that fight the tempest perish utterly.”[10] Those who are weak enough to yield under normal circumstances are left alone. Those who are strong enough to remain rigid under normal circumstances, though, are inevitably destroyed by the divine system of cause and effect. The divine sanction against leaving the dead unburied leads to Creon’s tragic loss of son, wife, and niece to suicide. But it is not that the gods do not like Creon as a person. The gods in Sophocles have no personal relationship with any mortal at all. Creon himself says that “no human has the power to pollute the gods.”[11] This can be taken to mean that the gods are too far removed from humans to allow any action by a human being to effect how the gods will mete out the consequences of human actions.
When the gods are unseen and predictably act everywhere at all times, there is nothing specific that one can point to and give the label “god.” Without any clearly defined difference between what is god and what is not god, going from the idea that the gods act everywhere to the idea that it is nature that acts everywhere is not a very big step. The only real difference between these two beliefs, initially, is the label used for whatever it is that determines the consequences of our actions. The existence or nonexistence of gods, once gods have become abstract and impersonal, has nothing to do with what does happen. All the natural cause-and-effect relationships observed in everyday life remain. The sun still rises every day, the moon every night. All that changes is an explanation for why these things happen, and because that explanation cannot be tested, any explanation that works is equally valid.
When the transition between a sort of pantheism and atheism first occurs, though, there is usually a radical change in what people believe ought to happen. Specifically, people start to question the validity of the old moral code. The Athenians saw that in their own literature, the gods had repeatedly punished those who would otherwise have been strong enough to accomplish whatever it was they set out to do. It was natural for many of them to conclude that the gods were merely inventions used to prevent the strong from attempting to do what they could easily accomplish in the absence of gods. They also saw in their literature that people tended to act in what they believed to be their own best interest. It is never in one’s best interest to attempt to do what one will be punished for doing, but when the gods are taken out of the picture, there is no longer something specific that will mete out the punishments. One is left with only the punishments human beings can deliver, and if a man is stronger than those other human beings, he does not risk being punished by them for his actions. Therefore, many Athenians came to believe that whatever was in the best interest of the strong, and could be done without being punished, was the right course of action.
So while the transition to atheism in fifth-century Athens may not have been a huge change in and of itself, the moral transition that accompanied it was indeed radical. However, with Socrates, one notices the beginning of a reclamation of old moral codes without the need for a divine sanction on society’s mores. He shows that it is better to live in a good community, that a man who harms his neighbors makes it a bad community and so harms himself, and that no man prefers to be harmed.[12] That is, by acting in such a way as to make a man’s neighbors angry at him, whether they are weaker or stronger than he is, a man makes his community worse as a whole, and so brings harm upon himself. For this reason, and because no man prefers to be harmed, it cannot be in anyone’s best interest to act immorally toward the people around him. If something is not in one’s best interest, he is not right to do it. Even though Socrates himself seems to have believed in the gods, his argument illustrates a system of enlightened self-interest: A person should always act morally, because it is always in his best interest to do so.